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New 'Digital Divide' Seen in Wasting Time Online - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...en-in-wasting-time-online.html digital divide technology time
shared by Javier E on 01 Jun 12 - Cached
  • As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show. This growing time-wasting gap, policy makers and researchers say, is more a reflection of the ability of parents to monitor and limit how children use technology than of access to it.
  • “access is not a panacea,” said Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft. “Not only does it not solve problems, it mirrors and magnifies existing problems we’ve been ignoring.”
  • d the initial push to close the digital divide did not anticipate how computers would be used for entertainment.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • children and teenagers whose parents do not have a college degree spent 90 minutes more per day exposed to media than children from higher socioeconomic families. In 1999, the difference was just 16 minutes.
  • children of parents who do not have a college degree spend 11.5 hours each day exposed to media from a variety of sources, including television, computer and other gadgets. That is an increase of 4 hours and 40 minutes per day since 1999.
  • Children of more educated parents, generally understood as a proxy for higher socioeconomic status, also largely use their devices for entertainment. In families in which a parent has a college education or an advanced degree, Kaiser found, children use 10 hours of multimedia a day, a 3.5-hour jump since 1999.
  • “Despite the educational potential of computers, the reality is that their use for education or meaningful content creation is minuscule compared to their use for pure entertainment,” said Vicky Rideout, author of the decade-long Kaiser study. “Instead of closing the achievement gap, they’re widening the time-wasting gap.”
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What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind? - WSJ.com - 1 views

online.wsj.com/...3806504577181351486558984.html adolescence teenage brain research development learning experience brain science psychology
shared by Javier E on 06 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness. Fortunately, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists are starting to explain the foundations of that weirdness.
  • The crucial new idea is that there are two different neural and psychological systems that interact to turn children into adults. Over the past two centuries, and even more over the past generation, the developmental timing of these two systems has changed. That, in turn, has profoundly changed adolescence and produced new kinds of adolescent woe. The big question for anyone who deals with young people today is how we can go about bringing these cogs of the teenage mind into sync once again
  • The first of these systems has to do with emotion and motivation. It is very closely linked to the biological and chemical changes of puberty and involves the areas of the brain that respond to rewards. This is the system that turns placid 10-year-olds into restless, exuberant, emotionally intense teenagers, desperate to attain every goal, fulfill every desire and experience every sensation. Later, it turns them back into relatively placid adults.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • adolescents aren't reckless because they underestimate risks, but because they overestimate rewards—or, rather, find rewards more rewarding than adults do. The reward centers of the adolescent brain are much more active than those of either children or adults.
  • What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers
  • In contemporary life, the relationship between these two systems has changed dramatically. Puberty arrives earlier, and the motivational system kicks in earlier too. At the same time, contemporary children have very little experience with the kinds of tasks that they'll have to perform as grown-ups.
  • The second crucial system in our brains has to do with control; it channels and harnesses all that seething energy. In particular, the prefrontal cortex reaches out to guide other parts of the brain, including the parts that govern motivation and emotion. This is the system that inhibits impulses and guides decision-making, that encourages long-term planning and delays gratification.
  • This control system depends much more on learning. It becomes increasingly effective throughout childhood and continues to develop during adolescence and adulthood, as we gain more experience.
  • Expertise comes with experience.
  • In gatherer-hunter and farming societies, childhood education involves formal and informal apprenticeship. Children have lots of chances to practice the skills that they need to accomplish their goals as adults, and so to become expert planners and actors.
  • In the past, to become a good gatherer or hunter, cook or caregiver, you would actually practice gathering, hunting, cooking and taking care of children all through middle childhood and early adolescence—tuning up just the prefrontal wiring you'd need as an adult. But you'd do all that under expert adult supervision and in the protected world of childhood
  • there is more and more evidence that genes are just the first step in complex developmental sequences, cascades of interactions between organism and environment, and that those developmental processes shape the adult brain. Even small changes in developmental timing can lead to big changes in who we become.
  • The experience of trying to achieve a real goal in real time in the real world is increasingly delayed, and the growth of the control system depends on just those experiences.
  • Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers. Puberty not only turns on the motivational and emotional system with new force, it also turns it away from the family and toward the world of equals.
