So, Willard Was An English Major

You really have hand to the wingnut conservatives. It seems like every time they come up with a certain mantra they can relentlessly repeat in the media in an attempt to thwart popular dissent in any given area, reality almost always seems to rear its ugly head and makes a mockery out of their words. Not that this cows them in any way, mind you. It's just that after it happens often enough you would think that even the movement's dimwitted followers would finally catch on that they are being conned.

As everyone knows, for the past year or so student loan debt and the inability of most recent college graduates to find good jobs has become a very prominent issue in the national conversation. The conservatives have tried to counter the public's growing concern that young adults are being systemically crippled financially before they even have a chance to get started in life by doing what they do so well: blaming the victim. One of the ways this is being done is to chide college students for studying "worthless" degrees like music, art, history, political science, communications, philosophy and English. Supposedly, it is the students' fault for being so daft as to enter a field of study for which there will be few jobs waiting for them when they graduate.

It's exactly the kind of line that sells really well with the selfish old fuckers who make up the majority of Republican Party's base--just another version of the "these kids today got no respect" bullshit that selfish old fuckers have been peddling ever since modern medicine advanced to the point where it allowed enough selfish younger people to live to become selfish old fuckers and affect the outcome of elections. It is, of course, absolute crap. Notwithstanding the fact that there IS value in studying for knowledge's sake rather than to earn a buck later, prior to 2008 the economy never had any trouble absorbing all of those art and liberal arts majors once they graduated. It was the economic crisis created by the greedy elite scumbags who run Wall Street and corporate America, not the students' choice of majors, that created this crisis.

So lo and behold, along comes the most unlikely poster child to prove that the conservative line blaming the students for choosing unprofitable majors is complete bullshit: former Massachusetts Governor and Wall Street titan Willard Mitt Romney himself. On Friday, at a speech at Otterbein University in Ohio, Romney not only admitted he was an English major, but advised English majors that their best option was to go to graduate school. So much for the ridiculous conservative notion that you can't make any money after studying in the liberal arts.

What Romney's example really shows, of course, is that it hardly matters WHAT you choose to study just so long as you are born with silver spoon shoved up your ass into a well connected family. Romney's success on Wall Street and in politics has nothing whatsoever to do with his college major and everything to do with the fact that his father was Chairman of the old American Motors Corporation, Governor of Michigan and a presidential cabinet secretary. In that regard, he is no different from President George Bush the Lesser, who may have been a business major, but actually was a "C" student, a draft dodger, a drunk, a coke head and an all around fuck up who kept getting second chances in life because of the family he was born into.

Nevertheless, I am fairly certain that this latest example of blatant hypocrisy won't slow down the conservative propaganda machine one damn bit. As long as there are plenty of selfish old fuckers out there who are happy to have someone tell them that they should not at all feel guilty about how young adults today are getting boned by a system that is now hopelessly broken, the bullshit will just keep piling up until one day it engulfs us all.


Bonus: They want more

Another List of Recent Mass School System Layoffs

Back on February 24th, I ran a post listing the recent mass layoff headlines for local school districts across the country. Time for an update. Here is the latest batch of bad news on the education front from the past month or so, courtesy of Daily Job Cuts:

The Flint School Michigan - 28 Administrator Layoffs

The Morenci Area Schools Michigan - Approves 8 Layoffs

Philadelphia Public Schools - Looking to close 64 Schools over Next 5 Years

The San Diego schools - Voted to Layoff 1,000 More Workers

John Paul the Great Catholic High School in Jasper (closing)

St. John's School in Roseville California (closing)

