TearingDowntheGates

So who are the real working-class heroes in this Presidential race?

2008-09-08T20:11:00.000-07:00

Now that the conventions are over and the presidential campaign’s endgame begins, it has become abundantly clear that both the Obama and McCain campaigns are locked in a feverish race for the title of Most Ordinary.

Having stumbled with white working-class voters who don’t seem to trust Obama’s working-class roots, he is running as fast as possible from the elite educational background that helped launch his extraordinary rise to power. Despite their Harvard Law pedigrees, Obama and wife Michelle have taken pains to tell Americans that they’re really just ordinary folks.

McCain, the U.S. Naval Academy graduate who married into one of the richest families in Arizona, who’s come dangerously close to being unmasked as an ordinary-man phony (he can’t recall how many of the eight homes across the country he actually owns), can trot out Sarah Palin as a genuine gun-tot’n, snowmobile-riding lady who went to public schools and graduated from a land-grant university.

The salient facts of Palin’s political potency are now clear: She’s extraordinarily ordinary. Hockey Mom; Alaska oil field worker’s devoted spouse and soon-to-be grandma to the child of her pregnant 17-year-old daughter; an American “just like us,” who also happens to be a governor of a rugged western state.

As an outsider to the precious Washington elite, Palin in a few short days became the GOP’s front for its newfound populist rhetoric.

Palin’s big coming-out speech at the Republican National Convention hit the right populist chords, and the sea of comfortably white delegates and in the St. Paul audience wildly approved, woo-hooing Palin’s tele-prompted “gotcha” lines aimed at Barack Obama and the Democrats.

“Perfect populist pitch, “ as CBS’s Jeff Greenfield described Palin’s performance.

Populist pitches aside, who are the real working-class heroes in this race?

In terms of identity politics, the Obama-Biden ticket would be hard-pressed to beat Palin on that score. Neither Biden nor Obama have enough Grandma or Scranton, Pennsylvania stories in the queue to overcome Palin’s rugged Western backstory.

What’s more, having an unmarried 17-year old daughter who’s five months along is powerfully middle-American. (Springer’s waiting on the line, Sarah. He wants to do a show.)

In an age when ordinary Americans will vote a wealthy Connecticut Yankee, George W. Bush, for president because he did a good Texas drawl, the Democrats simply can’t match what the Republican image machine can make of Palin’s story.

Image really is everything. That’s really too bad for the Democrats because, it turns out, they actually have represented working-class economic interests better than the Republicans since the Second World War.

In fact, the empirical evidence is eye opening. In an impressive new study, Larry M. Bartels, a professor of political science at Princeton, found that across the spectrum of poor to upper-middle economic classes, inflation-adjusted family incomes grew significantly higher under Democratic administrations than Republican ones.

Consider the 20th, 40th, and 60th percentile of family incomes, for instance. These include the solidly middle- and lower-middle class voters both political parties claim to represent.

When Democrats were in power from 1948 through 2005, average annual growth of family incomes for the 60th percentile of families was three times the growth under Republican rule. At the 40th percentile, the annual growth in real family income under Democrats grew was 2.5 percent versus just 0.8 percent under Republican administrations.

At the 20th percentile, the gap was widest. Under Democrats, family incomes for these upper-middle class Americans grew at 6.5 times the annual rate than under Republicans: That’s 2.6 percent compared to a meager 0.4 percent.

So the party of tax and spend liberals, as conservatives never tire of complaining, do a much better job than the party of alleged limited government and low taxes of actually protecting the economic interests of ordinary Americans.

By rights, Democrats should own that issue. But two truths should never be underestimated: The cynical ability of the Republican marketing machine to delude; and the proclivity of ordinary Americans to be deluded.

Harvard's Middle-class Makeover

2007-12-27T15:14:00.000-08:00

Harvard's decision to drastically reduce tuition costs for "middle" income families has some observers gushing with praise for America's richest and most powerful university.

But it's not completely out of altruism that Harvard has slashed costs to families earning as much as $180,000 a year -- a "middle" income only in the rarefied world of elite college admissions. America's richest and most powerful university has cut costs for such families in order to preserve its dominance as America's richest and most powerful university.

Despite its market power, Harvard's Achilles' heel is the practical wisdom of certain upper-middle class American families. These families have a number of good college choices for their high-achieving children, particularly some flagship public universities that offer an equivalent or better education at a fraction of Harvard's cost.

All colleges want these certain students, the sons and daughters of affluent professionals who attend excellent schools, live in safe and attractive neighborhoods and -- most important -- score well on their SATs. They also boast extracurriculars that Mother Teresa would envy. It's a good thing because, in this rarefied world, even such high-flying students have to "walk on water" in the lingo of admissions professionals, to have any chance of being admitted to places like Harvard.

Colleges covet such students, not because the SAT is the final word on one's potential for college success. In fact, colleges know that the SAT is the proverbial emperor with no clothes. Rather, they love such students because they add prestige to the institution. That's because institutional prestige is largely a function of its selectivity, measured by median SAT scores, and that selectivity is a dominant factor in the U.S. News & World Report rankings game.

Colleges want these students so much that they're willing to pay for them -- bribe them, really, in order to entice them to enroll. Under the guise of "merit," colleges in recent years have drastically increased the amount of scholarship money they offer high-scoring students.

What's wrong with that? Nothing if your objective is to take limited scholarship funds from the truly needy students who wouldn't be able to afford college without financial aid. And nothing's wrong with that if you're a policy maker who isn't concerned about raising the overall college-going rates in your state. That's because the "merit" scholarships go most often to relatively affluent students who would be going to college regardless of the scholarship money. Still, as a policy maker you'd be happy with the transfer of wealth from the needy to upper middle class because they vote more often than poor people.

Many top public universities have been among the most aggressive in playing the merit aid arms race, and that's an irritation for the pricey privates like Harvard. If you happen to be among the pool of high- achieving students, then the elite public flagship campuses such as the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, The University of Wisconsin in Madison, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill st some price, Harvard's brand name just isn't worth it for these price-conscious families of high-flying students who, in effect, get paid to attend the less costly public institutions.

By limiting the attendance costs to no more than 10 percent of family income, Harvard's move will produce a windfall of savings to the select few upper-middle class families whose children are admitted. A family earning $180,000 would see its Harvard bill drop from about $30,000 to $18,000.

Depending on whether you consider a family earning $180,000 a year as "needy," then it's a matter of debate whether that windfall represents "need" based or "merit" based aid. If you believe that such a family ought to rethink the new Volvo or reconsider the kitchen remodel in order to pay for a Harvard education, then Harvard's bold move is but thinly disguised merit scholarship program for the upper middle class. (It's worth noting that, according to the Census Bureau, a family earning $180,000 puts it in the top 5 percent of household incomes nationwide.)

All this is great for Harvard. It's great for those few students who now choose Harvard over a public flagship university. Harvard's applicant pool and its admissions selectivity will bust through the roof, as families who previously thought Harvard was out of reach financially will now apply. Harvard's U.S. News ranking will surge.

But this is potentially bad news for American higher education. Other universities will respond with their own versions of "middle class" tuition relief. They will jockey for market position, and the merit-aid arms race will escalate.

That's all to the detriment of truly needy students and their families who will see a fall off in need-based financial aid programs, as colleges increasingly target the very students who already have high rates of college attendance.

At stake is the nation's economic future. Policy makers are struggling to find ways to increase college attendance among families in the bottom half of the income distribution. We know that more college degrees mean better jobs and a more productive citizenry. If Harvard wants to help something other than itself, it would find ways to contribute to that project.

Peter Sacks is an economist and the author of Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education (University of California Press, 2007)

A Thousand Splendid Books

2007-11-20T07:34:00.000-08:00

Finishing a new book and see it go out into the world should be a time of great relief and excitement for me as an author. But as is often the case when I begin the promotion part of authorship, I go into a deep depression. I am drug down by the sensation that I'm beating my head against the Great Wall of American popular culture, which seems absolutely impervious to books about serious subjects.

