21: What is the elephant in the room? #LifeWideLearning16@mrchase
— Ben Wilkoff (@bhwilkoff) January 21, 2016
Starting down the rabbit hole.
This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.
If I were in a school or classroom right now, I’d throw out whatever lesson plan I had ahead of me and pull in Lower Income, Higher Ed a documentary in the Breaking Ground series from WAMU’s Kavitha Cardoza.
Throughout the doc, Cardoza talks with DC high school grads who are most, if not all, the first in their families to have headed to college after growing up in poverty. The stories are poignant, moving, and illustrative of the cultural, economic, and emotional issues facing students making the transition from poverty to higher ed. I want to use this doc with a few audiences.
Any teacher who has ever prepared a student for college or university life needs to hear the stories Cardoza has captured. They shine a light on what happens after so many high school students leave our care and cross the threshold toward which we’ve been helping them move. Most importantly, these stories help to remind us that high school graduation is only one milestone of educational attainment. Yes, it inceases the likelihood of economic success, but it does not ensure the social capital so necessary to help first-generation college students navigate post-secondary life.
Cardoza’s work here captures the stories of students torn between “survivor’s guilt” and the opportunities they’ve worked to secure for themselves. She chronicles worries and concerns these students face, which they likely never described to the parents. And she talks about the importance of support structures back home when students struggle with the college transitions. When a student becomes a first-generation college student, their parents become first-generation college parents, and that brings with it a whole other set of needs.
Perhaps the most obvious audience for the doc are those students following in the footsteps of those Cardoza features in her reporting. If it does nothing else (and I think it can do so much more), Lower Income, Higher Ed can give much-needed permission for these students to seek outside help, to contact community groups, and to realize they aren’t in it alone.
Maybe the least likely to be among the intended audience of this piece, students who grew up outside of poverty stand to gain a great deal from listening to stories likely wound up in the lives of those students sitting next to them in class. Many of the students Cardoza interviews for the doc are also students of color recounting their time on predominantly white campuses. I found myself wishing she would talk to the white students in these largely midwestern schools and say, “What could you do to better understand those who might enter this space with less comfort than you?”
This is my one frustration with the documentary. While she does a fine job of helping her listeners understand the needs of and supports available to these students, I wish Cardoza had shined more light on the institutional shifts that would help shift the burrden from students coming out of poverty and onto colleges and their faculty. While the work of support organizations featured in the program is to be appreciated, perhaps universities could do more to be welcoming places of learning in addition to their financial support. Poverty, as it turns out, is about more than money.
From a recent Bill Moyers post:
Most people in poverty do not receive cash assistance. In 1996, for every 100 families with children in poverty, there were 68 families who accessed cash assistance. In 2011, for every 100 families with children in poverty, 27 accessed cash assistance.
With the Farm Bill’s faltering in Congress putting food assistance for children in poverty in a dangerous limbo, maybe it’s time we agreed poverty as the most important issue in education. Anyone who thinks differently can remove themselves from the line of helpful voices.
This week’s reading takes us back to Losing Ground by Charles Murray. While the opening chapters bordered on the ridiculous in their cherry picking of facts, avoidance of sources and generally fallacious arguments, these final chapters were particularly frustrating. Surely conservative thinkers have a stronger argument to make than Murray’s. Rather than devote any more posts to this book, I’ve decided to sum up the last three chapters here.
Murray’s argument completes its break from reality. “Part of the genius of the system in the United States,” he writes, “is that status is not immutable. Those on the bottom at any given time can see themselves as just passing through on the way up…” (p. 179). Given Murray’s earlier refusal to see poverty as a systemic problem, his belief in the upward mobility possible for anyone willing to do the work should not be surprising. It leads one to question why more people haven’t decided to muster the willpower and grit to leave poverty behind. Murray’s answer, of course, is that the federal government has made poverty too enticing and comfortable. Beginning with Harold and Phyllis, Murray implies welfare payments, food stamps, etc. provide recipients with a standard of living too resplendent to inspire anyone to want or try for better.
