Education and Class

• Teacher: I see the difference in educational privilege every day. I live it. I am disgusted by it. – The Washington Post

  I wish that more teachers would talk about their anger, because I know that they experience it.

  “He tells me I don’t have to buy him food, but I do anyway, because he needs it. He always takes it.

  Why do I do it? Is it because it hurts me to see when my students are hungry, to know that they are wanting? That’s one reason, yes. But another reason I do it is because, deep down, I am ashamed of an educational system that provides such privilege to some students, while willfully and purposefully denying it to others.”

  tags: socialclass

• Why Obama’s Proposal for 529s Had No Chance – NYTimes.com

  Policy shaped by reporters and politicians who have sense of how lower income people live.

  “But if you look at the data, $200,000 is not a normal income, even in a prosperous suburban county like Westchester, N.Y., where 77 percent of married couples are somehow managing to get by on less. In Montgomery County outside Washington, the figure is 72 percent. These figures start to seem normal to politicians only because, when they’re not hanging out with ultra-wealthy donors, they tend to spend time with the sort of pretty-wealthy professionals who use 529 accounts.

  They also start to seem normal to reporters, perhaps because $200,000 is about what a married couple might make if both worked as correspondents for major news organizations. One reads frequently of the plight of living on $200,000 or more a year. Writing for The Fiscal Times in 2010, Karen Hube found that $250,000 “does not a rich family make,” after you consider the cost of buying a home in an affluent suburb with a top school district like Bethesda, Md. (Of course, one option is to not live in Bethesda.) A Wall Street Journal article this September laid out how $400,000 isn’t a lot of money — after you spend it.”

  tags: socialclass

• Vanderbilt Rape Convictions Stir Dismay and Denial – NYTimes.com

  Campus sexual assault, elite colleges, privileged students, and “I can’t believe that happened here”.

  ““At a lot of institutions, there’s an intense effort to protect the reputation of the place,” said John D. Foubert, a professor of higher education at Oklahoma State University. “What’s different at really elite institutions is that the students will also do most anything to protect the reputation of the institution, because they think it reflects on them.”

  At many colleges, “people still have the ‘Oh my God, I’m so shocked that it could happen here’ reaction,” said Jane Stapleton, a co-director of the violence prevention program at the University of New Hampshire. People need to understand that no place is immune, she said, “but not use that as an excuse, either.”

  Continue reading the main story
  Sarah O’Brien, now a graduate student at Vanderbilt, was sexually assaulted while she was an undergraduate there, and said there was a powerful element of denial on the campus.”

  tags: socialclass

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