Yes, I confess, I'm one of those. I am a writer of "serious" non-fiction. Worse, I labor in the trenches of the "midlist," which is book-talk for relatively unknown authors who toil for modest advances and modest sales, who write books that, maybe, ten thousand people on Planet Earth will read in a good year. I could write a bestseller, though, yes? Well, probably not. I'll put it this way. The other day I received an email message from my publicist setting me straight when I noted that our radio campaign needed to hit bigger markets in order to build momentum. "As they say in the New York Lottery," she reminded me, "you gotta be in it to win it!" I thought that was awfully sweet of her to point out after I'd spent three years of my life working eighty hours a week on my book, giving a pound of my flesh in the process. It was no sweat, like a casual stroll down to the 7-Eleven to buy a lottery ticket.

I write books basically for free. In fact, when you consider that pound of flesh I lose each time I produce a well researched, engagingly readable 350 page book, giving my heart and soul to something I believe deeply in, I am in essence paying for the privilege of giving the world that book. I wish I could justify this insanity by confessing that I'm a vanity author, who pays publisher money to produce and market a book that no real publisher would want. No, it's worse, really. A real publisher -- a highly respected one, at that -- thought so highly of my book that it decided to publish my book and promote it. My new book has been out a couple of months, and it's not a bestseller. In the brave new world of book publishing, for me to concede that my book has not become a bestseller feels like a confession of abject failure. When some of my clueless friends ask me about my book, they rarely express interest in its substance. But they're dying to know whether it's a hit. I get the weird impression that, if it's a hit, only then would they actually consider buying it. If Oprah likes it, then it must be worthwhile. If it's on the New York Times Bestseller list, it must be good. The winner takes all.

Reading, and reading what strikes one's idiosyncratic fancy, is a declining art. Reading books is even more endangered. A recent AP-Ipsos poll found that almost one of every three Americans hadn't read a single book in the past year. And, except for history, about which there seems to be an endless supply of bestsellers, reading serious non-fiction books about current and pressing issues -- apart from name-calling books by political hacks and right-wing bitches with flowing Breck-girl hair -- is on its deathbed.

Ok, I'm sorry about the bitch remark. I take it back. But I am troubled (actually, I'm rather pissed about it) that the inflammatory garbage being written these days can pass for a "book." Such "books" have no detectable ideas or thoughts, and yet these so-called books seem to be what many readers want. Like political campaigns, negativity sells books, and the more inflammatory, thoughtless, and ideological the better. The more that authors of such "books" disregard facts or logic, indeed flout the very notion of truth, the more successful such "books" are.

When I get into one of my post-publication, book-promotion funks, it's easy to fall into the existential black hole that writers, artists and other creative people get sucked into. In that dark space, we come to believe we are failures. We think we talentless hacks and clueless goobers. But the pain of authorship is all the worse when I know in my heart of hearts that I have written a very good book. I know that I have done justice to my subject. I have done justice to the ordinary people whose stories I have told. I have done justice to the notion that some readers really do care, and are willing to open their eyes wide to reality rather than be put to sleep by the Huxleyan drug of American Idol and Paris Hilton.

Oh, by the way. I use big words sometimes and what some might call obscure literary references. I occasionally write in complex sentences, too. Maybe that's part of my problem. I refuse to dumb it down, and I'll persist in the belief, until the day I give up writing altogether, that readers are smart, that Americans want to read, and that they have attention spans of more than 30 seconds. But don't tell that to Amazon. Recently, the online bookseller installed a new feature on its website, presumably to allow its more anti-intellectual customers to keep their book purchases to a 6th grade reading level. Thus, I have learned from Amazon that my new book has 1.7 syllables per word, and that 61 percent of the books in its system have fewer syllables.

Alas reading is a declining art, and it's giving way to the great postmodern tidal wave in advanced societies. In the postmodern world, we are all producers now. We are all bloggers who produce "content," and content is now a commodity. You don't need much talent to produce a commodity. You don't need to be particularly creative or to have an original idea. When you produce content, you feed a machine, which chews upon your commodified words for a few fleeting moments until it spits them out into the void of digital hyperspace.

Meanwhile, a thousand splendid authors, working in relative obscurity, have written a thousand splendid books that you will never hear about. We splendid authors dwell on the dark side of the publishing world, clinging to our precious bones of good news -- a possible review coming up in a small magazine, a publicist who continues to answer our emails, a slight bump in our Amazon rankings. We wonder what it might be like to live on the light side, where A Thousand Splendid Suns shines so brightly that few inhabitants of American culture could possibly be unaware of it. For those of us on the dark side, however, we endure, hoping for just an ember of that warmth. That would be enough. That would keep us going.

Don't Read Books. Page 99 Says it All

2007-08-10T09:34:00.000-07:00

I received an interesting invitation recently. It was from Marshal Zeringue. Marshal runs a wonderful website called the Campaign for the American Reader, and he has a blog that he calls the Page 99 Test, which is based on this Ford Madox Ford quote: "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." Marshal's challenge, if I cared to accept it, was to respond to the Ford quote regarding page 99 of my new book, which he had just learned about in a magazine. (http://page99test.blogspot.com/)

At first, when Marshal asked me to do this, I read page 99 and thought, "Oops, it's not very sexy." There were a lot of other pages of interesting writing and storytelling that I would have picked to reveal my book's whole. But I discovered that Ford Madox Ford was right in a sense. I looked more closely at 99, and there it was, the genetic code of my book. In fact, I could pick any page at random, and I would be able to find the same strands of DNA that held my book together.

My 99 comes in Chapter 5 of my book, Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education. I call that chapter "Public Schools, Private Privilege," and it ties together a couple of earlier narrative chapters in which I tell the stories of some students and teachers at schools in Berkeley, California and in Boise, Idaho. Politically, the towns and the school systems couldn't be farther apart. One is an American archetype of political liberalism and the other is as red-state conservative as it gets.

But I picked Berkeley and Boise to write about the class divide, not the political one. In that sense, the two towns shared far more in common than either Berkeleyites or Boisians would dare admit. I found that class differences transcended politics. Class transcended race, and also ethnicity. I found that, when it comes to schools, affluent liberals in Berkeley had a lot in common with with affluent conservatives in Boise.

Bear with me as I explain what page 99 is about in my book. Americans like to think of schools as the great equalizers of educational opportunity. But in both Berkeley and Boise, schools were doing just the opposite. They were deeply engaged in practices that actually made the class divide worse. Despite official policies supposed to close the achievement gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students, schools were heavily committed to programs that accomplished just the opposite.

How could this happen? I found that schools in Boise and Berkeley were under constant pressure from affluent and well educated parents to create various havens of privilege for their own children, including gifted and talented programs, advanced and enriched classes, elite math and science centers, and so on.

But while schools were providing the already-privileged children with a Mercedes education, they were content to provide a Ford education to the ordinary children on the other side of the class divide.

Page 99 began to intrigue me in ways that I hadn't thought about before, simply because it was among the more pedestrian of the pages in my book. On my page 99, I referenced the classic work of Jeannie Oakes, an education professor at UCLA, whose 1985 book, Keeping Track, revealed the widespread use of tracking in American schools to sort the supposedly bright kids from the dull ones. It just so happened that the "bright" kids were also the economically, socially and culturally advantaged kids. Back then, schools were blatant about their tracking systems. What's different now is the subtlety of all various sorting devices that separate the smart kids at the top from the dumb kids at the bottom. As I write that sentence, I'm reminded of another book that I referenced in that chapter. The author is Ellen Brantlinger, whom I've never met but feel that we have a lot in common, just as I feel that there's something deep within me that shares what Jeannie Oakes has deep within her. It's odd to think that each of our page 99's, however much they differ in style or method, share some essential traits that define us as people, and as authors. In her 2004 book, Dividing Classes: How the Middle Class Negotiates and Rationalizes School Advantage, Brantlinger, describes how highly educated professionals in "Hillsdale," the pseudonym for a university town in the Midwest, manipulated public schools to serve their best interests, at the expense of working-class or poor families. Because smart and dumb are thought to be objectively measurable in the universe of public schooling, who could possibly argue with these self-serving arrangements?

My page 99 is essentially about tracking, in a broad sense. Generally, tracking is the practice of sorting students into different levels for the same course based upon "ability." It's hard to find a school administrator who will admit to doing it nowadays. Schools call it by other names. Take the Treasure Valley Math and Science Center in Boise, Idaho, actually a very cool public school for the best and brightest math and science students. To gain admittance to this wonderful school, students must pass standardized tests that are pre-ordained to identify the most culturally and socially affluent children -- such as the sons and daughters of the Micron Corp. executives that gave the Boise school district $1 million to start the school.