Not only is such a living attractive, but government programs have worked to bring a sense of pride to being poor and eliminated any stratification that may have existed among the poor as well, according to Murray who offers no empirical evidence of his claims. Leading to his proposal for what is to be done, Murray’s argument rests on the following premises:
Moving into his conclusion, Murray focuses on transfers and finds them, on the whole, lacking in logic. He returns to education and gives us the example of the good student who must make a transfer to the disinterested student by means of a diminished school experience when both students are placed in the same classroom. This example, and the theory in general, strikes me as inconsistent with Murray’s larger belief that poor people can lift themselves out of poverty if policymakers would get out of the way. It is unclear why the presence of a less dedicated student should prevent the good student from reaching his bootstraps. Another alternative is that Murray is arguing the good student will still improve his status but not as much as he would without the disinterested distraction. If this is true, Murray fails to make this point clearly or to outline why some factors are insurmountable in escaping poverty, but others can be overcome through sheer hard work.
As Murray concludes the text by outlining a proposal for the dismantling of all welfare programs, this is the question that sticks in my mind. People in poverty would prefer not to be poor, he argues, and they were making progress toward that goal prior to the instatement of federal welfare policies. What though, is it about poverty with these policies (government-made poverty) that is impossible to overcome in Murray’s eyes? Assuming this is answered, what is it about natural poverty that makes it easier to overcome than a federal policy? Where is the line of poverty that can be escaped and poverty that is inescapable? I’m not certain Murray has the answer or is aware he’s inspired such a question.
This week’s reading takes us back to Losing Ground by Charles Murray. While the opening chapters bordered on the ridiculous in their cherry picking of facts, avoidance of sources and generally fallacious arguments, these final chapters were particularly frustrating. Surely conservative thinkers have a stronger argument to make than Murray’s. I’ve decided to think of this series of posts as “Reading, so you don’t have to.”
It is unlikely one will find a graph axis label that gives the appearance of saying much while, in reality, saying so little as the vertical label Murray includes on page 168, “Odds of Going Unarrested for 5 Crimes.” It acts as a suitable metaphor for the contents of the chapter.
The second graph on page 169 presents readers with an even more confusing story. Within the text, Murray points to the span between 1961 and 1969 as particularly unsettling because the number of incarcerated citizens fell so sharply. He fails to mention or find any problem with the soaring incarceration rates beginning in the early 70s.[1]
Murray implies throughout the opening of this chapter that police stopped arresting criminals and that crime rates were skyrocketing. In looking closely, his only mention of actual crime rates comes not from national statistics, but within Cook County, IL. Even then, Murray is making mention not of an actual increase in number of crimes, but concerns himself with juvenile crime (in this one county) “entering its highest rate of increase” (p.170). His conclusion that no reason existed not to commit delinquent acts in the 1970s is a strange one. Murray needed only look at his own graph to see the youth he mentions standing on the street corner had a fairly likely chance of knowing someone who had been arrested and imprisoned for committing a crime.
When turning his attention to education, Murray continues his focus on punishments and sanctions. His description of the frustrations inherent in working in schools with students from varied backgrounds was not incorrect. Students with little support from home present special challenges for learning. These are challenges that often require new approaches to teaching. Murray, once again assumes an external locus of control. This is not surprising, considering his application of such a theory to people living in poverty, those considering criminal activity, and Harold & Phyllis’ decision of whether or not to go on welfare. Children, like the adults Murray considers, are to be considered as driven solely by external forces.
Suspensions and expulsions, Murray reasons were key tools in helping students learn. Those who found themselves suspended had made their choice, and rejected the opportunity to learn. In defending these tools, Murray again ignores race and shows no signs of awareness of or interest in the school-to-prison pipeline[2] that was developing in America at the time. Further, in his dismissal of African American efforts to shift schooling for their children, Murray shows an ahistorical understanding of the goals and work of those schools as we discussed in class.
Murray’s main argument about education (that the inclusion of disinterested students who would otherwise have found themselves suspended or expelled destroyed the learning of interested students and lowered the standards of teachers) comes not surprisingly without evidence to support his claims. More frustrating is Murray’s lack of interest in changing what was going on inside of schools rather than kicking students out of them. He appears to be making a “business as usual” argument that education would have been fine if we could have kept the bad kids out. Again, this shows a lack of consideration of the ways in which the world was changing during the 60s and 70s. Murray would have done well to consider the idea that the misalignment of the world within the classroom with the world outside the classroom might have had more to do with a lack of student interest than the removal of the “bad” students.
