Education and Class

When I teach about social class and education, we examine discouraging labor market data. We scrutinize graphs and charts documenting funding inequalities among the schools attended by middle-class, working-class, and poor kids. We analyze disparities in college attainment.

And the teachers and wanna-be teachers inevitably ask “But what do we tell our students?”

The Education Wonkette generated discussion about exactly such things here.  While she (and her readers) have moved on to other things as I’ve been chipping away at my Google Reader backlog, the question remains:

What do we tell the kids?

The Pew Charitable Trust’s Economic Mobility Project continues to release comprehensive reports in its series on the “status of the American Dream”. Today, they have released 11 topical literature reviews on such topics as education, immigration, and tax and spending policies.

These are excellent resources for teaching, for becoming more politically informed, for moving far beyond the simple rhetoric of America as the land of opportunity.

I was delayed at the airport and grabbed a magazine with beautiful, happy people on the cover. Flipping through the glossy pages, I found an article about a couple who had decided to downsize from their 4,000 square foot home to a 1,800 square foot condo.

The focus of the article? The couple’s decision to hire a “decorator/therapist” to assist them with the difficult transition of parting with superfluous possessions while creating a new space that reflects their new, relatively unencumbered selves. The therapist spoke in gentle and nurturing tones of the simultaneous mourning and liberation that comes with letting go of so much that one has accumulated in a lifetime.

On this trip, I’d see a family member who  would also likely be facing challenging transitions. Last summer, she finally fulfilled a dream and completed an advanced degree that was a very long time coming. She told herself that all that was promised to those who accomplish such things could now be hers. She bought a new house, just beyond her means, hopeful that the old house would soon sell.

And it has not. And for complicated reasons, must now be pulled off the market. She stands at the brink of losing a great deal, at the point of reaching that excruciating moment when she’d believed that things would all come together for her, finally.

The couple who brought (bought) someone into their lives to ease them through the angst of disentanglement? Some things, they came to realize, could easily be cast aside. Since they now spend most holidays abroad, they decided, they no longer need the china, the crystal, the linens for the scores of guests that they once entertained.

And the woman in my family? There’s no nurturing therapist in sight, and she thinks that she’s convinced us all she’s just fine.

I wrote briefly last week about the “Pell Grants for Kids” proposal from the State of the Union Address. One of the justifications for this new initiative, President Bush argued, is the growing number of private and faith-based schools in inner cities that are closing, leaving poor kids with fewer alternatives to failing public schools.

Yet federal policy may be contributing to the demise of Catholic schooling in inner cities. Today, Education Week reports on research [annoying registration required] suggesting that charter schools (opened with the strong endorsement of the Bush administration) draw students disproportionately from Catholic schools, particularly now that these schools, no longer able to rely upon the very cheap labor of teaching nuns, must charge more tuition to pay lay teachers. From the article:

Rev. Ronald J. Nuzzi, the director of the Alliance for Catholic Education leadership program at the University of Notre Dame, … has called charters “one of the biggest threats to Catholic schools in the inner city, hands down.”

“An unintended consequence—that’s probably the most politically sensitive way to put it,” Father Nuzzi said about the erosion of Catholic-school enrollment. “For the most part, when you offer an alternative to the mainstream [public] school free of charge, it can be a threat to Catholic schools, which charge tuition.”

It would be refreshing if those drafting federal policy in the supposed interest of poor kids could get their stories (and their programs) straight. If at least part of the story of declining enrollment in Catholic schools is parent choice, what business is it of the federal government to subsidize those schools? If “choice” — without the infusion of new resources — is key to spurring public schools to improve, why wouldn’t we trust market forces to work in whatever is now going on with urban Catholic schools?

That Privilege Meme simply will not die, moving now among a number of blogs written by people of color, and generating infinitely more complicated discussion about class, gender, and race than were evident in the early rounds rounds of denial, discrediting, and general disdain of the very idea of class privilege.

I’m finding the discussions in this round of the meme to be particularly intriguing, because in every single conference session I’ve done on class, people in the audience (both white and people of color) stand up to argue that if we open the door to talking about class, whites will have an excuse to simply stop talking about race.

I’ve always found this puzzling because in my experience (and I’d love to learn that my experience has been particularly limited), few whites have gotten beyond conflating race with poverty,  and fewer still have any interest in talking about class whatsoever.

I’ve yet to hear anyone in these sessions argue that people of color might, themselves, have considerable interest in talking about class and might, indeed, deepen the broader conversation about class privilege.

In contrast, the conversations on which I’ve eavesdropped this week are rich, frank, and complicated. Sample them here at Racialicious, The Apostate, What Tami Said, Postbourgie, Prometheus 6 and The Luscious Librarian

Are there other conversations about class and race out there this multi-faceted?

And is it possible to imagine having conversations about class, race, and privilege within the same blogs rather than in these very discrete conversations that have unfolded over the last month?