School Frays
Whenever a new study comes out comparing the performance of conventional public, charter, and private schools, its effect is like the first pie thrown in a Three Stooges short film. Chaotic debate ensues in the educational community, with the usual cast of characters expressing outrage before hurling their own ripostes. Most people tune out the whole spectacle, but those who pay attention are either disgusted or mildly amused by the frenzy.
The study Matt Yglesias blogged about last weekend -- it showed public school students doing at least as well on math tests compared to private and charter school kids after taking into account differences in family income, ethnicity, etc. -- has produced the usual flurry (actually, his comments thread is pretty representative). Normally, I'd try to say something high minded and constructive about all this, but today I just feel like throwing some pie.
The Center for Education Reform, a pro-voucher outpost that has received a lot of support from the right-wing Walton Family and Bradley Foundations, put out a response that among other things pointed to the work of Harvard's Caroline Hoxby as a model of how school research ought to be done. Hoxby in the past received support from the pro-voucher Olin Foundation and has produced a number of studies showing favorable results for voucher programs and charters. In the particular Hoxby report that CER linked to, she concluded that students in charter schools do better than comparable conventional public schools, and that the results get progressively better the longer the charter schools have been in operation.
Now we turn to the Economic Policy Institute's Joydeep Roy and Lawrence Mishel, who analyzed Hoxby's own data (which she generously supplied to them). They found that the socioeconomic backgrounds of the students in the schools she was comparing were significantly different. For example, her sample of charter schools had fewer low-income students (defined as eligible for free- or reduced-price lunch) compared to her public schools by a margin of 49 percent to 60 percent. After adjusting her numbers to take into account such differences (which independently affect test performance), Roy and Mishel found that the purported advantages that Hoxby found disappeared. Splat!
What all of this academic mishigas both distracts from and reinforces at the same time is that the real crisis in American education is dysfunctional urban school systems attributable to high percentages of students coming from low-income families. Moving lots of low-income kids from high-poverty, conventional public schools to high-poverty private schools or high-poverty charter schools won't solve that crisis, as the mounting evidence is showing. What does work is to get low-income kids dispersed into middle-class schools. Making that happen in a big way -- the best model is in Wake County, North Carolina -- will take a lot of political leadership and policy creativity. Either we can keep wasting our energy focusing on the organizational structure of schools or we can start to address the real problem, politically difficult though it may be.
Comments (34)
I don't recall the author of this statement, but he said, ["If a foreign country came in here and fostered on us the educational system that we have, we would declare it another act of war"].
And you can bet that if 9/11 and our attack on Iraq had not happened, our congress would still be too damned lazy to vote and to go into debt for educational funds in the same manner that it has voted funds for fighting in Iraq.
February 3, 2006 8:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
Schools and public schools are vital to America. There is no doubt that rundown schools left in disrepair tells the students the real message about the importance of eduction. However, schools cannot make up for parents.
As Albert O. Hirschmann's Exit, Voice Loyaltydemonstrated that schools suffer as parents who care most about education pull their kids out of public schools first. Schools need to be improved with better books and facilities and teachers. However, parents have to get more involved in their children's education if only insisting it is important.
February 3, 2006 8:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
You failed to mention how important ethnicity is in describing failure...and forced mixing with middle-class kids doesn't work either. Get your PC head out of your ass.
February 3, 2006 8:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
What does work is to get low-income kids dispersed into middle-class schools. Greg Anrig, Jr.
I'm afraid that this assertion is no more free of controversy than those you're lampooning, above.
February 3, 2006 8:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
Ellen, Here are a few pieces of evidence re socioeconomic integration:
--In North Carolina, on the 2005 High School End of Course exams, 63.7 percent of low-income students in Wake (which has pursued socio-economic integration) passed, compared with 48.7 percent in Durham County, 47.8 percent in Guilford County, and 47.8 percent in Mecklenburg County.
--One study found that the average NAEP math score for low-income fourth-graders attending schools with less than 25 percent of students eligible for free- or reduced-price lunch was 218, versus just 204 for those attending high poverty schools.
--Studies of open enrollment-type programs like Metco in Massachusetts and Chapter 220 in Wisconsin where students from the cities can attend suburban schools show good outcomes -- the urban kids do better with no downside on the performance of the middle-class children.
