D's Resources for the scholars of AVCHS
The purpose of this blog is to provide students in my English 10 and my READ 180 ® courses access to educational resources with which to further their learning. Additionally, homework assignments and upcoming projects/quizzes/tests will be posted here to help students prioritize their academic responsibilities.
Monday, October 20, 2014
Monday, September 15, 2014
The Death of Adulthood in American Culture
THE CULTURE ISSUE
The Death of
Adulthood in American Culture
By A. O. SCOTT
SEPTEMBER 11, 2014
Sometime this spring,
during the first half of the final season of “Mad Men,” the popular pastime of
watching the show — recapping episodes, tripping over spoilers, trading notes
on the flawless production design, quibbling about historical details and
debating big themes — segued into a parlor game of reading signs of its hero’s
almost universally anticipated demise. Maybe the 5 o’clock shadow of mortality was
on Don Draper (fig. 1) from the start. Maybe the plummeting graphics of the
opening titles implied a literal as well as a moral fall. Maybe the notable
deaths in previous seasons (fictional characters like Miss Blankenship, Lane
Pryce and Bert Cooper, as well as figures like Marilyn Monroe and Medgar Evers)
were premonitions of Don’s own departure. In any case, fans and critics settled
in for a vigil. It was not a matter of whether, but of how and when.
TV characters are among
the allegorical figures of our age, giving individual human shape to our
collective anxieties and aspirations. The meanings of “Mad Men” are not very
mysterious: The title of the final half season, which airs next spring, will be
“The End of an Era.” The most obvious thing about the series’s meticulous,
revisionist, present-minded depiction of the past, and for many viewers the
most pleasurable, is that it shows an old order collapsing under the weight of
internal contradiction and external pressure. From the start, “Mad Men” has, in
addition to cataloging bygone vices and fashion choices, traced the erosion,
the gradual slide toward obsolescence, of a power structure built on and in
service of the prerogatives of white men. The unthinking way Don, Pete, Roger
and the rest of them enjoy their position, and the ease with which they abuse
it, inspires what has become a familiar kind of ambivalence among cable
viewers. Weren’t those guys awful, back then? But weren’t they also kind of
cool? We are invited to have our outrage and eat our nostalgia too, to applaud
the show’s right-thinking critique of what we love it for glamorizing.
The widespread hunch that
“Mad Men” will end with its hero’s death is what you might call overdetermined.
It does not arise only from the internal logic of the narrative itself, but is
also a product of cultural expectations. Something profound has been happening
in our television over the past decade, some end-stage reckoning. It is the era
not just of mad men, but also of sad men and, above all, bad men. Don is at
once the heir and precursor to Tony Soprano (fig. 2), that avatar of masculine
entitlement who fended off threats to the alpha-dog status he had inherited and
worked hard to maintain. Walter White, the protagonist of “Breaking Bad,”
struggled, early on, with his own emasculation and then triumphantly (and
sociopathically) reasserted the mastery that the world had contrived to deny
him. The monstrousness of these men was inseparable from their charisma, and
sometimes it was hard to tell if we were supposed to be rooting for them or
recoiling in horror. We were invited to participate in their self-delusions and
to see through them, to marvel at the mask of masculine competence even as we
watched it slip or turn ugly. Their deaths were (and will be) a culmination and
a conclusion: Tony, Walter and Don are the last of the patriarchs.
In suggesting that
patriarchy is dead, I am not claiming that sexism is finished, that men are
obsolete or that the triumph of feminism is at hand. I may be a middle-aged
white man, but I’m not an idiot. In the world of politics, work and family,
misogyny is a stubborn fact of life. But in the universe of thoughts and words,
there is more conviction and intelligence in the critique of male privilege
than in its defense, which tends to be panicky and halfhearted when it is not
obtuse and obnoxious. The supremacy of men can no longer be taken as a
reflection of natural order or settled custom.
This slow unwinding has
been the work of generations. For the most part, it has been understood —
rightly in my view, and this is not really an argument I want to have right now
— as a narrative of progress. A society that was exclusive and repressive is
now freer and more open. But there may be other less unequivocally happy
consequences. It seems that, in doing away with patriarchal authority, we have
also, perhaps unwittingly, killed off all the grown-ups.
