Is Education a Girl Thing?
I'm chatting with a well-known, prolific (male) education blogger, whose work I greatly admire--and whose name I'm not going to reveal. I love what he writes, because it's deep--reaching past media flip-offs and who's winning the policy wars and whether they're Gates-funded. He writes about things like how children think, deconstructing the impact of competition on learning, and organic leadership that isn't laid out in seven steps by a Famous Author. We're talking about a mutual passion: how to get more teachers, beginning with bloggers, into rich professional conversation networks. He says:
How can we get the guy who works in urban schools, the guy who made his name on using tech tools in the classroom, the guy who teaches poor kids in a remote rural school, and the guy who teaches in the high-performing 'burbs to talk together?
There's a pause. That's a lot of guys, I say. Can girls play, too?
Immediately, he's self-conscious about the language that came without thinking. We talk about how the gender makeup of the teaching force impacts the profession's willingness to stand up for itself. How this gender disproportion impacts all kinds of issues, from why teachers can't get family insurance (the presumption there's a husband whose job will provide it) to why Scott Walker stripped away teachers' rights, rather than firefighters.' We discuss iconic women (Randi Weingarten, Diane Ravitch, Wendy Kopp) who are held up as "proof" that the national discourse on education reform is gender-diverse.
But it's not. It's a heavily male-dominated arena. Men are making the policy arguments and pronouncements, hosting the virtual communities and producing the media. Women are carrying out the policy orders, teaching kids to read using scripted programs and facing 36 students in their algebra classes. And when teachers are bold enough to mention this, they're likely to be reminded that fixing public education is far more important than their "feelings" about being slighted--a depressingly familiar argument to women of a certain age who consider themselves feminists.
This is more than unsubstantiated blah-blah. There's plenty of evidence that men are the loudest voices in the media around social issues like education. Here, here, here and here, for example. And when women are powerful, smart and respected, the negative pushback is especially vicious--on both sides of any ed-policy disagreement.
Makes me wonder: Has the "reform" movement (the one where public education is an untapped market, and testing the linchpin strategy) gotten as far as it has because those most motivated to mobilize resistance--K-12 teachers and parents--are predominantly female? If more women were writing and speaking powerfully about education policy, philosophy and practice, would public schools be perceived as America's best, albeit neglected, hope for the future--rather than an opportunity for profit and control?
My friend David Loitz recently posted a call for educators to name their favorite female education heroes and influences--a blog that's garnered 67 comments with nearly 100 nominees, from eminent figures to very personal inspirations. It's been thrilling to see new names go up every day--and wonder why those names aren't better known.
I posted a few suggestions of my own--but kept thinking there were names I was missing. There's a bookcase in my office stocked with my go-to ed-library. I have boxes and boxes of books about education, but keep the ones I use most often in writing and workshops handy. Just for fun, I counted the titles by women (or groups of mostly women). Grand total: 192 books, 34 by female authors. An appalling 18%.
Read more at http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teacher_in_a_strange_land/2012/06/is_education_a_girl_thing.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TeacherInAStrangeLand+%28Teacher+in+a+Strange+Land%29
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Showing posts with label America. Show all posts
Showing posts with label America. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Does Social Studies Matter?
Does Social Studies Matter?
On a recent 13-minute drive home from baseball practice, my 15-year-old explained to me how World War I started.
Mind you, I knew the bit about Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand being assassinated by a Bosnian Serb but I couldn’t have told you why other countries started joining in like it was a brawl at an NHL game.
For most of us, information has a use-it-or-lose-it quality. If we’re not called on in daily life to remember who was president during the Spanish-American War, it might slip our minds.
What stays are concepts. How America’s founders enshrined freedom of speech, religion and the press in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority. That America came to England’s aid to defeat Hitler. How Martin Luther King Jr. and other Civil Rights leaders used non-violence to force this country to see the shamefulness of the Jim Crow system.