The real controversy isn't so much related to the data -- though it's admittedly skimpy given that these initiatives aren't widespread -- but political. Suburban parents strongly resist letting city kids into their schools. That's where the leadership and creativity is needed. Or we can keep banging our heads against the wall.
February 3, 2006 8:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
The data is "skimpy" you say. What an understatement...and what a delusion! The real controversy is "political". How astute of you to notice.
Forced integration, and affirmative action, are the issues that have lost the white vote to the Democratic party. You don't need studies to know that the principal results of such policies are white flight and dumbed-down schools. Dysfunctional behavior and attitudes are so common in the black community that Bill Cosby felt forced to go public about it. It's the same in Hispanic areas. That famous teacher, formerly at Garfield High in L.A., said the same thing as Cosby nearly 20 years ago. Billions of dollars thrown at education over the past 50 years have not improved things.
But people like you still insist that all that's neeeded is "leadership and political will". I think convservatives are right when they characterize modern liberalism as mental illness.
February 3, 2006 9:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
Or are you saying that it just doesn't matter if mixing classes works, since it's too politically damaging to attempt it? That's almost intellectually respectable; people used to say that about affirmative action too.
February 3, 2006 9:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
The thing that really gets me is the false dichotomy that conservatives have forced on us regarding schools. Vouchers are a beautiful example of how framing the issue produces outcomes.
The rhetoric on the issue goes something like this: Schools aren't performing very well, based on some measure. In order to improve performance, you would have to bring every school with low funding up to the level of schools with high funding, which are the ones that do better, presumably. But more public funding won't help schools that don't perform well. The only other option is to introduce market-based reforms into the school system.
I recently noted a version of this argument in the The Daily Texan, the undergraduate student newspaper at the University of Texas:
My italics.
The problem, of course, is that this is an entirely false dichotomy. The issue is framed such that the only two choices are "pouring more funding into the system" and "introducing market forces."
The most obvious reforms are excluded from the debate. I am not an education policy wonk, but it seems clear to me that there are a lot of things we can do to change the way the public school systems work, and improve them, without turning it over to markets. Very broadly, we could change the way schools use public money in order to ensure that is used as effectively as possible. We could change employment rules to ensure that bad teachers are weeded out. We could change how the school year is organized so that kids spend more time in school. And we could introduce public vocational training in the place of traditional high schools after the German model.
I have to give credit to a conservative friend of mine who inadvertently brought this to my attention. We were discussing the report released last week, and I wanted to deny the premise that schools are failing on the basis that private schools were doing no better. He naturally pointed out that American students compare poorly to students from other countries. The problem--for him--is that many of the countries that do better than us (likely) have robust public school systems that succeed even without market forces.
Thus, I would suggest that every one of us first get our heads out of the grooves created by the conservative framing of the issue, and second that we take a look around for ways to improve our schools that are related to neither significantly increased spending nor introducing markets.
February 3, 2006 9:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
What we really have to replace is Low income kids with middle income parents. Replace the minimum wage law with Living wage laws. Provide moderate housing at low income prices. Eliminate all low income jobs. Capitalism must find a way to elimite poverty just as effectively as if creates high income and wealth.
February 3, 2006 9:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
Ask yourself why you can't see the elephant in the room? Why you need "studies" and "data"? But since you do just use Google.
February 3, 2006 9:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
Good points, Reece.
Re the international comparisons, the US is generally in the middle of the pack. The ones at the top are mostly countries with much more homogeneous populations like Japan and the Netherlands. And there's a big differences in the US between test score perfomance in suburban and rural schools compared to city schools. Suburban/rural schools aren't perfect by any means, but most of them are pretty good and the parents are generally happy with them.
Part of the conservative movement's success, ever since the "rising tide of mediocrity report" in the Reagan administration, has been to conflate the genuine failure of city school districts with the effectiveness of public schools generally. Suburban public schools could be better, but they aren't remotely dysfunctional. Urban schools are a disaster--that's where the focus should be.
-- Greg
February 3, 2006 9:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
But it's not clear that that sort of racial hostility will be a driving force for voting patterns over say the next 10 years. For example, look how quickly the "Minutemen" appeared in Herndon,VA in response to a proposed day laborers center, but also how quickly the city managed to tamp down the public controversy.
