Education and Class

In the State of the Union Address last night, Bush proposed a new “Pell Grants for Kids” program that would provide $300 million for poor chidren to attend private and religious schools, just as the “regular” Pell Grant program has enabled poor college students to “reach their full potential” via tuition support.

And the blogosphere has begun to weigh in:

The Mirror of Justice applauds the program as potentially stemming the closure of inner-city faith-based schools due for “financial reasons”, schools that he sees as providing vital alternative to children in chronically under-performing schools.

Other bloggers are far more critical:

The Carpet Bagger Report notes the obvious: that this is a voucher program that can’t be called a voucher program because the term “vouchers” does not poll well. He continues:

it’s ironic that Bush talked about the success of the Pell Grant program in helping “low-income college students realize their full potential,” given that his administration has repeatedly scaled back funding for regular ol’ Pell Grants.

The International Reading Association draws on the NYT’s reporting (as does The Education Policy Blog) that critics of the proposal wonder why, if NCLB is so successful, poor kids would need a program like this.

Greg Palast notes that given that there are 15 million poor children in this country, the $300 million for this program would provide only $20 per child. Accordingly,

George Bush’s alma mater, Phillips Andover Academy, tells us their annual tuition is $37,200. The $20 “Pell Grant for Kids,” as the White House calls it, will buy a poor kid about 35 minutes of this educational dream. So they’ll have to wake up quickly.

And The Engaged Intellectual asks whether this new initiative is intended to divert attention from the failures in NCLB in her scathing critique of each.

I’ll compile more here as bloggers continue to weigh in.

In today’s New York Times, Christopher Caldwell writes that

The economy as politicians present it is a folkloric thing.

While candidates go out of their way to be photographed with factory workers to show their concern for “the people”, many more Americans now work in casinos, in retail, or as security guards than work in manufacturing. The “jobs of the future” that candidates promised 20 years ago are now here, Caldwell writes, and the news is not good:

Choreographers, blackjack dealers and security guards have replaced factory workers as the economy’s backbone, if not yet its symbol.

While candidates steer clear of being photographed with the cashiers at Walmart, educational policy makers seem also to be living in folkloric times, promising us that high test scores will sustain the nation’s economic competitiveness in new global markets and enable individuals to live lives of material comfort.

Indeed, recently, I’ve seen any number of bloggers and pundits (such as this recent post) argue that we’re putting too much emphasis on preparing kids for college, not enough on encouraging kids to pursue lucrative career paths that don’t require college degrees.

I fear that they’re missing the point.

Like the politicians who want us to see the hard harts but not the ill-fitting uniforms of the minimum-wage earning, night-shift security guards, educators seldom talk about the Walmart and call center jobs for which so many of our young people are heading, with or without vocational training or college.

In campaigns, Caldwell argues, the hypothetical needs of the employers of the future have superseded “the real needs of today’s dental hygienists and landscape gardeners”.

In educational policy making, the life circumstances of today’s low-wage workers are rendered invisible when our deliberations go no further than wondering whether their children should go to college or into a high-paying trade.

The trouble is that in today’s economy, most kids will able to do neither.

At least until we’re willing to bring the Walmart workers out from under wraps and talk frankly about how people like them have come to be the backbone of the U.S. economy.

We’ve heard it so many times already, but maybe if we keep saying it over and over and over, someone, somewhere, will begin to feel some moral outrage:

When it comes to school funding, too many states still provide the least to school districts serving students with the greatest needs, according to a report released today by The Education Trust.

Find the link to the full report here.

I’m happy to announce that I am now under contract to edit a book series on Mobility Studies and Education with Sense publishers. You can view the announcement here (PDF), and for those who need a good reason to click, here’s a summary of the major themes within which I’m seeking book proposals:

• Interrogation of stories of educational “success” against the odds for what these cases might teach about social class itself.

• Examination of the psycho-social processes by which people traverse class borders, including the social construction of ambition and achievement in young people marginalized from the academic mainstream by class, race, or gender.

• Explorations of economic mobility within developing countries. How is formal education implicated in these processes?

Sense is an academic publisher, and I’d be very interested in proposals that cross traditional academic disciplines.

Who is doing research and writing in these neglected areas?

Thanks to Lane Kentworthy at Consider the Evidence for the link to Pathways Magazine: A Magazine on Poverty, Inequality, and Social Policy, a publication of Stanford University’s Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality. In this issue, you’ll find articles by John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Hilary Clinton on how they would alleviate poverty.

Rebecca Blank’s article comparing and critiquing the candidates’ platforms is particularly informative.