  • An ever longer protected period of immaturity and dependence—a childhood that extends through college—means that young humans can learn more than ever before. There is strong evidence that IQ has increased dramatically as more children spend more time in school
  • children know more about more different subjects than they ever did in the days of apprenticeships.
  • Wide-ranging, flexible and broad learning, the kind we encourage in high-school and college, may actually be in tension with the ability to develop finely-honed, controlled, focused expertise in a particular skill, the kind of learning that once routinely took place in human societies.
  • this new explanation based on developmental timing elegantly accounts for the paradoxes of our particular crop of adolescents.
  • First, experience shapes the brain.
  • the brain is so powerful precisely because it is so sensitive to experience. It's as true to say that our experience of controlling our impulses make the prefrontal cortex develop as it is to say that prefrontal development makes us better at controlling our impulses
  • Second, development plays a crucial role in explaining human nature
  • Today's adolescents develop an accelerator a long time before they can steer and brake.
  • Brain research is often taken to mean that adolescents are really just defective adults—grown-ups with a missing part.
  • But the new view of the adolescent brain isn't that the prefrontal lobes just fail to show up; it's that they aren't properly instructed and exercised
  • Instead of simply giving adolescents more and more school experiences—those extra hours of after-school classes and homework—we could try to arrange more opportunities for apprenticeship
  • Summer enrichment activities like camp and travel, now so common for children whose parents have means, might be usefully alternated with summer jobs, with real responsibilities.
  • Javier E on 06 Feb 12
     
    The two brain systems, the increasing gap between them, and the implications for adolescent education.
  • anonymous on 06 Feb 12
     
    "In gatherer-hunter and farming societies, childhood education involves formal and informal apprenticeship" (Gopnik). Similarly to the way that Marx pointed out the economic shift from hunter-gatherer to farmer to (eventually) capitalist societies, Gopnik underlines the societal shift- especially in teenagers. While I think that some of the changes in teenagers are due to evolution and development (as proven through some of the medical tests mentioned in the article), I think that this issue may relate back to parenting. As the article about French parenting pointed out, it has become a very obvious fact that many (specifically American) parents simply do not have good techniques, and this could effect the way that their child develops and behaves. I also think that another possible explanation to this issue is that there is more expected of teenagers, scholarly, then before; however, as the article mentioned, the real-world experience is lacking. By raising the academic bar higher and higher, it may actually cause more students to, essentially, "burn out" before everything that they have learned can be applied: "What happened to the gifted, imaginative child who excelled through high school but then dropped out of college, drifted from job to job and now lives in his parents' basement?" (Gopnik)
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Big Savings for U.S. Students in Open-Source Book Program - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-open-source-book-program.html students university textbook economics
shared by Javier E on 12 Feb 12 - Cached
  • Connexions, an initiative at Rice University in Houston devoted to producing textbooks using open-source materials, will produce free textbooks for five of the most-attended subjects in American colleges.
  • the OpenStax College textbooks “will be competitive with texts that currently retail for $150 or more,” said the books’ editor in chief, David Harris. “Furthermore, because our content is openly licensed, faculty will be able to easily modify and adapt OpenStax College content to meet specific course needs.”
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Putting Chinese Students to the Test - NYTimes.com - 0 views

rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/...g-chinese-students-to-the-test education china test
shared by Javier E on 18 Jun 12 - Cached
  • More than 9.1 million students throughout China sat for the college exam beginning Thursday morning, competing for 6.85 million places at Chinese universities, according to Ministry of Education figures reported by China Daily. The exam is known as the gao kao (高考), pronounced gow kow, and the number of high school test-takers has dropped each year since 2008, the ministry said, as the graduation-age population has decreased and more students gravitate to universities abroad.
  • the number of students wanting to study abroad has increased by more than 20 percent each year since 2008. “Students don’t believe they can have better prospects if they study in universities in China,”
  • But new research by the workplace manager Regus shows that Chinese employers are now favoring graduates with internship experience, winning personalities and foreign language skills. Just 9 percent of employers, especially at large companies, now put educational background as the top priority in hiring.
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  • ‘They think the goal is to pass the test. They’re studying for the test, not studying English.’ ”
  • found cheating on college applications to be “pervasive in China, driven by hyper-competitive parents and aggressive agents.’’
