This short snippet of a report from an economic journalist is worth a look, but even more important and insightful are many of the comments attached to the article:
Booming businesses, weakened workers | Journalist Profile |
Put succinctly in terms of social class: capitalists (upper class) benefit from a wider world in which to invest capital and sell products and services, workers (whether working class, middle class or even many upper middle class) suffer from loss of jobs, and declining wages and benefits.
Showing posts with label social class. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social class. Show all posts
Monday, August 23, 2010
Monday, June 14, 2010
an unholy alliance
Today the Chronicle of Higher Education posted an interesting story Is "Wal-Mart U." a Good Bargain for Students?, about a deal made between the Walmart corporation and American Public University, a for-profit institution that specializes in on-line instruction.
Here are some excerpts from the story:
My experience college teaching in the past thirty years has shown me that college students from lower and working class families, and even many from middle class families, are extraordinarily naive about the different values that employers put on degrees from different institutions. They also actively resist knowing how different the content of education differs between colleges. My students refuse to acknowledge any difference between the content of their college courses and those at four year colleges and universities. Yet they find ways not to read the forty or fifty pages a week assigned in my class, and will not listen to the facts, that students at four year school are expected to read and comprehend, two and three times the amount of content.
The reality is, I could assign as much reading as I thought was necessary and test students on that reading, but then my course failure rate would be unacceptably high, and my teaching evaluations unacceptably low. So slowly as years have gone by, I've bowed the quiet, subtle pressure NOT to "dumb" down the class, but to cover less material, and to cover it differently (like not getting into esoteric discussions about the deeper meaning and implication of materials).
Community college faculty are constantly commanded to accommodate students who are married, with children and full-time jobs. These students cannot read three full books a week (as I often had to do in my own undergraduate career at an elite four year college) -- heck they cannot even seem to find the time to read three full books a semester.
The depth and breadth of knowledge acquired by community college students simply pales compared to that acquired at more demanding four year colleges and universities. This fact is well understood by colleges, graduate schools, professional programs, and employers. Which is why graduates from elite schools have different doors open to them than do community college students.
So an educational institution that is willing to say, oh sure we'll give students up to 45 percent of their academic credit for just doing their Walmart job, is reducing the content of education even lower. Students will be able to get "degrees without all that troublesome knowledge" (my husband's favorite saying) even easier than they already can with this alliance between Walmart and American Public U.
Here are some excerpts from the story:
A closer look at the deal announced this month shows how American Public slashed its prices and adapted its curriculum to snare a corporate client that could transform its business. It also raises one basic question: Is this a good bargain for students?The cynic in me wonders if the lack of transferability of the credits may be exactly the point for Walmart. As the last paragraph above points out, there is very high worker turnover in the retail industry. Walmart expends time and money training workers, only to have them leave. The ones most likely to leave are those who obtain a college degree and move on to new careers. What better way to gain more stability in their labor market -- provide workers with something they crave -- access to a college degree that will give them huge amounts of credit just for working at Walmart, and they'll discover that the degree is only good for advancing within Walmart.
Adult-learning leaders praise Wal-Mart, the nation's largest private employer, for investing in education. But some of those same experts wonder how low-paid workers will be able to afford the cost of a degree from the private Web-based university the company selected as a partner, and why Wal-Mart chose American Public when community-college options might be cheaper. They also question how easily workers will be able to transfer APU credits to other colleges, given that the university plans to count significant amounts of Wal-Mart job training and experience as academic credit toward its degrees.
For example, cashiers with one year's experience could get six credits for an American Public class called "Customer Relations," provided they received an "on target" or "above target" on their last performance evaluation, said Deisha Galberth, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman. A department manager's training and experience could be worth 24 credit hours toward courses like retail ethics, organizational fundamentals, or human-resource fundamentals, she said.
Altogether, employees could earn up to 45 percent of the credit for an associate or bachelor's degree at APU "based on what they have learned in their career at Wal-Mart," according to the retailer's Web site.
Janet K. Poley, president of the American Distance Education Consortium, points out that this arrangement could saddle Wal-Mart employees with a "nontransferable coupon," as one blogger has described it.
"I now see where the 'trick' is—if a person gets credit for Wal-Mart courses and Wal-Mart work, they aren't likely to be able to transfer those to much of anyplace else," Ms. Poley wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle. Transferability could be important, given the high turnover rate in the retail industry.
My experience college teaching in the past thirty years has shown me that college students from lower and working class families, and even many from middle class families, are extraordinarily naive about the different values that employers put on degrees from different institutions. They also actively resist knowing how different the content of education differs between colleges. My students refuse to acknowledge any difference between the content of their college courses and those at four year colleges and universities. Yet they find ways not to read the forty or fifty pages a week assigned in my class, and will not listen to the facts, that students at four year school are expected to read and comprehend, two and three times the amount of content.
The reality is, I could assign as much reading as I thought was necessary and test students on that reading, but then my course failure rate would be unacceptably high, and my teaching evaluations unacceptably low. So slowly as years have gone by, I've bowed the quiet, subtle pressure NOT to "dumb" down the class, but to cover less material, and to cover it differently (like not getting into esoteric discussions about the deeper meaning and implication of materials).
Community college faculty are constantly commanded to accommodate students who are married, with children and full-time jobs. These students cannot read three full books a week (as I often had to do in my own undergraduate career at an elite four year college) -- heck they cannot even seem to find the time to read three full books a semester.