As handmaidens to elite interests, the schools were behaving in exactly the manner that social reproduction theorists, such as Pierre Bourdieu, would predict. The elegance of this system of self-perpetuating privilege is its widely perceived legitimacy. Backed up with "scientific" aptitude testing and other methods, the Boise school district could claim educational legitimacy in providing a wonderfully enriched learning environment for a few elite kids versus the dumbed down and boring schools it provided for all the other kids.

I probably gave Marshal far more than he wanted. But the question he posed began to really intrigue me. If just one page, page 99, revealed the essence of my 350 page book, which took me three years to complete, did I need to write the other 349 pages for readers to get my point? Why do we need books anyway, whose arguments can be condensed into a single blog post?

But can a book's essential quality really, truly be revealed in a single page? Ford was right but he was also dead wrong. Yes, my page 99 contains a basic idea that winds its way throughout my book: that the class divide in American education is no accident and that it is perpetuated according to a systematic process of institutions -- schools, colleges, universities, even the government -- responding to the demands of political and economic power.

But to believe that a strand of a book's genetic code reveals all there is to know about the whole is to say that I can know my yellow lab, Diego, from just his chromosomes. Dogs -- and people -- are more complicated and beautiful than that, and so are books, because books, not pages of books, nor blog posts of books reveal who we are as both authors of books and readers of books and characters in books.

On my page 99, you will never know Ashlea Jackson or Gillian Brunet or Dayle Mazzarella, people whose stories I tell on other pages of my book. You'll never know my book without knowing who they are, and you'll never know me without knowing who they are. You'll never know about us from single page or a blog post. And most important of all, without books, you'll never know you.

Class War? Bring it On

2007-07-10T11:51:00.000-07:00

So this is what it’s come to. In the 1950’s blacks in the South sued schools because white segregationists were excluding black children from attending their pseudo-private public schools. Now, in 2007, white families sue schools for including blacks and other minorities, for trying to prevent the re-segregation of American schools.

So we think we’ve made progress? It’s the same segregated society as fifty years ago, only worse in the banality of its evil. In this age of Paris Hilton, the great economic divide is actually “good,” the unmitigated result of the free market working as it should, producing great wealth for the few with the extra minor annoyance of great poverty for the many and, yes, great mediocrity for everyone in between who live under the illusion of prosperity.

We have great schools for the fortunate few who are lucky enough to be born to the right parents and in the right neighborhoods, and terrible schools -- or more accurately, terribly deprived schools -- for those children who were unlucky enough to be born to the wrong parents and in the wrong neighborhoods.

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court realized it couldn’t do much about racial segregation in the society at large, but it could do something about pseudo-private schooling in our allegedly public schools. And the historic result was Brown v. Board of Education, the single most important legal event in the past half-century for integrating blacks into the fabric of the American enterprise.

Now, the U.S. Supreme Court, led by the great Orwellian orator Chief Justice John Roberts, tells us that, in the name of Brown v. Board of Education, the best way to stop racial discrimination is to “stop discriminating by race.” Our society may not be colorblind, but our Constitution is. Therefore, local governments in Seattle, Louisville and elsewhere can’t even think about race when crafting policies to attack racially segregated schools, lest they run afoul of the Constitution’s equal protection clause. (http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/06slipopinion.html)

Justice Stephen Breyer, in his brave dissent to Roberts’s majority ruling, called his colleagues’ invocation of Brown to legitimize racially segregated schools a “cruel irony.”

But irony doesn’t come close to describing what is now transpiring in American society, from education to healthcare.

In Brown v. Board of Education, it was the disadvantaged who were victims. Now, the privileged classes are the victims. They’re suing schools for trying to block a road that leads us nowhere good, to a segregated system that keeps the “good” kids safe from the society’s caste-offs. We’ll keep the untouchables in educational holding cells until they enter the America prison system or get shipped off to Iraq.

In Michael Moore’s latest film, “Sicko,” he shows how our corrupt system of profit-driven health insurance discards human beings like so many cattle. The question is, Moore asks, why do Americans put up with this shit? What prevents us from doing for our people what every other advanced democracy seems capable of providing for their citizens? Why do big media and big politicians roll out the proverbial anti-socialist rhetoric every time we broach the subject of universal health care like that provided by other democracies in Canada and Europe?

The operative word here is democracy. Some countries got it and some don’t.

France has universal health care because France is a democracy. Britain has universal health care because Britain is a democracy. America’s alleged business and political leaders spurn those models because the United States, circa 2007, is not a democracy. As Moore suggests in Sicko, we’re not a democracy because fear rules our lives. Fear of losing our jobs. Fear of making a fuss. So we hand our power to a system that fuels fear and rules by fear.

Instead of democracy, we have Big Pharma and Big HMOs that skim excessive profits from the fearful hearts of bleeding American people. But the “cruel irony,” as Justice Breyer might call it, is that the rich and powerful, with the help of a compliant media, have managed to convince the weak and powerless that the privileged are the real victims. As the vanguards of America’s health care system – “the best in the world” – it’s they who are the unfortunate objects of overzealous government power and screwy socialist ideas.

In the past I’ve been accused of inciting class warfare whenever I bring up these inconvenient truths. In the past, I’ve not responded to those provocations, because, as Britain, Canada, and France have shown in their systems of democratic health care, a country doesn’t need class warfare to creatively solve problems with practical solutions that help ordinary people.

But the class war has already begun, my friends. As Moore shows, powerful entities with the most to lose from democracy have long been engaged in a war of ideology that keeps us fearful and keeps us bleeding.

Our inept political leadership won’t stand up to these powerful interests, so ordinary people must. Ordinary people need to take a break from Paris, Dale Earnhardt and American Idol, and stand up. If that’s class warfare, then I say, bring it on.

Obama and the American Class System

2007-05-19T07:03:00.000-07:00

Imagine you’re an admissions officer at an elite college or university, which admits just one out of every ten students who apply. In your job, the university’s prestige and reputation are always on the line in every admissions decision you make. You operate within a framework of relatively narrow parameters. While the company line says that no single factor should dominate the decision, such as SAT scores, you know differently. If you accept too many students who don’t fit the right profile of your prestigious and elite institution, you risk the school losing favor with trustees, parents, alumni and, god forbid, U.S. News & World Report.

But there is some wiggle room with the student profile at your elite institution. That’s when you start looking for “hooks.” When the kid who wants into your school has one of several possible hooks, the chances that you’ll take a good hard look at that applicant are substantially improved. Being a lacrosse player, a high school quarterback or another kind of athlete that the college’s athletic department has recruited is a really big hook. Being the “legacy” child of a former graduate of the college is another good one. And, at some selective universities, being the child of a rich guy who has tantalized the college’s development staff with a potentially very large gift -- no quid pro quo, of course -- is another hook that gives the children of rich people a boost in the elite admissions game.

There’s another important hook as well, one that could receive a great deal more attention in coming months during the presidential campaign, and that is the admissions advantage that elite colleges and universities give to underrepresented minorities, in the jargon of the admissions business.

Yes, I’m referring to Barack Obama.

According to a recent study of the admissions practices at a few dozen elite colleges by Eugene Tobin of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and his co-authors, the underrepresented minority hook provides such applicants a 28 percent increase, on average, in the chances of admission, second only to the recruited athlete average boost of 30 percent. Legacies, with a 20 percent increased chance of admission, ranked as the third most powerful hook. In sharp contrast, students from low-income families or those who’d be the first in their families to attend college got essentially nothing from the admissions offices at the elite colleges and universities

Obama, who identifies himself as African American, is the son of a Harvard PhD from Kenya who married Obama’s white mother from Kansas when both were students at the University of Hawaii. Obama grew up with all the advantages afforded a child of well-educated parents, who provided him with the right cultural, economic and social capital that schools value and reward, enabling him to attend an elite private school in Hawaii. All of this put him on a power path that led to Columbia University and Harvard Law School and enabled him to pursue a life in high-octane national politics.

In short, Obama is a full-fledged member of the power elite. He and his wife will pass that privileged status onto their children and they will pass it onto theirs. The American education system will handsomely reward Obama’s children with many advantages, using selection, admissions and sorting systems that perpetuate upper-class privilege. His daughters will be placed into the top academic tracks at the best schools with the best teachers.

That’s the American class system at work. And the inconvenient truth is that it is based upon birth. Class privilege doesn’t guarantee one’s success in life, but you’d have to be pretty dumb and lame to screw it up.