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In a Buyer's Market, Colleges Become Fluent in the Language of Business - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-the-language-of-business.html university commercial relations students economics
shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Higher education is today less a rite of passage in which institutions serve in loco parentis, and more a commercial transaction between school and student.
  • “It makes a certain amount of sense for those families, especially, to think about return on investment, but I would hope that they would see other values, as well,” Mr. Rawlings said. He disparaged evaluations of alumni earnings by college and major, “but let’s face it, it’s really part of American culture, because we evaluate practically everything monetarily.”
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Standards Have Fallen in Universities - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ds-have-fallen-in-universities university studying time trend US leisure standards
shared by Javier E on 24 Aug 10 - Cached
  • My co-author, Mindy Marks, and I found a whopping 10-hour decline in time spent studying outside of class for full time students at four-year universities between 1961 and the 2000s.
  • One theory is that increased market pressures have empowered students, causing colleges to cater more to students’ desires for leisure. Students do appear to prefer leisure and easier classes. A given instructor in a given course tends to receive lower ratings from students during terms when he or she grades less generously or requires more.
  • The Delta Study finding that spending for non-academic and recreation facilities has been increasing relative to spending on academic instruction also seems consistent with this explanation.
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  • It’s true that the Internet and word processors have made it easier for today’s students to write papers and search for references. But because the largest portion of the study time decline happened between 1961 and 1981, before these advances could have been a factor, and because declines also occurred in majors that don’t rely on writing papers or searching the library, we doubt this explains much of the story.
  • the study time decline is clearly visible both for students who work for pay while in school and for those who don’t.
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The Density of Smart People - Richard Florida - Business - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...57384 university density educated economic people city
shared by Javier E on 28 Jan 11 - Cached
  • Jane Jacobs argued that the clustering of talented and energetic in cities is the fundamental driving force of economic development.
  • Instead of measuring human capital or college degree holders as a function of population, he measures it as a function of land area -- that is, as college degree holders per square mile.
  • San Francisco and New York are far and away the leaders in human capital density with 7,031 and 6,357 college degree holders per square mile, respectively.
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A Theory of Everyting (Sort of) - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...eory-of-everyting-sort-of.html protest political crisis technology trends economic prospect competition international
shared by Javier E on 14 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Across the world, a lot of middle- and lower-middle-class people now feel that the “future” is out of their grasp, and they are letting their leaders know it.
  • the world has gone from connected to hyper-connected. This is the single most important trend in the world today.
  • And it is a critical reason why, to get into the middle class now, you have to study harder, work smarter and adapt quicker than ever before. All this technology and globalization are eliminating more and more “routine” work — the sort of work that once sustained a lot of middle-class lifestyles.
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  • It used to be that only cheap foreign manual labor was easily available; now cheap foreign genius is easily available. This explains why corporations are getting richer and middle-skilled workers poorer. Good jobs do exist, but they require more education or technical skills. Unemployment today still remains relatively low for people with college degrees. But to get one of those degrees and to leverage it for a good job requires everyone to raise their game. It’s hard.
  • At little Grinnell College in rural Iowa, with 1,600 students, “nearly one of every 10 applicants being considered for the class of 2015 is from China.” The article noted that dozens of other American Colleges and universities are seeing a similar surge as well. And the article added this fact: Half the “applicants from China this year have perfect scores of 800 on the math portion of the SAT.”
  • This globalization/I.T. revolution is also “super-empowering” individuals, enabling them to challenge hierarchies and traditional authority figures — from business to science to government. It is also enabling the creation of powerful minorities and making governing harder and minority rule easier than ever.
  • So let’s review: We are increasingly taking easy credit, routine work and government jobs and entitlements away from the middle class — at a time when it takes more skill to get and hold a decent job, at a time when citizens have more access to media to organize, protest and challenge authority and at a time when this same merger of globalization and I.T. is creating huge wages for people with global skills (or for those who learn to game the system and get access to money, monopolies or government contracts by being close to those in power) — thus widening income gaps and fueling resentments even more.