Westerville Schools Ohio - Vote to Layoff 32 Teachers

The Zionsville School Indiana - 17 Possible Layoffs

The Lakota Local School District - Oks 150 Layoffs

Howland-area School Administrative Maine - Expect More Layoffs

North Kitsap School - Possible Layoffs

Lake Elsinore Unified School District CA - Approves 73 Job Cuts

Yorktown school district NY - Proposed Tax Increase and Layoffs

Imperial Valley College - 17

Schenectady schools NY - up to 40 Layoffs Possible

The Warwick Valley School District NY - 16

Update: Kingston Schools NY - 91

Update: Cincinnati Public Schools Ohio - Vote to Eliminate 237 Teaching Jobs

Santa Paula Elementary School District CA - 24

St. Landry Parish School System - 182

Cleveland Schools Ohio - 500+ Teachers Notified of Possible Layoffs

Brandywine Community Schools - 3

The Battle Creek Public Schools Michigan - 26

The Richland-Bean Blossom Community School - 13

The Thousand Islands Central School District - Considering Layoffs

La Marque school district Texas - Approves 10 Layoffs

Detroit Public Schools - 4,000 Layoff Notices/ Pink Slips

California University of Pennsylvania - 9

Merced Union High School District CA - 18 Bus Drivers

Update: Community Unit School District 200 IL - 35

Seneca Valley school - Layoffs, Higher Fees, Program Cuts All Possible to Balance Budget

The Kenosha Unified School District - Expects to Cut 250+

Richmond Schools VA - Firm Suggest Job Cuts, for Budget Savings

Western Foothills Regional School Maine - At Least 30

Electric Boat - 13

Peoria School District IL 150 - Voted to layoff 258

Rich Township High School District 227 - 48

Sumner County Schools - May Outsource 237 Custodial Jobs

Canton Central School District, - Up to 24 Layoffs Possible

Willamette Education Service District - up to 30 Positions Possible

East Irondequoit School District NY - 13 Proposed Layoffs

Anderson-Shiro Consolidated Independent School District TX - 15 Layoff Notifications

The Easton Area School District PA - 77

The Cleveland school district Ohio - Plans 600

Turlock Unified School District CA - 2

The Big Spring School - Approves Layoff of 9 Positions

Lincoln Community High School IL - 3

Portland Oregon Public Schools - up to 110 Possible Layoffs

Southern Oregon University - 12+ after end of June

Cabrillo College - Vote to Eliminate 13 Positions

Lorain Schools Ohio - 138

Bristol Schools CT - Some Teachers Layoffs Seem Likely

Mariposa Middle School CA (closing)

Erie School District - Proposes Closing 3 Elementary Schools

Southern Tioga School District 's North Penn High School PA - Considers Closing

The East St. Louis school system Ill - Says it will Close 5 Schools

The Houston School Board Votes to Close 4 Schools

East End Elementary School in Meadville Pa

I have an idea...how about we replace the fairy tales they read to kids in school with stories about the great and glorious economic recovery. Each are just as believable.


Bonus: Schoolhouse Rock glorifies the Tea Party...educational propaganda at its finest

Assholocracy Porn: "I Have Very Little Tolerance For People With Student Loan Debt"

Awhile back, I adopted the phrase "assholocracy" for use as a tag here at TDS, and since then I have already used it on an incredible 52 different posts. Back in the 1970s glory days of Larry Flynt and Hustler Magazine, he used to have a regular feature called "Asshole of the Month" (and yes, I only read that particular publication for the articles....really). Not having picked up an issue in more than 20 years, I don't know if Flynt is still running that always amusing feature, but if he is I would humbly suggest that for April 2012, he consider making it cretinous North Carolina Representative Virginia Foxx. Here is the Raw Story with the details:

If someone is looking for sympathy for their high student loans, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) would not be among those providing any support.

According to audio obtained by Think Progress, the congresswoman appeared on G. Gordon Libby show Friday afternoon, saying she “never borrowed a dime of money” during her time in college before lashing out at those burdened with heavy loans.

“I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that,” Foxx said. “We live in an opportunity society and people are forgetting that.”

Despite her disgust for high student loans, Foxx is somehow content with high mortgage notes. Think Progress reported that Foxx owed two individual notes up to $250,000.

Here are a few fun facts that Representative Foxx might want to consider before ever again opening her big fat fucking yap about student loans. According to her Wikipedia page, old battle axe Foxx was born in 1943, which means she would have graduated college around 1965 or so. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average cost for one year of undergraduate tuition, room and board at a public university in 1965 was: $950. By 2007 (the last year for which statistics were available from the NCES), tuition, room and board had risen to a whopping $11,034. At private schools, tuition had risen from $1,907 to $28,384. What's even worse is that since 2007 many public universities have have imposed large tuition hikes on students as cash-strapped state governments have cut back funding.

So it doesn't take a whole lot of fucking imagination to understand how graduates are being burdened with such impossibly huge student loan debts and at a time when there are few good paying jobs with decent benefits waiting for them when they graduate. Unless you are addle-brained asshole North Carolina Representative Virginia Foxx that is.

