Education As The Great Equalizer

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  education as the great equalizer: Stuck in the Shallow End, updated edition Jane Margolis, 2017-03-03 Why so few African American and Latino/a students study computer science: updated edition of a book that reveals the dynamics of inequality in American schools. The number of African Americans and Latino/as receiving undergraduate and advanced degrees in computer science is disproportionately low. And relatively few African American and Latino/a high school students receive the kind of institutional encouragement, educational opportunities, and preparation needed for them to choose computer science as a field of study and profession. In Stuck in the Shallow End, Jane Margolis and coauthors look at the daily experiences of students and teachers in three Los Angeles public high schools: an overcrowded urban high school, a math and science magnet school, and a well-funded school in an affluent neighborhood. They find an insidious “virtual segregation” that maintains inequality. The race gap in computer science, Margolis discovers, is one example of the way students of color are denied a wide range of occupational and educational futures. Stuck in the Shallow End is a story of how inequality is reproduced in America—and how students and teachers, given the necessary tools, can change the system. Since the 2008 publication of Stuck in the Shallow End, the book has found an eager audience among teachers, school administrators, and academics. This updated edition offers a new preface detailing the progress in making computer science accessible to all, a new postscript, and discussion questions (coauthored by Jane Margolis and Joanna Goode).
  education as the great equalizer: The Education Trap Cristina Viviana Groeger, 2021-03-09 Why—contrary to much expert and popular opinion—more education may not be the answer to skyrocketing inequality. For generations, Americans have looked to education as the solution to economic disadvantage. Yet, although more people are earning degrees, the gap between rich and poor is widening. Cristina Groeger delves into the history of this seeming contradiction, explaining how education came to be seen as a panacea even as it paved the way for deepening inequality. The Education Trap returns to the first decades of the twentieth century, when Americans were grappling with the unprecedented inequities of the Gilded Age. Groeger’s test case is the city of Boston, which spent heavily on public schools. She examines how workplaces came to depend on an army of white-collar staff, largely women and second-generation immigrants, trained in secondary schools. But Groeger finds that the shift to more educated labor had negative consequences—both intended and unintended—for many workers. Employers supported training in schools in order to undermine the influence of craft unions, and so shift workplace power toward management. And advanced educational credentials became a means of controlling access to high-paying professional and business jobs, concentrating power and wealth. Formal education thus became a central force in maintaining inequality. The idea that more education should be the primary means of reducing inequality may be appealing to politicians and voters, but Groeger warns that it may be a dangerous policy trap. If we want a more equitable society, we should not just prescribe more time in the classroom, but fight for justice in the workplace.
  education as the great equalizer: The Great Equalizer Mark D. Benigni, Barbara A. Haeffner, Lois B. Lehman, 2022-04-11 The Great Equalizer: Six Strategies to Make Public Education Work in America delves into the bleak reality of leading a district with a school poised for state takeover and a district with growing inequalities and increasing student needs. Learn how collaboration allowed that same district to become a 1:1 school system when K-12 schools were still dealing with technology roadblocks. Discover how public schools can garner philanthropy and foundation support to lead their districts down the road of excellence. Chapter hooks, key takeaways, and guided discussion questions provide a glimpse into the realities of leading public education systems across our nation. By implementing six strategies for success, public education can be innovative and make a difference for all students. Together we can ensure that America’s public education system remains the great equalizer.
  education as the great equalizer: Handbook of Research on Social Justice and Equity in Education Keengwe, Jared, 2022-05-06 There is growing pressure on teachers and other educators to understand and adopt the best ways to work with the various races, cultures, and languages that diverse learners represent in the ever-increasing culturally-diverse learning environments. Establishing sound cross-cultural pedagogy is also critical given that racial, cultural, and linguistic integration has the potential to increase academic success for all learners. To that end, there is also a need for educators to prepare graduates who will better meet the needs of culturally diverse learners as well as support their students to become successful global citizens. The Handbook of Research on Social Justice and Equity in Education highlights cross-cultural perspectives, challenges, and opportunities pertaining to promoting cultural competence, equity, and social justice in education. It also explores multiple concepts of building a bridge from a monocultural pedagogical framework to cross-cultural knowledge. Covering topics such as diversity education and global citizenship, this major reference work is ideal for academicians, researchers, practitioners, policymakers, instructors, and students.
  education as the great equalizer: Education in America Kimberly A. Goyette, 2017-05-16 Education in America introduces readers to social inequality in education in the U.S. The book highlights findings from current, rigorous sociological research, covering patterns and trends in inequality in education by socioeconomic background, race, and gender, and framing them in the context of current issues and controversies such as expanded accountability and school choice policies. This book sheds light on the complexity of inequality in schools--that inequality is difficult to attribute to a single factor or explanation, and that it works differently by socioeconomic status, race, and gender. This complexity, in turn, complicates possible overarching policy solutions--Provided by publisher.