I bring this up because the Allentown School District is considering combining social studies with English in the sixth grade in order to free up time for more math, according to The Morning Call. The district’s math scores on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) tests drop off after elementary school, which puts it at odds with the federal No Child Left Behind law. The Allentown School Board could vote on the change April 26.
Combining the subjects might sound like it makes sense because so many works of literature can shed light on historical events: Have a class read “Animal Farm” to learn about communism or “To Kill a Mockingbird” to discuss segregation in the South.
But unless those classes are team-taught by an English teacher and a Social Studies teacher, one of the subjects will be slighted. Plus the time on these subjects would be cut in half.
Allentown is in a pickle. The regiment of high stakes standardized testing instituted by No Child Left Behind diminishes the importance of anything not on the PSSAs, including social studies.
While I was researching other efforts to combine social studies and English, I spoke to Corbin Moore, vice president of the Ohio Council for the Social Studies and a former history teacher.
Moore said he’s seen the combining of such subjects done successfully but only when they were team-taught.
“It can work, but my fear would be that social studies would get the short end of the stick like it usually does,” Moore said. “Pretty much what gets tested, gets taught. You talk about No Child Left Behind, well …social studies was the subject that got left behind.”
Here’s what gets lost: Creativity – one of the hardest talents to measure -- germinates in our frame of reference. Learning world history is key to expanding that.
Social studies helps us understand who we are as a country and what is worth saving. It reminds Americans from diverse backgrounds, ages and ethnicities of our common bond and shared rights and responsibilities. It teaches us what solutions to problems have – and have not – worked.
Perhaps a clergyman I know said it best: Science and math can tell us how to build gas chambers and opera houses. Social sciences like history teach us which one to build.
Read more at http://easton.patch.com/articles/does-social-studies-matter
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
On a recent 13-minute drive home from baseball practice, my 15-year-old explained to me how World War I started.
Mind you, I knew the bit about Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand being assassinated by a Bosnian Serb but I couldn’t have told you why other countries started joining in like it was a brawl at an NHL game.
For most of us, information has a use-it-or-lose-it quality. If we’re not called on in daily life to remember who was president during the Spanish-American War, it might slip our minds.
What stays are concepts. How America’s founders enshrined freedom of speech, religion and the press in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority. That America came to England’s aid to defeat Hitler. How Martin Luther King Jr. and other Civil Rights leaders used non-violence to force this country to see the shamefulness of the Jim Crow system.
I bring this up because the Allentown School District is considering combining social studies with English in the sixth grade in order to free up time for more math, according to The Morning Call. The district’s math scores on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) tests drop off after elementary school, which puts it at odds with the federal No Child Left Behind law. The Allentown School Board could vote on the change April 26.
Combining the subjects might sound like it makes sense because so many works of literature can shed light on historical events: Have a class read “Animal Farm” to learn about communism or “To Kill a Mockingbird” to discuss segregation in the South.
But unless those classes are team-taught by an English teacher and a Social Studies teacher, one of the subjects will be slighted. Plus the time on these subjects would be cut in half.
Allentown is in a pickle. The regiment of high stakes standardized testing instituted by No Child Left Behind diminishes the importance of anything not on the PSSAs, including social studies.
While I was researching other efforts to combine social studies and English, I spoke to Corbin Moore, vice president of the Ohio Council for the Social Studies and a former history teacher.
Moore said he’s seen the combining of such subjects done successfully but only when they were team-taught.
“It can work, but my fear would be that social studies would get the short end of the stick like it usually does,” Moore said. “Pretty much what gets tested, gets taught. You talk about No Child Left Behind, well …social studies was the subject that got left behind.”
Here’s what gets lost: Creativity – one of the hardest talents to measure -- germinates in our frame of reference. Learning world history is key to expanding that.
Social studies helps us understand who we are as a country and what is worth saving. It reminds Americans from diverse backgrounds, ages and ethnicities of our common bond and shared rights and responsibilities. It teaches us what solutions to problems have – and have not – worked.
Perhaps a clergyman I know said it best: Science and math can tell us how to build gas chambers and opera houses. Social sciences like history teach us which one to build.