The depth and breadth of knowledge acquired by community college students simply pales compared to that acquired at more demanding four year colleges and universities. This fact is well understood by colleges, graduate schools, professional programs, and employers. Which is why graduates from elite schools have different doors open to them than do community college students.
So an educational institution that is willing to say, oh sure we'll give students up to 45 percent of their academic credit for just doing their Walmart job, is reducing the content of education even lower. Students will be able to get "degrees without all that troublesome knowledge" (my husband's favorite saying) even easier than they already can with this alliance between Walmart and American Public U.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
college students today....
College professors have always complained about college students. The complaints usually starts with the phrase "the trouble with college students today..." and usually also contains the phrase "when I was a student..."
The fact is that college students today are different from the past, in a whole host of ways. Let's look at the demographics: in 1966 the total number of undergraduate college students of all ages was 6,085,000 which represented 3% of the total U.S. population, in 2008 the total number of undergraduate college students of all ages was 14,955,000, which represented 5% of the total U.S. population ; in 1966 39% of college students were 18-19 years old, 15% were age 25 or older, 94% were white and 5 percent were black, 38% were women and 62% were male; in 2008 22% were 18-19 years old, 37% were age 25 or older, 77% were white and 13 percent were black, 55% were women and 45% were male. In the year 1970 (first year for which the government collected data on this) the percent of all undergraduate students attending community colleges was 27%, in 2008 that had risen to 36%.
As discussed this past week in the Chronicle of Higher Education most of the increasing numbers of college students in the last couple of decades have gone into the community colleges, and to a lesser extent into less selective four year colleges (public and private). More selective colleges and universities have used the increased numbers of students applying to become more selective, more choosy.
Family income which impacts college choices due to rising costs, also has a strong positive correlation with standardized test scores and to a more moderate correlation with high school grade point average. Other aspects of social class, such as parental educational levels influence students' selection of or assignment to courses of study in high school. [The college educated parent is more likely to know that taking algebra in summer school before high school can put their child on a fast track to advance math classes in high school making him or her more attractive to selective colleges and universities.]
As a result of the confluence of increased selectiveness and rising costs, social class and income stratification between colleges has increased steadily over the past twenty years. Students from poor and working class families are becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of elite, selective colleges and universities, while community colleges become the primary educational institutions for poor, working class, and even lower middle class families.
The flood of new college students into community colleges and less selective four year colleges, is made up primarily of poorer, working class and lower middle class students who are the first in their family to go to college. Educational pundits have pointed out the impact of this on the level of college preparation -- a large percentage of these new students were shunted by their high school advisers into non-college preparatory tracks or classes. They did not take the mathematics, science or even English, history, etc. usually taken by college bound secondary students. Pundits have also made much about the lack of monetary resources of these students, and the high percentage of them that have jobs (all of these things have been discussed extensively in The Chronicle of Higher Education in recent weeks and over the last few years).
One thing that has not been discussed at all, that is painfully obvious among our poorer and working class student body at my Kentucky community college, is the impact of poor health and health care problems on students. Our students themselves have a very high level of health problems, including diabetes and its complications, heart disease, other obesity related conditions, back problems, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and a frighteningly high level of cancer for a relatively young population. As many health problems as my students have, their families -- spouses, parents, grandparents, mothers- and fathers-in-law, siblings, aunts and uncles, have even more. Because in lower income communities, people are highly dependent on family and kin for aid during crises, students often are primary care-takers for ill family members, providing emotional support, transportation, and nursing care at home or in the hospital. [These days with nursing staffs stretched so thinly -- especially in poor rural areas like this -- some one needs to be present in the hospital with a patient to insure proper nursing care.]
This semester I had one student providing physical, household, medical/nursing, and emotional support for her mother with cancer and her mother-in-law with congestive heart failure (the mother-in-law died just before the end of term). An other student spent weeks in the nearest research hospital (3 hours away from her home) providing support for her long term partner who was dying, and then came home to her own diagnosis of heart disease and need for heart surgery. At least a dozen other students in my classes (I only teach about 75 students a semester) had serious health issues for themselves or family members this term, and this was not an unusual semester.
All these forms of illness have a higher incidence among lower income and working class populations. On top of that, are the burdens imposed by lack of good health coverage. Many of them have the additional struggle of having to worry about mounting medical bills that they may never be able to pay off. If they have assistance from Medicaid or from the local public health department, they often have very little control over the times of appointments and have to invest more time than some one with insurance would have to invest.
Just this week as I was getting my mammogram I overheard the following situation -- a woman with a suspicious lump had been referred by the public health department to a private physician to order a diagnostic mammogram and had authorized payment for that mammogram. The physician however, had decided that an ultrasound would provide him with more information and wrote an order for an ultrasound. The woman showed up at the radiography department for her appointment, only to be told that she would have to return to the public health department, so that they could write a new authorization for payment for the ultrasound, and then go back to the physicians office for a new order to go with it, and have to reschedule the mammogram for a day later in the week. It was obvious from the conversation that her husband who accompanied her, had taken off from work and was losing pay, and would have to take off yet another day later in the week to accompany her for the second go-round.
Poor health and poor health care are huge obstacles to successful college completion for lower income and working class students.
