Education and Class

In the press this week were intriguing portraits of  young people finishing high school during turbulent economic times, stories that individually — and especially collectively — illustrate the powerful ways in which starting points shape one’s life trajectory.

In D.C., the academically-engaged children of undocumented workers rallied for passage of  the Dream Act that would grant them citizenship after attending college for two years. If the Act does not pass, these young people, many of whom know no other life than that that their parents built for them in the U.S.,  face either deportation or lives of low-skilled work. The reporter observed:

They looked tired, solemn, defiant, hopeful in the way young people have that banishes cynicism. They seemed incredulous that a message they grew up with — work hard, stay in school, study and you will succeed — does not apply to them.

Across the country in L.A., two students from very different families and who attended very different schools ended their junior years on very different footing.   One drifts from state to state and from one  crowded home to the next as his parents drift from job to job, His parents place high hopes in his future. “He can be anything he wants to be”, they say, yet they cannot provide him the stability from which  he could begin to build a different future. In his school, few students graduate and fewer still see the point of their decision to stay in school.  Across town, the other boy studies advanced German surrounded by  peers who have already traveled to Germany.  Just back from  an intensive college tour on the East Coast with his parents, he thoughtfully weighs his considerable options.

Meanwhile in Dayton, members of  the high school class of ’09 who had assumed that they’d follow their parents and grandparents into high-paying jobs in the GM plant, are now wading into the untested waters of community college in hopes of finding something akin to economic security  in a world that’s caught them off-guard.  Many of these students have been working since they were 16 and are stunned to learn now that working hard all of their lives did little to protect their parents from struggles and pain.

And back on the East Coast, reality TV captures the lives of students from New York prep schools who aim for Harvard by day and shop and party by night.  From the NYT review of the show:

Taylor, 15, who goes to the highly selective Stuyvesant, a public high school, worries that wealthier students from places like Nightingale-Bamford and Dwight could look down on her. To improve her status, she decides to throw a party at a chic Japanese restaurant downtown.  And the arrival scene of the guests, all girls, all filing in wearing the same mini-skirts, dark tights and high heels, looks more like “Madeline” than “Sex and the City,” except that they left the house at half past 9 p.m. in two straight lines and the smallest one picks up the tab.

Every spring, newspaper stories provide compelling portraits of individual students at turning points in their lives, but few take the next step of broader analysis and critique of social inequalities that are only exacerbated by the very different quality of education available to students from very different backgrounds.

Over at In Practice, Michaele Sommerville has posted her second essay on her jarring transition from teaching in a Title 1 school to working in a new school with abundant resources.  Others have, of course, written of differences in resources available to children from different backgrounds, but Michaele eloquently articulates the differences in teaching across very inequitable settings:

Title-I teachers know there is a battle to be won, that the battle must be won. Our students, schools, and our jobs depend upon our skill. Teacher “burn out” is our battle fatigue.

Amongst the Title-I new hires, the inherent inclination to not only quickly learn whatever choreography was in place, but to act with urgency motored us through our first quarter of school, and affected not only our attempts to bond with new colleagues, but made us stand out like sore thumbs in regard to our open communication and persistent relationship building activities with students’ families.

Many of our new colleagues gave us a wide berth.

I’d linked to her first installment in this series yesterday.  Both are worth a careful read.

And both make a compelling case for actively seeking the voices of many more teachers in policy debates over the education of poor and working class children.

UPDATE: Part 3 was published later today.

• You’re Not in Title-I-Land Anymore, part 1 | In Practice

  A veteran teacher, on her first visit to her classroom in the first non- Title 1 school in which she will have taught, and the stunning differences in resources that she finds there.

  tags: Social class

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

In last Sunday’s NYT, Barbara Ehrenreich writes eloquently of those Too Poor to Make the News.   She disparages the news coverage of the effects of the recession on everyday life:

The super-rich give up their personal jets; the upper middle class cut back on private Pilates classes; the merely middle class forgo vacations and evenings at Applebee’s. In some accounts, the recession is even described as the “great leveler,” smudging the dizzying levels of inequality that characterized the last couple of decades and squeezing everyone into a single great class, the Nouveau Poor, in which we will all drive tiny fuel-efficient cars and grow tomatoes on our porches.

The lives of the working poor, meanwhile, are considerably less faux -romantic:

The recession of the ’80s transformed the working class into the working poor, as manufacturing jobs fled to the third world, forcing American workers into the low-paying service and retail sector. The current recession is knocking the working poor down another notch — from low-wage employment and inadequate housing toward erratic employment and no housing at all. Comfortable people have long imagined that American poverty is far more luxurious than the third world variety, but the difference is rapidly narrowing.

She describes families of five moving into the  two -bedroom apartments of relatives, living under the threat of eviction if they get caught, living invisibly, beyond the scrutiny of  reporters census takers.  She writes that one third of Americans now report being unable to pay for their prescriptions, of the downward spiral of wages for unskilled workers.

And somehow, policy makers still believe that we need only admonish teachers to work harder if  these children of parents who have lost their second and third jobs, whose lives outside of school are marked by fear and stress,  are not to be left behind.