29 Friday May 2015
Posted in Uncategorized
Forty New York Superintendents: Cuomo’s Law Can’t Work.
When superintendents do a better job sticking up for teachers than NYSUT, do we have a problem?
26 Tuesday May 2015
Posted in Uncategorized
I have been asked to appear on a Web based talk show called Shindig on http://www.edcircuit.com in early June. I will provide more information when I get it.
The hosts ask me to come up with a few quotes from my book so I thought I would share them with you in advance.
My hope is to provoke thought and conversation. I hope you do both, and maybe, if you like the ideas, investigate more in the book.
19 Tuesday May 2015
Posted in Uncategorized
Tags
@anthonycody, @dianeravitch, @valeriestrauss, children, education, Educators, Elizabeth Green, students, teachers, WISE Services
“TWENTY years ago, kids in preschool, kindergarten and even first and second grade spent much of their time playing: building with blocks, drawing or creating imaginary worlds, in their own heads or with classmates. But increasingly, these activities are being abandoned for the teacher-led, didactic instruction typically used in higher grades.”
“Nevertheless, many educators want to curtail play during school. ‘Play is often perceived as immature behavior that doesn’t achieve anything,’ says David Whitebread, a psychologist at Cambridge University who has studied the topic for decades. ‘But it’s essential to their development. They need to learn to persevere, to control attention, to control emotions. Kids learn these things through playing.’”
“Jay Giedd, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, ‘The trouble with over-structuring is that it discourages exploration,’ he says.” http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/opinion/sunday/let-the-kids-learn-through-play.html?_r=0
I posit that what is true for 4-5 year olds is as true for 17-18 year olds. As kindergarten is a transitional year from pre- school in whatever form it takes to formal school, so is the senior year in high school a transition to the more advanced learning of college and life. They too “need to learn to persevere, to control attention, to control emotions.” “Kids learn these things through playing.” The difference is in how we define playing. “The trouble with over-structuring is that it discourages exploration.”
Too bad high schools, more often than not, don’t let their students play meaningfully.
So many students are overly stressed in college because they cant answer this question.How do college and life differ from high school? Colleges provide orientation materials to incoming students that will, in theory, help them successfully adjust to life in college. For example SMU tells incoming freshmen that the basic difference is that in college they choose responsibility as opposed to following the rules in high school.
Who learns actions by reading them or listening to someone read them to you?
HIGH SCHOOL COLLEGE
| * Your time is structured by others. | * You manage your own time. |
| * You need permission to participate in extracurricular activities | * You must decide whether to participate in co-curricular activities. |
| * You can count on parents and teachers to remind you of your responsibilities and to guide you in setting priorities. | * You must balance your responsibilities and set priorities. You will face moral and ethical decisions you have never faced before. |
| * Each day you proceed from one class directly to another, spending 6 hours each day–30 hours a week–in class. | * You often have hours between classes. You spend only 12 to 16 hours each week in class |
| * Guiding principle: You will usually be told what to do and corrected if your behavior is out of line. | * Guiding principle: You are expected to take responsibility for what you do and don’t do, as well as for the consequences of your decisions. |
| * Guiding principle: You will usually be told in class what you need to learn from assigned readings. | * Guiding principle: It’s up to you to read and understand the assigned material; lectures and assignments proceed from the assumption that you’ve already done so. |
| * Guiding principle: High school is a teaching environment in which you acquire facts and skills. | * Guiding principle: College is a learning environment in which you take responsibility for thinking through and applying what you have learned. |
| * Guiding principle: Mastery is usually seen as the ability to reproduce what you were taught in the form in which it was presented to you, or to solve the kinds of problems you were shown how to solve. | * Guiding principle: Mastery is often seen as the ability to apply what you’ve learned to new situations or to solve new kinds of problems. |
http://www.smu.edu/Provost/ALEC/NeatStuffforNewStudents/HowIsCollegeDifferentfromHighSchool
How many high school seniors can say they have learned, though experience, that they are ready and already capable of the college challenge? How many schools can truthfully say they prepare students?
