Education and Class

Richard Rothstein has an excellent article, Whose Problem is Poverty, in the current issue of Educational Leadership. The article is also available on the ASCD webite.  He writes:

Promoters of the myth that schools alone can overcome social and economic causes of low achievement assert that claims to the contrary let schools “off the hook.” But their myth itself lets political and corporate officials off a hook. We absolve these leaders from responsibility for narrowing the pervasive inequalities of American society by asserting that good schools alone can overcome these inequalities. Forget about health care gaps, racial segregation, inadequate housing, or income insecurity. If, after successful school reform, all adolescents regardless of background could leave high school fully prepared to earn middle class incomes, there would, indeed, be little reason for concern about contemporary inequality. Opportunities of children from all races and ethnic groups, and of rich and poor, would equalize in the next generation solely as a result of improved schooling. This absurd conclusion follows from the “no excuses” approach.

Writing specifically to teachers of poor children, he argues:

Educators cannot be effective if they make excuses for poor student performance. But they will have little chance for success unless they also join with advocates of social and economic reform to improve the conditions from which children come to school.

Many other authors admonish teachers  to take up the cause of justice and  equity.  Rothstein simply continues to  make these arguments more coherently and clearly than just about anyone else.

Thanks to Brian at In Practice for the link.

I’m not interested in using this space to debate the merits of the presidential candidates, but I have a strong interest in dispelling stereotypes based on class.

I was interested, then, in Larry Bartels’ column in today’s NYT.   Bartels, the director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton, writes, for example, that:

It is true that American voters attach significantly more weight to social issues than they did 20 years ago. It is also true that church attendance has become a stronger predictor of voting behavior. But both of those changes are concentrated primarily among people who are affluent and well educated, not among the working class.

While so many of us have been gratified by the more open and frank discussions about race that have been generated by this campaign, I wonder: what it will take to get to more informed deliberations about class?

March.

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.

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.