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Universities Seeking Out Students of Means - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...21admissions.html university admissions income wealth foreign
shared by Javier E on 22 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • More than half of the admissions officers at public research universities, and more than a third at four-year colleges said that they had been working harder in the past year to recruit students who need no financial aid and can pay full price, according to the survey of 462 admissions directors and enrollment managers conducted in August
  • we’re seeing a fundamental change in the admissions process,
  • “Where many of the older admissions professionals came in through the institution and saw it as an ethically centered counseling role, there’s now a different dynamic that places a lot more emphasis on marketing.”
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  • the full-pay students they were admitting, on average, had lower grades and test scores than other admitted applicants.
  • More than a quarter of the admissions directors said they had felt pressure from senior-level administrators to admit certain applicants, and almost a quarter got pressure from trustees or development officers.
  • Mr. Thacker said his own research had found students becoming more cynical about higher education. “Students say, ‘They’re cheating us, so we can cheat them,’ ” he said. “The cheat they see is that colleges are out for themselves, not for them as students. Our research, with 2,500 students, found that of all the sources of information students get about higher education, they thought the least trustworthy sources are the colleges
  • Admissions directors at many public universities said in the survey that recruiting more out-of-state and international students, who pay higher tuition, was their top strategy.
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Free Community College, but Where's the Money? - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...384380 students education US Obama politics government
shared by Grace Gannon on 13 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Grace Gannon on 13 Jan 15
     
    President Obama wants to provide free tuition at community colleges, a proposal that could benefit as many as 9 million students, according to a White House outline of the plan released Thursday. But there's one big caveat in the proposal: There isn't plan to fund it, other than to ask Congress for the money.
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String of Sexual Assault Cases May Lead to Tipping Point - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...may-lead-to-tipping-point.html sexism culture crisis
shared by Javier E on 04 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • While protests of the so-called rape culture on college campuses have surfaced before — Take Back the Night marches are decades old — the sudden convergence of exposure and outrage over these acts of sexual violence suggests a tolerance tipping point in American culture for a problem that institutions and victims alike have long hidden from view.
  • “I think we are at a critical moment,” said Eugene R. Fidell, an expert on military justice at Yale Law School. “The military is not on an island all to itself, and the debate in the country is over what is the medicine we need to take. The fact that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way our society treats women is a proposition on which there is now general agreement.”
  • “As women expect more equality,” said Michael S. Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, who banned some fraternity functions after two separate assault cases, “the prevalence of this archaic behavior becomes increasingly intolerable. You now find flash points where you can protest against that behavior on college campuses and in the military, and there will be others where women and others can get attention for their claims.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • What has changed are the willingness of women to come forward in ways that would have been unthinkable in the past and, as a result, the pressure on institutions to respond to issues that were once allowed to fester just out of sight.
  • in the case of all violence, there are matters ingrained in the culture that experts on sexual violence say go far beyond the institutions now under fire.
  • “The fix that I’d like to see,” said Erin Buzuvis, the director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Western New England University School of Law, “and one that is relevant whether we are talking about Cosby or the military or UVA. is to cultivate as individuals and society intolerance to the ways violence against women is normalized in the media, through sports, on TV and in movies, in video games, in advertising and online.”
  • “What you’re seeing with Cosby and college campuses and the military is that victims are gaining strength by seeing the courage of other victims,” she said. “I have seen this incredible increase in the number of people who have come out and are saying, ‘I want people to know that this happened to me.’ ”
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Fewer Top Graduates Want to Join Teach for America - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...to-join-teach-for-america.html teach america US
shared by jlessner on 06 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Teach for America, the education powerhouse that has sent thousands of handpicked college graduates to teach in some of the nation’s most troubled schools, is suddenly having recruitment problems.
  • For the second year in a row, applicants for the elite program have dropped, breaking a 15-year growth trend. Applications are down by about 10 percent from a year earlier on college campuses around the country as of the end of last month.
  • “I want the numbers to be higher, because the demand from districts is extremely high and we’re not going to meet it this year,” said Matt Kramer, a co-chief executive of Teach for America. But, he added, “it is not existentially concerning.”
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  • Last year, the highly selective program accepted about 15 percent of its applicants. Mr. Kramer said there were no plans to lower standards for the current year simply to yield a larger corps of teachers.
  • “We are sort of at 2.0 of education reform, and its future direction seems a little bit uncertain at this point,” said David M. Steiner, the dean of the Hunter College School of Education in New York.