A little over a week
after the conclusion of the first half of the last “Mad Men” season, the
journalist and critic Ruth Graham published a polemical essay in Slatelamenting the popularity of young-adult fiction among fully
adult readers. Noting that nearly a third of Y.A. books were purchased by
readers ages 30 to 44 (most of them presumably without teenage children of
their own), Graham insisted that such grown-ups “should feel embarrassed about
reading literature for children.” Instead, these readers were furious. The
sentiment on Twitter could be summarized as “Don’t tell me what to do!” as if
Graham were a bossy, uncomprehending parent warning the kids away from sugary
snacks toward more nutritious, chewier stuff.
It was not an argument
she was in a position to win, however persuasive her points. To oppose the
juvenile pleasures of empowered cultural consumers is to assume, wittingly or
not, the role of scold, snob or curmudgeon. Full disclosure: The shoe fits. I
will admit to feeling a twinge of disapproval when I see one of my peers
clutching a volume of “Harry Potter” or “The Hunger Games.” I’m not necessarily
proud of this reaction. As cultural critique, it belongs in the same category
as the sneer I can’t quite suppress when I see guys my age (pushing 50) riding
skateboards or wearing shorts and flip-flops, or the reflexive arching of my
eyebrows when I notice that a woman at the office has plastic butterfly
barrettes in her hair.
God, listen to me! Or
don’t. My point is not so much to defend such responses as to acknowledge how
absurd, how impotent, how out of touch they will inevitably sound. In my main
line of work as a film critic, I have watched over the past 15 years as the
studios committed their vast financial and imaginative resources to the
cultivation of franchises (some of them based on those same Y.A. novels) that
advance an essentially juvenile vision of the world. Comic-book movies,
family-friendly animated adventures, tales of adolescent heroism and comedies
of arrested development do not only make up the commercial center of
21st-century Hollywood. They are its artistic heart.
Meanwhile, television has
made it very clear that we are at a frontier. Not only have shows like “The
Sopranos” and “Mad Men” heralded the end of male authority; we’ve also
witnessed the erosion of traditional adulthood in any form, at least as it used
to be portrayed in the formerly tried-and-true genres of the urban cop show,
the living-room or workplace sitcom and the prime-time soap opera. Instead, we
are now in the age of “Girls,” “Broad City,” “Masters of Sex” (a prehistory of
the end of patriarchy), “Bob’s Burgers” (a loopy post-"Simpsons” family
cartoon) and a flood of goofy, sweet, self-indulgent and obnoxious improv-based
web videos.
What all of these shows
grasp at, in one way or another, is that nobody knows how to be a grown-up
anymore. Adulthood as we have known it has become conceptually untenable. It
isn’t only that patriarchy in the strict, old-school Don Draper sense has
fallen apart. It’s that it may never really have existed in the first place, at
least in the way its avatars imagined. Which raises the question: Should we
mourn the departed or dance on its grave?
Before we answer that, an
inquest may be in order. Who or what killed adulthood? Was the death slow or
sudden? Natural or violent? The work of one culprit or many? Justifiable
homicide or coldblooded murder?
We Americans have never
been all that comfortable with patriarchy in the strict sense of the word. The
men who established our political independence — guys who, for the most part,
would be considered late adolescents by today’s standards (including Benjamin
Franklin (fig. 3), in some ways the most boyish of the bunch) — did so partly
in revolt against the authority of King George III, a corrupt, unreasonable and
abusive father figure. It was not until more than a century later that those
rebellious sons became paternal symbols in their own right. They weren’t widely
referred to as Founding Fathers until Warren Harding, then a senator, used the
phrase around the time of World War I.
From the start, American
culture was notably resistant to the claims of parental authority and the
imperatives of adulthood. Surveying the canon of American literature in his
magisterial “Love and Death in the American Novel,” Leslie A. Fiedler
suggested, more than half a century before Ruth Graham, that “the great works
of American fiction are notoriously at home in the children’s section of the
library.” Musing on the legacy of Rip Van Winkle and Huckleberry Finn (fig. 4),
he broadened this observation into a sweeping (and still very much relevant)
diagnosis of the national personality: “The typical male protagonist of our
fiction has been a man on the run, harried into the forest and out to sea, down
the river or into combat — anywhere to avoid ‘civilization,’ which is to say
the confrontation of a man and woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage
and responsibility. One of the factors that determine theme and form in our
great books is this strategy of evasion, this retreat to nature and childhood
which makes our literature (and life!) so charmingly and infuriatingly
‘boyish.’ ”
Huck Finn is for Fiedler
the greatest archetype of this impulse, and he concludes “Love and Death” with
a tour de force reading of Twain’s masterpiece. What Fiedler notes, and what
most readers of “Huckleberry Finn” will recognize, is Twain’s continual
juxtaposition of Huck’s innocence and instinctual decency with the corruption
and hypocrisy of the adult world.