  education as the great equalizer: The Race between Education and Technology Claudia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz, 2009-07-01 This book provides a careful historical analysis of the co-evolution of educational attainment and the wage structure in the United States through the twentieth century. The authors propose that the twentieth century was not only the American Century but also the Human Capital Century. That is, the American educational system is what made America the richest nation in the world. Its educational system had always been less elite than that of most European nations. By 1900 the U.S. had begun to educate its masses at the secondary level, not just in the primary schools that had remarkable success in the nineteenth century. The book argues that technological change, education, and inequality have been involved in a kind of race. During the first eight decades of the twentieth century, the increase of educated workers was higher than the demand for them. This had the effect of boosting income for most people and lowering inequality. However, the reverse has been true since about 1980. This educational slowdown was accompanied by rising inequality. The authors discuss the complex reasons for this, and what might be done to ameliorate it.
  education as the great equalizer: Education, Occupation and Social Origin Fabrizio Bernardi, Gabriele Ballarino, 2016 This innovative book takes a comparative approach to the social origin-education-destination triangle (OED), looking at the intergenerational transmission of advantage in 14 countries. The intention is to debate the claim that education is the 'great social equalizer'. The contributors examine the relation between family background, education and occupational achievement over time and across educational levels, focusing on the relationship between individuals' social origins and their income and occupational outcomes. It will be of interest to academics and students of social policy and those interested in social inequalities and their reproduction over time.
  education as the great equalizer: The Great Equalizer David Smick, 2017-01-10 The experts say that America's best days are behind us, that mediocre long-term economic growth is baked in the cake, and that politically, socially, and racially, the United States will continue to tear itself apart. But David Smick-hedge fund strategist and author of the 2008 bestseller The World Is Curved-argues that the experts are wrong. In recent decades, a Corporate Capitalism of top down mismanagement and backroom deal-making has smothered America's innovative spirit. Policy now favors the big, the corporate, and the status quo at the expense of the small, the inventive, and the entrepreneurial. The result is that working and middle class Americans have seen their incomes flat-lining and their American Dreams slipping away. In response, Smick calls for the great equalizer, a Main Street Capitalism of mass small-business startups and bottom-up innovation, all unfolding on a level playing field. Introducing a fourteen-point plan of bipartisan reforms for unleashing America's creativity and confidence, his forward-thinking book describes a new climate of dynamism where every man and woman is a potential entrepreneur-especially those at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. Ultimately, Smick argues, economies are more than statistical measurements of supply and demand, economic output, and rates of return. Economies are people-their hopes, fears, dreams, and expectations. The Great Equalizer is a call for a set of new paradigms that inspire and empower average American people to reimagine and reboot their economy. It is a manifesto asserting that, with a new kind of economic policy, America's best days lie ahead.
  education as the great equalizer: Back to School Michael Anthony Rose, 2012 Shines a light on institutions that are teaching students, young and old, how to rebuild our economy and put America back to work (President Bill Clinton). It's a statistic that's sure to surprise: Close to forty-five percent of postsecondary students in the United States today did not enroll in college directly out of high school, and many attend only part-time. Following a tradition of self-improvement as old as the Republic, the nontraditional college student is becoming the norm. Back to School is the first book to look at the schools that serve a growing population of second-chancers, exploring what higher education--in the fullest sense of the term--can offer our rapidly changing society and why it is so critical to support the institutions that make it possible for millions of Americans to better their lot in life. In the anecdotal style of his bestselling Possible Lives, Mike Rose crafts rich and moving vignettes of people in tough circumstances who find their way, who get a second . . . or third . . . or even fourth chance, and who, in a surprising number of cases, reinvent themselves as educated, engaged citizens. Rose reminds us that our nation's economic and civic future rests heavily on the health of the institutions that serve millions of everyday people--not simply the top twenty universities listed in U.S. News and World Report--and paints a vivid picture of the community colleges and adult education programs that give so many a shot at reaching their aspirations. Thoughtful and surprising. --The Washington Post Inspiring stories of older Americans attending secondary schools. --Kirkus Reviews
  education as the great equalizer: Aging, Health, and Longevity in the Mexican-Origin Population Jacqueline L. Angel, Fernando Torres-Gil, Kyriakos Markides, 2012-02-08 Aging, Health, and Longevity in the Mexican-Origin Population creates a foundation for an interdisciplinary discussion of the trajectory of disability and long-term care for older people of Mexican-origin from a bi-national perspective. Although the literature on Latino elders in the United States is growing, few of these studies or publications offer the breadth and depth contained in this book.