Read more at http://easton.patch.com/articles/does-social-studies-matter
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Friday, May 18, 2012
Half Of New Graduates Find They Are Jobless Or Underemployed
Half of new graduates are jobless or underemployed.
A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don't fully use their skills and knowledge.
Young adults with bachelor's degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that's confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.
STORY: Economists' outlook brightens
An analysis of government data conducted for the Associated Press lays bare the highly uneven prospects for holders of bachelor's degrees.
Opportunities for college graduates vary widely.
While there's strong demand in science, education and health fields, arts and humanities flounder. Median wages for those with bachelor's degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological changes that are eliminating midlevel jobs such as bank tellers. Most future job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention as the U.S. population ages.
Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor's degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade.
"I don't even know what I'm looking for," says Michael Bledsoe, who described months of fruitless job searches as he served customers at a Seattle coffeehouse. The 23-year-old graduated in 2010 with a creative writing degree.
Initially hopeful that his college education would create opportunities, Bledsoe languished for three months before finally taking a job as a barista, a position he has held for the last two years. In the beginning he sent three or four resumes day. But, Bledsoe said, employers questioned his lack of experience or the practical worth of his major. Now he sends a resume once every two weeks or so.
Bledsoe, currently making just above minimum wage, says he has received financial help from his parents to help pay off student loans. He is now mulling whether to go to graduate school, seeing few other options to advance his career. "There is not much out there, it seems," he said.
His situation highlights a widening but little-discussed labor problem. Perhaps more than ever, the choices that young adults make earlier in life — level of schooling, academic field and training, where to attend college, how to pay for it — are having a long-lasting financial impact.
"You can make more money on average if you go to college, but it's not true for everybody," says Harvard economist Richard Freeman, noting the growing risk of a debt bubble with total U.S. student loan debt surpassing $1 trillion. "If you're not sure what you're going to be doing, it probably bodes well to take some job, if you can get one, and get a sense first of what you want from college."
Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University who analyzed the numbers, said many people with a bachelor's degree face a double whammy of rising tuition and poor job outcomes. "Simply put, we're failing kids coming out of college," he said, emphasizing that when it comes to jobs, a college major can make all the difference. "We're going to need a lot better job growth and connections to the labor market, otherwise college debt will grow."
By region, the Mountain West was most likely to have young college graduates jobless or underemployed — roughly 3 in 5. It was followed by the more rural southeastern U.S., including Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee. The Pacific region, including Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington, also was high on the list.
On the other end of the scale, the southern U.S., anchored by Texas, was most likely to have young college graduates in higher-skill jobs.
The figures are based on an analysis of the 2011 Current Population Survey data by Northeastern University researchers and supplemented with material from Paul Harrington, an economist at Drexel University, and the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. They rely on Labor Department assessments of the level of education required to do the job in 900-plus U.S. occupations, which were used to calculate the shares of young adults with bachelor's degrees who were "underemployed."
About 1.5 million, or 53.6%, of bachelor's degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years. In 2000, the share was at a low of 41%, before the dot-com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields.
Out of the 1.5 million who languished in the job market, about half were underemployed, an increase from the previous year.
Broken down by occupation, young college graduates were heavily represented in jobs that require a high school diploma or less.
In the last year, they were more likely to be employed as waiters, waitresses, bartenders and food-service helpers than as engineers, physicists, chemists and mathematicians combined (100,000 versus 90,000). There were more working in office-related jobs such as receptionist or payroll clerk than in all computer professional jobs (163,000 versus 100,000). More also were employed as cashiers, retail clerks and customer representatives than engineers (125,000 versus 80,000).
According to government projections released last month, only three of the 30 occupations with the largest projected number of job openings by 2020 will require a bachelor's degree or higher to fill the position — teachers, college professors and accountants. Most job openings are in professions such as retail sales, fast food and truck driving, jobs which aren't easily replaced by computers.