Huck’s “Pap” is a
thorough travesty of paternal authority, a wretched, mean and dishonest drunk
whose death is among the least mourned in literature. When Huck drifts south
from Missouri, he finds a dysfunctional patriarchal order whose notions of
honor and decorum mask the ultimate cruelty of slavery. Huck’s hometown
represents “the world of belongingness and security, of school and home and
church, presided over by the mothers.” But this matriarchal bosom is as
stifling to Huck as the land of Southern fathers is alienating. He finds
authenticity and freedom only on the river, in the company of Jim, the runaway
slave, a friend who is by turns Huck’s protector and his ward.
The love between this
pair repeats a pattern Fiedler discerned in the bonds between Ishmael and
Queequeg in “Moby-Dick” and Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook in James Fenimore
Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels (which Twain famously detested). What struck
Fiedler about these apparently sexless but intensely homoerotic connections was
their cross-cultural nature and their defiance of heterosexual expectation. At
sea or in the wilderness, these friends managed to escape both from the
institutions of patriarchy and from the intimate authority of women, the
mothers and wives who represent a check on male freedom.
Fiedler saw American
literature as sophomoric. He lamented the absence of books that tackled
marriage and courtship — for him the great grown-up themes of the novel in its
mature, canonical form. Instead, notwithstanding a few outliers like Henry James
and Edith Wharton, we have a literature of boys’ adventures and female
sentimentality. Or, to put it another way, all American fiction is young-adult
fiction.
The elevation of the
wild, uncivilized boy into a hero of the age remained a constant even as
American society itself evolved, convulsed and transformed. While Fiedler was
sitting at his desk in Missoula, Mont., writing his monomaniacal tome, a
youthful rebellion was asserting itself in every corner of the culture. The bad
boys of rock ‘n’ roll and the pouting screen rebels played by James Dean and
Marlon Brando proved Fiedler’s point even as he was making it. So did Holden
Caulfield, Dean Moriarty, Augie March and Rabbit Angstrom — a new crop of
semi-antiheroes in flight from convention, propriety, authority and what Huck
would call the whole “sivilized” world.
From there it is but a
quick ride on the Pineapple Express to Apatow. The Updikean and Rothian heroes
of the 1960s and 1970s chafed against the demands of marriage, career and
bureaucratic conformity and played the games of seduction and abandonment, of
adultery and divorce, for high existential stakes, only to return a generation
later as the protagonists of bro comedies. We devolve from Lenny Bruce to Adam
Sandler, from “Catch-22” to “The Hangover,” from “Goodbye, Columbus” to “The
Forty-Year-Old Virgin.”
But the antics of the
comic man-boys were not merely repetitive; in their couch-bound humor we can
detect the glimmers of something new, something that helped speed adulthood to
its terminal crisis. Unlike the antiheroes of eras past, whose rebellion still
accepted the fact of adulthood as its premise, the man-boys simply refused to
grow up, and did so proudly. Their importation of adolescent and preadolescent
attitudes into the fields of adult endeavor (see “Billy Madison,” “Knocked Up,”
“Step Brothers,” “Dodgeball”) delivered a bracing jolt of subversion, at least
on first viewing. Why should they listen to uptight bosses, stuck-up rich guys
and other readily available symbols of settled male authority?
That was only half the
story, though. As before, the rebellious animus of the disaffected man-child
was directed not just against male authority but also against women. In
Sandler’s early, funny movies, and in many others released under Apatow’s
imprimatur, women are confined to narrowly archetypal roles. Nice mommies and
patient wives are idealized; it’s a relief to get away from them and a comfort
to know that they’ll take care of you when you return. Mean mommies and
controlling wives are ridiculed and humiliated. Sexually assertive women are in
need of being shamed and tamed. True contentment is only found with your
friends, who are into porn and “Star Wars” and weed and video games and all the
stuff that girls and parents just don’t understand.
