Mike Rose has written a thought-provoking, post-election post on opportunity, the limitations of pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentalities, and education.   He writes:

The creation of opportunity involves a good deal of thoughtful work on
the part of the provider, and, as well, demands significant effort on
the part of the recipient. The creating of social programs,
compensatory interventions, and the like are not, as some conservative
writers claim, a giveaway, a soft entry into the meritocracy. If done
well, the creation of opportunity in education (and this applies to
other domains as well) also requires great effort, even courage. What
that special program or compensatory intervention assures is that one’s
effort is not just sound and fury, but is directed and assisted toward
achievement.

and this:

…it does not diminish the importance of individual commitment and effort
to also acknowledge the tremendous role played in achievement by the
kind, distribution, and accessibility of institutions, programs, and
other resources. And these resources, as everybody knows, are not
equally available. Particularly now.

It sometimes seems as if some of these students project their own relative comfort back several generations, even while they also claim a family legacy of “working hard to make it”. It would seem, at least in the versions of family history told in my classes, that immigrants of previous generations enjoyed cozy evenings gathered around the scratched and worn kitchen table, wearied, perhaps, by their day at the factory but profoundly grateful for all that their children were accomplishing at school.

I honestly do appreciate their questions about why, then, they see poor children struggling with English in their classrooms. They wonder why the children of these families haven’t worked harder to learn English, why the parents aren’t working enough to provide for their children, why these families “rely” on public services for things like health care when their ancestors valued taking responsibility for one’s own family, why school seems to not be a priority in some of these families.

And this opens the doors to all sorts of conversations. We trace family economic histories (though I’ve been thinking that I could do this much more formally), and talk about how, historically, it had commonly taken four generations from immigration to the first college graduate in a family.

We talk about the differences between coming with “nothing” in terms of savings or material possessions yet having a marketable skill, and coming with only the strength in one’s arms and back.

We talk as straightforwardly as I can press them about how those of us gathered in a university classroom are not representative of the rest of the population, and advise caution against the assumption that we are the norm while those kids in their second grade classroom are the aberration.

We talk about the Catholic schools during the waves of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe (including the one attended by my father) that taught children in their home language, as families slowly transitioned into English while adamantly preserving ties to home.

We talk about the changing nature of immigration, about how people who arrived after weeks on a boat (and whose letters home would take as long to cross back) had fewer options for sustaining identification with their homeland than today’s immigrants who can text, call, skype, post and view photos and videos on the internet, and can (and do) live simultaneously in multiple worlds.

We talk about the immense differences between immigration that was, for all intents and purposes, permanent, when travel and politics and religion made clear to everyone that leaving was for good, and immigration motivated primarily by the search for jobs.

And we talk about economic times that have and have not enabled people to get beyond the first steps on steep ladders, about jobs and wages and upturns and downturns and the declining earning power of people who do manual labor.

The inability to make a decent living, let alone to get ahead, in spite of working hard is powerfully illustrated in Peter Goodman’s recent NYT article on Latinos being particularly hard hit by the current downturn in the economy. He writes:

The boom in American housing generated millions of new jobs for those willing to engage in physically demanding tasks, from factory work churning out floorboards, carpeting and upholstery, to landscaping, roofing and janitorial services. Latinos occupied widening swaths of these trades and filled large numbers of relatively high-paying construction jobs.

As a great influx of Latino immigrants spread beyond the initial entryways of the Southwest into smaller cities and towns across the South and the Midwest, many found employment doing much of the unpleasant work shunned by those with better prospects.

But now significant portions of this work are disappearing. What were once the fastest-growing areas of the nation, including states with expanding Hispanic populations like Florida, California, Georgia and Nevada, are often bearing the brunt of the pain.

The belief that we can control our economic circumstances through hard work is difficult to shake, but at least with analysis like this, we can delve deeper in our conversations about “them” and “us” as we move into more nuanced discussion about how our families found their own way in very different economic times.

And hopefully, we can also then move beyond talk of education being mainly about preparing people for jobs to also talk about how education can be about preparing a citizenry who can participate in creating public policies other than those that simply leave people to fend for themselves, floundering, in spite of working very hard all of their lives.

It’s very hard work for teachers to rethink so much of what they’ve learned about the place of education in the lives of American families, and to become advocates for those kids in their classrooms, especially in the face of so much public discourse that simply takes the easy route of blaming teachers for persistently uneven playing fields.

I took a deep breath, clutched my to-do list, and dove in. There was no way that I could get through it all.

And then there were the troubled students, and troubled family, and the tyranny of the mundane, day after day.

And then AERA.

And then back home to start a new quarter.

I got through my first class, came home, and crashed.

Coughing loud enough to wake the neighbors, shivering under piles of blankets. Sicker than I’ve been in years.