College graduates who majored in zoology, anthropology, philosophy, art history and humanities were among the least likely to find jobs appropriate to their education level; those with nursing, teaching, accounting or computer science degrees were among the most likely.
In Nevada, where unemployment is the highest in the nation, Class of 2012 college seniors recently expressed feelings ranging from anxiety and fear to cautious optimism about what lies ahead.
With the state's economy languishing in an extended housing bust, a lot of young graduates have shown up at job placement centers in tears. Many have been squeezed out of jobs by more experienced workers, job counselors said, and are now having to explain to prospective employers the time gaps in their resumes.
"It's kind of scary," said Cameron Bawden, 22, who is graduating from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas in December with a business degree. His family has warned him for years about the job market, so he has been building his resume by working part time on the Las Vegas Strip as a food runner and doing a marketing internship with a local airline.
Bawden said his friends who have graduated are either unemployed or working along the Vegas Strip in service jobs that don't require degrees. "There are so few jobs and it's a small city," he said. "It's all about who you know."
Any job gains are going mostly to workers at the top and bottom of the wage scale, at the expense of middle-income jobs commonly held by bachelor's degree holders. By some studies, up to 95% of positions lost during the economic recovery occurred in middle-income occupations such as bank tellers, the type of job not expected to return in a more high-tech age.
David Neumark, an economist at the University of California-Irvine, said a bachelor's degree can have benefits that aren't fully reflected in the government's labor data. He said even for lower-skilled jobs such as waitress or cashier, employers tend to value bachelor's degree-holders more highly than high-school graduates, paying them more for the same work and offering promotions.
In addition, U.S. workers increasingly may need to consider their position in a global economy, where they must compete with educated foreign-born residents for jobs. Longer-term government projections also may fail to consider "degree inflation," a growing ubiquity of bachelor's degrees that could make them more commonplace in lower-wage jobs but inadequate for higher-wage ones.
That future may be now for Kelman Edwards Jr., 24, of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, who is waiting to see the returns on his college education.
After earning a biology degree last May, the only job he could find was as a construction worker for five months before he quit to focus on finding a job in his academic field. He applied for positions in laboratories but was told they were looking for people with specialized certifications.
"I thought that me having a biology degree was a gold ticket for me getting into places, but every other job wants you to have previous history in the field," he said. Edwards, who has about $5,500 in student debt, recently met with a career counselor at Middle Tennessee State University. The counselor's main advice: Pursue further education.
"Everyone is always telling you, 'Go to college,'" Edwards said. "But when you graduate, it's kind of an empty cliff."
Read more at http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-04-22/college-grads-jobless/54473426/1
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don't fully use their skills and knowledge.
Young adults with bachelor's degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that's confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.
STORY: Economists' outlook brightens
An analysis of government data conducted for the Associated Press lays bare the highly uneven prospects for holders of bachelor's degrees.
Opportunities for college graduates vary widely.
While there's strong demand in science, education and health fields, arts and humanities flounder. Median wages for those with bachelor's degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological changes that are eliminating midlevel jobs such as bank tellers. Most future job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention as the U.S. population ages.
Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor's degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade.
"I don't even know what I'm looking for," says Michael Bledsoe, who described months of fruitless job searches as he served customers at a Seattle coffeehouse. The 23-year-old graduated in 2010 with a creative writing degree.
Initially hopeful that his college education would create opportunities, Bledsoe languished for three months before finally taking a job as a barista, a position he has held for the last two years. In the beginning he sent three or four resumes day. But, Bledsoe said, employers questioned his lack of experience or the practical worth of his major. Now he sends a resume once every two weeks or so.
Bledsoe, currently making just above minimum wage, says he has received financial help from his parents to help pay off student loans. He is now mulling whether to go to graduate school, seeing few other options to advance his career. "There is not much out there, it seems," he said.
His situation highlights a widening but little-discussed labor problem. Perhaps more than ever, the choices that young adults make earlier in life — level of schooling, academic field and training, where to attend college, how to pay for it — are having a long-lasting financial impact.
