He’d Wanted to Be a History Teacher
May 29, 2008
He’d wanted to be a history teacher, but that never did happen.
He fell too hard and too early in love, stayed close to the grandparents who had raised him. He fell hard again for his two young sons, and again later, for my sister’s daughters, and most of all perhaps, for the daughter that they raised together.
Every Christmas, he donned the ratty Santa Claus suit for whichever toddlers were still willing to fall for it. Every summer, he presided over the grill. He loved the Packers. Only two years older than me, he bled love for his eight grandchildren and they loved him.
He’d wanted to be a history teacher, but that never did happen. He met my sister when she was just starting her late run at college, juggling one course at a time with working and loving her children.
And he worked: long hours, exhausting jobs.
Soon, he often said, he’d be able to back off: when the child support payments ended, when the kids’ weddings were paid for, when my sister’s new-found zeal for learning was finally sated, when the kid currently in crisis found her way through it.
A year ago, he and my sister finally packed up the truck and moved away from our home town, middle-aged pilgrims in search of a quiet piece of land and a life less defined by obligation. In part, my sister’s new degrees made dreaming possible; in part, they had decided that it was now or never.
And still, he worked long hours in exhausting jobs. There were setbacks, unexpected struggles, and some of that was just starting to turn around.
“He was just starting to dream again”, my sister told me this morning on the phone. He’d worked 16 hours last Friday, and then over the long weekend, hauled rocks on that new piece of land, creating a grove for his new hammock, a place he’d imagined spending his Sundays this summer.
But my phone rang way too early this morning. It was my niece.
He’d called my sister at 5:00 last night to say that he’d knock off a little early.
And shortly after that, the machinery that had, until that moment, been wearing down his body one muscle fiber at time, tipped.
He’d just started to dream again. Not dreams this time of being a history teacher, but of evenings at home, of standing without pain, of weekends floating on a river, of a life less burdened by bills.
But for him now, those things never will happen.
Marketing College to the Needy
May 27, 2008
From today’s Inside Higher Ed newsletter comes this article on the College Board’s new policies that will allow college admissions officers to identify potential applicants from low-income neighborhoods:
[C]olleges in the pilot program will be able to identify probable low-income students by purchasing names of those who live in certain low-income zip codes or attend certain low-income high schools. This may sound innocuous — after all, colleges routinely plan visits to certain high schools in impoverished areas as part of efforts to recruit disadvantaged students. But the pilot represents a significant shift for the College Board, which moved away from selling zip code-based names 20 years ago when some colleges were using the information to try to attract wealthier students.
The experiment — which features strict rules designed to make sure colleges use the purchases only to increase socioeconomic diversity, not to limit it — come at the request of colleges that wanted new ways to reach low-income students. Many educators believe that the key reason the poorest students have low enrollment rates in higher education is not a lack of availability of financial aid, but lack of information about aid that exists. The only way to combat this problem, they argue, is direct communication with prospective students and their families, with information focused on their economic situation.
In an ideal world, getting information about financial aid to those who need it would be routine, and would begin long before a young person had taken the SAT, but it should be interesting to follow this pilot
Talking About the “Last Great Taboo”
May 23, 2008
Here’s a good article from the Class Action website about the organization’s work to generate open conversations about class in community settings.
Where else is this sort of work going on?
Poor Children in Poor and Wealthy Districts
May 23, 2008
The Center for Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington has published a thoughtful and carefully documented report on school funding, School Funding’s Tragic Flaw. From their announcement:
[A]uthors Kevin Carey and Marguerite Roza examine two schools that from the outside appear the same but inside are quite different: Cameron Elementary School in Fairfax County, Virginia, and Ponderosa Elementary School in Cumberland County, North Carolina. Both schools educate a large number of low-income students.
Yet, because of a number of circumstances, federal, state, and local policies play out such that Cameron has more than twice the money per pupil than Ponderosa, $14,040 vs. $6,773.
In its straightforward analysis of federal, state, and local policies, this report would make an excellent teaching tool, especially for those looking for non-urban examples of disparities in school funding.
Some days, I don’t know whether to bang my head on my monitor or laugh when I read what’s being written about social class in the blogosphere.
Today, I’m opting for head banging.
For example:
This blogger takes a break from offering advice on fashion to educating her readers about social class in the U.S. in this surprisingly detailed post in which she explains that
a) most people who graduate from high school are middle class (including, one would presume, all of those high school graduates working at McDonalds and Walmart?)
b) brick laying is a low class occupation because brick layers need brawn by not brains (I’d recommend popping Mike Rose’s The Mind at Work into those shopping bags to read during latte breaks at the mall) and
c) the “ultra wealthy are described as those making more than $200,000 a year”. It would seem that when shopping, those subtle differences between being in the top quintile and being in the upper class are merely trivial semantics.
More free-lance class analysis can be found in the commentors on this post on the shifting middle class as they deliberate about whether they are or are not middle class based on little more than their own feelings about their relative economic circumstances. To be fair, though, some do reference the interactive tool published on the NYT website a few years ago (which, contrary to what our shopping class analyst above asserts, is not a “scientific” tool to determine one’s class, but at least is better than idle speculation).
And then there’s Steve, one of many bloggers who has jumped on an article written for the London Times (also posted here) asserting that disproportionate admission of the elite to selective colleges is explained entirely by difference in IQ between high and lower status people. Steve and his fellow ” we knew that they were dumber than us” bloggers ignore the imperfect correlations between IQ and academic achievement, between IQ and personal ambition, and IQ and eventual adult success.
Does IQ correlate with social class? Yes. But does that explain class stratification in higher education? No.
Steve, your argument is essentially the same as saying that since the data show that it’s less likely to rain in June than in November, planning an outdoor event in June guarantees that the sun will always shine on the picnic.
In the US, as Peter Sacks writes, mediocre students from high -income families are more likely to attend college than high achieving students from low-income families. Meritocracy? Right.
So again, I wonder:
How do we begin to move toward a more informed discourse on class in this country?