Nobody wants a preponderance of poor people in their schools, neighborhoods, etc. People who are just hanging on in the middle class tend to feel especially threatened by these changes. But that's exactly the point of this approach: break up the preponderantly poor schools, and send the kids to various middle-class schools. I believe there's some tact required to do this in a way that doesn't raise too many hackles, but I don't think it's a perpetual loser for the Dems.
So enough on the politics, of it. I'd also be very curious to know how the poor kids who are swept up into these environments fare during and after primary education. There's a decent body of evidence to suggest that poorer kids face a lot of difficulties getting through college, due in some part to factors outside of economics.
February 3, 2006 9:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
It is much easier to fiddle and diddle with schools--pass out vouchers, establish charter schools that circumvent teachers' unions, send children to the suburbs and out of our urban sight--than to attack the problem at its root, where a real difference could be the resut. Granted, that effort is hard to initiate, harder to carry out and see through. But at least let's take the discussion to that plane.
February 3, 2006 10:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
Certainly you don't think my screen-name is accidental, that I didn't deliberately choose it?
As for your fantasies try Googling "busing+schools". You'll find thousands of articles, many citing studies, which detail the failure of the policies you advocate. Many, many years and many, many millions of dollars of failure.
February 3, 2006 10:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
What we see here is a direct manifestation of both hatred of blacks and Hispanics, and hatred of the poor -- which in many urban areas are largely overlapping categories. The rich and would-be-rich middle classes claim not to be able to handle mixing with the poor people; their solution? Ghettoize the poor and leave them in inferior schools, which will in turn reduce their ability to stop being poor. Then blame the poor for their lack of achievement. It's a series of self-fulfilling acts of discrimination all around, with the evident aim -- so far quite successful -- of creating a caste society in which the upper caste (rich, white) has power, access to information, and the knowledge of how to work the system, and the lower castes (poor, black, Hispanic) are shut out.
A little information that should not be controversial (though those on the right doubtless will make it so): blacks, Hispanics, poor people, and other minorities are not intrinsically stupider, less well behaved, or more criminal than members of the upper caste. They simply are channelled by a society shaped by the upper caste into those roles, and some of them feel no choice but to act out the roles assigned to them. I don't minimize the role of individual choice, but choices are conditioned by environmental factors, and at a mass level, trends are observable that cannot be assigned to a mere summation of "bad choices". If an entire group is suffering because of discrimination in employment, in education, in access to information, it is not our task to berate them for an assumed series of individual bad choices, but to find out what mistaken policies have created the trend, and reverse them.
The problem here is that of the reflexive, knee-jerk response of loathing by a privileged sector of the nation to an underprivileged sector. It is the task of the government to overcome this loathing. Discriminatory attitudes cannot, of course, be changed by magic; they can only be gradually reduced from one generation to the next. But the only way in which this reduction in discriminatory tendencies can be carried out is by making sure that overt discrimination never has a chance to be manifested; that is, by making sure that public acts of discrimination are prevented, by social pressure where possible, and by law where necessary. Discrimination will not be reduced over time if we condone it and excuse it; this simply tells the next generation that society considers their prejudiced attitudes okay.
To answer the inevitable question: yes, I attended a well-integrated public school, and I learned there how to begin to respect and understand people of very different backgrounds from my own.
February 3, 2006 10:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
FOREIGNID: 89675
FOREIGNPARENTID: 89666
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AUTHOR: SqueakyRat
DATE: 02/03/2006 10:44:48 AM
February 3, 2006 10:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
Since you appear to have read extensively on this subject selfinterest, perhaps you could enlighten us with some links to these studies. Just as a cautionary note, TPMCafe readers generally prefer not to read "studies" funded by right-wing think tanks.
February 3, 2006 10:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
Dysfunctional behavior and attitudes are so common in the black community that Bill Cosby felt forced to go public about it.
I guess if those blacks just pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, like Doctor Huxtable did, then they could all be doctors, too.
I mean, this is America.
We all have an equal chance of making it, right?
February 3, 2006 10:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
You had me until the last paragraph of your blog.
I think what you're missing is that good public schools are needed in impoverished areas.