The Obama scenario raises all sorts of touchy questions regarding affirmative action in college admissions and the growing class divide in American education. Educationally, economically and culturally, Obama has a lot more in common with affluent and well-educated whites than he does disadvantaged blacks and their children who to this day attend segregated schools across the United States. And, in a weird sort of way, former president Bill Clinton, who grew up relatively impoverished with a single mom, has a lot more in common with disadvantaged blacks that Obama. (Perhaps that partly explains why the African American community adopted Clinton as one of its own).

So my first question is this: Should Obama’s children be provided a special admissions advantage to attend Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or any number of elite universities that routinely provide an admissions boost even to such culturally and economically affluent people of color?

Being a good liberal, I find myself cringing when I ask that question. But, to remain intellectually honest about this touchy subject, I can’t help but think about kids like Melissa Morrow. When researching my new book, Tearing Down the Gates, about the growing class divide in America and its education system, I ran across a poor white high school student named Melissa, who grew up in urban Tacoma, Washington, and then in rural Montana. Her father left when she was young and her mother never finished high school. In Melissa, I found young woman who could have grown up to be a brilliant scientist. (She might still but the odds are heavily stacked against her.) After a high school science teacher recognized something special about her intellect, he encouraged her to take part in his science program and persuaded her to spend part of a summer with counselors at the Math and Science Upward Bound program (One of the endangered federal TRIO programs for disadvantaged students who hope to go to college that has been on George W. Bush’s hit list for years). Melissa discovered who she was through science, and she started winning regional science competitions.

But despite her obvious brilliance, Melissa was never in a million years ever going to Harvard, Amherst, or even the University of Washington, which would have been the most selective university near her home in the Northwest. Melissa grew up with uneducated parents, who saw college as an alien place full of different sorts of people -- largely affluent young people who spoke differently and acted differently than the poor-people’s culture they were used to. Melissa knew little about getting on a path to college. As well intentioned and emotionally supportive as her mother was, the family could never afford expensive tutors and private college counselors for Melissa -- advantages that affluent families provide children as a matter of entitlement.

So my second question is this. Should Barack Obama’s children be afforded special consideration for admission to an elite university that children such as Melissa are never going to receive, because she happens to be the wrong color? Is color really what this is all about anyway? Should colleges and universities begin to look beyond color and to socioeconomic class?

In fact, the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action admissions programs based upon race have been affluent whites. That’s because, the poor unhooked schmucks who apply over the transom are screened according to entrenched notions of merit with primacy given to SAT scores and the like. It’s a system that primarily works to the advantage of students from well-educated and affluent homes. “Diversity” has been the all the rage in higher education, but diversity has been rather narrowly defined, as colleges and universities, particularly elite ones, have become homogenous along class lines. For example, while the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor was fighting the good fight for affirmative action before the U.S. Supreme Court, it enrolled a meager 13 percent of students from lower-income families. In one important study by the Century Foundation, just 3 percent of freshman at 146 of the nation’s best universities are from lower-income families, while fully 75 percent are from upper-class families.

When you consider, as former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor noted in her opinion on the University of Michigan case, that those elite, often-private universities are the primary training grounds for the nation’s future leaders, those are disturbing statistics indeed about the future direction of the American democracy.

In an oblique way, Obama himself seemed to answer both my questions in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week” last Sunday. When his two young daughters eventually apply to college, they ''should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged,'' Obama said.

Obama went on to suggest that social and economic class transcends color and that diversity-seeking colleges perhaps ought to take a second look at kids like Melissa, regardless of race. While noting that “there are a lot of African-American kids who are still struggling,'' Obama also said, ''I think that we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and been brought up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed.”

Perhaps that’s not the stand he’ll eventually settle upon as the campaign solidifies its positions on hot-button topics, but a class-based solution to the affirmative action controversy is certainly the direction he seems to be hinting. If so, he’s sounding a lot like Martin Luther King Jr. did during the weeks and months before his assassination, when both he and Bobby Kennedy were taking the American civil rights battle to the next level, and they both began to speak far more pointedly about how the American class system transcended the color line.

It also remains to be seen whether the admissions offices at elite universities will treat a poor girl growing up in rural Montana as nicely as they now treat the soccer player from Harvard-Westlake who grew up with every privilege in sight.

We Need a Revolution in Imagination and Leadership

2007-05-09T07:11:00.000-07:00

Stay the course. Don’t give in to the naysayers and defeatists. Forge ahead with the same failed paradigms for improving schools, creating democracies, closing achievement gaps and winning the war against terrorism.

Indeed, the parallels between the Iraq War and George Bush’s education centerpiece, No Child Left Behind, became even more pronounced recently. That’s when the Education Trust, a highly influential educational advocacy organization that played an important role in the creation of NCLB, announced its plan for revising the 2001 education law.

Or, should I say, a plan for reshuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic.
“In the months ahead, many education groups will argue that the current law demands too much,” says Education Trust founder and president Kati Haycock. “Giving in to that argument would be a terrible mistake and a huge step backward in America’s uneven march toward educational opportunity for all. Instead of asking less, Congress should ask more of our schools.”

From the beginning, the school accountability movement, embodied with tragic perfection in a bureaucratic and Orwellian nightmare called No Child Left Behind, has been full of such unassailable rhetoric. We’ve heard all the homilies: World-class standards. Leave no child behind. No Excuses. Bush and his allies painted critics of NCLB as virtually unpatriotic child abusers. Either you were for improving the educational achievements of minority and poor kids, or you were a bad person stuck in old days of educational neglect, willing to abandon poor, black and Hispanic students as being inherently incapable.

For too long, the teaching profession, teachers unions, school administrators and the rest of the education establishment caved to the political bullying from Washington. In effect, Bush upended a long tradition of locally based school systems operated by states and local school boards, replaced by a federal system of crimes and punishments, allotting federal Title I funds based upon the performance of children and schools on high-stakes standardized tests.

Unlike the political supporters of NCLB in the corporate world and testing and educational consulting industries, Haycock and her organization, I believe, do have the best interest of disadvantaged children at heart. The organization is an amazingly effective and vocal advocate, and Haycock is on the speed-dials of virtually every education reporter in the country.

If only Haycock would put that voice to better use.

Just as the Bush administration failed utterly to anticipate the consequences of invading Iraq, NCLB’s advocates failed to understand what would happen on the ground when the consequences of failure for schools became so high that teaching and learning have become reduced to little more than prepping for the next round of testing.

I rarely meet an educator these days, especially those who’ve been in the field for years, who are not sickened by what is happening. Good teachers are turned into mediocre technicians whose job has been bureaucratized and de-professionalized. Great teachers leave the profession. Young teachers don’t see teaching as a career, but as a first job that might lead to better things.

And, as always, the brunt of the damage falls hardest upon poor and minority children, because they attend schools that have the most ground to make up in the NCLB race to make 100 percent of students “proficient” in reading and math by 2014.

As for affluent schools in the suburbs, NCLB is a mere annoyance. Rich families with children in “gifted and talented” programs and other such havens of privilege for high achieving kids simply won’t tolerate the intrusion. While poor kids are drilled for tests, rich kids are treated to the most enriching learning environments imaginable. They learn more than poor kids because they are taught more and in more interesting and engaging ways. They are blessed to attend schools that have little fear of federal agents looking over their shoulders.

If the intent of NCLB is to close the achievement gap between the rich and poor, it is a failed policy because it is a technocratic solution -- a politically expedient Band Aid -- to a much deeper economic and sociological malady. From the time of the landmark Coleman Report in the 1960’s, sociologists have understood that the lion’s share of the achievement differences among schools was attributable to vast socioeconomic class differences of families and individuals. What’s more, most of the achievement gaps between white kids and black kids has been driven by social class differences -- the wealth, incomes and occupational status of parents and grandparents -- a gap that has narrowed over the years owing to greater relative wealth in the black community.

While the achievement a gap along race lines has improved, the class divide has remained stubbornly persistent. For instance, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 34 percent of white high school graduates go on to complete a BA degree within eight years compared to 24 percent of black graduates. That’s a troubling difference, to be sure. But consider the huge achievement gap by class: 46 percent of graduates from the highest socioeconomic quintile earn a BA within eight years compared to a mere 12 percent of the poorest students.