So between naps, I’ve been reading some fiction, and came upon this from Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn:

In 1995, he remembered the year, remembered the moment, he had been at home in Cambridge, when his wife was still his wife, not an ex, and she was hugely pregnant with Marlee (Jackson imagined their baby tightly packed like the heart of a cabbage inside his wife), and Jackson was washing up after dinner (when he still called it “tea” before his language was buffed into something more middle-class and southern by his wife). They ate early at the end of her pregnancy, any later and she was too full to sleep, so while he washed the pots and listened to the Six O’Clock News on Radio 4, and somewhere in the middle of that night’s bulletin they announced the closure of the pit his father had worked in all his life. Jackson couldn’t remember why that pit had made the news when so many had closed by then with so little fuss, perhaps because it had been one of the largest coalfields in the area, perhaps because it was the last working mine in the region, but whatever, he stood with a soapy plate in his hand and listened to the newsreader, and without any warning the tears had started. He wasn’t even sure why — for everything that had gone, he supposed. For the path he hadn’t taken, for a world he’d never lived in. “Why are you crying” Josie asked, lumbering into the kitchen, she could hardly get through the door by that stage. That was when she cared about everything he experienced. “Fucking Thatcher,” he said, shrugging it off in a masculine way, making it political, not personal, although in this case there was no difference.

And then they got a baby and a dishwasher, and Jackson continued on and didn’t think again for a long time about the path he hadn’t chosen, a way of life that never had been, yet that didn’t stop him from aching for it in some confused place in his soul.

Atkinson, Kate. (2006). One Good Turn. New York: Back Bay Books/Little Brown and Company. p. 248.

Education, work experience and saving enhance the opportunity for upward economic mobility. To this end, many federal investments aim to enhance economic mobility. But exactly how much does the federal government encourage economic mobility? What form does the encouragement take? And who benefits from these efforts?

Alas, they conclude, 2/3 of federal spending to support mobility goes to middle and high income households, while many federal programs targeting low income families sometimes actively discourage mobility.

Looking at ten categories of supports, from home ownership to child well-being programs, the report concludes the beneficiaries of these federal programs are those in the upper two income quintiles, “people who already possess substantial command of financial and human capital”.

This non-partisan project is publishing an excellent series of reports of economic mobility in the U.S., and as in this most recently released report, the news is generally not good.

• 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?

You can find all three reports here, or download a two page “fact sheet” here.

While the release of the reports was covered widely in the news, I’m finding little in the blogosphere about the reports’ overall findings that depending on one’s starting points, income mobility may be more limited than many Americans believe.

An exception is the Wall Street Journal’s Wealth Report, where Robert Frank contrasts the finding of the reports that family background still strongly influences where one winds up on the economic ladder with recent reports supporting the belief that in the U.S.,
“wealth is [now] ruled by the entrepreneur and the middle-class guy made good”.

And over at Writing in the Wild, Ray Watkins provides a good summary of the reports and insight into the possible “glass half-full/half empty” interpretations of their findings.

In contrast, No Oil for Pacifists seems to have given the Pew Reports a very quick read, indeed. Ignoring the high rates of downward mobility of African American children from middle-income families, he proclaims that

“the economic prospects for African-Americans has improved dramatically since the mid 1970s; I suspect the gains over the past decade are closer to those of whites”.

Similarly, he proclaims that unlike Europe, “nearly everyone in America has the chance to be rich”, when the Pew Reports repeat the findings that are widely cited elsewhere: that America is a less mobile society than other developed nations. He’s missed, also, one of the report’s central findings: that much of the growth in family income in the past generation is attributable to more women going to work, not to the ease by which ambitious people simply work their way into wealth.

The Washington Post’s Michael Fletcher’s on-line Q and A focused on diverse explanations for the fall of so many African Americans from middle income status, while Get Religion, going far beyond the data used in these reports, insists that these long-term economic trends can be explained by individual choices (decline in involvement in religion, single parenthood) made by African Americans.

Insisting, instead, that the data in the reports are evidence of ongoing racism, Jack and Jill Politics blog takes exception to NPR’s Juan Williams’ essay on the divergence of black culture and values along class lines.

It will be interesting to follow Pew’s ongoing work on this project of careful scrutiny of the American Dream — and to follow, also, the public discourse that their work generates.

I’ve been working through the essays in Michael Perry’s Truck, a Love Story, and Population 485: Meeting your Neighbors One Siren at a Time, and finally, Off Main Street.

Perry grew up on a farm in a town not far my home town, smaller than where I come from but populated, it seems, by many of the same characters. And after college, after leaving his nursing career to write full-time, after living in Europe and traveling in Central America, he came home, bought a house, and writes there now at a window that looks down over Main Street. He joined the volunteer fire department, and his writing is often interrupted by barn fires and wrecks on the highway. On these emergency calls, he works beside his mother and brothers to save the lives and property of people he’s known since childhood.