The fact is that college students today are different from the past, in a whole host of ways. Let's look at the demographics: in 1966 the total number of undergraduate college students of all ages was 6,085,000 which represented 3% of the total U.S. population, in 2008 the total number of undergraduate college students of all ages was 14,955,000, which represented 5% of the total U.S. population ; in 1966 39% of college students were 18-19 years old, 15% were age 25 or older, 94% were white and 5 percent were black, 38% were women and 62% were male; in 2008 22% were 18-19 years old, 37% were age 25 or older, 77% were white and 13 percent were black, 55% were women and 45% were male. In the year 1970 (first year for which the government collected data on this) the percent of all undergraduate students attending community colleges was 27%, in 2008 that had risen to 36%.
As discussed this past week in the Chronicle of Higher Education most of the increasing numbers of college students in the last couple of decades have gone into the community colleges, and to a lesser extent into less selective four year colleges (public and private). More selective colleges and universities have used the increased numbers of students applying to become more selective, more choosy.
Family income which impacts college choices due to rising costs, also has a strong positive correlation with standardized test scores and to a more moderate correlation with high school grade point average. Other aspects of social class, such as parental educational levels influence students' selection of or assignment to courses of study in high school. [The college educated parent is more likely to know that taking algebra in summer school before high school can put their child on a fast track to advance math classes in high school making him or her more attractive to selective colleges and universities.]
As a result of the confluence of increased selectiveness and rising costs, social class and income stratification between colleges has increased steadily over the past twenty years. Students from poor and working class families are becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of elite, selective colleges and universities, while community colleges become the primary educational institutions for poor, working class, and even lower middle class families.
The flood of new college students into community colleges and less selective four year colleges, is made up primarily of poorer, working class and lower middle class students who are the first in their family to go to college. Educational pundits have pointed out the impact of this on the level of college preparation -- a large percentage of these new students were shunted by their high school advisers into non-college preparatory tracks or classes. They did not take the mathematics, science or even English, history, etc. usually taken by college bound secondary students. Pundits have also made much about the lack of monetary resources of these students, and the high percentage of them that have jobs (all of these things have been discussed extensively in The Chronicle of Higher Education in recent weeks and over the last few years).
One thing that has not been discussed at all, that is painfully obvious among our poorer and working class student body at my Kentucky community college, is the impact of poor health and health care problems on students. Our students themselves have a very high level of health problems, including diabetes and its complications, heart disease, other obesity related conditions, back problems, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and a frighteningly high level of cancer for a relatively young population. As many health problems as my students have, their families -- spouses, parents, grandparents, mothers- and fathers-in-law, siblings, aunts and uncles, have even more. Because in lower income communities, people are highly dependent on family and kin for aid during crises, students often are primary care-takers for ill family members, providing emotional support, transportation, and nursing care at home or in the hospital. [These days with nursing staffs stretched so thinly -- especially in poor rural areas like this -- some one needs to be present in the hospital with a patient to insure proper nursing care.]
This semester I had one student providing physical, household, medical/nursing, and emotional support for her mother with cancer and her mother-in-law with congestive heart failure (the mother-in-law died just before the end of term). An other student spent weeks in the nearest research hospital (3 hours away from her home) providing support for her long term partner who was dying, and then came home to her own diagnosis of heart disease and need for heart surgery. At least a dozen other students in my classes (I only teach about 75 students a semester) had serious health issues for themselves or family members this term, and this was not an unusual semester.
All these forms of illness have a higher incidence among lower income and working class populations. On top of that, are the burdens imposed by lack of good health coverage. Many of them have the additional struggle of having to worry about mounting medical bills that they may never be able to pay off. If they have assistance from Medicaid or from the local public health department, they often have very little control over the times of appointments and have to invest more time than some one with insurance would have to invest.
Just this week as I was getting my mammogram I overheard the following situation -- a woman with a suspicious lump had been referred by the public health department to a private physician to order a diagnostic mammogram and had authorized payment for that mammogram. The physician however, had decided that an ultrasound would provide him with more information and wrote an order for an ultrasound. The woman showed up at the radiography department for her appointment, only to be told that she would have to return to the public health department, so that they could write a new authorization for payment for the ultrasound, and then go back to the physicians office for a new order to go with it, and have to reschedule the mammogram for a day later in the week. It was obvious from the conversation that her husband who accompanied her, had taken off from work and was losing pay, and would have to take off yet another day later in the week to accompany her for the second go-round.
Poor health and poor health care are huge obstacles to successful college completion for lower income and working class students.
Friday, May 29, 2009
reconstituting working class neighborhoods
I grew up (1954-1969) in a suburb of San Francisco -- San Mateo -- in a neighborhood of blue collar/working class families. Construction on the subdivision in which we lived began in about 1948, and was not fully completed until a few years after we moved there in 1954. The first wave of houses were two and three bedroom, one bath, with a attached single car garage, and lots under a quarter acre. The later wave of houses built between 1953 and 1956, were three bedroom, two bath, with attached two car garages. These were on the same sized lot, so had less yard.
By 1954, solid six foot high privacy fences completely divided the backyards of each single family home from its neighbors. The only shared/public spaces were the sidewalks, the elementary school ground, and the single, large municipal park located across from the elementary school at the center of the subdivision. Children roamed from yard to yard, but adults stayed within the limits of their own yard, and did not socialize frequently with neighbors.