I know which students and which schools can honestly say yes: Students who have done a WISE project and schools who offer it. It is that simple.
“For 42 years, WISE seniors of all ability levels have created individualized real-world experiences (WISE projects), exploring their passions outside the traditional classroom. Over 40,000 WISE graduates at over 100 high schools have learned to collaborate and to work independently, developing organizational, research, writing, and presentation skills as they ignite a lifetime of personal growth.”
Says Nicole Sharpe, Woodlands class of 1988 and now Director of the Black Male Donor Collaborative administered by the Schott Foundation, “I believe WISE was one of the most in valuable experiences in my life,” said Nicole. “I believe that young people need to be taught to think independently, and WISE does that. WISE prepares them for life.”
During her WISE project, Nicole was involved with the Rainbow Coalition and the Jesse Jackson Presidential campaign. She ran weekly registration drives targeted at college students and canvased the communities for the campaign from Maine to Virginia. Over the entire project, she raised $10,000 through her fundraising efforts.”
Was she ready for college and life? You bet she was. Now she helps others.
16 Saturday May 2015
Posted in Uncategorized
Tags
@anthonycody, @dianeravitch, @valeriestrauss, common core, education, Educators, High Stakes Testing, opt out, teachers, urban education
I just figured out who the “Deformers” really are: We are suffering through an “Invasion of the School Snatchers.” Maybe “they” are really a 21st manifestation of the pod people and “body snatchers” and we are all the Kevin McCarthy Character?
13 Wednesday May 2015
Posted in Uncategorized
Tags
@anthonycody, @dianeravitch, @valeriestrauss, children, education, Educators, Elizabeth Green, Inner cities, Joe Nocera, students, teacher, urban education
“As one gang member told an interviewer working for the sociologist Deanna Wilkinson:
“I grew up as looking for somebody to love me in the streets. You know, my mother was always working, my father used to be doing his thing. So I was by myself. I’m here looking for some love. I ain’t got nobody to give me love, so I went to the streets to find love.”
Teachers provide that love through mentoring. However recent education policies have diminished the time teachers have to do this loving role.
I can probably say that unofficially I have been someone’s mentor since I was still in high school working as a camp counselor in local day camps.
You can’t say what a mentor is as simply as it is defined, nor can you just arbitrarily decide to be one. There are some people who will never be able to become mentors. Mentors know that with each person you play a different role. Do you give advice to someone with less experience? Sure. Do you counsel them? Sure. Do you help them learn to prepare for upcoming situations and events in their lives? Sure. However most of all you have to listen and develop a trusting relationship. Without that, whatever the extrinsic circumstances, you are not a mentor. You are a bore.
You might be in a situation where mentoring is called for and thus you naturally do it. That’s what happened with me. Kids already know who are natural mentors and choose them because of who they are.
Difficulties naturally arise with mentoring. Psychologists know that you often can’t reach people who don’t want to be reached or helped. So each time I couldn’t reach a student I thought I needed to reach more than I did, it felt like failure. But for me, the worst time I had was with a high school senior I never had in class but with whom I was working with on a senior class play came to me for help.
At first it was just about playing his role, but it developed into a more important relationship, as I got involved with his family issues and his fears both of them and graduating high school. Soon it evolved into me talking him out of suicide with the help of his girlfriend and his shrink. We thought we were doing well. The play was a hit and he was the star, but a few days prior to graduation I received a call from his girl friend saying she thought he was going to do it and that he had a gun. She begged me to call him to stop him. I did call: about a minute too late. Compared to that, what’s difficult?
The first, and most important thing I have learned from students is how to be a better mentor. It is a natural process. Obviously, I have learned much about how kids function and how they learn. They have also taught me about things I never thought I would learn about, for example…DNA slicing…but content is far inferior to process.