The problem as I saw it from an educators standpoint, is not solely management, I've seen the best principals have difficulty steering the ship of a campus that is too big, with too few resources, limited authority, and almost no discretionary spending. Simply, a typical public inner-city school needs SIGNIFICANTLY MORE resources than suburban schools to compensate for the elements their kids are coming from. I've never understood why this is so difficult for some to grasp.
And frankly, I resent the implication that the only way to educate poor black and hispanic kids is to put them in white schools. The solution isn't ripping kids from their neighborhoods, which makes it more difficult for low-income working parents to participate in their child's school life by the way, it's to bring the education to the community. Lets give these administrators and students a fair shake first. Lets move the operational hours, lengthen the school year, and significantly increase the out of classroom budget while giving the principals the authority to determine how best to spend it. I'm talking about 8:30 to 4:30 school days 10 months a year, life skills classes, extracurriculars, after and before school care, nurses, psychologists, and a small counselor to student ratio.
Also, if we wanted we could build public school academies in the inner city that specialize in particular fields or all fields, with a limited enrollment and an application process. We could help develop the talented young minds IN THEIR COMMUNITIES, while in the process providing the teachers and administrators that LOOK LIKE THE KIDS with the resources they need to succeed, and giving the community an educational institution to be proud of. That's the type of message we should be sending these kids and their communities. Not, "If you want a good education you need to be well-off and/or white".
But that's just my perspective as a former inner city black student and educator.
February 3, 2006 11:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
There are a lot of bad parents out there, but the sad reality is that a parent has to be incredible to compensate for the many environmental factors that influence a child once they hit middle school and on. These parents are the ones with the greatest obstacles as it is.
February 3, 2006 12:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Points well taken, DWCG. A few clarifying comments:
-- There are plenty of high-poverty successful schools in cities. But every single U.S. city school district is dysfunctional, according to Education Week based on its effort to find a successful urban school district. The hurdles, for so many reasons including but by no means confined to money, have proven to be insurmountable.
-- Luring in suburban kids to attend schools in the city via magnet schools has proven to be effective on a small scale. That definitely needs to be part of the strategy.
--You equated income with race, I didn't. The problem is high concentrations of poverty, which almost entirely occur in cities and almost always comprise predominantly blacks or Hispanics. Middle class blacks and Hispanics, and low-income blacks and Hispanics in middle-class schools, do well enough to get into good colleges and lead successful lives. It's the people trapped in high-poverty neighborhoods who really are up against it in ways that liberal and conservative reforms haven't begun to resolve. My argument is that getting those people out of areas of concentrated poverty would give them a better shot than trying to revitalize those neighborhoods. That's something that I think long, hard, painful experience has taught us.
--Greg
February 3, 2006 12:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
I have posted on this subject before, and I will post again.
First, the entire idea that you can introduce 'market' ideas, into a process that REQUIRES the public schools to take every school-age child regardless of income, ethnicity, primary language and/or IQ is one of the dumbest things the conservatives have ever come up with. Publically funded entities aren't businesses, and they do not cater themselves well to 'market ideas'. Can they be more efficient? - yes. But that does not imply a 'market model' in its core functioning.
Second, there are specific reforms that can be implemented around assuring that there is a significant increase in teacher-student contact time. These reforms range from increasing the length of the school year by 20 to 30 days, moving to a year-round calendar, adding a universal pre-K program, decreasing class size and addressing ongoing training needs beyond grade 12. And by the way, for any conservatives reading this list, it is not meant to be a 'band-aid' and piecemealed. Taken together, they represent a significant investment in addressing the one area we know that will improve student achievement - a significant increase in the student-teacher contact time in meaningful ways.
Third, irregardless of race, ethnicity or socio-economic status, there is a group of citizens that are simply not particularly interested in the education of their children. Whether they are too busy in their own world of work, or they are struggling to survive, or chemically addicted or simply disenfranchised from society in general, it matters little what professional educators do, they will never be supported in the home. It is sad, but it happens much more than people want to admit.
And it is for these children/students, that we must figure out how we can best prepare them for adult life. At the middle school and high school levels we need to be more creative in our offerrings (voc/tech for example) and work to make sure that we do not chase them away with heightened pressure to go 'onto college' or some other false expression for their future that they have no desire to work toward at this point in their lives.