  education as the great equalizer: Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty Paul C. Gorski, 2017-12-29 This influential book describes the knowledge and skills teachers and school administrators need to recognize and combat bias and inequity that undermine educational engagement for students experiencing poverty. Featuring important revisions based on newly available research and lessons from the authors professional development work, this Second Edition includes: a new chapter outlining the dangers of grit and deficit perspectives as responses to educational disparities; three updated chapters of research-informed, on-the-ground strategies for teaching and leading with equity literacy; and expanded lists of resources and readings to support transformative equity work in high-poverty and mixed-class schools. Written with an engaging, conversational style that makes complex concepts accessible, this book will help readers learn how to recognize and respond to even the subtlest inequities in their classrooms, schools, and districts.
  education as the great equalizer: Why School? Mike Rose, 2014-02-04 Why School? is a little book driven by big questions. What does it mean to be educated? What is intelligence? How should we think about intelligence, education, and opportunity in an open society? Drawing on forty years of teaching and research and a profound understanding of the opportunities, both intellectual and economic, that come from education (Booklist), award-winning author Mike Rose reflects on these and other questions related to public schooling in America. He answers them in beautifully written chapters that are both rich in detail and informed by an extensive knowledge of history, the psychology of learning, and the politics of education. This paperback edition includes three new chapters showing how cognitive science actually narrows our understanding of learning, how to increase college graduation rates, and how to value the teaching of basic skills. An updated introduction by Rose, who has been hailed as a superb writer and an even better storyteller (TLN Teachers Network), reflects on recent developments in school reform. Lauded as a beautifully written work of literary nonfiction (The Christian Science Monitor) and called stunning by the New Educator Journal, Why School? offers an eloquent call for a bountiful democratic vision of the purpose of schooling.
  education as the great equalizer: Education, Skills, and Technical Change Charles R. Hulten, Valerie A. Ramey, 2019-01-11 Over the past few decades, US business and industry have been transformed by the advances and redundancies produced by the knowledge economy. The workplace has changed, and much of the work differs from that performed by previous generations. Can human capital accumulation in the United States keep pace with the evolving demands placed on it, and how can the workforce of tomorrow acquire the skills and competencies that are most in demand? Education, Skills, and Technical Change explores various facets of these questions and provides an overview of educational attainment in the United States and the channels through which labor force skills and education affect GDP growth. Contributors to this volume focus on a range of educational and training institutions and bring new data to bear on how we understand the role of college and vocational education and the size and nature of the skills gap. This work links a range of research areas—such as growth accounting, skill development, higher education, and immigration—and also examines how well students are being prepared for the current and future world of work.
  education as the great equalizer: The Hidden Rules of Race Andrea Flynn, Susan R. Holmberg, Dorian T. Warren, Felicia J. Wong, 2017-09-08 This book explores the racial rules that are often hidden but perpetuate vast racial inequities in the United States.
  education as the great equalizer: The Prize Dale Russakoff, 2015 As serialized in the New Yorker, a roiling, behind-the-scenes look at the high-pressure race to turn around Newark's failing schools, with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Governor Chris Christie, and Senator Cory Booker in eyebrow-raising leading roles
  education as the great equalizer: The Credential Society Randall Collins, 2019-05-28 The Credential Society is a classic on the role of higher education in American society and an essential text for understanding the reproduction of inequality. Controversial at the time, Randall Collins’s claim that the expansion of American education has not increased social mobility, but rather created a cycle of credential inflation, has proven remarkably prescient. Collins shows how credential inflation stymies mass education’s promises of upward mobility. An unacknowledged spiral of the rising production of credentials and job requirements was brought about by the expansion of high school and then undergraduate education, with consequences including grade inflation, rising educational costs, and misleading job promises dangled by for-profit schools. Collins examines medicine, law, and engineering to show the ways in which credentialing closed these high-status professions to new arrivals. In an era marked by the devaluation of high school diplomas, outcry about the value of expensive undergraduate degrees, and the proliferation of new professional degrees like the MBA, The Credential Society has more than stood the test of time. In a new preface, Collins discusses recent developments, debunks claims that credentialization is driven by technological change, and points to alternative pathways for the future of education.
