The Disconnect
February 22, 2012
As we reduce schooling to reading and math and if there’s time, a little science; as teachers march through scripted curricula; as poor and working-class children come to understand that school is about in intractability of their failure (and as their communities are told that this failure is the fault of their teachers who either can’t or work hard enough); and as my state and the federal government both insist that we need to get more kids to college if we are to remain economically competitive, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ data on areas of projected job growth through 2o20 makes clear that if all kids aced those precious tests from now until adulthood, most would still be heading for low-wage, low skill jobs.
There is always a moment of stunned silence when we look at data like this in my courses. We talk about broader purposes of schooling — for citizenship, for building strong communities, for the hope of raising a generation that will do better at all of this than we have.
But my students — many of whom are themselves going deeply into debt to become teachers or to eek out a minimal raise with a graduate degree — understand at some fundamental level how vulnerable their students are and how fundamentally misguided the efforts are to solve deep economic inequalities through test-driven schools.
Thanks to Sociological Images for making the BLS data so readily available.
Inequality is Even Bad for People Indifferent to Inequality
February 21, 2012
It’s too easy, when teaching about class and economic inequality, for the conversations to turn to what to do for them, as if economic justice were primarily a matter of charity.
The Equality Trust is compiling very good resources for shifting that conversation beyond talk of safety nets and foodbanks. Their data (based primarily in the UK but also based on studies in the U.S.) makes clear that everyone is harmed in unequal societies.
One example: They document the correlation between income inequality in a state and the rates at which young people in that state drop out. I can imagine sparking all sorts of conversations with students about possible explanations for this data (including, likely, conversations about the limits of correlational analysis, but those are always good conversations, too).
The Trust is working on compiling studies on the effects of inequality on areas from health care to global warming.
I’m updating my course websites with many of these links.