One final note about this chapter, on page 177, Murray writes, “For blacks, the uncertainty and distance of the incentive have been compounded by discrimination that makes it harder to get and hold jobs.” Here, the emotional baggage of race in America moves to support his purpose and is picked up again. It raises the question of whether Murray ignored race in the previous chapter because it could muddy the clarity he found in his argument about welfare incentives.
[1] This is to say nothing of the abhorrent design of the graph.
[2] As documented by the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana – http://jjpl.org/suspensions-matter/
This week’s reading takes us back to Losing Ground by Charles Murray. While the opening chapters bordered on the ridiculous in their cherry picking of facts, avoidance of sources and generally fallacious arguments, these final chapters were particularly frustrating. Surely conservative thinkers have a stronger argument to make than Murray’s.
In chapters 12, Murray continues to use an interesting approach to analyzing changes in American poverty beginning in the early-to-mid 1960s and using the 1950s as a basis of comparison. He decides not to look at the whole history. In the opening to Ch. 12, Murray writes, “It is not necessary to invoke the Zeitgeist of the 1960s, or changes in the work ethic, or racial differences, or the complexities of postindustrial economies, in order to explain increasing unemployment among the young, increased dropout from the labor force, or higher rates of illegitimacy and welfare dependency“ (p. 154). Here, as in earlier chapters, Murray is discounting the importance of other forces that may have been at work in shifting poverty rates and one of his main premises – that America started thinking differently about what it means to be poor.
While I understand the careless and ambiguous approach to data, charts, graphs, etc. could be particularly pernicious, this declaration of consideration of only pieces of the culture and society he’s decided to include undermines his entire argument. What’s more, Murray furthers his myopic analysis on the next page, writing, “Let us drop the racial baggage that goes with the American context and make the point first in a less emotional setting” (p. 155). He then presents an example set in a developing nation as though his invocation of race in would not be in his readers’ minds. It is akin to telling someone not to picture an elephant. While this may be as easy for Murray as putting the sentence to the page, for those he writes about, separating race from any aspect of the American experience is not nearly so easy. It can be taken as more evidence to support the claim stated in last week’s class that Murray’s argument is meant more as permission for those feeling white guilt to let those feelings go. “It’s not about race, “ he writes in one form or another throughout the text. Yet, to deny race or drop the emotional baggage it includes only works to highlight Murray’s ignorance (fabricated or authentic) of the multitude of factors involved in poverty and class in America.
The crux of his argument in Ch. 12, though, is the story of Harold and Phyllis and Murray’s explanation of how these two might navigate having a child together in 1960 versus 1970 and their options in attempting to make ends meet. In presenting these characters, Murray takes great pains to work against the stereotype of a welfare recipient his target readership would likely hold. Through all of his detail, Murray’s subtext seems to be shouting, “No, they’re white, so you wouldn’t expect them to be on welfare.” This fact aside, Murray’s stated purpose is to have us ask, “[W]hat course of action makes sense?” (p. 157). Here, he asks us not only to strip away the cultural factors that might play a role in Harold and Phyllis’ decisions, but to strip away aspects of their humanity as well.[1] They will be driven by the logic of the math. Aside from removing any intrinsic will to work a job, Murray returns to his old tricks involving explaining the math of the situation. The explanation of Harold and Phyllis’ options in 1970 is particularly slippery, moving back and forth between the real amounts in 1970 and their 1980 equivalents. A reader could easily lose their way through the description to walk away with the idea that Harold and Phyllis were receiving a few hundred dollars per week through welfare benefits.
Murray’s prejudice is further displayed in his explanation of Phyllis’ decision to keep the baby. He removes all sense of agency and independence from his subject when he implies her two choices for “economic insurance” are either the government support her baby elicits or the support of a husband. It’s a disturbing image that also works against the bootstrap endgame Murray has been working toward throughout the book. Evidently, only men can pick themselves up out of poverty, and women can pick themselves up by latching on to a man on his way up.