  education as the great equalizer: Degrees of Inequality Suzanne Mettler, 2014-03-11 America’s higher education system is failing its students. In the space of a generation, we have gone from being the best-educated society in the world to one surpassed by eleven other nations in college graduation rates. Higher education is evolving into a caste system with separate and unequal tiers that take in students from different socio-economic backgrounds and leave them more unequal than when they first enrolled. Until the 1970s, the United States had a proud history of promoting higher education for its citizens. The Morrill Act, the G.I. Bill and Pell Grants enabled Americans from across the income spectrum to attend college and the nation led the world in the percentage of young adults with baccalaureate degrees. Yet since 1980, progress has stalled. Young adults from low to middle income families are not much more likely to graduate from college than four decades ago. When less advantaged students do attend, they are largely sequestered into inferior and often profit-driven institutions, from which many emerge without degrees—and shouldering crushing levels of debt. In Degrees of Inequality, acclaimed political scientist Suzanne Mettler explains why the system has gone so horribly wrong and why the American Dream is increasingly out of reach for so many. In her eye-opening account, she illuminates how political partisanship has overshadowed America’s commitment to equal access to higher education. As politicians capitulate to corporate interests, owners of for-profit colleges benefit, but for far too many students, higher education leaves them with little besides crippling student loan debt. Meanwhile, the nation’s public universities have shifted the burden of rising costs onto students. In an era when a college degree is more linked than ever before to individual—and societal—well-being, these pressures conspire to make it increasingly difficult for students to stay in school long enough to graduate. By abandoning their commitment to students, politicians are imperiling our highest ideals as a nation. Degrees of Inequality offers an impassioned call to reform a higher education system that has come to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, socioeconomic inequality in America.
  education as the great equalizer: Class Rules Peter W. Cookson, Jr, 2015-04-26 Class Rules challenges the popular myth that high schools are the “Great Equalizers.” In his groundbreaking study, Cookson demonstrates that adolescents undergo different class rites of passage depending on the social-class composition of the high school they attend. Drawing on stories of schools and individual students, the author shows that where a student goes to high school is a major influence on his or her social class trajectory. Class Rules is a penetrating, original examination of the role education plays in blocking upward mobility for many children. It offers a compelling vision of an equitable system of schools based on the full democratic rights of students. Book Features: Provides a fresh, dynamic way of understanding educational inequality and social reproduction.Offers a breakthrough social/psychological theory of how adolescents acquire class consciousness.Compares the cultures and curricula of five American high schools focusing on the class composition of their students. “This highly readable and original book illuminates why we don’t have open class warfare in our society, despite huge inequalities. Peter Cookson shows how schools reproduce classes through institutional practices that forge class-based consciousness. He also suggests how education might be changed.” —Caroline Hodges Persell, professor emerita of sociology, New York University “Cookson does a superb job of analyzing the powerful forces in our schools that reinforce the racial, ethnic, and social-class structures our nation hopes to overcome. Breaking out of one’s social class was always hard but may now be harder than in previous decades. Cookson reminds us of what high schools can be, the great equalizers, institutions for promoting America’s finest values.” —David Berliner, Regents’ professor emeritus, Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University
  education as the great equalizer: Social Mobility in Europe Richard Breen, 2004-11-25 Social Mobility in Europe is the most comprehensive study to date of trends in intergenerational social mobility. It uses data from 11 European countries covering the last 30 years of the twentieth century to analyze differences between countries and changes through time.The findings call into question several long-standing views about social mobility. We find a growing similarity between countries in their class structures and rates of absolute mobility: in other words, the countries of Europe are now more alike in their flows between class origins and destinations than they were thirty years ago. However, differences between countries in social fluidity (that is, the relative chances, between people of different class origins, of being found in given classdestinations) show no reduction and so there is no evidence supporting theories of modernization which predict such convergence. Our results also contradict the long-standing Featherman Jones Hauser hypothesis of a basic similarity in social fluidity in all industrial societies 'with a market economyand a nuclear family system'. There are considerable differences between countries like Israel and Sweden, where societal openness is very marked, and Italy, France, and Germany, where social fluidity rates are low. Similarly, there is a substantial difference between, for example, the Netherlands in the 1970s (which was quite closed) and in the 1990s, when it ranks among the most open societies.Mobility tables reflect many underlying processes and this makes it difficult to explain mobility and fluidity or to provide policy prescriptions. Nevertheless, those countries in which fluidity increased over the last decades of the twentieth century had not only succeeded in reducing class inequalities in educational attainment but had also restricted the degree to which, among people with the same level of education, class background affected their chances of gaining access to better classdestinations.