Addendum: But wait, it gets worse. Right after I wrote this post, I came across another article in Salon about Virginia Foxx, who is not only an asshole, but a fucking hypocrite as well:

Earlier this year, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to pass a bill with the impressive, everybody-can-get-behind-this title “Protecting Academic Freedom in Higher Education Act.” Sponsored by the ultra-conservative North Carolina Republican Virginia Foxx, the bill ostensibly took aim at an issue close to small-government-loving hearts: intrusive federal regulation of for-profit colleges — fast growing, highly profitable outfits like DeVry University or the online-only University of Phoenix.

Like so many of the bills passed by the House since Republicans gained the majority in the 2010 midterm elections, the bill was designed to repeal specific actions taken by the Obama administration. In this case, the issue at hand was the Obama administration’s efforts to ensure greater “program integrity” in the for-profit educational sector. Specifically, a new federal definition of what constitutes a legitimate academic “credit hour” and a new requirement that all online providers of post-secondary education be accredited in each and every state in which they do business.

Foxx’s bill repealed both measures. (The Senate has yet to address the measure.) According to Foxx, the new federal regulations threatened “innovation” in the educational sector. As reported by InsideHigherEducation, Foxx is on record as declaring that for-profit colleges do a “a better job of being mindful about efficiency and effectiveness than their nonprofit peers.” By, for example, flexibly providing online education when and where low-income working Americans want it, the for-profit free market delivers the kind of quality higher education that Americans so desperately need. The government should just stay out of their business.

I stumbled upon this story while researching the student loan crisis and at first I was perplexed. I didn’t understand why Republicans were opposed to higher academic standards for the for-profit sector, and I didn’t get the connection to student loans. But it didn’t take much research to discover what was really going on: an example of blatant hypocrisy sufficient to outrage even the most jaded observer of American politics.

The for-profit educational sector is an industry almost entirely subsidized by the federal government. Around 70-80 percent of for-profit revenues are generated by federal student loans. At the same time, judging by sky-high dropout rates, the for-profit schools do a terrible job of educating students. The Obama administration’s efforts to define a credit hour and require state accreditation were motivated by a very understandable desire: to ensure that taxpayers are getting their money’s worth when federal cash pays for a student’s education. In contrast, Foxx’s legislation is designed to remove that taxpayer protection. So here’s a more accurate title for her bill: “The Protecting the Freedom of For-Profit Schools to Suck off the Government Teat Without Any Accountability Whatsoever Act.”

The for-profit educational sector has been growing extraordinarily rapidly for the past decade: 12 percent of all post-secondary students are now enrolled in for-profit schools, up from 3 percent 10 years ago. But the main beneficiaries of the growth appear to be the shareholders and executives of the largest publicly traded for-profit schools, not the students.

In 2008, for-profit schools registered a a graduation rate of 22 percent. (Public and private non-profits registered 55 percent and 65 percent respectively.)

54 percent of the students who enrolled in 2008-2009 in 14 publicly traded for-profit schools had withdrawn without a degree by 2010.

The biggest player in the for-profit sector, the University of Phoenix, graduated only 9 percent of its B.A. candidates within six years.

The pathetic performance of the for-profit sector in delivering actual degrees becomes all the more alarming when you realize that most of the students who are dropping out paid for their educations with student loans that have to be paid back: According to a report released in the summer of 2010 by Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, “Emerging Risk?: An Overview of Growth, Spending, Student Debt and Unanswered Questions in For-Profit Higher Education,” in 2009, the five largest for-profit schools reported that government grants and loans accounted for 77.4 percent of their revenue.

Really, North Carolina, on this blog I have facetiously asked, what's the matter with a lot of different states, but you really have some 'splaining to do as to how you managed to elect someone as purely odious as Representative Virginia Foxx.


Bonus: "But you say that we're the assholes...because we bitched about the hassles...while you're sleeping in your castle"

ACT College (Virginia) Abruptly Closes, Leaving Students Hanging

What's worse than graduating college with a beaucoup load of student loans? Having your college close abruptly leaving you with nothing to show for a beaucoup load of student loans. Here is InsideNOVA.com with the details:

Dreams were broken and students were left with crushing debt and nothing to show for it after ACT College abruptly closed its doors Tuesday.