In the end, it is not inconceivable that a couple who found themselves in the shoes of 1970 Harold and Phyllis could approach their situation in the calculated mathematical manner Murray describes. That this would be the case for all is not only unlikely, but highly insulting as well.
[1] This is to say nothing of the normalized assumptions about the benefits of the couple living together, which is presented devoid of any nuance of analysis of whether the economic best choice is also best for the socio-emotional needs of all three.
As part of this week’s reading for my policy course, we’ve been asked to take a look at Charles Murray’s seminal tome, Losing Ground. While my reaction to the text is different than my reading of Dewey’s Experience & Education, it seemed this might be a good chance to put another side of the argument into perspective.
In Ch. 3, Murray walks readers through the shift in thinking from the intelligentsia of the mid-to-late 60s. Before digging in to the one sentence that made it incredibly difficult for me to continue reading this chapter, let me outline some of the common cause I was able to muster from these pages.
Murray outlines what he describes as a certain way of thinking becoming unfashionable during the time period. Pre-1964 thinking was that those unhappy with their jobs should take matters into their own hands to change their position and, recognizing the difficulties inherent in that premise, the system was doing all it could to help them. Murray’s argument here was 1964 exposed the faulty nature of the second premise and thereby the impossibility of the first.
Where we find common ground is in his conversation of how the shift took place and the lack of conversation or dialogue – the lack of a difficult conversation – about what should be done and what was right.
There was no great debate in the interim, no moment at which the nation could observe itself changing its national policy. The change happened unannounced.
Charles Murray. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, 10th Anniversary Edition (p. 45). Kindle Edition.
Somewhere in the last few years, the sentiment above shifted to reflect the lack of conversation or debate in how we set the fashionable education reforms that are currently en vogue.
Where Murray lost me, was with the following sentence:
Before 1964, blacks were unique. They constituted the only group suffering discrimination so pervasive and so persistent that laws for that group were broadly accepted as necessary.
Charles Murray. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, 10th Anniversary Edition (p. 43). Kindle Edition.
I don’t know what to say about that belief or to that belief, so I’m going to let it sit in my brain for a while.
As part of this week’s reading for my policy course, we’ve been asked to take a look at Charles Murray’s seminal tome, Losing Ground. While my reaction to the text is different than my reading of Dewey’s Experience & Education, it seemed this might be a good chance to put another side of the argument into perspective.
Murray opens Losing Ground by first describing America’s general blindness to poverty leading up to to the 1960s, referencing few mentions of impoverished Americans in periodicals and research of the day. It was a problem (45 million or 30 percent of America’s population) but not one garnering much attention. I can’t help reading thinking perhaps Murray’s looking to Life magazine as the barometer of knowledge and awareness of poverty as perhaps coming short. Surely, those 45 million were aware of their poverty. Perhaps they too were surprised that one of the nation’s most widely circulated magazines wasn’t mentioning the failure of America’s post-war boom to help everyone attain prosperity. Then again, given our more contemporary willful blindness to poverty, maybe no one was surprised.
The meat of Murray’s first chapter, though, has to do with President Kennedy’s departure from tradition in suggesting the federal government put institutions in place that transferred welfare from “a hand” to “a hand up” and President Johnson’s subsequent expansion of this principal.
Murray closes the first chapter with this:
Johnson lost no time in implementing the Kennedy rhetoric. The initial antipoverty bill was written, debated, passed, and signed-in August 1964 -within Johnson’s first nine months in office. The bill was a faithful attempt to follow the “hand, not a handout” script. It provided for job training, part-time jobs for teenagers and college students, community antipoverty projects, loans to low-income farmers and businessmen, and the establishment of VISTA, the domestic Peace Corps. There was not a handout in the lot. Johnson was careful to point this out at the signing ceremony, incorporating into his remarks the cheerful prediction that “the days of the dole in this country are numbered.”14
Charles Murray. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, 10th Anniversary Edition (Kindle Locations 406-409). Kindle Edition.