We can dramatically improve our educational processes, however, it simply is not going to happen when we apply 'market ideas' to education. Vouchers et al are the snake oil of public education.
February 3, 2006 12:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not sure that comparisons among counties are all that persuasive. For example, Wake County is much wealthier than the other named counties and has a much smaller black population (one half of Durham's, for example).
A better comparison would be perfromance of the "free and reduced lunch" Wake County school students* before and after socio-economic integration was introduced.
Do those statistics exist? Do you have a link?
* The differences between counties in the ratio of the "free lunch" v. "reduced lunch" students may also be significant -- that is, poor Wake County students may not be as poor as poor Guilford County students.
February 3, 2006 12:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Bussing to integrate -- whether on race or class bases -- is dependent upon distances.
Wake County and Raleigh may be somewhat unique in having a large amount of middle and high income residential housing within and throughout the city. Integration, there, can proceed with minimal disruption.
In most other urban locations, such a housing pattern is unusual, and bussing imposes real hardships.
February 3, 2006 12:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Legitimate questions, Ellen. The available data can't really answer them. Wake County used to have racial integration programs before they switched to focusing on economic integration, so the before/after picture may not be all that revealing. Kids eligible for free and reduced price lunch are usually lumped together in these sorts of studies as being economically disadvantaged. Parsing them probably wouldn't yield a much different picture, but I don't have those numbers. At my think tank, we're trying to get outside funding so we can get better data on what's happening in NC. (It's much easier to get that sort of support on the Right!). --Greg
February 3, 2006 12:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
If you look at the PISA report from the OECD (pisa.oecd.org) from 2003, the US is in the middle of the pack, yes, but the top students here don't do any better than the top students in other countries - that is, these class-homogeneous suburban schools that we all think are so great aren't doing any better than good schools in (homogeneous) Hungary or (less homogeneous) Sweden. And the bottom kids in America do a lot worse.
For all their problems with racism and a striking failure to integrate their immigrants, somehow most continental Europeans even in countries with sizable immigrant populatoins manage to educate their marginalized inner-city people (native-born and immigrant) at least a little better than we do, and they sure don't have vouchers. I suspect it has something to do with less class-based residential segregation, at least in the Netherlands, but there are probably other things worth looking at.
February 3, 2006 2:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
The argument about education always seems to boil down to a battle between those who want to blame the teachers and introduce competition and those who want to blame social injustice and eliminate poverty. What is inevitably ignored is the root cause of the problem, stupid students. The students and their parents are products of a culture that says it is good to be stupid. None of the solutions discussed have anything to do with the problem. The real solution is rigorous educational discipline. As long as we tolerate stupidity and try to use it to push our favorite social scheme, we will have plenty of stupid people. The fact that we have a moron as president should be reason enough to be concerned about allowing the population of stupid people to continue to grow. Don't blame the system, punish the students. In the case of those infected with southern culture, that's the only way to get their attention.
February 3, 2006 11:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Suppose all public schools were funded equally by state income taxes instead of local property taxes. The quality of your kids' education wouldn't depend so much on the price of your home or the neighborhood you live in. Suddenly, you wouldn't have to live in an overpriced suburban mcmansion and have to commute 100 miles a day just to get your kids in a good school district. The benefits would reach far beyond just improving education.
--
-- All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. (John Kenneth Galbraith) --
February 5, 2006 1:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm a teacher. In classes with mixed economic backgrounds, my students from lower economic levels are more likely to work hard to keep up. In classes with a high percentage of students from lower economic levels, those students reinforce each other's disregard for education and fail.
Exactly which elephant am I failing to see? Or is it just that you nom-de-keyboard is absolutely accurate?
-Tayefeth
February 5, 2006 7:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
More likely? How much more likely? High percentages? How high? Low levels? How low? Do performances and percentages differ depending on ethnicity? Your post doesn't say anything.
Which elephant are you failing to see? Blacks and Latins are failing in overwhelming and disproportionate numbers throughout the country and have been doing so for years. Attempts to remedy the situation have all failed. The pattern of failure resembles that of similar attempts to"cure" obesity, drug addiction, and various diseases; something is touted by "experts", becomes popular, assumes faddish proportions, then quietly is forgotten to be replaced by the next bit of hyped drivel.