I’m sure Haycock is a smart woman. But the Education Trust’s stance on NCLB suggests that the organization has underappreciated how America’s vast economic disparities produce the gaping divide in the cultural and social capital that parents provide children from birth – the intergenerational transmission of human capital that can mean success or failure in the American school system. American schools were never designed to address such disparities. In fact, in our decidedly anti-egalitarian era, in this shameless new Gilded Age of ours, American schools have actually become very good at exacerbating inequality, playing the handmaiden’s role in perpetuating the social and economic gaps between rich and poor.

For those genuine advocates like Haycock, NCLB is a failure of imagination, the failure of well-meaning people locked into the American style of thinking and policymaking that technological solutions can fix any problem. It ain’t gonna happen.

Sure, Haycock will tell you that NCLB has “changed the conversation” -- or something like that -- about America doing something to help disadvantaged kids succeed. Yeah, it’s hard to ignore the power of the federal government, which definitely has changed the conversation to include the end of public education, as we know it. NCLB is paving the ground for profiteers to seize control of public schools that fail its tests. By changing the conversation, NCLB has only made matters worse.

We need more than a change in the conversation. We need a revolution in imagination and leadership -- leadership of the heroic kind that we haven’t seen since Martin Luther King Jr. led the civil rights movement. America has everything it needs to make futures brighter for the schools and children NCLB is supposed to help. We have the wealth -- were we to direct it to perpetual education and not perpetual war. We have great teachers. The question is, when will we, at long last, unleash that wealth and talent to make a real difference?

A Yellow Lab for President

2007-04-19T06:52:00.000-07:00

I have a friend who has two young children and four dogs. One of these dogs is a pit bull. Captain Chuck, as my friend is known, is quiet and gentle, well educated, and upper-middle class. He’s hardly the sort you would think would own a pit pull. I asked him if he trusted the dog, and Chuck became uncomfortable, telling me the story of how the pit bull, tired of being poked and prodded by Chuck’s nephew one day, had become aggressive with the child. Otherwise, the dog is sweet and playful and a joy to be around. Sort of like George W. Bush, I thought. “We’re trying hard to figure out a way to keep him,” Chuck says of his tenuous relationship with the dog. Sort of like America trying to figure out a way to keep George around. I held my tongue. We know what happens with pit bulls. The story could end very badly.

No, it’s not about the guns. And it’s not about laws. It’s about a society, led by the nation’s first pit bull president, that attacks first, and asks questions later, leaving innocents to pay the price.

Yes, we are horrified at what happened in Blacksburg -- horrified and fascinated and amused at the same time, as we incessantly watch ourselves in the mirror of 24 hour cable news. Records are broken, the deadliest in history, and we watch and watch. The spectacle grinds on, with perpetual death, perpetual wars and countless enemies.

Our pit bull culture manifests itself in many seemingly disparate ways. In education, George W. Bush conspires with gutless Democrats to “get tough” on schools by passing an Orwellian law known as the No Child Left Behind Act, which attempts to improve education by punishing schools that don’t measure up on high-stakes tests. In the aftermath, teachers, schools and children are left to deal with the consequences of this technocratic violence.

In foreign affairs--well you know that horrific story. George W. Bush conspires with gutless Democrats to get tough on terrorism by attacking first and facing the consequences later -- consequences that innocent Americans and Iraqis will pay for generations to come in blood and treasure.

The Iraq war and No Child Left Behind and the massacre in Blacksburg are epistemological cousins, sharing the same DNA.. Yes, it’s all of a piece.

America can be terribly beautiful. Great wealth breeds greater wealth and beauty for some and terrible envy of those left behind. In his college writing classes, Cho Seung-Hui wrote of his hatred of rich people and women, the iconic objects of a deranged young man who felt left behind.

What does the pit pull society teach him? To lash out, to attack first, and to the beat the enemy into submission.

I don’t know how we change our DNA. Maybe it starts with something simple, like going to the Humane Society and bringing a boundlessly enthusiastic yellow lab home for the kids. You can trust a yellow lab.

Take one of my yellow labs, Diego. He’s going on 9 now, but he’s still fit and lean because he runs and plays and chases balls every day. He’s a joy to be around, but he’s no party boy, like his sister, Sadie. He’s strong and silent, and his bearing is regal. He’s boundlessly enthusiastic with life and his love for humans. But Diego is no pushover. He will defend his turf, and he’ll fight if provoked. Yet, when children come over to play, they can prod and poke and bug him and twist his ears and he’ll never, never utter a sound of complaint. He’s a good dog, and he’s got all the qualities for a great president.

Come to think of it, when we are ready to make a bigger step in changing our DNA, we could do a lot worse than finding a human to run the White House who has the qualities of my yellow lab. Boundlessly enthusiastic, strong and regal, and can always be trusted with children. A good dog.

America’s Best College Scam

2007-04-11T19:35:00.000-07:00

The recent disclosure by a college president that U.S. News & World Report is willing to publish made-up data about a college that dares not play the silly rankings game suggests just how far the magazine is willing to act like Tony Soprano to protect its lucrative franchise. And I’m not talking about the teddy bear Tony who likes his midnight ice cream splurges in his underwear and bathrobe. I’m talking about kick the marked man until he bleeds and leave him to rot in the New Jersey wastelands Tony Soprano.

Like the sweet Tony, U.S. News & World Report has been known as that nice middle-of-the-road magazine that your grandmother likes and the one students and their parents look to for reliable information about everything from hospitals to colleges, universities and graduate schools. In fact, as the nation’s lowest ranking news magazine -- after Time and Newsweek -- U.S. News has endeavored mightily to maintain readership by ranking everything in sight. And none of its franchises in the “America’s Best” ranking business comes close to the popularity of its annual college guide.

So what’s the problem? Parents and students need good information about colleges and universities to make informed choices, right? I’ve got no problem with that premise. The problem is the dubious methodology -- and more important, the magazine’s unstated ideology about the thorny question of academic merit -- which the magazine uses to sort “best” colleges from the also-rans.

In fact, while U.S. News appears to crunch all manner of numbers, from graduation rates to student/faculty ratios, in order to derive its rankings, there is just one factor that drives virtually the whole ranking scheme, and that is the SAT or ACT scores of an institution’s entering freshman. Indeed, according to George D. Kuh and Ernest T. Pascarella, two highly regarded educational researchers who examined the magazine’s list of the top 50 national universities, most of U.S. News’s college quality factors are mere window dressing. “What this means is that for all practical purposes, U.S. News rankings of best colleges can largely be reproduced simply by knowing the average SAT/ACT scores of their students,” Kuh and Pascarella concluded in a 2004 study. “Once the average SAT/ACT score is taken into account, the other so-called ‘quality’ indices have little additional influence on where an institution falls on the list.” (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1254/is_5_36/ai_n7069157)

I’m not a statistician, but it hardly requires a degree in econometrics to determine that graduation rates, student-faculty ratios, acceptance rates, alumni giving rates, and all the factors in the U.S. News methodology are profoundly correlated to the institution’s selectivity -- how many freshman the institution accepts for admission relative to the number who apply. And none of these factors is related to selectivity more than freshmen SAT scores. In the U.S. News worldview of college quality, it matters not a bit what students actually learn on campus, or how a college actually contributes to the intellectual, ethical and personal growth of students while on campus, or how that institution contributes to the public good. College quality in the U.S. News paradigm boils down to the supposed quality of freshmen the day they pass through the ivory gates -- long before they write a single college essay or solve a physics problem.

And then, when you consider that student SAT scores are profoundly correlated parental income and education levels -- the social class that a child is born into and grows up with -- you begin to understand what a corrupt emperor “America’s Best Colleges” really is.

The ranking amounts to little more than a pseudo-scientific and yet popularly legitimate tool for perpetuating inequality between educational haves and have nots -- the rich families from the poor ones, and the well-endowed schools from the poorly endowed ones. Toss in the most heavily weighted factor in the U.S. News survey, the assessment of deans, college presidents, admissions officials and others regarding their peer institutions (a beauty contest that constitutes a full 25 percent of the U.S. News ranking), and you get the perfect recipe for a self-perpetuating, class-based rankings system driven by brand names, marketing hype, and prestige.

It’s no wonder then what a high-stakes and yet risk-averse game this is for colleges, college presidents and boards of trustees. U.S. News preys upon the naivety of consumers as well as the American obsession with prestige and brand names. The out-of-whack importance of the rankings to the universities explains why the Arizona Board of Regents recently approved a bonus deal for Arizona State University president Michael Crow to pay him an extra $60,000 if he raises the institution’s ranking in U.S. News. (http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/03/19/usnews).