  education as the great equalizer: Public Education David C. Berliner, Carl Hermanns, 2021-11-12 In this important collection, eminent education scholars and practitioners remind us that our nation's system of free universal public education is under attack, putting our very democracy in jeopardy. Over and above preparing students for employability, American schools must prepare our youth to be informed citizens and active, constructive participants in the democratic process. These essayists, criticizing as well as lauding our educational system, believe that such a goal is best accomplished through a high-quality, public, free system of schooling designed to serve all our nations' children without regard to race, religion, gender, LGBTQ+ identity, (dis)ability, social class, citizenship status, or language. In the 100th anniversary year of the Horace Mann League, these thought leaders in education take stock of enduring principles, current dilemmas, and important forward directions. With privateers growing in numbers and seeking to take advantage of systemic breakdowns, this book will serve as a rousing defense of our public schools for our nation's educators, parents, school board members, and politicians. Book Features: Reminds all Americans of the essential roles that schools serve in contemporary society, beyond simply learning the prescribed school curriculum. Presents a counterpoint to those who promote private or charter schooling at the expense of genuine public schools. Paints a complex and multi-faceted portrait of our public education system and provides a set of diverse and provocative remedies for many pressing contemporary problems of public schooling.
  education as the great equalizer: Schooling Citizens Hilary J. Moss, 2010-04-15 While white residents of antebellum Boston and New Haven forcefully opposed the education of black residents, their counterparts in slaveholding Baltimore did little to resist the establishment of African American schools. Such discrepancies, Hilary Moss argues, suggest that white opposition to black education was not a foregone conclusion. Through the comparative lenses of these three cities, she shows why opposition erupted where it did across the United States during the same period that gave rise to public education. As common schooling emerged in the 1830s, providing white children of all classes and ethnicities with the opportunity to become full-fledged citizens, it redefined citizenship as synonymous with whiteness. This link between school and American identity, Moss argues, increased white hostility to black education at the same time that it spurred African Americans to demand public schooling as a means of securing status as full and equal members of society. Shedding new light on the efforts of black Americans to learn independently in the face of white attempts to withhold opportunity, Schooling Citizens narrates a previously untold chapter in the thorny history of America’s educational inequality.
  education as the great equalizer: Screen Schooled Joe Clement, Matt Miles, 2017-10-01 Over the past decade, educational instruction has become increasingly digitized as districts rush to dole out laptops and iPads to every student. Yet the most important question, Is this what is best for students? is glossed over. Veteran teachers Joe Clement and Matt Miles have seen firsthand how damaging technology overuse and misuse has been to our kids. On a mission to educate and empower parents, they show how screen saturation at home and school has created a wide range of cognitive and social deficits in our young people. They lift the veil on what's really going on in schools: teachers who are often powerless to curb cell phone distractions; zoned-out kids who act helpless and are unfocused, unprepared, and unsocial; administrators who are influenced by questionable science sponsored by corporate technology purveyors. They provide action steps parents can take to demand change and make a compelling case for simpler, smarter, more effective forms of teaching and learning.
  education as the great equalizer: The Privileged Poor Anthony Abraham Jack, 2019-03-01 An NPR Favorite Book of the Year “Breaks new ground on social and educational questions of great import.” —Washington Post “An essential work, humane and candid, that challenges and expands our understanding of the lives of contemporary college students.” —Paul Tough, author of Helping Children Succeed “Eye-opening...Brings home the pain and reality of on-campus poverty and puts the blame squarely on elite institutions.” —Washington Post “Jack’s investigation redirects attention from the matter of access to the matter of inclusion...His book challenges universities to support the diversity they indulge in advertising.” —New Yorker The Ivy League looks different than it used to. College presidents and deans of admission have opened their doors—and their coffers—to support a more diverse student body. But is it enough just to admit these students? In this bracing exposé, Anthony Jack shows that many students’ struggles continue long after they’ve settled in their dorms. Admission, they quickly learn, is not the same as acceptance. This powerfully argued book documents how university policies and campus culture can exacerbate preexisting inequalities and reveals why some students are harder hit than others.
  education as the great equalizer: Uncivil Wars Sandra Messinger Cypess, 2012-08-01 The first English-language book to place the works of Elena Garro (1916–1998) and Octavio Paz (1914–1998) in dialogue with each other, Uncivil Wars evokes the lives of two celebrated literary figures who wrote about many of the same experiences and contributed to the formation of Mexican national identity but were judged quite differently, primarily because of gender. While Paz’s privileged, prize-winning legacy has endured worldwide, Garro’s literary gifts garnered no international prizes and received less attention in Latin American literary circles. Restoring a dual perspective on these two dynamic writers and their world, Uncivil Wars chronicles a collective memory of wars that shaped Mexico, and in turn shaped Garro and Paz, from the Conquest period to the Mexican Revolution; the Spanish Civil War, which the couple witnessed while traveling abroad; and the student massacre at Tlatelolco Plaza in 1968, which brought about social and political changes and further tensions in the battle of the sexes. The cultural contexts of machismo and ethnicity provide an equally rich ground for Sandra Cypess’s exploration of the tandem between the writers’ personal lives and their literary production. Uncivil Wars illuminates the complexities of Mexican society as seen through a tense marriage of two talented, often oppositional writers. The result is an alternative interpretation of the myths and realities that have shaped Mexican identity, and its literary soul, well into the twenty-first century.