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Some alums object when 'Princeton Mom' says some 'date rape' is just a bad hookup, a 'l... - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ups-a-group-of-alums-disagrees US culture experience
shared by jlessner on 09 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • With 100 or so colleges under investigation by the federal government for the way they have handled allegations of sexual assault, with the president and member of Congress and countless advocacy groups weighing in, with some particularly horrifying cases making headlines and scores of other allegations simmering within campus communities, it’s a minefield.
  • Not everyone disagreed with Patton, who is president of the alumni class of 1977.
  • When people take the issue seriously, Daniels said, people can do something about it; work on education, work on prevention, work on supporting the victims.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • I think any form of rape is something that needs to be taken seriously. Rape is a crime that needs to be treated as a crime. The victims of a crime should not be blamed, should not be dismissed. Anything that trivializes any form of rape is very offensive to me.”
  • When List and several other alums, furious, reached out to others, they found that many were quick to sign on to their letter of opposition, more than 100 in a day or so.
  • Empowerment comes from control, and control comes from taking responsibility for yourself.”
  • With this, I strongly felt she was really, really undermining the young women who might have finally gotten the courage to come forward if they were raped by an acquaintance or on a date.”
  • Besides, she said, Princeton is a place that seeks, and welcomes, a plurality of opinions. “There’s no need to shut down any voice.”
  • And while we know that Princeton, like many other colleges and universities, has been struggling to find the right balance between the rights of the accused and protections for the victims,
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'Dear White People,' About Racial Hypocrisy at a College - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...al-hypocrisy-at-a-college.html white supremacy university movie
shared by Javier E on 18 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • “Dear White People” brilliantly uses the complexities of Obama-era racial consciousness to explore a basic paradox of interpersonal interaction. We are all stereotypes in one another’s eyes and complicated, unique individuals in our own minds. Somehow, within the compass of a compact, modestly budgeted (and independently financed) feature, Mr. Simien holds the antics of an astonishing variety of recognizable human types up to critical scrutiny. At the same time, he explores the desires and frustrations of a motley collection of plausible human beings with amused compassion.
  • “Dear White People” does not point the way toward a happy, huggy, post-racial future. Nor does it prophesy a revolutionary fire next time. And it does not pretend that “race” is a symmetrical problem to be solved by acts of reciprocal good will on both sides. This is in part a movie about racism, about how deeply white supremacy is still embedded in institutions that congratulate themselves on their diversity and tolerance. It is, in other words, about how the distance from a place like Winchester to a place like Ferguson, Mo., is not as great as some of us might wish or suppose.
  • Mr. Simien serves harsh medicine with remarkable charm and good humor. He is an incisive writer and a disciplined and decorous filmmaker, framing and cutting his scenes with clean, almost classical economy.
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The Halloween Costume Controversy at Yale's Silliman College - The Atlantic - 2 views

www.theatlantic.com/...414810 campus Yale halloween free speech victimization tolerance culture
shared by Javier E on 10 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Watching footage of that meeting, a fundamental disagreement is revealed between professor and undergrads.
  • Christakis believes that he has an obligation to listen to the views of the students, to reflect upon them, and to either respond that he is persuaded or to articulate why he has a different view. Put another way, he believes that one respects students by engaging them in earnest dialogue.
  • But many of the students believe that his responsibility is to hear their demands for an apology and to issue it. They see anything short of a confession of wrongdoing as unacceptable. In their view, one respects students by validating their subjective feelings.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Notice that the student position allows no room for civil disagreement.
  • In “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argued that too many college students engage in “catastrophizing,” which is to say, turning common events into nightmarish trials or claiming that easily bearable events are too awful to bear. After citing examples, they concluded, “smart people do, in fact, overreact to innocuous speech, make mountains out of molehills, and seek punishment for anyone whose words make anyone else feel uncomfortable.”
  • As students saw it, their pain ought to have been the decisive factor in determining the acceptability of the Halloween email. They thought their request for an apology ought to have been sufficient to secure one. Who taught them that it is righteous to pillory faculty for failing to validate their feelings, as if disagreement is tantamount to disrespect? Their mindset is anti-diversity, anti-pluralism, and anti-tolerance, a seeming data-point in favor of April Kelly-Woessner’s provocative argument that “young people today are less politically tolerant than their parents’ generation.”