In a letter to students and faculty, Jeff Moore, the president of the school that offered courses in medical assisting, health sciences and medical radiography at campuses in Alexandria, Arlington and Manassas, said the school was forced to close its doors after being denied recertification for federal financial assistance programs by the U.S. Department of Education.

Kaitlyn Zadroga moved from Millville, N.J., to learn to be a medical assistant, or MA, at the school’s Manassas campus and said she was looking to eventually make a life for herself as a nurse.

“I was going to be an MA and get my foot in the door and then be an RN. Apparently that’s not going to happen now,” said the 19-year-old Zadroga who joined 50 to 60 other students to protest at the school’s Manassas campus Wednesday.

Zadroga wasn’t the only student feeling there was nowhere to turn.

Lashanee Gaskins, had been at the school for five months and is on the hook for a $21,000 in student loans.

She said she got a text message Tuesday telling her that the school was closed indefinitely and that it was no longer certified.

“We’re out of our financial aid. People who have graduated have not received diplomas,” the 30-year-old mother of three said. “We’re stranded. We have nowhere to go. People are not accepting our credits from here to transfer, so we have to start all over.”

Gaskins said she gave up her home day-care business to attend ACT College and was looking to better her life.

“I just wanted something that was stable,” the Bristow woman said.

While some students got the letter from Moore saying that the college had worked with the federal Department of Education after a 2010-2011 audit left the school without financial assistance certification, others got phone calls telling them the school was closing. Still others learned of the closing through social networking sites.

Some didn’t find out until they showed up for classes Wednesday.

Sean Doheney, 29, a U.S. Army Reserves pharmacy technician studying radiology at the school, said the administration was heartless in not letting students know that it was having certification and financing problems.

“What they did to us is cruel to say the least,” said the 29-year-old Doheney, who spent $30,000 in grants and loans at the school and was only a few months away from graduating.

Moore’s letter also indicated that the family-owned business had been in negotiations to sell, but that the deal had fallen through when the department refused to release funds that Moore said were due the school.

In the letter, Moore said the department “threw up one last roadblock which caused the deal to fall apart.”

Right here you see yet another problem with private, for profit colleges that prey upon lower income students, loading them up with debt to obtain degrees of often dubious value. The article doesn't state why the Department of Education chose to pull the school's certification, but we can only assume given that shady outfits like the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University are still allowed to operate, there must have been some pretty bad management going on at the very least.

Senior Citizens Have $36 Billion In Outstanding Student Loans

This is a good companion piece to the post I made yesterday about CNN being in denial that there may be a crisis in the student loan industry. It's bad enough that many young adults are carry huge education-related debt burdens, but now it also appears that student loans are going to follow some people right into the grave. Here is Yahoo News with the story:

New research from the New York Fed shows Americans 60 years and older owe a collective $36.5 billion in outstanding student loans. More than 10 percent of these indebted seniors are delinquent on their loans, which means they may field calls from persistent debt collectors and be forced to offer up parts of their Social Security checks to satisfy their decades-old debts, the Washington Post reports.

Most people with student loans are under 40, but because this type of loan cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, the debt can follow a person around for life. The average amount due from all student loan borrowers is $23,300, according to the New York Fed's data, while the median amount is $12,800. On average, college graduates make significantly more over their lifetimes than high school graduates and face a lower unemployment rate. But college costs have skyrocketed over the past 30 years, and the potential payoff of a college education varies widely, depending on which subject a person majors in and the value and reputation of the college.

Notice how that last bit almost perfectly mirrors the propaganda put forth in the CNN story? It almost like the media collaborates in the lies it tells the public. Who would have ever thought?


Bonus: "Old man, look at my life...I'm a lot like you were (or maybe are now)"

Media Denial Porn: CNN Says "There Is No Student Loan Crisis"

Great news, America! Just because the total value of student loans recently topped (cue Dr. Evil) One TREEEEELION Dollars, and the rate of student loan defaults has been skyrocketing, there is no student loan "crisis." So says CNN, the so-called, "Worldwide Leader in News," which back around 2005 or so was, like the rest of the mainstream media, just as confident that there was no so-called "housing bubble." Here is the story in all of its denialist glory:

Total student loan debt has topped $1 trillion ... but there's no need to panic.