  education as the great equalizer: The Great Leveler Walter Scheidel, 2018-09-18 How only violence and catastrophes have consistently reduced inequality throughout world history Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world. Ever since humans began to farm, herd livestock, and pass on their assets to future generations, economic inequality has been a defining feature of civilization. Over thousands of years, only violent events have significantly lessened inequality. The Four Horsemen of leveling—mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues—have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich. Scheidel identifies and examines these processes, from the crises of the earliest civilizations to the cataclysmic world wars and communist revolutions of the twentieth century. Today, the violence that reduced inequality in the past seems to have diminished, and that is a good thing. But it casts serious doubt on the prospects for a more equal future. An essential contribution to the debate about inequality, The Great Leveler provides important new insights about why inequality is so persistent—and why it is unlikely to decline anytime soon.
  education as the great equalizer: Schooling in Capitalist America Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis, 2011 This seminal work . . . establishes a persuasive new paradigm.--Contemporary Sociology No book since Schooling in Capitalist America has taken on the systemic forces hard at work undermining our education system. This classic reprint is an invaluable resource for radical educators. Samuel Bowles is research professor and director of the behavioral sciences program at the Santa Fe Institute, and professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts. Herbert Gintis is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute and emeritus professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts.
  education as the great equalizer: The Years that Matter Most Paul Tough, 2019 The bestselling author of How Children Succeed returns with a devastatingly powerful, mind-changing inquiry into higher education in the U.S.
  education as the great equalizer: Class War Megan Erickson, 2015-09-07 In an age of austerity, elite corporate education reformers have found new ways to transfer the costs of raising children from the state to individual families. Public schools, tasked with providing education, childcare, job training, meals, and social services to low-income children, struggle with cutbacks. Meanwhile, private schools promise to nurture the minds and personalities of future professionals to the tune of $40,000 a year. As Class War reveals, this situation didn't happen by chance. In the media, educational success is framed as a consequence of parental choices and natural abilities. In truth the wealthy are ever more able to secure advantages for their children, deepening the rifts between rich and poor. The longer these divisions persist, the worse the consequences. Drawing on Erickson's own experience as a teacher in the New York City school system, Class War reveals how modern education has become the real hunger games, stealing opportunity and hope from disadvantaged children for the benefit of the well-to-do.
  education as the great equalizer: Inequality at the Starting Gate Valerie E. Lee, David T. Burkam, 2002-01-01 Inequality at the Starting Gate is a new EPI study of the learning gap between rich and poor children when they enter kindergarten. This study, by two education experts from the University of Michigan, analyzes U.S. Education Department data on 16,000 kindergartners nationwide, showing the direct link between student achievement gaps and socioeconomic status. The report finds that impoverished children lag behind their peers in reading and math skills even before they start school. It shows how a lack of resources and opportunities can cause lasting academic damage to some children, underscoring the need for earlier and more comprehensive efforts to prepare children to succeed in school.--Http://www.lights.com/cgi-bin/epi/shop/shop.cgi.
  education as the great equalizer: Education and Society Thurston Domina, Benjamin G. Gibbs, Lisa Nunn, Andrew Penner, 2019-08-20 Drawing on current scholarship, Education and Society takes students on a journey through the many roles that education plays in contemporary societies. Addressing students’ own experience of education before expanding to larger sociological conversations, Education and Society helps readers understand and engage with such topics as peer groups, gender and identity, social class, the racialization of achievement, the treatment of immigrant children, special education, school choice, accountability, discipline, global perspectives, and schooling as a social institution. The book prompts students to evaluate how schools organize our society and how society organizes our schools. Moving from students to schooling to social forces, Education and Society provides a lively and engaging introduction to theory and research and will serve as a cornerstone for courses such as sociology of education, foundations of education, critical issues in education, and school and society.