The residents of the homes during the 50's and 60's were primarily nuclear families, consisting a husband employed in a blue collar or working class occupation, wives who were rarely employed outside the home, and 2+ children. Occasionally a home was occupied by a retired couple, without children. Many of the men in this subdivision worked in maintenance departments of major air lines based at San Francisco International Airport (less than 8 miles away). There were also large numbers of men in the construction trades -- carpenters, electricians, bricklayers, plumbers, etc.
Almost all of the adults were from outside California, and many of the older children had been born outside the state as well. None of the families were related to each other, all were stripped of kinship ties. Grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins all resided "back east" or in the Midwest, rather than California. Rarely families would go "home" for brief vacations, usually during the summer months. Even more rarely kin would come for short visits. Thanksgiving and Christmas were holidays celebrated by isolated nuclear families.
Those of us who grew up in these communities took this isolation from kin for granted. Leaving behind extended family, to move great distances for work opportunities, and new communities was the norm for the majority of white working class families in California of the 1950's and 1960's. So it was not unexpected that most of the first wave of children would leave the area to go to college, find work and build futures in other cities and other states.
Attending college in Ohio and later graduate school in Kentucky, most of my fellow students had also left their homes and families some distance away. So the family and neighborhood patterns of my childhood seemed quite normal. It was not until I obtained my first full-time teaching position in Johnstown, Pennsylvania that I got a good, close hand look at a very different pattern of working class family and community life.
In Johnstown, the majority of working class and lower middle class adults lived within a few miles of their parents and grandparents, frequently on the same street, and not uncommonly in the other half of a double house -- a two or three story house under a single roof, that was divided down the middle into two distinct separate living units with separate kitchens, etc. This type of housing is extremely common in older working class neighborhoods of older industrial cities and towns east of the Mississippi.
Not only did the generations stay close to each other physically, but they often formed cooperative economic and social units. Children were cared for by grandparents, while parents worked. The increasing necessity for married women to be employed outside the home, made the assistance of grandparents in child care more and more crucial to economic well-being of working and lower middle class families in the 1980's.
The period of time that I spent in Johnstown included 1984-1985 during which time official unemployment rose to 25 percent as Bethlehem and U.S. Steel closed down the majority of their steel works. The permeable boundaries of family/household across generations was essential to many families survival, as those who retained jobs shared income with those who lost jobs. Many of the family and community patterns chronicled by Gans in Urban Villagers were alive and well in Johnstown in the 1980's.
I have since observed that trans-generational/trans-household family patterns are also exceedingly common among the working and lower middle classes in small town Virginia and rural Kentucky, and part of long standing traditions of kin helping kin.
What I find fascinating is that fifty years later in the 21st century, working and middle class families in San Mateo are reconstituting similar family and neighborhood patterns. This is being done both by new ethnic in-migrants to California (Filipino, Tongan, Vietnamese, Cambodian etc.) and by the later generations of the original working class families that populated the second wave in San Mateo's subdivisions.
It has become extremely common for two to four houses on one street to be owned by successive generations of the same family, and for other homes to be inhabited by cousins or other relatives. Because of vastly inflated housing values, often the older generation owns several homes that are rented to younger couples starting out. One family that first bought into the neighborhood in 1962 (the second wave) has three generations living in four houses at one end of one street. Two other houses nearby are owned by cousins who settled in the neighborhood in the 1970's and their adult child.
The entire neighborhood that was once populated by isolated nuclear families has become a complex web of family ties across generations, and extending out to collateral kin. The behavior of these families, providing assistance, child care, and financial aid, is far more similar to the old working class neighborhoods of Johnstown, than to the same neighborhood in the 1950's. All it took was time.
By 1954, solid six foot high privacy fences completely divided the backyards of each single family home from its neighbors. The only shared/public spaces were the sidewalks, the elementary school ground, and the single, large municipal park located across from the elementary school at the center of the subdivision. Children roamed from yard to yard, but adults stayed within the limits of their own yard, and did not socialize frequently with neighbors.
The residents of the homes during the 50's and 60's were primarily nuclear families, consisting a husband employed in a blue collar or working class occupation, wives who were rarely employed outside the home, and 2+ children. Occasionally a home was occupied by a retired couple, without children. Many of the men in this subdivision worked in maintenance departments of major air lines based at San Francisco International Airport (less than 8 miles away). There were also large numbers of men in the construction trades -- carpenters, electricians, bricklayers, plumbers, etc.
Almost all of the adults were from outside California, and many of the older children had been born outside the state as well. None of the families were related to each other, all were stripped of kinship ties. Grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins all resided "back east" or in the Midwest, rather than California. Rarely families would go "home" for brief vacations, usually during the summer months. Even more rarely kin would come for short visits. Thanksgiving and Christmas were holidays celebrated by isolated nuclear families.
Those of us who grew up in these communities took this isolation from kin for granted. Leaving behind extended family, to move great distances for work opportunities, and new communities was the norm for the majority of white working class families in California of the 1950's and 1960's. So it was not unexpected that most of the first wave of children would leave the area to go to college, find work and build futures in other cities and other states.
Attending college in Ohio and later graduate school in Kentucky, most of my fellow students had also left their homes and families some distance away. So the family and neighborhood patterns of my childhood seemed quite normal. It was not until I obtained my first full-time teaching position in Johnstown, Pennsylvania that I got a good, close hand look at a very different pattern of working class family and community life.