The bro comedy has been,
at its worst, a cesspool of nervous homophobia and lazy racial stereotyping.
Its postures of revolt tend to exemplify the reactionary habit of pretending
that those with the most social power are really beleaguered and oppressed. But
their refusal of maturity also invites some critical reflection about just what
adulthood is supposed to mean. In the old, classic comedies of the studio era —
the screwbally roller coasters of marriage and remarriage, with their dizzying
verbiage and sly innuendo — adulthood was a fact. It was inconvertible and
burdensome but also full of opportunity. You could drink, smoke, flirt and
spend money. The trick was to balance the fulfillment of your wants with the
carrying out of your duties.
The desire of the modern
comic protagonist, meanwhile, is to wallow in his own immaturity, plumbing its
depths and reveling in its pleasures. Sometimes, as in the recent Seth Rogen
movie “Neighbors,” he is able to do that within the context of marriage. At other,
darker times, say in Adelle Waldman’s literary comedy of manners, “The Love
Affairs of Nathaniel P.,” he will remain unattached and promiscuous, though
somewhat more guiltily than in his Rothian heyday, with more of a sense of the
obligation to be decent. It should be noted that the modern man-boy’s
predecessors tended to be a lot meaner than he allows himself to be.
But they also, at least
some of the time, had something to fight for, a moral or political impulse
underlying their postures of revolt. The founding brothers in Philadelphia cut
loose a king; Huck Finn exposed the dehumanizing lies of America slavery; Lenny
Bruce battled censorship. When Marlon Brando’s Wild One was asked what he was
rebelling against, his thrilling, nihilistic response was “Whaddaya got?” The
modern equivalent would be “. . .”
Maybe nobody grows up anymore, but everyone gets older. What happens to the
boy rebels when the dream of perpetual childhood fades and the traditional
prerogatives of manhood are unavailable? There are two options: They become
irrelevant or they turn into Louis C. K. (fig. 5). Every white American male
under the age of 50 is some version of the character he plays on “Louie,” a
show almost entirely devoted to the absurdity of being a pale, doughy heterosexual
man with children in a post-patriarchal age. Or, if you prefer, a loser.
The humor and pathos of
“Louie” come not only from the occasional funny feelings that he has about his
privileges — which include walking through the city in relative safety and the
expectation of sleeping with women who are much better looking than he is — but
also, more profoundly, from his knowledge that the conceptual and imaginative
foundations of those privileges have crumbled beneath him. He is the center of
attention, but he’s not entirely comfortable with that. He suspects that there
might be other, more interesting stories around him, funnier jokes, more
dramatic identity crises, and he knows that he can’t claim them as his own. He
is above all aware of a force in his life, in his world, that by turns bedevils
him and gives him hope, even though it isn’t really about him at all. It’s
called feminism.
Who is the most visible
self-avowed feminist in the world right now? If your answer is anyone other
than Beyoncé (fig. 6), you might be trying a little too hard to be contrarian.
Did you see her at the V.M.A.'s, in her bejeweled leotard, with the word
“feminist” in enormous illuminated capital letters looming on the stage behind
her? A lot of things were going on there, but irony was not one of them. The
word was meant, with a perfectly Beyoncé-esque mixture of poise and
provocation, to encompass every other aspect of her complicated and protean
identity. It explains who she is as a pop star, a sex symbol, the mother of a
daughter and a partner in the most prominent African-American power couple not
currently resident in the White House.
And while Queen Bey may
be the biggest, most self-contradicting, most multitude-containing force in
popular music at the moment, she is hardly alone. Taylor Swift recently
described how, under the influence of her friend Lena Dunham, she realized that
“I’ve been taking a feminist stance without saying so,” which only confirmed
what anyone who had been listening to her smart-girl power ballads already
knew. And while there will continue to be hand-wringing about the ways female
singers are sexualized — cue the pro and con think pieces about Nicki Minaj,
Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, Iggy Azalea, Lady Gaga, Kesha and, of course, Madonna,
the mother of them all — it is hard to argue with their assertions of power and
independence. Take note of the extent and diversity of that list and feel free
to add names to it. The dominant voices in pop music now, with the possible
exception of rock, which is dad music anyway, belong to women. The
conversations rippling under the surfaces of their songs are as often as not
with other women — friends, fans, rivals and influences.