  • This notion that one’s existence can be invalidated by a fellow 18-year-old donning an offensive costume is perhaps the most disempowering notion aired at Yale.
  • It ought to be disputed rather than indulged for the sake of these students, who need someone to teach them how empowered they are by virtue of their mere enrollment; that no one is capable of invalidating their existence, full stop; that their worth is inherent, not contingent; that everyone is offended by things around them; that they are capable of tremendous resilience; and that most possess it now despite the disempowering ideology foisted on them by well-intentioned, wrongheaded ideologues encouraging them to imagine that they are not privileged.
  • Here’s one of the ways that white men at Yale are most privileged of all: When a white male student at an elite college says that he feels disempowered, the first impulse of the campus left is to show him the extent of his power and privilege. When any other students say they feel disempowered, the campus left’s impulse is to validate their statements. This does a huge disservice to everyone except white male students.
  • That isn’t to dismiss all complaints by Yale students. If contested claims that black students were turned away from a party due to their skin color are true, for example, that is outrageous. If any discrete group of students is ever discriminated against, or disproportionately victimized by campus crime, or graded more harshly by professors, then of course students should protest and remedies should be implemented.
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Why Are White Death Rates Rising? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-white-death-rates-rising.html working class white supremacy white despair reference standards
shared by Javier E on 22 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Why are whites overdosing or drinking themselves to death at higher rates than African-Americans and Hispanics in similar circumstances?
  • I’d like to propose a different answer: what social scientists call reference group theory.
  • The term “reference group” was pioneered by the social psychologist Herbert H. Hyman in 1942, and the theory was developed by the Columbia sociologist Robert K. Merton in the 1950s. It tells us that to comprehend how people think and behave, it’s important to understand the standards to which they compare themselves.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • It’s likely that many non-college-educated whites are comparing themselves to a generation that had more opportunities than they have, whereas many blacks and Hispanics are comparing themselves to a generation that had fewer opportunities.
  • The hourly wages of male high school graduates declined by 14 percent from 1973 to 2012
  • The sociologist Timothy Nelson and I observed this phenomenon in interviews with high-school-educated young adult men in 2012 and 2013
  • NORC at the University of Chicago has asked Americans in its biennial surveys to compare their standard of living to that of their parents.
  • among 25- to 54-year-olds without college degrees, blacks and Hispanics were much more positive than whites: 67 percent of African-Americans and 68 percent of Hispanics responded “much better” or “somewhat better,” compared with 47 percent of whites.
  • But we size ourselves up based on more than just our parents. White workers historically have compared themselves against black workers, taking some comfort in seeing a group that was doing worse than them.
  • Non-college-graduate whites in the General Social Survey are more likely to agree that “conditions for black people have improved” than are comparable blacks themselves, 68 percent to 53 percent.
  • Reference group theory explains why people who have more may feel that they have less. What matters is to whom you are comparing yourself.
  • It’s not that white workers are doing worse than African-Americans or Hispanics.In the fourth quarter of 2015, the median weekly earnings of white men aged 25 to 54 were $950, well above the same figure for black men ($703) and Hispanic men ($701).
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Opinion | What the Working Class Is Still Trying to Tell Us - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...terms-working-class-labor.html working class trump labor tracking
shared by Javier E on 10 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • I was surprised how massive the Republican turnout was in response.
  • These were high-school-educated, working-class Republicans.
  • Part of the problem is misplaced priorities. For the last several decades, American economic policy has been pinioned on one goal: expanding G.D.P. We measure G.D.P. We talk incessantly about economic growth. Between 1975 and 2015, American G.D.P. increased threefold. But what good is that growth if it means that a thick slice of America is discarded for efficiency reasons?
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • This is still a country in which nearly 20 percent of prime-age American men are not working full time. This is still a country in which only 37 percent of adults expect children to be better off financially than they are. This is still a country in which millions of new jobs are through “alternative work arrangements” like contracting or consulting — meaning no steady salary, no predictable hours and no security.
  • Oren Cass’s absolutely brilliant new book, “The Once and Future Worker.” The first part of the book is about how we in the educated class have screwed up labor markets in ways that devalued work and made it harder for people in the working class to find a satisfying job
  • Trump ran another American carnage campaign. That’s because American life still feels like carnage to many.