In Johnstown, the majority of working class and lower middle class adults lived within a few miles of their parents and grandparents, frequently on the same street, and not uncommonly in the other half of a double house -- a two or three story house under a single roof, that was divided down the middle into two distinct separate living units with separate kitchens, etc. This type of housing is extremely common in older working class neighborhoods of older industrial cities and towns east of the Mississippi.
Not only did the generations stay close to each other physically, but they often formed cooperative economic and social units. Children were cared for by grandparents, while parents worked. The increasing necessity for married women to be employed outside the home, made the assistance of grandparents in child care more and more crucial to economic well-being of working and lower middle class families in the 1980's.
The period of time that I spent in Johnstown included 1984-1985 during which time official unemployment rose to 25 percent as Bethlehem and U.S. Steel closed down the majority of their steel works. The permeable boundaries of family/household across generations was essential to many families survival, as those who retained jobs shared income with those who lost jobs. Many of the family and community patterns chronicled by Gans in Urban Villagers were alive and well in Johnstown in the 1980's.
I have since observed that trans-generational/trans-household family patterns are also exceedingly common among the working and lower middle classes in small town Virginia and rural Kentucky, and part of long standing traditions of kin helping kin.
What I find fascinating is that fifty years later in the 21st century, working and middle class families in San Mateo are reconstituting similar family and neighborhood patterns. This is being done both by new ethnic in-migrants to California (Filipino, Tongan, Vietnamese, Cambodian etc.) and by the later generations of the original working class families that populated the second wave in San Mateo's subdivisions.
It has become extremely common for two to four houses on one street to be owned by successive generations of the same family, and for other homes to be inhabited by cousins or other relatives. Because of vastly inflated housing values, often the older generation owns several homes that are rented to younger couples starting out. One family that first bought into the neighborhood in 1962 (the second wave) has three generations living in four houses at one end of one street. Two other houses nearby are owned by cousins who settled in the neighborhood in the 1970's and their adult child.
The entire neighborhood that was once populated by isolated nuclear families has become a complex web of family ties across generations, and extending out to collateral kin. The behavior of these families, providing assistance, child care, and financial aid, is far more similar to the old working class neighborhoods of Johnstown, than to the same neighborhood in the 1950's. All it took was time.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
norms on speaking up
Friday was our monthly faculty meeting. Since we have five campuses spread over 100 miles, most of our meetings are held via Interactive Television (or compressed two way video). The faculty gather on each campus in a common room, and can view speakers (and the folks around them) on the other campuses. Unless a microphone is turned on, any conversation that happens on a campus cannot be heard elsewhere.
This Friday something happened that has happened many times before. A faculty member on another campus made a proposal that did not sit well at all with anyone in the room around me. An immediate buzz of complaints and criticism took over the room. Several people said, "someone should tell them" but no one made a move to touch one of the microphones and report their concerns. In the meantime, several other individuals (all male) from other campuses, did activate their microphones and speak on behalf of the proposal. The volume of complaint around me increased. While I personally had no problem with the proposal, I could see that it would not be successful with such a high level of negative feeling from my local colleagues. Finally, since none of the people around me with the complaints did anything, I punched my microphone and informed the chair that our campus was unanimous in opposing the proposal. A few other people, from other campuses, then chimed in with their doubts, and the proposal was withdrawn.
Many times over the years that we have conducted our meetings through Interactive Television, there have been issues and proposals that have raised the ire and criticism of the faculty on my campus. Not once in all those years has any one, aside from myself, ever pressed the microphone button and expressed their concerns. If the issue is not one I share or wish to ally with, then the opposition of faculty on my campus is not expressed. Instead, they continue to grumble to each other, but never speak up, never take an action to oppose something. Indeed, no one on my campus, willingly speaks in the meeting unless they have a specific committee assignment on which they are required to report. I am the only one who will simply ask questions or offer opinions. The faculty on other campuses, with the exception of three others (all men), are the same, only those with official roles to play (heads of programs, elected officers, deans, etc.) will speak, make comments and ask questions.
This particular Friday, several people thanked me for speaking up and expressing our view. But more often, the comments and questions by those few of us who do speak up, are resented rather than appreciated. Two of the three men who speak up frequently are considered annoying trouble makers. My guess is that I may well have developed that reputation as well.
I am left to wonder to what extent this norm against speaking up in meetings, and asking questions of the authority figures, is a function of regional subculture (central Appalachia) and to what extent is it a function of working class subculture (since nearly all of the community college faculty I work with are from working class families). Sociologists Sennett and Cobb in their seminal work The Hidden Injuries of Class recorded similar behavior among grade school students in working class Boston and Pennsylvania. But I did not see the same behavior in the working-class originating faculty of the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, when I taught there in the 1980's. Perhaps this is not an "either/or" situation, but a combination of both regional and social class subculture.
This Friday something happened that has happened many times before. A faculty member on another campus made a proposal that did not sit well at all with anyone in the room around me. An immediate buzz of complaints and criticism took over the room. Several people said, "someone should tell them" but no one made a move to touch one of the microphones and report their concerns. In the meantime, several other individuals (all male) from other campuses, did activate their microphones and speak on behalf of the proposal. The volume of complaint around me increased. While I personally had no problem with the proposal, I could see that it would not be successful with such a high level of negative feeling from my local colleagues. Finally, since none of the people around me with the complaints did anything, I punched my microphone and informed the chair that our campus was unanimous in opposing the proposal. A few other people, from other campuses, then chimed in with their doubts, and the proposal was withdrawn.