My nom-de-keyboard is absolutely accurate. I chose it to emphasize my contention that replacing conservative selfishness with liberal foolishness is a bad deal.
February 5, 2006 11:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
Right. You want to be silly, I'll be glad to match you.
If you want to be serious do a little research and you'll find that modern America offers a great deal of opportunity to everyone, that historic America was pretty good too, and that many, many talented and hard-working people do just what you are pretentiously and stupidly ridiculing.
February 5, 2006 11:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
As a citizen and an educator actively involved in teacher preparation, this is a topic of vital interest to me. I taught my first undergraduates during the fall of 1980, and have been teaching full-time since 1990 after spending five years as a university library faculty member. In other words, my academic/scholarly career has coincided with a sustained and relentless assault on the Commons, and upon the pillars of democratic republicanism. Someone asked, tongue-in-cheek no doubt, who won the war on poverty. I don't think it was the poor. Selfinterest (sounds like it came straight out of the Pilgrim's tale, doesn't it?) represents a huge segment of the right's elite. They've had the upper hand for two-and-a-half decades now, yes, even through the Clinton years. How else do you explain "ending welfare as we know it"? Montgomery Gentry’s song “You Do Your Thing, And I’ll Do Mine” is the perfect anthem for these people. I do as much humanities programming as I can, and in it I emphasize the importance of the Commons to the success of our democratic republic. The Founding Fathers came up with lots of great ideas, but free public libraries and free public schools were two of the greatest. Both have been under continual assault since Reagan took office. Yes, the problems in our schools are based in changing socioeconomic factors, and no, we will never solve the "educational crisis" as long as Social Darwinian self-interest is the gospel of Selfinterest and people like him. (I just had one of those “oh my lord, we thought it couldn’t get worse, but it did: Reagan led the charge to cut funding for libraries, and Bush, married to a former school librarian, not only keeps up the pressure to cut funding, but also wants to spy on our reading habits through surveillance of our library circulation records! But I guess that’s part of his commander-in-chief powers, right?) We had Alfie Kohn on our campus a couple of years ago, and I suggest everyone who doesn’t already know his work and is interested in improving education in this country check out his home page and buy his books. Spending that evening with Alfie, along with public school teachers, my fellow faculty members, and so many of our education majors was a delightful, soul-refreshing experience. We know what needs to be done. We just need the courage to fight for the money that it takes to do it, and then even more courage to do it, in the face of self-interest. Bushco delenda est. P.S. in case the link didn't work, go to http://www.alfiekohn.org/index.html
February 6, 2006 5:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
Another poster who can't see the forest for the trees, who can't see the elephant in the room. How can you not mention the Internet, the greatest addition to the Commons in all recorded history? Every person now has equal access to the world's greatest library and to much of humanity, uncensored, almost free of charge?
I pay $10/mo. for Internet access. I live in one of the most rural, isolated environments in this country but I read 10 or 15 or the worlds newspapers every morning, e-mail their writers if I wish, participate in at least 2 political forums on a regular basis thus reaching hundreds of thousands with my opinions. If I have questions about almost anything - architecture, photography, computers, politics, agriculture, global warming - a wealth of information is at my fingertips.
I'm sorry to hear you're an educator. You don't seem up to it. But I do thank you for the compliments...even though they were inadvertant and you've seriously mistated my position and denied - ex cathedra (but without actually possessing any such authority) - the validity of much of Social Darwinism.
February 7, 2006 9:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
What is inevitably ignored is the root cause of the problem, stupid students. The students and their parents are products of a culture that says it is good to be stupid.
Yes. It is called the 'culture of poverty' where the norms of mainstream society are rejected due to the economic inability of the group to maintain or have access to the resources that sustain mainstream norms. To compensate for this huge disparity betweeen what is beamed into their homes and commercialized by the media..the disenfranchised group develops their own set of norms.
Poverty alone is not the sole issue, but the response to economic disenfranchisement is what undergrids and perpetuates a completely different set of norms which can be reinforced and sustain with the resources available to those who are impoverished.
February 27, 2006 5:48 AM | Reply | Permalink