  • for the last several decades American, welfare policy has focused on consumption — giving money to the poor so they can consume more. Yet we have not successfully helped poor people produce more so that they can take control of their own lives. We now spend more than $20,000 a year in means-tested government spending per person in poverty. And yet the average poverty rate for 2000 to 2015 was higher than it was for 1970 to 1985
  • Right now, we have a one-size-fits-all education system. Everybody should go to college. The problem is that roughly one-fifth of our students fail to graduate high school in four years; roughly one-fifth take no further schooling after high school; roughly one-fifth drop out of college; roughly one-fifth get a job that doesn’t require the degree they just earned; and roughly one-fifth actually navigate the path the system is built around — from school to career.We build a broken system and then ask people to try to fit into the system instead of tailoring a system around people’s actual needs.
  • he’s really trying to put work, and the dignity of work, at the center of our culture and concern. In the 1970s and 1980s, he points out, the Emmy Award-winning TV shows were about blue-collar families: “All in the Family,” “Taxi,” “Cheers,” “The Wonder Years.” Now the Emmy-winning shows are mostly about white-collar adults working in Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, New York and Washington.
  • We in the college-educated sliver have built a culture, an economy and a political system that are all about ourselves. It’s time to pass labor market reforms that will make life decent for everybody.
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Income Inequality Explains the Decline of Youth Sports - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...574975 sports inequality decline competition elite
shared by Javier E on 07 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • Among richer families, youth sports participation is actually rising. Among the poorest households, it’s trending down. Just 34 percent of children from families earning less than $25,000 played a team sport at least one day in 2017, versus 69 percent from homes earning more than $100,000. In 2011, those numbers were roughly 42 percent and 66 percent, respectively.
  • This isn’t a story about American childhood; it’s about American inequality.
  • In his 2017 book, Dream Hoarders, the economist Richard Reeves wrote that economic mobility in the U.S. has been declining in the past few decades in part because of “opportunity hoarding.” For example, rich parents may pull special levers to get their kids into hyper-select schools, or elite internships, or exclusive entry-level jobs. In so doing, they—in effect— snatch precious opportunities away from the less fortunate.
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  • Expensive travel leagues siphon off talented young athletes from well-off families, leaving behind desiccated local leagues with fewer players, fewer involved parents, and fewer resources. “When these kids move to the travel team, you pull bodies out of the local town’s recreation league, and it sends a message [to those] who didn’t get onto that track that they don’t really have a future in the sport.” The result is a classist system: the travel-team talents and the local leftovers.
  • In short, the American system of youth sports—serving the talented, and often rich, individual at the expense of the collective—has taken a metal bat to the values of participation and universal development. Youth sports has become a pay-to-play machine.
  • As a general rule, rich parents in the United States don’t just spend more money on their kids; they spend a larger share of their income on their kid
  • If you divide American households into five quintiles by income, the richest group earns about five times as much as the poorest, but spends about seven times as much on kids—about $9,300 to $1,300 per child
  • Income inequality, vast at the household level, is even vaster at the child-investment leve
  • “Kids’ sports has seen an explosion of travel-team culture, where rich parents are writing a $3,000 check to get their kids on super teams from two counties, or two states, away,”
  • those in the nation’s upper-middle class have “taken their money out of productive activities and put it into walls”—physical walls and social barriers—that make it harder for any child not born into privilege to reach the same level of success.
  • “Many of the parents are not doing it with the intention to harm anyone, since they’re just trying to help their child,” Farrey said. “But they don’t think about the kids they’re leaving behind. They’re not thinking about what makes sense for the whole community.”
  • Well-off parents dedicate so much time and money to kids’ sports partly because of the college system, which dangles tantalizing rewards for the most gifted teenage athletes. In the 1990s, Division 1 and Division 2 colleges distributed about $250 million a year in full and partial scholarships to student athletes. Today that figure has grown to more than $3 billion.
  • Sports matter. As soon as some children enter second or third grade, their parents scramble to place them on youth travel teams, which will set them up for middle-school travel teams, which will set them up for high-school athletic excellence, which will make them more competitive for admissions and scholarships at select colleges
  • one might argue, even though super teams for gifted and sufficiently wealthy young people might leave disadvantaged kids behind, this is simply the price that society must pay for excellence. It’s a version of a familiar conservative economic argument about the general economy: The U.S. has the world’s smartest people, because we celebrate success and punish indolence; so we should cut taxes on the rich and unwind collectivist welfare programs, which only dampen the nation’s competitive mojo.