When institutions play the game according to U.S. News’s rules, genuine innovation in admissions practices is highly discouraged because the impacts on the institution are potentially costly. Colleges fear that emphasizing other student qualities besides test results in deciding whom to admit could cause a slip in their rankings, which could damage students’ interest in applying, alumni donations and fundraising support. If you’re that college’s president, rest assured that while U.S. News is bumping you down the rankings scale, other institutions are eager to take your spot. U.S. News has the colleges by the balls, as it were, and none dare opt out and try to flee New Jersey for some quaint New Hampshire village. Tony will hunt you down.

All of which makes the story of Sarah Lawrence College so astonishing. A couple of years ago, the private liberal arts college decided to drop the SAT requirement, concluding that the entrance exam wasn’t a very good predictor of success at Sarah Lawrence, and that the SAT testing culture simply did not mesh well with the institution’s undergraduate emphasis on writing and, well, thinking. Because the college no longer required the exam, it stopped sending the scores to U.S. News. But, as college president Michele Tolela Myers revealed in a Sunday Washington Post op-ed piece, lacking the actual SAT data, U.S. News simply made up some numbers, arbitrarily assigning an SAT average of one standard deviation below Sarah Lawrence’s peer institutions, the equivalent of about 200 SAT points.

According to Myers, U.S. News’s director of research explained to her his reasoning: schools that chose to quit the SAT, he said, were admitting “less capable” students, and therefore ought to be downgraded in the rankings.
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/09/AR2007030901836.html).

Did that research director offer Myers any empirical evidence to support the magazine’s conclusion? That’s not likely because virtually all the evidence I’ve seen on these questions, when colleges decide to drop or de-emphasize the SAT (Bates College and the University of Texas at Austin, among many others), is that academic performance at institutions is not harmed and in some instances actually improves when colleges drop the SAT. That, in fact, was the case at Sarah Lawrence as well, Myers says.

After consulting with the college faculty, Myers moved Sarah Lawrence into even more dangerous ground. The college decided to stop cooperating with the U.S. News survey, joining Reed College in Portland, Oregon, as another highly regarded school that has tried to opt out of the game. Then, at a 2006 trade meeting, a representative of U.S. News warned a gathering of officials from several colleges that the magazine would, in effect, punish any school that tried to opt out by assigning data equivalent to one standard deviation below the college’s peer group on all its “quality” measures.

Though the Big Boss has laid down the law, it now appears that the rankings controversy may be reaching a critical juncture. According to Time magazine, there is now a move a foot by some higher education associations representing hundreds of small and mid-sized colleges to collectively opt of the U.S. News survey. Exactly which colleges are involved in this looming revolt is apparently a secret as they hash out a draft of an agreement. (http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1601485,00.html).

All of which is well and good. But unfortunately, such a move by a collection of small and midsized colleges would likely put but a small dent in the U.S. News ranking machine. The magazine, it appears, has no qualms about publishing made-up numbers, and it will continue to ride this profitable “best colleges” hog until it blows up in the editors’ faces.

At this juncture, I know of only one way for that implosion to happen. The really big dogs of the America higher education industry need to step up and do what’s right. I’m talking about Harvard, Yale and Princeton. I’m talking about the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of California system.

A few years ago, the University of California system stood up to the College Board and forced the organization to develop a new SAT exam to more accurately reflect what students actually studied in high school. It’s now time for the UC system and the elite private universities on the East Coast to stop playing the U.S. News rankings game -- for the sake of the integrity of the higher education enterprise and the public good.

To be sure, a Harvard or a Princeton could go on blissfully ignoring the damage the America’s Best College scam is doing to higher education because these institutions are the main beneficiaries of the U.S. News worldview. But leaders of these institutions also understand that American higher education is deeply troubled. Rather than the great equalizer, American higher education over the past 20 years has forged itself into the great perpetuator of inequality, having created admissions and financial aid systems stacked heavily in favor of the most privileged.

Leaders of these institutions ought to take a lesson from one young Massachusetts woman named Esther Mobley. Attending a top-notch high school in an affluent suburb of Boston where parents buying high-priced SAT tutoring for their kids is like death and taxes, Mobley opted out, declining to take an SAT prep course. According to the New York Times, she did so on the simple principle that kids like her, growing up with Harvard-educated parents and every educational advantage, don’t need or deserve such extra help. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/us/01girls.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

While many will argue with Esther’s decision, the larger message is this: At some point, the nation’s elite universities have to stand up and say, “No.” Not because refusal is in their own best interest, but because refusal is right for us all.

Thank you, Sarah Lawrence. And thank you, Esther Mobley.

The Class Divide in La La Land

2007-03-27T09:24:00.000-07:00

When it comes to the class divide in America, we can pretend that it doesn’t exist. We can pretend that we can become whoever we’d like to be in life, regardless of the family we were were born to, what neighborhoods we grew up in, and what sort of schools we attended. We can believe our opportunities are born from personal choices, cultural values, and our wits.

We can believe what Ruben Navarrette Jr., a conservative columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune, believes when he rails against ongoing press coverage of executive compensation scandals. “Americans shouldn’t feel bad about that,” Navarrette says, suggesting that we should just stop complaining about growing income disparities between the rich and ordinary folks, and instead get an education.

“Much of (the income divide) is tied to the decisions that individuals make about how much education they’re going to pursue, and how hard they’re going to pursue it,” Navarrette continues. “Most of the obstacles that people face are self-imposed, and self-designed. We can’t say that enough, especially at a time when too many people in this country look to blame others for their troubles, failings and shortcomings.” (1)

If our failings are as self-imposed as Navarrette suggests, then we are a nation of masochists. Consider educational attainment. The rate of bachelor’s degree attainment for students from low-income families, at a meager 6 percent, has remained virtually unchanged since 1970. The BA attainment rate for students in the second-lowest quartile of family income has stagnated at around 11 to 13 percent over that period. Only those students born into families in the top two income quartiles have experienced a surge in bachelor’s attainment since 1970. (2)

The statistics along these lines are brutally repetitive, suggesting that educational advancement in modern America is becoming far less a story about bootstrapping and far more a story about class origins.

Still, we cling to the nice story, the hopeful one about luck and pluck and individual sacrifice. It’s a story that is repeated and reinforced on a continual and perpetual basis in American society, rooted deeply in our sense of who we are.

In feudal Europe, peasants knew exactly where they stood in relation to kings and the landed gentry. Those class divisions were decidedly unsubtle. Nasty, mean, and brutish, in fact. No pretension was necessary.

I’m not a fan of feudal Europe, but class matters are indeed muddled in highly developed, consumer-driven societies like Western Europe and the United States. The magical and rare beauty of our narrative of the classless society is its subtle power and its ability to structure society without blatant force. Thoughts, ideas, hopes and dreams, cultural identities and social habits hold the superstructure in place.

Whether consuming Guns ‘n Ammo or The New Yorker, we take our stand as full-fledged members of the middle class. Ultimately, we can make the personal choice to remain where we are, in the vast middle of our fruitful imaginations, or to pick up and go somewhere else, which, for many of us, does require sacrifice and a new and profound sense of who we are and what sort of life we want to live. In that sense, Navarrette is right. Half right.

Chances are, however, we won’t move. Economists studying changing patterns of generational economic mobility, for example, are finding that Americans are considerably less upwardly mobile than we like to believe. The chances are very good that sons and daughters will wind up in the same social class as their parents before them.

Is that the fault of individuals or is there something systemic going on here?

If only getting a college education were as simple as Navarrette believes. If you are unlucky enough to be born to the wrong parents living in the wrong neighborhoods and attending the wrong schools, every educational, social and economic message you receive from the moment of birth seems designed to cement your socioeconomic destiny.

In my experience talking to children, parents and teachers, the rare and exceptional people who get an opportunity to rise above their class destiny almost always are able to do so because they were exceedingly lucky. And they almost always get help from people and organizations that they can’t get from their own families. Take Ashlea Jackson, who grew up in a trailer park in Boise, Idaho. For Ashlea, it has taken several rounds of intervention from the kindness of people and organizations beyond her family, including Big Brothers/Big Sisters, the Boys and Girls Club, a high school journalism teacher, and Upward Bound, a federal program – on George W. Bush’s perennial hit list of education programs to be eliminated -- to help disadvantaged students get on the path to college. (Contrast Ashlea with children of the affluent classes whose parents have mapped out their college careers by the time they are in second grade.)