And he deeply respects them, writes about them without patronizing, without irony. Truck is about (among many other things) restoring his 1951 L-120 International Harvester pickup truck under the tolerant, amused eye of his infinitely more skilled working-class brother-in-law.

I’ve spent the last hour paging again through his chapter “My People” from 485 , looking for the right quote to include here, knowing that of all he’s written in his three books, this is the place where he speaks most directly to the questions of belonging, identity, and going back home. I simply can’t find that single quote. This is not pithy academic writing. This is a chapter of inseparable stories about deer hunting, elderly gay modern dancers, a smelt fry, poetry readings, lunch with one’s publisher in New York and, of course, the Packers. Perhaps you could just go find a copy and read it.

These are not books about politics, about the ways in which small towns like his (and mine) are on the brink of economic devastation if not already there, about the more general state of the world. They are about belonging and dignity and loyalty.

And now a confession.

Michael Perry came to town recently for a book reading. It had been on my calendar for weeks. The room was packed — many people wearing Fleet Farm t-shirts and Packer caps. It felt like a reunion among strangers.

And the confession part: When Michael opened his mouth to read, I was stunned –barely consciously, and only for a moment — that he sounded exactly like my people: the long nasal vowels, the clipped consonants, the cadences that I fall back into when I’m home, the familiar sounds of my brother-in-law, my nieces, my mother.

And the fact that I was momentarily stunned reminded me that unlike him, I’m still working on this project of figuring out how to connect the dots from where I’m from to where I am now; from understanding my people intellectually and still knowing them in my heart and soul; of realizing, that in spite of the more theoretical understanding that I might bring to this work , I am still surprised in ways that make me cringe that someone who writes this beautifully could be this much like the people I left behind.

And in the end? Perry writes of something that I do understand deep within my being. Among our people, when distances and differences threaten to divide, we always come back to the very same deep connection. And that is simply this:

Go Packers.

To leave is to get out, but social mobility is no cure for social injustice. There is nothing wrong with wanting to leave pain, nor are those who cross the borders responsible for the horrific and painful effects of poverty and overwork, written on the minds and bodies of workers. Why would they not want to leave for the pleasures of another life and the fantasy of the absence of pain and oppression of the old one? It could be understood to be masochistic to want to stay, and yet, what a dilemma. They get out and leave their parents in pain. Watching parents in pain for children who are looking for safety can be very hard.

She goes on to say:

It is precisely the complex relationships between the old and the new inscriptions, simultaneously cultural and social, semiotic and psychic, that are so important to understand”.

Yet in almost twenty years of formal schooling, no one ever, ever talked to me about such transitions, about the double-edged experience of moving forward while grimacing as we looked back, about the particular “dual consciousness” that we might bring to deliberations about justice and equity.

Schools talk endlessly about “making it”. What will it take to also begin talking about the costs?

Walkerdine, V. (2006). Workers in the new economy: Transformations as border crossing. Ethos, 34, 10-41.

on average, 30-something males make about 12 percent less than they would have 30 years ago.

Additional commentary is provided by a high school social studies teacher, the son of a mortgage banker.

Perhaps, rather than “No Child Left Behind” [NCLB], we should be have “Ok, So Many Of You Are Going To Be Left Behind your Parents’ Generation. Now, How Far Will Your Slide Be?” [OSMOYAGTBLBYPGNHFWYSB]

Even Margaret Spellings would have trouble spinning that one on Jon Stewart.

Yet I’m conflicted when I read about how he’s eventually come to terms with shifts in the admissions landscape:

I came to understand that my own focus on Harvard was a matter of not sophistication but narrowness. I grew up in an unworldly blue-collar environment. Getting perfect grades and attending an elite college was one of the few ways up I could see.

My four have been raised in an upper-middle-class world. They look around and see lots of avenues to success. My wife’s two brothers struggled as students at mainstream colleges and both have made wonderful full lives, one as a salesman, the other as a builder. Each found his own best path. Each knows excellence.

Here, it seems, is the essential question of class.

I completely accept that there are many paths to personal happiness and many routes to individual excellence.

Yet there are, of course, fundamental differences between finding happiness within the options that are available to you and having many choices about where one might seek happiness.

As long as institutions like Harvard are growing less accessible to kids who can’t afford the frenetic resume building now required for admissions, and as long as Harvard remains a vital route to political and economic power, the questions of admissions go beyond whether one’s own child might find personal happiness there, or whether attaining excellence as a builder will, in the end, provide personal fulfillment.

Unless, of course, the children of the elite are asking the same questions.

It seems, however, that most are not.

As long as the kids who do eventually graduate from Harvard are going to wield power over other people’s kids, and as long as the grand narrative of the culture is that those Harvard kids deserve that power because they are essentially better people than kids who went to college elsewhere (and certainly, better than those who didn’t go to college at all), admissions is a social problem, not just a problem of misguided individual choices.