Similar conversations are
taking place in the other arts: in literature, in stand-up comedy and even in
film, which lags far behind the others in making room for the creativity of
women. But television, the monument valley of the dying patriarchs, may be
where the new cultural feminism is making its most decisive stand. There is now
more and better television than there ever was before, so much so that
“television,” with its connotations of living-room furniture and fixed viewing
schedules, is hardly an adequate word for it anymore. When you look beyond the
gloomy-man, angry-man, antihero dramas that too many critics reflexively
identify as quality television — “House of Cards,” “Game of Thrones,” “True
Detective,” “Boardwalk Empire,” “The Newsroom” — you find genre-twisting shows
about women and girls in all kinds of places and circumstances, from Brooklyn
to prison to the White House. The creative forces behind these programs are
often women who have built up the muscle and the résumés to do what they want.
Many people forget that
the era of the difficult TV men, of Tony and Don and Heisenberg, was also the
age of the difficult TV mom, of shows like “Weeds,” “United States of Tara,”
“The Big C” and “Nurse Jackie,” which did not inspire the same level of
critical rapture partly because they could be tricky to classify. Most of them
occupied the half-hour rather than the hourlong format, and they were happy to
swerve between pathos and absurdity. Were they sitcoms or soap operas? This
ambiguity, and the stubborn critical habit of refusing to take funny shows and
family shows as seriously as cop and lawyer sagas, combined to keep them from
getting the attention they deserved. But it also proved tremendously fertile.
The cable half-hour,
which allows for both the concision of the network sitcom and the freedom to
talk dirty and show skin, was also home to “Sex and the City,” in retrospect
the most influential television series of the early 21st century. “Sex and the
City” put female friendship — sisterhood, to give it an old political
inflection — at the center of the action, making it the primary source of
humor, feeling and narrative complication. “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and its
spinoffs did this in the 1970s. But Carrie (fig. 7) and her girlfriends could
be franker and freer than their precursors, and this made “Sex and the City”
the immediate progenitor of “Girls” and “Broad City,” which follow a younger
generation of women pursuing romance, money, solidarity and fun in the city.
Those series are,
unambiguously, comedies, though “Broad City” works in a more improvisational
and anarchic vein than “Girls.” Their more inhibited broadcast siblings include
“The Mindy Project” and “New Girl.” The “can women be funny?” pseudo-debate of
a few years ago, ridiculous at the time, has been settled so decisively it’s as
if it never happened. Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Amy Schumer, Aubrey Plaza, Sarah
Silverman, Wanda Sykes: Case closed. The real issue, in any case, was never the
ability of women to get a laugh but rather their right to be as honest as men.
And also to be as
rebellious, as obnoxious and as childish. Why should boys be the only ones with
the right to revolt? Not that the new girls are exactly Thelma and Louise. Just
as the men passed through the stage of sincere rebellion to arrive at a stage
of infantile refusal, so, too, have the women progressed by means of
regression. After all, traditional adulthood was always the rawest deal for
them.
Which is not to say that
the newer styles of women’s humor are simple mirror images of what men have
been doing. On the contrary. “Broad City,” with the irrepressible friendship of
the characters played by Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson at its center,
functions simultaneously as an extension and a critique of the slacker-doofus
bro-posse comedy refined (by which I mean exactly the opposite) by
“Workaholics” or the long-running web-based mini-sitcom “Jake and Amir.” The
freedom of Abbi and Ilana, as of Hannah, Marnie, Shoshanna and Jessa on “Girls”
— a freedom to be idiotic, selfish and immature as well as sexually adventurous
and emotionally reckless — is less an imitation of male rebellion than a
rebellion against the roles it has prescribed. In Fiedler’s stunted American
mythos, where fathers were tyrants or drunkards, the civilizing, disciplining
work of being a grown-up fell to the women: good girls like Becky Thatcher, who
kept Huck’s pal Tom Sawyer from going too far astray; smothering maternal
figures like the kind but repressive Widow Douglas; paragons of sensible
judgment like Mark Twain’s wife, Livy, of whom he said he would “quit wearing
socks if she thought them immoral.”