And even with all the interventions on Ashlea’s behalf, it has taken a brave leap of faith on her part to leave family and friends and move across the state to attend a community college. For children who grow up with parents who never went to college, who have never even stepped foot onto a college campus, this sort of extra bit of public kindness is absolutely necessary for them to see a world beyond their own experience. If you happen to be poor, you can have all the motivation that Navarrette desires, but your ‘re out of luck in this country if the stars don’t line up just so.

But I will give the conservative boot strappers this. While wealth and income inequalities in the United States are vast -- and, in fact, are as profound as at any point in our history -- we are somehow comforted by the adornments of advanced capitalism. A debt-driven consumer economy and the society of spectacle make little kings and Paris Hiltons of us all. Even when people do get their rare opportunity to rise above socioeconomic destiny, the question remains whether they will seize upon it; the question remains whether they themselves are fully conscious of the hardcore materialism of the class divide. Indeed, unlike the battles over civil rights and gender equality, the class divide in America has been especially troublesome political barrier. While ethnic identity and feminism have become a matter of pride and political power, who wants to be called poor? Anything resembling a poor-people’s movement in America died a long time ago with Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

In the popular mind, class is less a function of how much money you earn or how much wealth you’ve accumulated than what you consume and what you watch on TV. In the popular imagination, class has become less about hard economic assets and conditions of work, education and human capital, and more a matter of culture and taste. In America -- the classless society -- we’re all now in that vast, indefinable “middle.”

When Lou Dobbs rails at the disappearing middle class, whom exactly is he referring to? The ingenuity of the Dobbsian rhetoric is that most of us openly identify ourselves with this idyllic and meaningless middle, defined by fear and anxiety. Fears about illegal immigration. Anxieties about paying for college. And all the rest.

When I met an obviously affluent man from the San Francisco Bay Area and told him about my work studying the barriers to educational opportunity for people born into the wrong side of the class divide, he immediately turned the subject to illegal immigration as the culprit for educational inequities. Another time this past summer, I attended a wedding chock full of affluent doctors at a mountain retreat. Again, when I told one physician about my work, he attacked the system that made it so hard for middle-class parents (read: affluent physicians like him) to pay for their children's’ college. For affluent Americans, that is how these conversations about class typically go: Safe, legitimate, and Dobbsian.

Privately, however, we have our doubts about a classless America. We aren’t stupid, and we have eyes. We all know that, ultimately, pretending otherwise is an act of futility.

1. San Diego Union-Tribune, Feb. 21, 2007. http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/op-ed/navarrette/20070221-9999-lz1e21navar.html

2. Postsecondary Education Opportunity. http://www.postsecondary.org/home/default.asp

A Dirty Little Secret

2007-02-27T18:11:00.000-08:00

The flagship campus at the University of Wisconsin in Madison has a dirty little secret.

For all the grand rhetoric that higher education leaders have given to the importance of diversity in recent years, UW-Madison and many of our best public universities have instead become bastions of elitism, creating admissions and financial aid policies that are especially harmful to lower-income students and especially beneficial to students from affluent backgrounds.

In essence, if you have parents who never went to college or are from a family of limited financial means and attended schools on the wrong side of town, your chance of gaining admission to a university like Wisconsin is slim at best.

And that’s just top public universities. As for private institutions, such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Williams – opportunities for students of modest economic backgrounds are even more limited.

Universities are increasingly driven by the demands of the higher education marketplace. They compete with their peers for prestige in a cutthroat competition for the “right” sorts of students – those of high class rank and superb SAT scores -- who will make universities look good in the U.S. News & World Report beauty contest.

When it comes to “diversity,” universities talk the talk of Martin Luther King Jr., but they walk the walk profit-maximizing corporations. No, universities don’t earn profits per se. But they do maximize earnings – in their case, institutional endowments. Endowments are driven by the ability of these institutions to compete in the market for institutional prestige.

Scholarships for needy students? That’s so last century. Of course, if you happen to be poor and score off the charts on the SAT, you’ll get admitted to virtually any top college, and receive generous financial support should you enroll. But that’s a rarity. Because of the inexorable correlation between family wealth, parent education levels and student SAT scores, the pool of brilliant poor students (as measured by test scores) is limited indeed.

Such students are decidedly not the target market for endowment-maximizing universities.

In order to persuade the right students to apply and enroll, those from the affluent suburbs of Chicago, Detroit and Milwaukee, universities are increasingly fond of merit scholarships and other enticements. The dirty little secret is that the lion’s share of these “merit” scholarships go to the very affluent students who don’t really need the money for college.

To be sure, race-conscious affirmative action has been the principle tool for universities to create more diversity on their campuses, which is all well and good. But in terms of achieving a semblance of socioeconomic diversity, many of our best public universities have little to be proud of. Unfortunately, affirmative action as we’ve known it has done little to open such universities to students from families of low and modest economic backgrounds.

Consider the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Among the top 31 public universities in terms of institutional endowment, a mere 13 percent of Wisconsin’s undergraduates were eligible for the federal Pell grant for lower-income students in the Fall of 2004. Only the University of Delaware and the University of Virginia, at 9.8 percent and 7.6 percent, respectively, had worse records of enrolling lower-income students. (1)

Fortunately, higher education leaders are waking up, realizing that they are failing in their responsibility to serve the public good, not simply their private institutional interests. Among them is the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In fact, the university wants to revise its admissions system, adopting the ‘comprehensive review” method of evaluating applicants that allows the admissions office to consider one’s academic achievement in the context of his or her social and economic background. The new system will consider race but not just race. The university hopes that such a system will permit it to achieve a far richer level of diversity than in the past.

“Diversity isn’t just race,” university Regent David Walsh said. “It’s geography. It’s handicapped. It’s the veterans. It’s the football player. They all bring something to this campus. It’s about having a better educational experience for our students.” (2)

But there is dissention in the ranks of conservatives who believe academic merit is some absolutely measurable quantity, reducible to grades and test scores, and that students should, in essence, be rank-ordered for admission according to academic criteria alone.

According to Inside Higher Ed, Stephen Nass, a Republican who chairs the Wisconsin State Assembly’s committee on colleges and universities, believes the UW regents “are sending the wrong message to high-achieving high school students who might be turned away from the most competitive schools because of the policy.”

In other words, according to Nass, the university would sacrifice academic excellence on the altar of diversity. (3)

We’ve heard these dire warnings before.

This notion that our great universities are on the brink of collapse, threatened by ill-conceived efforts to put test scores in their proper perspective in admissions, has been proven over and over to be hollow rhetoric. We heard it in Texas with the Top 10 Percent Plan. We heard it at the University of California with the introduction of its comprehensive review admissions system.

We keep hearing these dire warnings, and yet the empirical evidence continues to demonstrate that universities can do a better job of predicting academic success by considering a full range of factors -- from family socioeconomic background to scores and grades -- that paint a true picture of a young person's academic promise. If I were an admissions officer looking for our nation's next leaders, I'd take an impoverished young girl growing up in rural Montana with modest test scores but doing real science any day of the week over the privileged child of a neurosurgeon with perfect test scores.

Money and institutional prestige are the coin of the realm in the American “meritocracy.” We can only imagine what it might look like if genuine merit were the underlying principle.

1. Karin Fischer, “Elite Colleges Lag in Serving the Needy,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 12, 2006.
2. University of Wisconsin, Madison, “Regents approve admissions policy, Feb. 9, 2007. http://www.wisconsin.edu/news/2007/r070209a.htm
3. Elia Powers, “Considering Race in Admissions,” Inside Higher Ed, Feb. 12, 2007. http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/02/12/wisconsin

Affirmative Action for the Rich

2007-02-26T10:30:00.000-08:00

You have a hard job, Mary Sue Coleman. You are president of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, which has been whipsawed lately by the rapidly changing legal environment of affirmative action. First came the U.S. Supreme Court’s twin rulings in the summer of 2003 over the legality of using race as an admissions boost at your law school and at the undergraduate college. While your undergraduate admissions program didn’t pass the court’s test – too much decisive weight was given to an applicant’s race -- you were thrilled by the Court’s separate ruling that the law school’s “narrowly tailored” program did pass constitutional muster. Indeed, the case appeared to settle the legitimacy of race-conscious university admissions for the foreseeable future. Claiming victory for the principle of diversity, you announced that the University of Michigan would modify its undergraduate admissions system in response to the Court’s demands.