My note in the margin here is more about what Murray’s not saying than the argument he’s explicitly making. Textually, he’s reporting what happened. In the subtext, he feels to be coughing under his breath saying, “And that’s when it all started to go to hell.”
It was difficult to align this subtext with my personal experience working alongside the modern-day equivalents of these programs and seeing the good they’ve done in communities and the capacity they have built in their participants.
More on Ch. 2 soon.
In a recent class, a colleague was describing the Chicano civil rights movement here in Colorado. As she detailed the events, she ended with, “…and then it went nationwide.”
I paused for a moment. Why hadn’t I heard about this movement when I was growing up in Central Illinois? Had it truly gone nationwide?
Then I got curious as to what the Hispanic population looked like by the numbers near my hometown. I’d several friends who identified as Hispanic when I lived in Florida, but couldn’t remember any from my time in Illinois. I took to the Internet. Here’s what I found:
It seemed from this picture that I had a reason why the movement going nationwide hadn’t resonated as profoundly in the Midwest. This got me curious. Here’s what else I found:
And…
And…
These were things I could probably have described generally if handed a blank map and asked to color in the distribution. It wasn’t until I started considering these maps with regard to the “national” conversations we have about race, ethnicity, and culture I’ve witnessed and participated in as I’ve moved around the country. Some things I’m thinking:
If I were in a social studies classroom, I’d be building a unit around these maps and the questions they raise for my students and me. If I were in an English classroom, I’d be asking how these distributions might influence my selection of texts and how I approached helping students access them. If I were leading a school, I’d open a faculty meeting with these images and ask how they might help us think about how we are preparing students for the larger world and their citizenship in it.
And, I’d throw one more map into the mix to make it interesting…
The combined efforts of millions of concerned citizens could do wonders to help the impoverished. The American people are ready for action!
– Barbara Boxer
Writing on the Ed Week blogs, Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville recently posted about his state’s commonwealth’s move to close the poverty gap for its students.
Of all the gaps, the poverty gap takes up the most intellectual space in my head. Perhaps this is because it feels as though it takes up the least amount of space in the national ed dialogue.
Reville touted the progress being made in Mass. building bridges between social services and schools, working to get students the mental and physical health supports they need in the lowest achieving schools. He specifically cited the Mass. Achievement Gap Act of 2010 that “requires the state’s lowest performing schools to explicitly address, in their school turnaround plans, the health and social-emotional well-being of all students.”
This is a thoughtful and well-meaning requirement. The ends to which the Act attempts to make means have my full support.
I wonder if they have everyone’s.
I wonder if measures like “making provision for counselors or community engagement specialists to be employed full time to connect needy students and their families with supportive services designed to address out-of-school issues that threaten and disrupt student learning” are set to be the norm.
In my last school, when designing a community that could support some of the lowest achieving students from around the district, the planning committee attached one guidance counselor and one social worker per 100 students.
If a student didn’t show up to school, suffered a death in the family or any other event that pushed learning lower on the list of priorities, the school was able to act almost immediately to meet that student’s needs.
I’ve rarely seen anything so dialed in to supporting students’ socio-emotional needs.
These counselors and social workers did more than lighten the students’ loads. They lightened the workloads of teachers as well. Anyone who’s worked in a classroom knows the profession requires more than a mastery of content and its delivery. As the adults many of our students have the most frequent and prolonged content with each day, we are bond to become confidants. Having a guidance counselor literally just outside my door meant I could listen to a student’s problems, provide them with the support they needed in the moment and then connect them with an adult trained specifically to give them the long-term help they needed to come to terms with whatever challenges they were facing.
What frustrated me then is what frustrates me still, my students needed access to those services and supports long before they became low-achieving. At some point in their time in education, they were in schools much larger than ours with many fewer support personnel.
These students, like the students in the schools about which Reville writes, needed to fail so mightily, so loudly and in such high concentrations that the adults in their lives worked to build supports for them only when they had fallen as low as the system would allow.
Failing or underachieving or striving schools aren’t any of those things at all. They are students. Students who we require to fail before we give them the help they need.
It strikes me as wildly disingenuous to suggest any type of test scores were necessary before any district, state or federal office could surmise which students needed these support structures.
All anyone needed to do was ask the teachers.