This morning I just read two articles in the New York Time: PTAs Go Way Beyond Cookies and Grades Rise as Reading Skills Drop in H.S. Study. As a counterpoint, there was also an article about companies catering to the super-rich which got me thinking about Social Class again.
I often ponder Social Class. It’s been a curiosity of mine ever since I attended Pomona College, an elite liberal arts college in California. I could only hope to go there thanks to generous financial aid and a family that was determined to support my education, even when far cheaper alternatives existed in my local state universities. While at Pomona I met an incredibly wide range of classmates across the social spectrum. It has one of the most generous financial aid programs in the country, more so than almost any other private school, so it’s easier for people of humble backgrounds to go there. What fascinated me, however, were the students who came from the wealthy families.
I wish I could write some insightful observations about the upper class, but the fact remains that I’ve only had a glimpse of their lives. The one relevant lesson I’ve come away from my exposure is that the difference between “them and us” has less to do with how much money they have and far more with how their brains simply operate and interact with society. They tend to get upper-crust jobs not because Daddy makes some phone calls when they need work, but more because they simply expect those jobs and act accordingly. I firmly believe it’s mostly a function of perception.
But this isn’t what I want to write about today. The most that I know about the Upper Class is that my brain hasn’t been wired the same way theirs have. What I know is (obviously) the particular slice of Middle Class that I come from. And that’s best defined by my reaction to the two articles I cited above. The first article talks about hyper-involved PTAs (Parent Teacher Associations) with an extreme example of an Elementary School that has 426 students, and the PTA has as many as 55 committees!
My reaction to this article is partially one of identification and at the same time one of complete bewilderment. I can identify with it because both of my brothers’ families and most of my (straight) friends’ families are like this. Their children are mostly of an elementary school age, and every minute of their lives is scheduled. The play dates (always supervised) and the after-school programs and the occasional tutoring—I’m sure there’s some monetary cost involved, but what amazes me is the time investment.
I’m bewildered by this because my life was so different. From the age of 10 when my parents divorced I was the “latch key kid”. Most of the time when I hung out with friends there was no parent around. Even before the divorce Dad was always working late, Mom would often be off running errands. It was no big deal. The most “after school” programming consisted of weekly piano lessons. Otherwise I was left to entertain myself. I don’t think I ever got “homework” until Junior High, whereas now kids as early as first or second grade are getting nightly homework to do.
The second Times article talks about how nationwide Reading skills have shown no significant improvement, and even decline, since 1992.
The share of students lacking even basic high school reading skills—meaning they could not, for example, extract data about train fares at different times of day from a brochure—rose to 27 from 20 percent in 1992. The share of those proficient in reading dropped to 35 from 40 percent in 1992.
This article discusses slice of society that I understand as little as the uber-affluent. I wish I could see some demographic statistics that would explain who these children are. I know it’s not simply a financial situation, because some of my adolescent classmates came from pretty poor families, and yet they were intelligent, well-read. Hell, most of them could perform impressive mathematical feats parsing combat tables in the AD&D (Dungeons and Dragons) Dungeon Masters’ Guide that make the aforementioned train fare brochures read like “See Spot Run”!
This brings me to ponder two big questions:
- Will the herculean efforts of these hyper-parents make any difference in the outcomes of their children’s lives, especially in terms of financial affluence?
- What actually are the influential factors and inherent barriers that cause illiteracy and prevent adequate education?
I have a hunch about the first question, and I would argue that maybe nobody understands the second question. With regard to the first question, I suspect that the greatest influences on a child’s destiny are the values instilled by his or her parents, and to a lessor degree by peers. There’s a famous book Rich Dad, Poor Dad that starts from a similar premise, at least when talking about the affluent. I doubt that rich parents spend nearly as much time supervising their kids’ childhoods. Yeah, they can write those checks for fancy summer camps and all that, but I suspect most of their effect comes from how they influence their kids’ perceptions of the world. One thing I can say that my Dad did for me, was to encourage my imagination and sense of wonder about the world. He wasn’t home all that much, and unlike the other kids’ fathers, he didn’t take me out hunting or camping, but he would indulge and encourage my imagination wherever it lead, and I think that lay the path for me becoming the ‘geek’ who would end up where I am right now.
I should mention there were a number of other influences on my education and my upbringing. I was raised in a “college town” that was significantly Caucasian, and yeah, I’m white too. My hometown’s school district is a pretty good one. It’s not all that well funded, but it’s always been run by competent administrators. (A subject for another blog: one difference between Education when I grew up and that of today is that I was the last generation to see wide extracurricular support of things like Music, Debate, Theater, Dance, etc. Many athletic programs that weren’t Football or Basketball got axed. With fewer opportunities to indulge kids’ interests, I think we may have accidentally cut their overall interest in school.)
I wish I could summarize all this with some “policy suggestions” to fix our education system, or to help out parents who want their kids to thrive. Alas, I’ll be the first to admit I’m unqualified to do so. But I will say two things. First, if you want your kids to be more (financially) successful, it’s equally important to instill in them a sense of confidence (ie. “You can do anything”) and an understanding of entrepreneurialism (ie. “Be your own boss & solve your own problems”) and then stand back and let them play.
The second is that I think we, as a nation, really don’t understand education anymore. We (the People) haven’t got a clue what’s going wrong, but something is really screwed up because our education system is quite simply failing. It’s enough to make me heartily endorse the concept of Charter Schools and to almost accept (and at least to understand the motivation for) the Republicans’ School Voucher proposals.
Any thoughts or comments? Please, comment here if you have other thoughts, observations, experiences, or if you think I’m on Crack.
Hello, Elliot,
I read these same articles in the NYT and also found them engaging. I blogged myself about the PTA article.
Families certainly do matter in instilling in kids a sense of “you can do anything”.
I think, too, that broader social contexts matter a great deal. For example, lower-income kids often attend schools with many fewer resources, less-experienced teachers, and larger classes. Their parents may well be experiencing the turbulence of the new economy — lay-offs, reduced hours and benefits, outsourcing, all things that can make people feel very disempowered.
I certainly agree with you that parents should do all that they can to instill a sense of possibility within their kids.
I wonder, though, about why we seldom acknowledge that some parents have the burden of having to also tell their kids that they should believe these things about themselves in spite of the plethora of messages all around them that they’re not as good or deserving as other people’s kids of such basic things as having libraries of children’s literature in their schools.
You were lucky to attend a good school system in a college town where paths to all sorts of lives were visible to you. You got messages from many directions about what was possible for you, not just from your parents.
The same folks who are very reluctant to fix very unequal levels of funding for public schools are often the same folks who then recommend vouchers or charters as the “solution” to the inadequacies of schools that often lack basic resources.
That connection alone gives me pause.
Jane
http://educationandclass.com
Comment by Jane — February 26, 2007 @ 2:48 pm
I’m not sure that funding is as direct of a causal variable as most people (especially most Democrats) would like to indicate, as my home state of Colorado has some of the lowest funding levels in the nation, but holds its own in performance statistics.
I recently saw an article—I wish I remember where; I think it was in Wired Magazine actually—that showed the correlation between the cost of college funding across the 50 states correlated with performance. The interesting thing was that, although there was obviously a positive correlation, there were some states that really broke the expected trend.
It’s hard to say…
Comment by me — February 26, 2007 @ 4:36 pm