Finally, as far as advice goes, to be a better mentor, become a better listener. Learn how to focus on the needs of your mentees rather than procedure or your own. Be flexible, but be yourself. They came to you because of who you are. Understand that you are the mirror, not the subject in the mirror. See? It isn’t simple.
http://www.amazon.com/Doing-Right-Thing-Teacher-Speaks/dp/1460225481
12 Tuesday May 2015
Posted in inner cities
Tags
@anthonycody, @valeriestrauss, education, Inner cities, politics, stereotypes, students, teacher, urban education
“Wow, new york, just like I pictured it
Skyscrapers and everything
[Verse 5] Hey hey brother, hey come here slick Hey you look, you look hip man
Hey you wanna make yourself five bucks man
You look hip
Run this across the street for me right quick Okay, run this across the street for me
[Verse 6] What? Huh? I didn’t know!
Put your hands up you punk!
I’m just going across the street
Lay down, shut your mouth
Hell no, what did i do?
Okay, turn around, turn around, put your hands behind your back, let’s go, let’s go….
A jury of your peers having found you guilty, ten years. What?”
– Living for The City, Stevie Wonder (1973)
I have read more than my share of books, blog posts, essays, social network comments, and tweets about public education. Some of them are by people who have done extensive research on how the history of public education differs from place to place. Unfortunately though, too many are from those who choose to ignore or are ignorant of the wide range of variables that affect both the students and the schools in socioeconomic and ethnically diverse areas regardless of geographic location.
Suburban districts tend to be less diverse than urban. Some are very homogeneous both socioeconomically and ethnically, but most are also more diverse than stereotypes note. If we also add special education needs as a factor, the results are even more uneven.
Most suburban commenters are aware of that, but many also look at other suburban districts through a lens colored based on where they live or grew up. But, since they live in suburban districts, they generally believe they have a better idea of the truths that exist in most suburban districts.
We can say exactly the same about rural districts. Here too there are some consistencies and variations. What happens, for example in “hyphenated” districts made up of two or more rural localities that may or may not be similar to each other?
Let’s face it. The real issues in education revolve around the urban poor. When you take poverty out of the equation when comparing American students to those of other countries taking the PISA exams, we are at the top. For example notes The National Association of Secondary School Principals, when you look at the number of US schools with < 10% of their students receiving free lunch (the poverty factor) the US overall average is 551, and betters #2 Finland by 15 points. When you look at the number of US schools with between 10 – 24.9% s of their students receiving free lunch, the US overall average is 527, and only behind Finland by 9 points.
The real problems exist in poverty schools. Those US schools with 50 -74.5% score 471. Those with a rate of >75% poverty scored 446, the second lowest of major nations. The shame is that as a result of the very real and very specific problems students and schools in those finite areas everyone in the nation has been subject to bad education policy.
Far too many people stereotype urban areas through the narrow lens of their own experiences. All sorts of euphemisms and misinformation are thrown around by people justifiable pissed off at those one size fits all policies. Experience means a lot in how we see “truths” and work to solve problems.
When I was raised in the Bronx as a poor white kid among Black and Puerto Rican schoolmates, friends, and neighbors, I didn’t know there was an “achievement gap” except between my abilities and how well my mother and teachers told me I should be doing.
When I taught in the Bronx, the only achievement gaps I sought to rectify were the individual needs of individual kids to achieve their potential. That was the only gap worth noting. Nothing brought greater satisfaction than to see a mislabeled Special Education student get AP credit for college. That is what I call closing the achievement gap. What made it easier for me, as that tall crazy white dude, was that I didn’t have to learn BS terms like “racial justice pedagogy” or better terms like cultural pedagogy, because I lived them.
The real need is to take this out of academia, and give new SUBURBAN white teachers a more meaningful urban experience. I used to not believe in telling workers where to live, but in this case, maybe its time to be that crazy white dude again and tell new white suburban bred teachers to live where they teach. That will cure them of that pedagogical psychobabble.
I based some of my book on the writings of sociologist Elijah Anderson’s Code of the Street where Anderson stresses the importance of the ability to code switch for both students and teachers to be successful in poor inner city schools. He states in an interview, “Like many black Americans who become upwardly mobile, I am capable of code switching, that is, speaking the language of the community and the language of the wider society. I guess that’s part of what it means to be an educated person regardless of what group you come from. Some who are brought up in strictly upper-middle-class situations are unable to code switch effectively, but I think most of us can.”