Many times over the years that we have conducted our meetings through Interactive Television, there have been issues and proposals that have raised the ire and criticism of the faculty on my campus. Not once in all those years has any one, aside from myself, ever pressed the microphone button and expressed their concerns. If the issue is not one I share or wish to ally with, then the opposition of faculty on my campus is not expressed. Instead, they continue to grumble to each other, but never speak up, never take an action to oppose something. Indeed, no one on my campus, willingly speaks in the meeting unless they have a specific committee assignment on which they are required to report. I am the only one who will simply ask questions or offer opinions. The faculty on other campuses, with the exception of three others (all men), are the same, only those with official roles to play (heads of programs, elected officers, deans, etc.) will speak, make comments and ask questions.
This particular Friday, several people thanked me for speaking up and expressing our view. But more often, the comments and questions by those few of us who do speak up, are resented rather than appreciated. Two of the three men who speak up frequently are considered annoying trouble makers. My guess is that I may well have developed that reputation as well.
I am left to wonder to what extent this norm against speaking up in meetings, and asking questions of the authority figures, is a function of regional subculture (central Appalachia) and to what extent is it a function of working class subculture (since nearly all of the community college faculty I work with are from working class families). Sociologists Sennett and Cobb in their seminal work The Hidden Injuries of Class recorded similar behavior among grade school students in working class Boston and Pennsylvania. But I did not see the same behavior in the working-class originating faculty of the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, when I taught there in the 1980's. Perhaps this is not an "either/or" situation, but a combination of both regional and social class subculture.
Sunday, July 01, 2007
Education and Economic Justice
My first reaction to Thursday (June 28, 2007) Supreme Court decision on race and education was dismay. It seemed, to a life long leftie like me, to be a horrendous step backward. But over the past few days, as I read articles from various papers around the nation, it occurs to me that this is instead a tremendous opportunity to turn the focus where it really should be -- on issues of social class.
The Christian Science Monitor today noted that many of those concerned about issues of equity in education feel "it would be more practical for districts to shift toward balancing school populations on the basis of factors such as income level."
Cited in the CS Monitor article:
It is time now to focus on making sure that our schools are integrated by social class, and use things like income, home value, and neighborhood residence to create diversity in the schools. If we have social class diversity, then racial and ethnic diversity will happen as a matter of course.
The Christian Science Monitor today noted that many of those concerned about issues of equity in education feel "it would be more practical for districts to shift toward balancing school populations on the basis of factors such as income level."
Cited in the CS Monitor article:
"The socioeconomic approach offers two advantages," says Richard Kahlenberg, author of a new report detailing such plans and a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive policy group in Washington. First, districts that have done it most successfully give families a choice of magnet schools with special programs, "so there are incentives for middle-class people to buy into socioeconomic integration," says Mr. Kahlenberg. Second, "as a legal matter, it's clearly fine to use income to distinguish people."If we are honest about it, the only reason for anyone to be concerned about inequities in education is because education has consequences for the material and economic conditions in which people live. Concerns about racial segregation were never about an abstract access to "knowledge," but rather about practical access to power (political and economic) and the pathways to full economic opportunity.
It is time now to focus on making sure that our schools are integrated by social class, and use things like income, home value, and neighborhood residence to create diversity in the schools. If we have social class diversity, then racial and ethnic diversity will happen as a matter of course.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Here goes....
Since it would appear that no one actually reads my blog, I might as well write whatever I want. So...
I was just watching Brit Hume's "Special Report" on Fox News (yes, I watch Fox News, it's always important to know what the enemy is up to). He had a panel of very articulate, interesting and thoughtful guests having a rational discussion about the immigration bill being debated in Congress. Two of the panelists pointed out that the current bill does not really have the support of the business community, because it does not go far enough with the guest worker program.
The current bill only offers 400,000 guest worker slots per year, and proposes that the workers only stay 2 years, then go back to their country of origin for one year, before being able to return for another two year stint. The American business community, according to one of Hume's conservative panelists, would rather see a million workers a year, with a three year work permit, that can be renewed for another three years without having to return home. (If you doubt my version of this, check out Brit Hume's "Special Report" website on Thursday, and click on the transcript for today's show -- Tuesday May 22, 2007 -- it won't go up until later today or early tomorrow).
I have absolutely no doubt that this speaker is right on the money when it comes to a large proportion of American businesses which depend very heavily on the inexpensive labor of immigrants, especially illegal workers.
What I find so fascinating about all this, is that the American upper class and business elite, have been stoking the fires of xenophobia and racism for more than a hundred years as a means of keeping the working class divided among itself and unable to joing together as a politically coherent class based political power. The power elite as G. William Domhoff calls them, make use of their ownership and control over mass media outlets, to promote this rabid anti-immigrant sentiment. [And don't give me any crap about the so called "liberal media" -- Lou Dobbs, who I am sure is considered "liberal" by folks on the far right, does a superb job in ramping up the hysterial xenophobia of his viewers].
I was just watching Brit Hume's "Special Report" on Fox News (yes, I watch Fox News, it's always important to know what the enemy is up to). He had a panel of very articulate, interesting and thoughtful guests having a rational discussion about the immigration bill being debated in Congress. Two of the panelists pointed out that the current bill does not really have the support of the business community, because it does not go far enough with the guest worker program.