  education as the great equalizer: Paying for the Party Elizabeth A. Armstrong, Laura T. Hamilton, 2013-04-08 Two young women, dormitory mates, embark on their education at a big state university. Five years later, one is earning a good salary at a prestigious accounting firm. With no loans to repay, she lives in a fashionable apartment with her fiancé. The other woman, saddled with burdensome debt and a low GPA, is still struggling to finish her degree in tourism. In an era of skyrocketing tuition and mounting concern over whether college is worth it, Paying for the Party is an indispensable contribution to the dialogue assessing the state of American higher education. A powerful exposé of unmet obligations and misplaced priorities, it explains in vivid detail why so many leave college with so little to show for it. Drawing on findings from a five-year interview study, Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton bring us to the campus of MU, a flagship Midwestern public university, where we follow a group of women drawn into a culture of status seeking and sororities. Mapping different pathways available to MU students, the authors demonstrate that the most well-resourced and seductive route is a party pathway anchored in the Greek system and facilitated by the administration. This pathway exerts influence over the academic and social experiences of all students, and while it benefits the affluent and well-connected, Armstrong and Hamilton make clear how it seriously disadvantages the majority. Eye-opening and provocative, Paying for the Party reveals how outcomes can differ so dramatically for those whom universities enroll.
  education as the great equalizer: The Cult of Smart Fredrik deBoer, 2020-08-04 Named one of Vulture’s Top 10 Best Books of 2020! Leftist firebrand Fredrik deBoer exposes the lie at the heart of our educational system and demands top-to-bottom reform. Everyone agrees that education is the key to creating a more just and equal world, and that our schools are broken and failing. Proposed reforms variously target incompetent teachers, corrupt union practices, or outdated curricula, but no one acknowledges a scientifically-proven fact that we all understand intuitively: Academic potential varies between individuals, and cannot be dramatically improved. In The Cult of Smart, educator and outspoken leftist Fredrik deBoer exposes this omission as the central flaw of our entire society, which has created and perpetuated an unjust class structure based on intellectual ability. Since cognitive talent varies from person to person, our education system can never create equal opportunity for all. Instead, it teaches our children that hierarchy and competition are natural, and that human value should be based on intelligence. These ideas are counter to everything that the left believes, but until they acknowledge the existence of individual cognitive differences, progressives remain complicit in keeping the status quo in place. This passionate, voice-driven manifesto demands that we embrace a new goal for education: equality of outcomes. We must create a world that has a place for everyone, not just the academically talented. But we’ll never achieve this dream until the Cult of Smart is destroyed.
  education as the great equalizer: The Mind at Work Mike Rose, 2005-07-26 Featuring a new preface for the 10th anniversary As did the national bestseller Nickel and Dimed, Mike Rose’s revelatory book demolishes the long-held notion that people who work with their hands make up a less intelligent class. He shows us waitresses making lightning-fast calculations, carpenters handling complex spatial mathematics, and hairdressers, plumbers, and electricians with their aesthetic and diagnostic acumen. Rose, an educator who is himself the son of a waitress, explores the intellectual repertory of everyday workers and the terrible social cost of undervaluing the work they do. Deftly combining research, interviews, and personal history, this is one of those rare books that has the capacity both to shape public policy and to illuminate general readers.
  education as the great equalizer: How Schools Work Arne Duncan, 2019-08-06 “This book merits every American’s serious consideration” (Vice President Joe Biden): from the Secretary of Education under President Obama, an exposé of the status quo that helps maintain a broken system at the expense of our kids’ education, and threatens our nation’s future. “Education runs on lies. That’s probably not what you’d expect from a former Secretary of Education, but it’s the truth.” So opens Arne Duncan’s How Schools Work, although the title could just as easily be How American Schools Work for Some, Not for Others, and Only Now and Then for Kids. Drawing on nearly three decades in education—from his mother’s after-school program on Chicago’s South Side to his tenure as Secretary of Education in Washington, DC—How Schools Work follows Arne (as he insists you call him) as he takes on challenges at every turn: gangbangers in Chicago housing projects, parents who call him racist, teachers who insist they can’t help poor kids, unions that refuse to modernize, Tea Partiers who call him an autocrat, affluent white progressive moms who hate yearly tests, and even the NRA, which once labeled Arne the “most extreme anti-gun member of President Obama’s Cabinet.” Going to a child’s funeral every couple of weeks, as he did when he worked in Chicago, will do that to a person. How Schools Work exposes the lies that have caused American kids to fall behind their international peers, from early childhood all the way to college graduation rates. But it also identifies what really does make a school work. “As insightful as it is inspiring” (Washington Book Review), How Schools Work will embolden parents, teachers, voters, and even students to demand more of our public schools. If America is going to be great, then we can accept nothing less.