Looking at those figures
and their descendants in more recent times — and at the vulnerable patriarchs
lumbering across the screens to die — we can see that to be an American adult
has always been to be a symbolic figure in someone else’s coming-of-age story.
And that’s no way to live. It is a kind of moral death in a culture that claims
youthful self-invention as the greatest value. We can now avoid this fate. The
elevation of every individual’s inarguable likes and dislikes over formal
critical discourse, the unassailable ascendancy of the fan, has made children
of us all. We have our favorite toys, books, movies, video games, songs, and we
are as apt to turn to them for comfort as for challenge or enlightenment.
Y.A. fiction is the least
of it. It is now possible to conceive of adulthood as the state of being
forever young. Childhood, once a condition of limited autonomy and deferred
pleasure (“wait until you’re older”), is now a zone of perpetual freedom and
delight. Grown people feel no compulsion to put away childish things: We can
live with our parents, go to summer camp, play dodge ball, collect dolls and
action figures and watch cartoons to our hearts’ content. These symptoms of
arrested development will also be signs that we are freer, more honest and
happier than the uptight fools who let go of such pastimes.
I do feel the loss of
something here, but bemoaning the general immaturity of contemporary culture
would be as obtuse as declaring it the coolest thing ever. A crisis of
authority is not for the faint of heart. It can be scary and weird and
ambiguous. But it can be a lot of fun, too. The best and most authentic
cultural products of our time manage to be all of those things. They imagine a
world where no one is in charge and no one necessarily knows what’s going on,
where identities are in perpetual flux. Mothers and fathers act like teenagers;
little children are wise beyond their years. Girls light out for the territory
and boys cloister themselves in secret gardens. We have more stories, pictures
and arguments than we know what to do with, and each one of them presses on our
attention with a claim of uniqueness, a demand to be recognized as special. The
world is our playground, without a dad or a mom in sight.
I’m all for it.
Now get off my lawn.
Now get off my lawn.
Homework for the week of the 15th of September and the weekend following
1. Read through chapter 22 in TCITR.
2. Study SAT words 21 - 40. There will be a quiz on Monday. We will review the words by playing a game this Thurs/Fri.
3. Be sure to use your TCITR packets to help you read and engage with the novel.
2. Study SAT words 21 - 40. There will be a quiz on Monday. We will review the words by playing a game this Thurs/Fri.
3. Be sure to use your TCITR packets to help you read and engage with the novel.
Sunday, September 14, 2014
Saturday, September 13, 2014
Homework, weekend of September 13th, 2014
1. Read through and annotate chapter 19 in TCITR.
2. Study SAT words 10-30
3. Be prepared to answer short essay questions about the characterization and major conflicts in TCITR.
4. Also, this video may help you get a better sense of MDC's perspectives.
2. Study SAT words 10-30
3. Be prepared to answer short essay questions about the characterization and major conflicts in TCITR.
4. Also, this video may help you get a better sense of MDC's perspectives.
Sunday, September 7, 2014
Rich and Poor in Education
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February 9, 2012
Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Say
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
WASHINGTON — Education was historically considered a great equalizer in American society, capable of lifting less advantaged children and improving their chances for success as adults. But a body of recently published scholarship suggests that the achievement gap between rich and poor children is widening, a development that threatens to dilute education’s leveling effects.
It is a well-known fact that children from affluent families tend to do better in school. Yet the income divide has received far less attention from policy makers and government officials than gaps in student accomplishment by race.
Now, in analyses of long-term data published in recent months, researchers are finding that while the achievement gap between white and black students has narrowed significantly over the past few decades, the gap between rich and poor students has grown substantially during the same period.
“We have moved from a society in the 1950s and 1960s, in which race was more consequential than family income, to one today in which family income appears more determinative of educational success than race,” said Sean F. Reardon, a Stanford University sociologist. Professor Reardon is the author of a study that found that the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students had grown by about 40 percent since the 1960s, and is now double the testing gap between blacks and whites.
In another study, by researchers from the University of Michigan, the imbalance between rich and poor children in college completion — the single most important predictor of success in the work force — has grown by about 50 percent since the late 1980s.