"You can make more money on average if you go to college, but it's not true for everybody," says Harvard economist Richard Freeman, noting the growing risk of a debt bubble with total U.S. student loan debt surpassing $1 trillion. "If you're not sure what you're going to be doing, it probably bodes well to take some job, if you can get one, and get a sense first of what you want from college."
Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University who analyzed the numbers, said many people with a bachelor's degree face a double whammy of rising tuition and poor job outcomes. "Simply put, we're failing kids coming out of college," he said, emphasizing that when it comes to jobs, a college major can make all the difference. "We're going to need a lot better job growth and connections to the labor market, otherwise college debt will grow."
By region, the Mountain West was most likely to have young college graduates jobless or underemployed — roughly 3 in 5. It was followed by the more rural southeastern U.S., including Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee. The Pacific region, including Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington, also was high on the list.
On the other end of the scale, the southern U.S., anchored by Texas, was most likely to have young college graduates in higher-skill jobs.
The figures are based on an analysis of the 2011 Current Population Survey data by Northeastern University researchers and supplemented with material from Paul Harrington, an economist at Drexel University, and the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. They rely on Labor Department assessments of the level of education required to do the job in 900-plus U.S. occupations, which were used to calculate the shares of young adults with bachelor's degrees who were "underemployed."
About 1.5 million, or 53.6%, of bachelor's degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years. In 2000, the share was at a low of 41%, before the dot-com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields.
Out of the 1.5 million who languished in the job market, about half were underemployed, an increase from the previous year.
Broken down by occupation, young college graduates were heavily represented in jobs that require a high school diploma or less.
In the last year, they were more likely to be employed as waiters, waitresses, bartenders and food-service helpers than as engineers, physicists, chemists and mathematicians combined (100,000 versus 90,000). There were more working in office-related jobs such as receptionist or payroll clerk than in all computer professional jobs (163,000 versus 100,000). More also were employed as cashiers, retail clerks and customer representatives than engineers (125,000 versus 80,000).
According to government projections released last month, only three of the 30 occupations with the largest projected number of job openings by 2020 will require a bachelor's degree or higher to fill the position — teachers, college professors and accountants. Most job openings are in professions such as retail sales, fast food and truck driving, jobs which aren't easily replaced by computers.
College graduates who majored in zoology, anthropology, philosophy, art history and humanities were among the least likely to find jobs appropriate to their education level; those with nursing, teaching, accounting or computer science degrees were among the most likely.
In Nevada, where unemployment is the highest in the nation, Class of 2012 college seniors recently expressed feelings ranging from anxiety and fear to cautious optimism about what lies ahead.
With the state's economy languishing in an extended housing bust, a lot of young graduates have shown up at job placement centers in tears. Many have been squeezed out of jobs by more experienced workers, job counselors said, and are now having to explain to prospective employers the time gaps in their resumes.
"It's kind of scary," said Cameron Bawden, 22, who is graduating from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas in December with a business degree. His family has warned him for years about the job market, so he has been building his resume by working part time on the Las Vegas Strip as a food runner and doing a marketing internship with a local airline.
Bawden said his friends who have graduated are either unemployed or working along the Vegas Strip in service jobs that don't require degrees. "There are so few jobs and it's a small city," he said. "It's all about who you know."
Any job gains are going mostly to workers at the top and bottom of the wage scale, at the expense of middle-income jobs commonly held by bachelor's degree holders. By some studies, up to 95% of positions lost during the economic recovery occurred in middle-income occupations such as bank tellers, the type of job not expected to return in a more high-tech age.
David Neumark, an economist at the University of California-Irvine, said a bachelor's degree can have benefits that aren't fully reflected in the government's labor data. He said even for lower-skilled jobs such as waitress or cashier, employers tend to value bachelor's degree-holders more highly than high-school graduates, paying them more for the same work and offering promotions.