The current bill only offers 400,000 guest worker slots per year, and proposes that the workers only stay 2 years, then go back to their country of origin for one year, before being able to return for another two year stint. The American business community, according to one of Hume's conservative panelists, would rather see a million workers a year, with a three year work permit, that can be renewed for another three years without having to return home. (If you doubt my version of this, check out Brit Hume's "Special Report" website on Thursday, and click on the transcript for today's show -- Tuesday May 22, 2007 -- it won't go up until later today or early tomorrow).
I have absolutely no doubt that this speaker is right on the money when it comes to a large proportion of American businesses which depend very heavily on the inexpensive labor of immigrants, especially illegal workers.
What I find so fascinating about all this, is that the American upper class and business elite, have been stoking the fires of xenophobia and racism for more than a hundred years as a means of keeping the working class divided among itself and unable to joing together as a politically coherent class based political power. The power elite as G. William Domhoff calls them, make use of their ownership and control over mass media outlets, to promote this rabid anti-immigrant sentiment. [And don't give me any crap about the so called "liberal media" -- Lou Dobbs, who I am sure is considered "liberal" by folks on the far right, does a superb job in ramping up the hysterial xenophobia of his viewers].
If you're interested in a serious, well documented sociological study on the use of racism and ethnic divisions to control the work force, check out the classic Blue Collar Community by William Kornblum about steel workers in South Chicago in the 1970's. For a less scholarly, but well written view of the same issue, read bell hooks where we stand: class matters [no capitals in the original].As a genuine left winger, I would like to see amnesty for all immigrants with jobs [if they are legal, they won't worry about being deported, and they can be more radical and agressive in pressing for better pay and working conditions]. If it weren't for that, I'd be crowing for joy that the American business community is not getting what they want out of this immigration bill. It seems only fair that if you spend a hundred years of fanning the flames of hate and fear, that hate and fear will suddenly be inconvenient when you suddenly decide you actually need a lot more cheap workers. Hoisted on their own petard.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Obama, memories, and me
Recent dissection of Barack Obama's youth and his memories of that youth in his book "Dreams from My Father" (see the Chicago Tribune http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0703250359mar25,1,605874.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed), prompted me to think about two of my most significant and influential memories of conversations.
The Chicago Tribune article about Barack Obama states:
My own experience suggests that a remembered conversation can be "about" something, even if it was not part of the conversation. Two conversations that I had with friends, about two months apart were extraordinarily influential in shaping my career path. The first of those conversations was "about" the impact of racial/ethnic and cultural differences, the second was "about" the impact of social class.
I know for a fact that race/ethnicity and culture were never even mentioned in the first conversation, yet that is precisely what that conversation was "about." August before my sophomore year in college I gave a party to reunite some friends from high school. Much of the conversation revolved around men and romance (pretty typical of a group of 19 year old women). Two of my friends, blond blue-eyed Betty and raven haired, brown-eyed Debbe, started talking about being attracted to young men who were different from themselves. Betty's affections were drawn to a man a few years older, from South America, and Japanese-American Debbe had been interested in a Caucasian man. Betty was still seeing her young man despite disapproval by her parents, but Debbe explained that after a great deal of thought and some anguish, she had decided dating someone of another race was not worth incurring the disapproval of her parents.
Betty and Debbe's discussion became heated, when Betty suggested that Debbe needed to show some spine and independence, and stop letting her parents decide who she would date. As they argued about this for some time, it was obvious to me, as the observer, that they both thought about this argument in terms of personality and individual preference, but that it was really about racial/ethnic and cultural differences in the way they were raised, and how they thought of themselves in relationship to their families.
As a result of this conversation, I spent the next several years researching racial/ethnic and cultural differences in child raising and identity, especially among Chinese- and Japanese-Americans. I'm sure that my memory of this conversation and what is was about, is entirely different from Betty and Debbe's memory of it -- if they even remember it at all.
The second remembered conversation is from just two months later, October in my sophomore year. I was stuck in Cleveland Hopkins Airport trying to stand-by for flights to Washington, D.C., and I ran into a fellow student, Ivory, also having difficulty getting on a flight. [I always traveled stand-by, but Ivory was the victim of flight cancellations due to striking air line employees).
I had something of a crush on Ivory, and knowing what I was like back then, I could be more than a little obnoxious to the objects of my affections. So in retrospect, it was kind of him to take the time to talk with me while we both waited to catch a flight. We conversed for nearly five hours stretched out over much of the day. Most of what we talked about is lost to memory. But two things about the conversation remained with me clearly. The first was that he was desperately unhappy at Oberlin College. The second was that at least some of that unhappiness derived from the mismatch between his family's view of purpose of a college education and the view held by the faculty and most of the students at Oberlin.
Ivory's family, like my own, sent him to college to become a teacher. To his parents, like mine, college was an instrument for obtaining a decent job. But the ethos at Oberlin College, in that day, was quite different. Having an instrumental approach to education was frowned upon -- unless it was as an instrument of social change. College was for intellectual, artistic and personal discovery. God forbid that any Oberlin student should show any concern for the pecuniary benefits of education [unlike the Commonwealth of Kentucky today that has signs saying "education pays" posted on every state vehicle and along the road sides].
Ivory expressed great anguish, and a sense of being rent in two, by the differing expectations of family and college community. Although I did not experience the pain Ivory did over this clash of values, I was very much aware of the disparity between my family's views about education and the views of my professors and friends at Oberlin.