  education as the great equalizer: Education without Debt Scott D. MacDonald, 2021-01-12 Almost 50 million Americans have cumulatively borrowed more than $1.5 trillion to attend college. Roughly one-third of all adults aged 25 to 34 have a student loan. In Education without Debt businessman and philanthropist Scott MacDonald examines the real-life impact of crushing levels of student debt on borrowers and what can be done to fix this crisis. Weaving together stories of debt-impaired lives with stories of personal success achieved with the essential help of financial aid, MacDonald reveals the devastating personal and societal impact of the debt problem and offers possible solutions. He explores the efforts of colleges and private philanthropists to make education affordable and relates his own experience of funding financial aid for need-eligible students at five universities. Education without Debt is a must-read book for anyone concerned about the rising cost of education and what to do about this critical policy and societal issue.
  education as the great equalizer: Reckoning with History Jim Downs, Erica Armstrong Dunbar, T K Hunter, Timothy Patrick McCarthy, 2021-08-03 Reckoning with History brings together original essays from a diverse group of historians who consider how writing about the past can engage with the urgent issues of the present. Covering a broad range of topics, these essays illuminate what it means to be a socially and politically engaged historian.
  education as the great equalizer: The Crisis of Race in Higher Education William F. Tate IV, Nancy Staudt, Ashley Macrander, 2016-12-22 The compendium of writings in this edited volume sheds light on the event “Race & Ethnicity: A Day of Discovery and Dialogue” at Washington University in St. Louis and the work current students, faculty, and staff are doing to improve inclusivity on campus and in St. Louis.
  education as the great equalizer: Confessions of a School Reformer Larry Cuban, 2022-10-18 In Confessions of a School Reformer, eminent historian of education Larry Cuban reflects on nearly a century of education reforms and his experiences with them as a student, educator, and administrator. Cuban begins his own story in the 1930s, when he entered first grade at a Pittsburgh public school, the youngest son of Russian immigrants who placed great stock in the promises of education. With a keen historian's eye, Cuban expands his personal narrative to analyze the overlapping social, political, and economic movements that have attempted to influence public schooling in the United States since the beginning of the twentieth century. He documents how education both has and has not been altered by the efforts of the Progressive Era of the first half of the twentieth century, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s through the 1970s, and the standards-based school reform movement of the 1980s through today. Cuban points out how these dissimilar movements nevertheless shared a belief that school change could promote student success and also forge a path toward a stronger economy and a more equitable society. He relates the triumphs of these school reform efforts as well as more modest successes and unintended outcomes. Interwoven with Cuban's evaluations and remembrances are his confessions, in which he accounts for the beliefs he held and later rejected, as well as mistakes and areas of weakness that he has found in his own ideology. Ultimately, Cuban remarks with a tempered optimism on what schools can and cannot do in American democracy.
  education as the great equalizer: Who Marries Whom? Hans-Peter Blossfeld, A. Timm, 2012-12-06 Marriage and social inequality are closely interrelated. Marriage is dependent on the structure of marriage markets, and marriage patterns have consequences for social inequality. This book demonstrates that in most modern societies the educa tional system has become an increasingly important marriage market, particularly for those who are highly qualified. Educational expansion in general and the rising educational participation of women in particular unintentionally have increased the rate of assortative meeting and assortative mating across birth cohorts. Rising educational homogamy means that social inequality is further enhanced through marriage because better (and worse) educated single men and women pool their economic and sociocultural advantages (and disadvantages) within couples. In this book we study the changing role of the educational system as a marriage market in modern societies from a cross-national comparative perspective. Using life-history data from a broad range of industrialized countries and longitudinal statistical models, we analyze the process of spouse selection in the life courses of single men and women, step by step. The countries included in this book vary widely in important characteristics such as demographic behavior and institutional characteristics. The life course approach explicitly recognizes the dynamic nature of partner decisions, the importance of educational roles and institutional circum stances as young men and women move through their life paths, and the cumulation of advantages and disadvantages experienced by individuals.
  education as the great equalizer: The Small College Imperative Mary B. Marcy, 2023-07-03 With costs rising, traditional college student populations shrinking, and pundits predicting that huge numbers of colleges will close in the next few decades, small colleges cannot afford to pretend that business-as-usual can sustain them. This book offers five emerging models for how small colleges can hope to survive and thrive in these very challenging times: Traditional; Integrative; Distinctive Program; Expansion, and Distributed. In addition to offering practical guidance for colleges trying to decide which model is for them, the book includes brief institutional profiles of colleges pursuing each model. The book also addresses the evolving role of consortia and partnerships as an avenue to provide additional innovative ways to manage cost and develop new opportunities and programs while maintaining fidelity to mission and strategic vision.
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