Education and Class

More on the growing income gap from NPR, in this commentary on differences in how the changing economy of the country is perceived differently in much of the heartland, where houses are still affordable, and the coasts, where few young people can hope to buy homes like those in which they grew up.

From the NYT, comes this article on the booming market for cell phones among 8-12 year olds (and among their parents, eager to appease them).

The article notes that “children” (an apparently homogeneous group) want them

for reasons obvious to them. It looks cool and makes them feel grown-up. It conveys a certain status. And it lets them stay in near-constant touch with friends and (oh, yeah) parents.

The tone of the article is one of benign amusement. Yet one sentence is given over to a developmental psychologist who observes that:

Kids whose families can’t afford all this junk are made to feel worse and worse, and some parents end up shelling out money that would be better spent elsewhere.

Families who are willing to pay for expensive techno-toys, in large measure to accommodate their children’s’ desire for status (one incident described in the article involves a jealous friend “screaming and crying” when a child showed up at school with her new phone), are framed in this article as the norm, are even celebrated as contributing to the economic health of cell phone companies.

Poor and working class kids who don’t want or can’t have such things are “othered”, positioned outside the generic reference to “children”. Beyond mention of “feeling bad”, no mention is made of the ways that hundreds of daily interactions — such as that of sitting quietly in the back of the classroom while peers show off their new expensive toys — are part of the ways in which children internalize messages of their relative worth and status.

And what are the lucky recipients of the new cells phones doing with them? Apparently, after an initial flurry of dialing, they are forgetting about them.

The point, it seems, is mainly  to acquire expensive things as part of their internalized sense of entitlement to the admiration — or envy — of their peers.

It would seem that this analysis of widening income gaps — with the top 1% of earners claiming the largest share of the national income since 1928 needs little comment.

And, as many of those consulted for this article note, these figures likely underestimate the gaps since so many of those with investment and business income “inaccurately” report those earnings on their taxes.

From today’s Inside Higher Education comes an interesting analysis of the rising costs of a college education at the exact moment that college is becoming more vital for getting a job paying a living wage.

While teachers across the country are being flogged to raise achievement levels in K-12 schools, college is becoming less and less affordable for low-income kids according to Alan Contreras, particularly relative to the ability of young people to earn money to pay for their own schooling. Contreras notes :

In 1974, a year of attendance at the University of Oregon (the flagship university in my state) cost what a student working minimum wage could earn working 27 hours a week, year-round. That is a lot of work for a full-time student during the school year, but was not impossible and could be offset by more work hours in the summer.

By 2004, a full-time student would have to work 46 hours a week to pay for the same attendance. That is essentially impossible, cannot be sufficiently offset by summer earnings and is the fundamental gap that policy makers either don’t understand or choose to ignore because it is too depressing and can’t be fixed.

As of the time of my posting, the comments posted to this essay include references to data on rising college enrollments among students of color, suggesting, according to the commenter that low-income kids are finding ways to go to college anyway. He argues that even if students are going into debt, the returns for college are higher now than they were in 1974.

Beyond the problems with equating race and class, enrollment does not, of course, equate with completion, as this report from Pell makes clear. I’ve written before about how data on growing wage gaps between high school and college graduates are attributable, in large measure, to the steep decline in wages for jobs available to high school graduates rather than to growing returns on the investment in a college degree.

The students I find most difficult to support are those who find themselves in over their heads in college through no fault of their own: They’re already deeply in debt but barely making it, they need to take a break from school to earn some money, yet without degrees, they can find only minimum wage jobs. If they stay out of school to work for too long, their first payments on their loans come due, and the most direct way to forestall those payments is to come back to school, which means that they have to take out more loans, which means that they have to take a minimum number of credits to be eligible for loans, which means that they then have less time to work.

Another commenter on this essay states simply that “college is still perfectly doable for people without financial support from parents”.

Maybe. But by what logic are we making college a much bigger financial risk for poor and working class kids, at this historical moment when a degree is more important than ever?

While I’ve been away, I’ve been catching up on reading the ever-growing stack of books on my desk. I have been reading and re-reading sections of Telling our Lives: Conversations on Solidarity and Difference, a remarkable and complex account of a multiple-year conversation among three women from the working class: One African-American, one Jewish-American, and one Irish-American. One is lesbian, the other two straight; all are now academics who have been meeting around kitchen tables to record their many-layered conversations about their lives and work.

They each talk about early engagement in school, the development of a keen competitive edge, the centrality of early literacy in their identity development. They write:

For all three of us, public presentation of self, enacted within and through the discursive regimes of the school, would become extremely important. At the same time, however, outstanding academic performances indicative of high levels of public literacy do not tell the whole story. The flip side of our overachievement (and to some extent, its motivation) was marginalization — primarily class based, although other factors contributed. The houses we built of words always had shaky foundations.

I come back again and again to these questions of how to best serve children poised at the boundaries of class divides that they can’t possibly understand, sensing the precariousness of their footing, floating between the joy of accomplishment and the quiet sense of unease that they cannot name.

Certainly, we can educate the teachers of these children that so much is going on beneath the high test scores and competitive treks through the classroom library.

Yet I know of few teacher education programs that come even close to engaging in such work.