To me that is the key to success. Those who can will be successful as students or teachers.
On May 9th, Orlando Patterson of Harvard, author of The Cultural Matrix, wrote an essay in the NYT titled “The Real Problem With America’s Inner Cities.” In it he reflected on the unrest in Baltimore and how many people have attempted to define the problems regarding racism and police behavior.
I believe there is a parallel between those situations and in how people have stereotyped the problems in “urban” schools based on assumptions about “inner city” populations. As Patterson says, “First, we need a more realistic understanding of America’s inner cities. They are socially and culturally heterogeneous, and a great majority of residents are law-abiding, God-fearing and often socially conservative.”
“According to recent surveys, between 20 and 25 percent of their permanent residents are middle class; roughly 60 percent are solidly working class or working poor who labor incredibly hard, advocate fundamental American values and aspire to the American dream for their children. Their youth share their parents’ values, expend considerable social energy avoiding the violence around them and consume far fewer drugs than their white working- and middle-class counterparts, despite their disproportionate arrest and incarceration rates.”
I find that true in the urban districts and neighborhoods I have worked in and with.
The problem is that there is a “problem minority” made up of disconnected youth between 16-24. Most are on the street. Their gang/thug culture is real. Patterson interestingly compares it to the “wild west” culture where kids like Billy ran wild. There is a long tradition of this culture in the inner cities. (One Hundred fifty or so years ago, on the lower east side on NYC the gangs were Irish. One didn’t enter the area called 5 Points carelessly.)
There is however a larger majority of children who do not run with the gangs, or are working as hard as they can to escape the street culture, trying to follow Anderson’s concept of code switching. To survive where they live you must. To get ahead in our society you must. There are numerous studies that show that minority females are far more likely to succeed than males.
What must we do? First we have to stop thinking that one size fits all works even if policy is directed only at inner city schools like those in NYC, Baltimore, or Rochester, NY. These schools are also heterogeneous, if not racially, but in so many other factors ignored by policy makers, and I might add, well meaning commenters.
What Patterson says regarding violence is as true regarding education, “In regard to black youth, the government must begin the chemical detoxification of ghetto neighborhoods in light of the now well-documented relation between toxic exposure and [poor results in schools]. Further, there should be an immediate scaling up of the many federal and state programs for children and youth that have been shown to work: child care from the prenatal to pre-K stages, such as Head Start and the nurse-family partnership program; after-school programs to keep boys from the lure of the street and to provide educational enrichment as well as badly needed male role models; community-based programs [WISE] that focus on enhancing life skills and providing short-term, entry-level employment.”
I disagree with his additional view that this includes “ continued expansion of successful charter school systems.” After all he is a Haaaarvaad guy.
This quote is poignant and right on the money. “As one gang member told an interviewer working for the sociologist Deanna Wilkinson: “I grew up as looking for somebody to love me in the streets. You know, my mother was always working, my father used to be doing his thing. So I was by myself. I’m here looking for some love. I ain’t got nobody to give me love, so I went to the streets to find love.”
Teachers and public schools have and can continue to do that if we allow them and find non data driven, non standardized, non commonized, and non one sized fits all ways to improve rather than replace them.
11 Monday May 2015
Posted in Uncategorized
I don’t think enough of you read the first version. I guess it was too long.
I bet you didn’t think I was still around. I guess I “egged” you all on to believe I left Earth in 1982, but I have been here all these many years masquerading as a series of your loser presidential hopefuls. I thought I was rather funny as Michael Dukakis. The tank looked so much like a rove ranger on my native planet, Ork.
My apologies for being elected president in 2000. Who knew Chad could be so important. I thought it was a nation in Africa.
Remember, I was sent here by the BIG GIANT HEAD to evaluate you. What did I find? Folly. I believe one of your fine historians defined that as “Pursuit of Policy Contrary to Self-Interest.”