But then, in November 2006 -- following similar initiatives in California and Washington State – Michigan voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 2, which called for banning the consideration of race or gender for admission to the state’s public universities. Initially, you balked, arguing that the highly selective Michigan couldn’t change admissions policies in midstream, and a federal judge did grant you a temporary reprieve from Prop 2 on Dec. 19. That lasted exactly ten days, when a U.S. Appeals Court reversed the judge’s order. You and your admissions staff were left with little choice but to immediately begin to make your undergraduate admissions system conform to the voters’ wishes.

Through it all, you have vowed to defend the principle of diversity in Ann Arbor classrooms. “We believe that in order to create a dynamic learning environment for all our students, we must bring together students who are highly qualified academically and who represent a wide range of backgrounds and experiences," you said in August 2003. "As a public university, we also have an important and distinctive role to provide access to students from all walks of life." (1)

Race-conscious admissions, you maintained, was necessary for the university to fulfill that role. But even when the law permitted you to consider race, did the university really done an adequate job of providing access to a broad cross-section of Michigan citizens? The university remains largely white (72 percent of undergraduates) and come from families that are far more affluent than the average Michigan family. (2)

Indeed, among top public research universities, the Ann Arbor campus ranked 28th in terms of enrolling lower-income students, as defined by their eligibility for federal Pell grants. Among the top thirty-one public universities, the university’s Pell grant enrollment rate of 13.5 percent in 2004 was higher only than that of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the University of Delaware and the University of Virginia. By the Pell measure, Michigan’s commitment to creating greater access to students of modest means put it on a par with many private universities – a dubious achievement for a public university with a claim to serve the public good. Consider, by comparison, your peers among public universities in terms of size, selectivity and research capabilities: the Pell grant enrollment rate at University of California at Los Angeles was 37.2 percent; at the University of Washington, a quarter of undergraduates qualified for the federal grants. (3)

As another example, how many federal TRIO programs does the Ann Arbor campus operate? Those are the programs such as Upward Bound, Talent Search, Student Support Services, and so on, which help students from lower-income families get to places like the University of Michigan and to survive the campus culture once there. According to a March 2004 report by Postsecondary Education Opportunity, the Ann Arbor campus has exactly zero TRIO programs, which places the University of Michigan among 24 universities that have no TRIO programs on campus. The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor was the only public institution among that group of 24. (4)

That record is indicative of an institutional culture that seems downright hostile to the notion of economic diversity on your campus. Is it any wonder, then, that institutions such as the University of Washington and the University of California at San Diego, which put Michigan to shame on the economic diversity front, each have several active TRIO programs on their campuses?

Hence, there is ample room for improvement on the diversity front at the University of Michigan, and perhaps you could view the recent changes in the legal landscape an opportunity to create a far richer, more complete sort of diversity than you had previously thought possible.

I have no doubt that many higher education leaders, yourself included, understand that their class problem will eventually become America’s class problem as the nation struggles with holding together a bifurcated society split between haves and have-nots. This growing social and economic divide, increasingly a function of one’s access to higher education, has troubling implications for the nation’s democratic and economic future, and institutions like the University of Michigan must play a role in alleviating this divide. On a promising note, several elite institutions, including Harvard, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, MIT, Yale, Princeton and Brown in the last few years have created methods to ease the enormous debt burden that lower-income families face when sending children to college.

But these efforts will do little to address higher education’s real problem with class, and that is the prestige-driven higher education marketplace and how it severely restricts the numbers of lower-income students from the pool of credible candidates. Under their self-imposed imperative to identify, recruit and enroll the “right” students at almost any cost, colleges and universities, including the University of Michigan, are engaged in a hotly competitive arms race for educational prestige -- at least as defined by U.S. News and World Report and other self-appointed arbiters of college quality.
Freshmen SAT scores rule in the rankings game, and colleges have employed all manner of “enrollment management” tactics to identify and enroll the sorts of students that will boost their U.S. News profile. Invariably, the right students are the sons and daughters of the investment bankers, eye surgeons and university professors who have been groomed from birth to score well on the SAT.

Make no mistake, Dr. Coleman. While you no longer are permitted to engage in race-conscious affirmative action, you do employ affirmative action of another, more subtle and far more powerful variety. Michigan remains a prestige-driven university that has tuned its back on poor and working-class families by employing selection methods that systematically favor children born into privileged families.

Call it affirmative action for the rich.

It would be one thing if the meritocracy that you claim to defend could be defended. In truth, all the rhetoric that education leaders espouse about maintaining academic quality at a great university like Michigan, by holding the line on SAT I scores of incoming freshman, is hollow. Countless academic studies have demonstrated that, at least beyond a certain benchmark of adequate academic preparation, SAT I scores are a poor predictor of academic success in college. They remain, however, an exceedingly powerful correlate to the cultural, educational and economic capital a child receives from home and school. In order to create more diversity, major universities must do a better job with admissions tests, using them a lot more creatively, judiciously, and realistically.

In fact, an SAT score for the young daughter of a neurosurgeon growing up with every possible advantage attending all the best schools and receiving all the best test prep money can buy really does mean something different than the SAT score of a young girl growing up in a poor family in rural Montana whose parents never went to college. And yet, that poor Montana girl (her name, in fact, is Melissa Morrow, who I interviewed at length for my forthcoming book) might have a “special spark” that could lead to great accomplishments if she had a fighting chance to attend a university like Michigan. It’s up to you, Dr. Coleman, to give her that fighting chance.

One strategy is to use the SAT with more precision – and as a consequence with more humanity. For example, similar to the concept of taxable income on a tax return, an applicant’s SAT score could be adjusted to produce a “net” score with empirically defensible and objectively measurable factors that have been proven to correlate strongly with SAT performance. These factors could, for instance, include parental wealth, income and education levels, quality of schools attended, average SAT scores of one’s peers, neighborhood wealth, and so on. Many, if not all of such measures, can be part of a mechanical computation that would permit a relatively inexpensive way for the university to sort through thousands of applicants.

Once you know an applicant’s academic credentials in their full context, human judgment comes into play. Finding the “special spark” in a young person requires human judgment, and your faculty are your best and perhaps most under-employed asset in order to identify promising applicants. A truly comprehensive review of applicants requires that every college application be fully read by experienced evaluators, and the faculty can contribute productively to this enterprise. Some major universities, including the University of California system, have embarked on a full reading of all applications from eligible students with promising results. The point at which all applications receive a full and comprehensive review is up to the political and economic context at a particular university. Perhaps that point comes after adjusted SAT scores are calculated for applicants in order to create an eligibility pool of potential admits. But in order to give students like Melissa Morrow a fighting chance, that point at which the institution consider fully every application must come.

In the end, Dr. Coleman, whether Michigan is to become an institution that is truly open to students from diverse economic backgrounds is a matter of institutional culture. Beyond all the tactical methods for creating a new admissions system in response to the limits on affirmative action, the question is whether Michigan continues to choose a culture of elitism or creates a new culture. Such a culture should embody every aspect of the academic enterprise, from student support services to faculty attitudes toward unconventional students, that makes the university a welcoming place for all students.

It’s time, Dr. Coleman, to reach beyond academe’s self-satisfied notions of diversity. It’s time to pay a lot more attention to social class in your diversity equation.

Peter Sacks is the author of Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education, to be published in May 2007 by the University of California Press. His book, Standardized Minds: The High Price of America’s Testing Culture and What We can do to Change it, was published in 2000 by Perseus.

Notes

(1) “New U-M undergraduate admissions process to involve more information, individual review,” Aug. 28, 2003 http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/print.php?Releases/2003/Aug03/admissions
(2) This statement is based, admittedly, on incomplete data. For this article, I contacted the University of Michigan for information about the socioeconomic backgrounds of admitted students, and I received no reply.
(3) Karin Fischer, “Elite Colleges Lag in Serving the Needy,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 12, 2006.
(4) “Pell Grant Share of Undergraduates Enrollment at the 50 Best National Universities 1992-93 and 2001-02,” Postsecondary Education OPPORTUNITY Issue #141 – March 2004