The changes are tectonic, a result of social and economic processes unfolding over many decades. The data from most of these studies end in 2007 and 2008, before the recession’s full impact was felt. Researchers said that based on experiences during past recessions, the recent downturn was likely to have aggravated the trend.
“With income declines more severe in the lower brackets, there’s a good chance the recession may have widened the gap,” Professor Reardon said. In the study he led, researchers analyzed 12 sets of standardized test scores starting in 1960 and ending in 2007. He compared children from families in the 90th percentile of income — the equivalent of around $160,000 in 2008, when the study was conducted — and children from the 10th percentile, $17,500 in 2008. By the end of that period, the achievement gap by income had grown by 40 percent, he said, while the gap between white and black students, regardless of income, had shrunk substantially.
Both studies were first published last fall in a book of research, “Whither Opportunity?” compiled by the Russell Sage Foundation, a research center for social sciences, and the Spencer Foundation, which focuses on education. Their conclusions, while familiar to a small core of social sciences scholars, are now catching the attention of a broader audience, in part because income inequality has been a central theme this election season.
The connection between income inequality among parents and the social mobility of their children has been a focus of President Obama as well as some of the Republican presidential candidates.
One reason for the growing gap in achievement, researchers say, could be that wealthy parents invest more time and money than ever before in their children (in weekend sports, ballet, music lessons, math tutors, and in overall involvement in their children’s schools), while lower-income families, which are now more likely than ever to be headed by a single parent, are increasingly stretched for time and resources. This has been particularly true as more parents try to position their children for college, which has become ever more essential for success in today’s economy.
A study by Sabino Kornrich, a researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Juan March Institute in Madrid, and Frank F. Furstenberg, scheduled to appear in the journal Demography this year, found that in 1972, Americans at the upper end of the income spectrum were spending five times as much per child as low-income families. By 2007 that gap had grown to nine to one; spending by upper-income families more than doubled, while spending by low-income families grew by 20 percent.
“The pattern of privileged families today is intensive cultivation,” said Dr. Furstenberg, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
The gap is also growing in college. The University of Michigan study, by Susan M. Dynarski and Martha J. Bailey, looked at two generations of students, those born from 1961 to 1964 and those born from 1979 to 1982. By 1989, about one-third of the high-income students in the first generation had finished college; by 2007, more than half of the second generation had done so. By contrast, only 9 percent of the low-income students in the second generation had completed college by 2007, up only slightly from a 5 percent college completion rate by the first generation in 1989.
James J. Heckman, an economist at the University of Chicago, argues that parenting matters as much as, if not more than, income in forming a child’s cognitive ability and personality, particularly in the years before children start school.
“Early life conditions and how children are stimulated play a very important role,” he said. “The danger is we will revert back to the mindset of the war on poverty, when poverty was just a matter of income, and giving families more would improve the prospects of their children. If people conclude that, it’s a mistake.”
Meredith Phillips, an associate professor of public policy and sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, used survey data to show that affluent children spend 1,300 more hours than low-income children before age 6 in places other than their homes, their day care centers, or schools (anywhere from museums to shopping malls). By the time high-income children start school, they have spent about 400 hours more than poor children in literacy activities, she found.
Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute whose book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” was published Jan. 31, described income inequality as “more of a symptom than a cause.”
The growing gap between the better educated and the less educated, he argued, has formed a kind of cultural divide that has its roots in natural social forces, like the tendency of educated people to marry other educated people, as well as in the social policies of the 1960s, like welfare and other government programs, which he contended provided incentives for staying single.
“When the economy recovers, you’ll still see all these problems persisting for reasons that have nothing to do with money and everything to do with culture,” he said.
There are no easy answers, in part because the problem is so complex, said Douglas J. Besharov, a fellow at the Atlantic Council. Blaming the problem on the richest of the rich ignores an equally important driver, he said: two-earner household wealth, which has lifted the upper middle class ever further from less educated Americans, who tend to be single parents.
The problem is a puzzle, he said. “No one has the slightest idea what will work. The cupboard is bare.”
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Friday, August 8, 2014
Elements of Fiction
Welcome, scholars of AVCHS. To get started with the year, I urge you to visit this website to access the elements of fiction, which we will use to engage with the first unit.
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