I have to report that you are the most foolish group of beings from another world I have ever come across.
How odd you are. You test children so if 10% know 95% of the information asked of on a “norm-based” test, and they get the lowest score (say a 95), they automatically are labeled failures. So too those who scored below an arbitrary “cut score” of, let’s say 97%.
So rather than saying how smart these children are and how creative and innovative their teachers, educational institutions may have been, they are all failures. These are the results of psychometrician-developed exams. That is incredulous.
I am shocked to learn that you grade these tests to emphasize speed and recall as opposed to careful thought and problem solving over time as demanded by long term projects that ask students to solve real problems.
I am more shocked to see how fundamentally primitive you are in believing that these one size fit all tests are suitable for everyone because I know how important it is for all children to have what you call an Individual Education Plan for only a very few students, and what Orkans call nurturing. Why are these plans only for those you call “Special?”
I wonder why, in the USA, you want everyone, everywhere, to be the same. In our most primitive times, a hundred “krell” ago, we progressed past that point and recognized the value of the individual. Our society learned how to bring out the best of each future adult to ultimately succeed by stressing what they can do, not what they can’t.
Ultimately I have to ask, why do you “American humans” exist? Why do you choose leaders that make these asinine decisions that hold back your society? Look what happened when you elected me. As a joke, I tried to sell you a bill of goods I called No Child Left Behind, and you took it seriously.
Why can’t you create education laws without someone you call a corporation profiting. (I still don’t understand how your laws call them individuals with all the rights of humans.) Why is your major concern finance and not child welfare and/or morality?
You guys crack me up. No reference to that other Orkan, Humpty Dumpty though.
Your predisposition to think that anything futuristic (in your quest to be like us) is based on the idea that neuroscientists, biometric specialists, economists, and computer operators using “Big Data” should rule your world, especially in how we educate our children is ludicrous.
We are so over that primitive and barbarian idea. It seems to me that this testing craze and what you call Common Core is at the heart of this.
Your society will not survive if you cannot answer these questions:
“Geezba.” I pity you. All I can finally say is for you to look what you do to your own children.
Your cruel testing schemes only prepare your children to be robotic servants while those barbarians among you who author Tom Wolf sarcastically called “masters of the universe” continue to defile your society.
Finally, I am totally disgusted with your bad behavior towards each other, your ill tempers, your inability to listen and learn from each other, and your avoidance of what matters most: a meaningful life.
After 37 years my final report is this:
Save your children or you are not worth the effort to save.
“Shazbot.”
Mork
Dedicated to the memory of Robin Williams.
09 Saturday May 2015
Posted in Uncategorized
What if all schools were public and integrated racially and economically?07 Thursday May 2015
Posted in Uncategorized
By Mork the Orkan
I bet you didn’t think I was still around. I guess I “egged” you all on to believe I left Earth in 1982, but I have been here all these many years masquerading as a series of your loser presidential hopefuls. I thought I was rather funny as Michael Dukakis. The tank looked so much like a rove ranger on my native planet, Ork.
My apologies for being elected president in 2000. Who knew Chad could be so important. I thought it was a nation in Africa.
I have to admit I still actually read print newspapers like the New York Times. It makes me a bit anachronistic, but I like having multiple ways of accessing information. I was trained to learn foreign languages to save my life, so I can say I am multi-lingual, and now I can also say I am “multi-medial”.
The past few days I read three articles that taken together add to my frustration understanding of some issues I have noticed you attempting to deal with the past few years. Unlike many of you, I try to read pieces from all sides of the ideology spectrum so I have a wider range of ideas and facts to form my own opinions. I know to some humans (what I would label myself here, I suppose, if one must be labeled) that might be anathema, but it is what I was taught in Orkan schools.
Richard Atkinson and Saul Geyser’s The Big Problem With the New SAT, David Brooks’ What Is Your Purpose?, and Eduardo Porter’s What Debate On Inequality Is Missing and my observations of your society for the past 37 Earth years have led me to some rather dramatic conclusions.