  • Norway’s youth-sports policies are deliberately egalitarian. The national lottery, which is run by a government-owned company called Norsk Tipping, spends most of its profit on national sports and funnels hundreds of millions of dollars to youth athletic clubs every year. Parents don’t need to shell out thousands to make sure their kids get to play. And play is an operative word: Norwegian leagues value participation over competition so much that clubs with athletes below the age of 13 cannot even publish game scores.
  • Norway is an athletic juggernaut. In the last Winter Olympics, the country won 39 medals—the most of any country in the history of the Games and nearly twice as many as the United States. It did so with a smaller population than Minnesota’s.
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In a Volatile Climate on Campus, Professors Teach on Tenterhooks - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...hing-amid-partisan-divide.html campus discussion censorship free speech Culture
shared by Javier E on 31 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Today’s students bring a multiplicity of personal identities to campus — their sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, religion, political leanings — and they want to see that reflected in course content. The values in readings, lectures and even conversations are open to questioning. All good — that’s what college is supposed to be about — except that now the safety screen around the examination of ideas has been pulled away. Higher education is increasingly partisan, and professors must manage these disconnected ideologies, which are sometimes between themselves and their students.
  • With so many professors identifying as liberal or far left (60 percent, according to a U.C.L.A. poll last year), it’s not surprising that the right distrusts the profession. In a Pew Research Center survey released in September, respondents indicated on a thermometer scale how they felt about professors. Democrats rated them a warm 71 degrees, Republicans a chilly 46 degrees.
  • It’s a charged climate and professors know it. The culture wars playing out in the classroom have made them fearful of being targeted.
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  • An English professor at Northern Arizona, Anne Scott, did end up on Fox News. After she deducted one point from a first-year student’s paper last spring for using “mankind” instead of “humankind” — she said she had told the class that “inclusive” vocabulary is required — the student contacted the website Campus Reform. She received more than 400 emails, rude voice mail messages and dropped calls. This semester, when the student’s name appeared on the wait-list for a course she was teaching, Dr. Scott said, “I was terrified.”
  • These clashes are affecting curriculum. After meeting with a professor to plan a spring course on fascism and anti-fascism, “we decided it was probably not worth it,” said Lori Poloni-Staudinger, head of the department of politics and international affairs, who has also received threats. The class won’t be offered. “People are more guarded,” she said. “They are watching what they say.”
  • Tools she shares are new to professors focused on conveying content. On the first day, she urges instructors to work with students to create ground rules for class discussions, including what to do when talk gets heated. She shares tricks like asking students, before peers pounce, to rephrase or repeat a provocative utterance (often it’s less harsh). If someone suggests that people who ride busses are poor, instead of calling him “classist,” she said, a teacher could reframe: “Let’s talk about the labels that come up when we talk about social class.”
  • It’s also important to openly discuss cultural identity with students, rather than make assumptions. “You can be from the same background and be very different,” she said. “Or you can be from very different backgrounds and think very similarly.” Digging below the surface is critical because students “are asking for more opportunity to be complicated individuals.”
  • Professors who once skipped pre-semester faculty workshops now want to know “how to model productive disagreement,”
  • In “Conflict in the Classroom,” a sketch recently staged at Skidmore College, a statistics “class” discusses correlation and causation. The “professor” posits an example: the link between infant mortality and maternal income. The “students” raise questions that have nothing to do with math. “It becomes a debate about the variables,” said Sara Armstrong, the artistic director: One student wonders why the example doesn’t consider household income, and defines a household as man and woman. Another objects. The first accuses the other of attacking. The instructor interjects, “I don’t think this is appropriate for this class. We really can’t talk about this.” The upset student insists, “This is a problem! We have to talk about this!” A student records on his phone.
  • In the post-performance discussion, the faculty members backtrack: What could the instructor have done ahead of time to prevent problems? What could the instructor do in the moment? And afterward? Approaches involve addressing not just what is taught, but how and why. The professor might explain why he chose the case study, pause the discussion, or email the class, acknowledging the disruption and, perhaps, apologizing.
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