The conversation stayed with me because I felt honored to have been the recipient of such confidences, and because it resonated with my own experiences. By the time I reached graduate school (5 years later) I remembered this as a discussion about social class, and the pain and bewilderment faced by working class students in an upper middle class environment. However, in retrospect, I cannot honestly say that either Ivory or myself spoke about social class at the time we had the conversation. Perhaps we did. Perhaps we did not. That does not make it any less "about" class.
The memory of this conversation, about social class, heavily influenced my work as a sociologist. Almost everything I have done has been in some way or another "about" social class, and the millions of ways that class affects our lives.
So who is really to say, just because Senator Obama's friend "Ray" (Kakugawa) does not remember Barack talking about race, does not mean that the pain he expressed at the time did not have a racial component. Sometimes it takes years to gain perspective on our pasts and know why it really was that we suffered.
The Chicago Tribune article about Barack Obama states:
"He said he does recall long, soulful talks with the young Obama and that his friend confided his longing and loneliness. But those talks, Kakugawa said, were not about race. 'Not even close,' he said, adding that Obama was dealing with 'some inner turmoil' in those days."The article goes on to say:
"'But it wasn't a race thing,' he said."
"Some of these discrepancies are typical of childhood memories -- fuzzy in specifics, warped by age, shaped by writerly license."
My own experience suggests that a remembered conversation can be "about" something, even if it was not part of the conversation. Two conversations that I had with friends, about two months apart were extraordinarily influential in shaping my career path. The first of those conversations was "about" the impact of racial/ethnic and cultural differences, the second was "about" the impact of social class.
I know for a fact that race/ethnicity and culture were never even mentioned in the first conversation, yet that is precisely what that conversation was "about." August before my sophomore year in college I gave a party to reunite some friends from high school. Much of the conversation revolved around men and romance (pretty typical of a group of 19 year old women). Two of my friends, blond blue-eyed Betty and raven haired, brown-eyed Debbe, started talking about being attracted to young men who were different from themselves. Betty's affections were drawn to a man a few years older, from South America, and Japanese-American Debbe had been interested in a Caucasian man. Betty was still seeing her young man despite disapproval by her parents, but Debbe explained that after a great deal of thought and some anguish, she had decided dating someone of another race was not worth incurring the disapproval of her parents.
Betty and Debbe's discussion became heated, when Betty suggested that Debbe needed to show some spine and independence, and stop letting her parents decide who she would date. As they argued about this for some time, it was obvious to me, as the observer, that they both thought about this argument in terms of personality and individual preference, but that it was really about racial/ethnic and cultural differences in the way they were raised, and how they thought of themselves in relationship to their families.
As a result of this conversation, I spent the next several years researching racial/ethnic and cultural differences in child raising and identity, especially among Chinese- and Japanese-Americans. I'm sure that my memory of this conversation and what is was about, is entirely different from Betty and Debbe's memory of it -- if they even remember it at all.
The second remembered conversation is from just two months later, October in my sophomore year. I was stuck in Cleveland Hopkins Airport trying to stand-by for flights to Washington, D.C., and I ran into a fellow student, Ivory, also having difficulty getting on a flight. [I always traveled stand-by, but Ivory was the victim of flight cancellations due to striking air line employees).
I had something of a crush on Ivory, and knowing what I was like back then, I could be more than a little obnoxious to the objects of my affections. So in retrospect, it was kind of him to take the time to talk with me while we both waited to catch a flight. We conversed for nearly five hours stretched out over much of the day. Most of what we talked about is lost to memory. But two things about the conversation remained with me clearly. The first was that he was desperately unhappy at Oberlin College. The second was that at least some of that unhappiness derived from the mismatch between his family's view of purpose of a college education and the view held by the faculty and most of the students at Oberlin.
Ivory's family, like my own, sent him to college to become a teacher. To his parents, like mine, college was an instrument for obtaining a decent job. But the ethos at Oberlin College, in that day, was quite different. Having an instrumental approach to education was frowned upon -- unless it was as an instrument of social change. College was for intellectual, artistic and personal discovery. God forbid that any Oberlin student should show any concern for the pecuniary benefits of education [unlike the Commonwealth of Kentucky today that has signs saying "education pays" posted on every state vehicle and along the road sides].
Ivory expressed great anguish, and a sense of being rent in two, by the differing expectations of family and college community. Although I did not experience the pain Ivory did over this clash of values, I was very much aware of the disparity between my family's views about education and the views of my professors and friends at Oberlin.
The conversation stayed with me because I felt honored to have been the recipient of such confidences, and because it resonated with my own experiences. By the time I reached graduate school (5 years later) I remembered this as a discussion about social class, and the pain and bewilderment faced by working class students in an upper middle class environment. However, in retrospect, I cannot honestly say that either Ivory or myself spoke about social class at the time we had the conversation. Perhaps we did. Perhaps we did not. That does not make it any less "about" class.
The memory of this conversation, about social class, heavily influenced my work as a sociologist. Almost everything I have done has been in some way or another "about" social class, and the millions of ways that class affects our lives.
So who is really to say, just because Senator Obama's friend "Ray" (Kakugawa) does not remember Barack talking about race, does not mean that the pain he expressed at the time did not have a racial component. Sometimes it takes years to gain perspective on our pasts and know why it really was that we suffered.
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