In addition, U.S. workers increasingly may need to consider their position in a global economy, where they must compete with educated foreign-born residents for jobs. Longer-term government projections also may fail to consider "degree inflation," a growing ubiquity of bachelor's degrees that could make them more commonplace in lower-wage jobs but inadequate for higher-wage ones.
That future may be now for Kelman Edwards Jr., 24, of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, who is waiting to see the returns on his college education.
After earning a biology degree last May, the only job he could find was as a construction worker for five months before he quit to focus on finding a job in his academic field. He applied for positions in laboratories but was told they were looking for people with specialized certifications.
"I thought that me having a biology degree was a gold ticket for me getting into places, but every other job wants you to have previous history in the field," he said. Edwards, who has about $5,500 in student debt, recently met with a career counselor at Middle Tennessee State University. The counselor's main advice: Pursue further education.
"Everyone is always telling you, 'Go to college,'" Edwards said. "But when you graduate, it's kind of an empty cliff."
Read more at http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-04-22/college-grads-jobless/54473426/1
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Friday, February 24, 2012
Study in America
Study in America.
With America being the top destination for students around the world, US-based International Student Network (ISN) will be holding the "American Education Scholarship Expo 2012" at the Four Seasons Bangkok on Feb 25 from 5:30-8pm.
Top 25 universities in the US will be represented at this event and up to $1 million (about 31 million baht) in scholarships will be available to Thai students.
The expo kicks off with a 30-minute talk on "How to get a US Student Visa" starting 5:30pm.
This is also an opportunity for students and parents to meet with admission officers of the represented universities and colleges.
Interested students should bring multiple copies of their report cards, transcripts and TOEFL scores. This will allow the representatives to determine their admission and scholarship eligibility.
Read more at http://www.bangkokpost.com/lifestyle/improvement/280667/study-in-america
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
With America being the top destination for students around the world, US-based International Student Network (ISN) will be holding the "American Education Scholarship Expo 2012" at the Four Seasons Bangkok on Feb 25 from 5:30-8pm.
Top 25 universities in the US will be represented at this event and up to $1 million (about 31 million baht) in scholarships will be available to Thai students.
The expo kicks off with a 30-minute talk on "How to get a US Student Visa" starting 5:30pm.
This is also an opportunity for students and parents to meet with admission officers of the represented universities and colleges.
Interested students should bring multiple copies of their report cards, transcripts and TOEFL scores. This will allow the representatives to determine their admission and scholarship eligibility.
Read more at http://www.bangkokpost.com/lifestyle/improvement/280667/study-in-america
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Friday, October 21, 2011
Occupy the Classroom
Occupy the Classroom.
OCCUPY Wall Street is shining a useful spotlight on one of America’s central challenges, the inequality that leaves the richest 1 percent of Americans with a greater net worth than the entire bottom 90 percent.
Most of the proposed remedies involve changes in taxes and regulations, and they would help. But the single step that would do the most to reduce inequality has nothing to do with finance at all. It’s an expansion of early childhood education.
Huh? That will seem naïve and bizarre to many who chafe at inequities and who think the first step is to throw a few bankers into prison. But although part of the problem is billionaires being taxed at lower rates than those with more modest incomes, a bigger source of structural inequity is that many young people never get the skills to compete. They’re just left behind....
Read more at http://educationviews.org/2011/10/21/occupy-the-classroom/
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
OCCUPY Wall Street is shining a useful spotlight on one of America’s central challenges, the inequality that leaves the richest 1 percent of Americans with a greater net worth than the entire bottom 90 percent.
Most of the proposed remedies involve changes in taxes and regulations, and they would help. But the single step that would do the most to reduce inequality has nothing to do with finance at all. It’s an expansion of early childhood education.
Huh? That will seem naïve and bizarre to many who chafe at inequities and who think the first step is to throw a few bankers into prison. But although part of the problem is billionaires being taxed at lower rates than those with more modest incomes, a bigger source of structural inequity is that many young people never get the skills to compete. They’re just left behind....
Read more at http://educationviews.org/2011/10/21/occupy-the-classroom/
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)