Says Porter, “Over the last four decades the debate in Washington about poverty and inequality has been bogged down in a somewhat pointless, often surreal debate about the size of government and the amount spent on behalf of the poor.”
Says Brooks, “Public debate is now under moralized and over politicized. We have many shows (I guess TV?) where people argue about fiscal policy but not so many on how to find a vocation or how to measure the worth of your life. Intellectual prestige has drifted away from theologians, poets and philosophers and toward neuroscientists, economists, evolutionary biologists and big data analysts. These scholars have a lot of knowledge to bring, but they’re not in the business of offering wisdom on the ultimate questions.”
Practical wisdom should always rule knowledge, not the other way around.
Finally, says Atkinson and Geiser, “Norm-referenced” exams [are] designed primarily to rank students rather than measure what they actually know. Such exams compare students to other test takers, rather than measure their performance against a fixed standard. They are designed to produce a “bell curve” distribution among examinees, with most scoring in the middle and with sharply descending numbers at the top and bottom.”
“Shazbot.” Is that a test or a roller coaster?
“Test designers accomplish this, among other ways, by using plausible-sounding “distractors” to make multiple-choice items more difficult, requiring students to respond to a large number of items in a short space of time, and by dropping questions that too many students can answer correctly.”
That is “Namnulicy”. (Idiocy.)
Remember, I was sent here by the BIG GIANT HEAD to evaluate you. What did I find? Instead of understanding the best of humanity and trying to find ways to maximize everyone’s personal potential and personal satisfaction, you debate about power and money and as a result do exactly the opposite. I believe one of your fine historians called that folly. She defined that as “Pursuit of Policy Contrary to Self-Interest.”
I have to report that you are the most foolish group of beings from another world I have ever come across.
How odd you are. You test children so if 10% know 95% of the information asked of on a “norm-based” test, and they get the lowest score (say a 95), they automatically are labeled failures. So too those who scored below an arbitrary “cut score” of, let’s say 97%.
So rather than saying how smart these children are and how creative and innovative their teachers, educational institutions may have been, they are all failures. These are the results of psychometrician-developed exams. That is incredulous.
I am shocked to learn that you grade these tests to emphasize speed and recall as opposed to careful thought and problem solving over time as demanded by long term projects that ask students to solve real problems.
I am more shocked to see how fundamentally primitive you are in believing that these one size fit all tests are suitable for everyone because I know how important it is for all children to have what you call an Individual Education Plan for only a very few students, and what Orkans call nurturing. Why are these plans only for those you call “Special?”
I wonder why, in the USA, you want everyone, everywhere, to be the same. In our most primitive times, a hundred “krell” ago, we progressed past that point and recognized the value of the individual. Our society learned how to bring out the best of each future adult to ultimately succeed by stressing what they can do, not what they can’t.
Ultimately I have to ask, why do you “American humans” exist? Why do you choose leaders that make these asinine decisions that hold back your society? Look what happened when you elected me. As a joke, I tried to sell you a bill of goods I called No Child Left Behind, and you took it seriously.
Why can’t you create laws without someone you call a corporation profiting. (I still don’t understand how your laws call them individuals with all the rights of humans.) Why is your major concern finance and not humanity and/or morality?
You guys crack me up. No reference to that other Orkan, Humpty Dumpty though.
Your predisposition to think that anything futuristic (in your quest to be like us) is based on the idea that neuroscientists, biometric specialists, economists, and computer operators using “Big Data” should rule your world, especially in how we educate our children is ludicrous.
We are so over that primitive and barbarian idea.
I am totally disgusted with your bad behavior towards each other, your ill tempers, your inability to listen and learn from each other, and your avoidance of what matters most: a meaningful life.
Will your society survive, I often ponder, if you cannot interact more personally, and ask, “Why the hell are you doing this to yourselves and your kids?”
Finally I examined your bizarre and obviously restrictive class structure. Surely you cannot continue to have so few exist so lavishly at the expense of so many. Surely you must recognize what rapidly growing class inequality and inequity has done to your society. It seems to me that this testing craze and what you call Common Core may be at the heart of this.
“Geezba.” I pity you.
Atkinson is right when he says of your kind, “We are stuck in a narrow set of ideas.”
All I can finally say is for you to look what you do to your own children.
Your cruel testing schemes will only prepare your children to be robotic servants of the universe while those barbarians among you who author Tom Wolf sarcastically called “masters of the universe” continue to defile your society.
After 37 years I must finally leave you. My final report to THE BIG GIANT HEAD is that unless you quickly change your ways you are not worth the effort to save until you learn to save yourselves. “Shazbot.”
Dedicated to Robin Williams.
03 Sunday May 2015
Posted in Uncategorized
Economic inequality in the United States is at its highest level since the 1930s, yet most Americans remain relatively unconcerned with the issue. Why, asks Michael W. Kraus, Shia Davidai, and A. David Nussbaum in May 3rd’s New York Times. (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/opinion/sunday/american-dream-or-mirage.html)
Why is the information from these studies important to us? Perception is reality. Politicians and political campaigners know that because of these false beliefs in social mobility people can be swayed to think along certain lines and thus they can avoid fixing the reasons the social mobility we used to have no longer exists.
They found that Americans, regardless of what economic quintile they belong to, severely overestimate the ability to be upwardly mobile in the good ole US of A. They deduced that there was a self-serving reason for this across the board. Those at the top justified their wealth and even those at the bottom thought it would lead to a brighter economic future. In fact, when compared to actual mobility trends reported by the Pew Research Center, “Participants in the survey overshot the likelihood of rising from the poorest quintile to one of the three top quintiles by nearly 15 percentage points. (On average, only 30 percent of individuals make that kind of leap.)”
In a Cornell study entitled, Building a More Mobile America—One Income Quintile at a Time, Shia Davidai and Thomas Gilovitch found that “Americans seem willing to accept vast financial inequalities as long as they believe that everyone has the opportunity to succeed.”
Additionally they found, “(a) people believe there is more upward mobility than downward mobility; (b) people overestimate the amount of upward mobility and underestimate the amount of downward mobility; (c) poorer individuals believe there is more mobility than richer individuals; and (d) political affiliation influences perceptions of economic mobility, with conservatives believing that the economic system is more dynamic—with more people moving both up and down the income distribution—than liberals do.” (file://localhost/(http/::pps.sagepub.com:content:10:1:60.abstract)
In another study, “Americans Overestimate Social Class Mobility” by Michael Krauss and Jacinth J.X. Tan, (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103115000062), the authors found respondents substantially misjudged the rate (5 times greater) at which families from the lowest quintile of our population attended college. And when Krauss and Tan asked them to predict the upward mobility of “those like them” they were even more likely to overestimate social mobility.
Interestingly, “For those lower in income or educational attainment, lower standing was associated with greater overestimation of upward mobility. Those with the most room to move up were more likely to think that such movement was possible.”
When examining this phenomenon by variables other quintiles the Times article not surprisingly went on to say, “Across both sets of studies, political liberals were less likely to overestimate upward mobility relative to conservatives.” and “that members of ethnic minority groups tended to overestimate upward mobility more than did European Americans. This result indicated that those with the most to gain from believing in an upwardly mobile society tended to believe so more strongly.”
These findings explain why some of our poorest Americans are some of our most conservative. It explains why Republican candidates still win across huge portions of America by still yapping about “tax and spend socialist Democrats” and worse.
As long as Americans believe we can “still make it if we try”, American politicians from both parties (although especially Republicans) can still tell us the status quo works for most Americans, and blame some Americans for not trying hard enough.
They can also say there is no need to reexamine the role of government in leveling the playing field, or supporting measures like increasing the minimum wage to a real living wage, or investing in building our infrastructure, or finding ways to lower education and medical costs, or overturning Citizen’s United, or reducing the influence of banks, hedge funds, and corporations on all of our governments- from local to national.
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