Most borrowers have a reasonable amount of debt, and the total balance is not likely to cause major damage to the economy like the mortgage crisis did, experts say.

Wow, I am so relieved that the "experts" have chimed in. Because the "experts" the mainstream media consults about the issues it chooses to report are ALWAYS right. It is perfectly evident by just how fantastic the economy has been preforming in recent years, how cheap energy prices have remained and also how swimmingly that whole Iraq War thing they were cheerleading for turned out. Damn, I might as well just end this article right here.

"I don't think it's a bubble," said Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of Finaid.org, a financial aid website. "Most students who graduate college are able to repay their loans."

So exactly which orifice did you pull THAT factoid from, Mr. Kantrowitz? Yes, it is technically true that the vast majority of student loans are not in default. But it is also true that the majority of student loans were issued to those who completed their educations before the financial crisis hit and got into the job market before the doors slammed shut. In fact, your idiotic statement is directly contradicted by the very next paragraph in the article:

This is not to say that there aren't problems with student loans, which now exceed the amount of credit card debt and auto loans. Students are taking on more debt, on average, and more than a quarter of borrowers are behind on their payments. And a hefty debt load could delay recent graduates' purchase of a home or starting a business.

Given how few high paying jobs are now being created during the "recovery," that sure sounds like a building crisis to me. Kind of like the housing bubble circa 2006 when the first signs of distress started to appear.

But all the talk of a crisis or bubble in the student loan industry is exaggerated, experts say.

Damn, there they are again. Those nebulous "experts." Gotta love those guys.

Nevertheless:

What's raising red flags is that the default rates on federal loans are climbing. They hit 8.8% in 2009, nearly double the rate five years earlier, according to the most recent Department of Education figures.

This jump is being fueled in particular by for-profit colleges, which have default rates of 15%, prompting federal officials to put in new rules. Now, schools with excessive default rates can lose their eligibility for the federal loan program.

Still, heavy debt loads can make it tough for young adults to establish themselves, especially these days. The Great Recession has made it tougher for young adults to find a job.

The unemployment rate for those age 16 to 24 with bachelor's degrees stood at 8.1% in February, up from 4.6% four years earlier. Many others find themselves underemployed.

"Having a lot of student debt can make a person's life very difficult," said Lauren Asher, president of the Project on Student Debt.

It is really hard not to get the feeling that CNN decided what the editorial slant on this article was going to be before they even conducted any interviews. So ultimately, what is the reasoning for claiming that that there is not student loan crisis?

But workers with bachelor's degrees earn about $650,000 more over their lifetime than their peers who only have high school diplomas, a recent Pew Research Center analysis found.

"It's an economic investment," said Sarah Turner, professor of economic and education at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. "It's not going to work for everyone, but on average, it has a high return."

Kantrowitz expects defaults to climb for another year, before starting to decline. That's because the economy is slowly strengthening and unemployment rates are coming down.

"The defaults are not unexpected, considering the aftermath of the downturn," he said.

Ah-ha! There it is! The tired old "business-as-usual" argument that says things will get better just because they have always gotten better before, spewed forth by a university professor who has every economic incentive in the world to deny that there is a student loan crisis. There is also no consideration given to the fact that the era of cheap oil-fueled economic growth is over and that we have entered a new paradigm of permanent economic contraction.

It's incredible how CNN allows blind faith to override all of the various facts presented right in in their own article. Since this is what passes for "journalism" in America these days, no wonder so few people out there truly understand our real predicament.


Bonus: "Everybody knows these are rock hard times...I gotta make it through...these are rock hard times"

Education and healthcare as sources of middle class deprivation?

I have written about the coming middle class deprivation due to the rising cost of healthcare, education, housing, and energy prices.

In this context, Stephen Rose has two excellent graphics in The Atlantic. The first shows the relative changes in prices of household consumption basket in the US over 60 years. Health care and education stand out as items which have experienced the biggest increases in prices.



The second shows the relative changes in the shares of items in that basket over the past 40 years. Here too health care stands out. Its share of the household consumption basket has risen from 8.1% in 1967 to 18% in 2007.



Necessities like food and clothing, which gobbled up 42% of our spending in 1947, have dwindled to just 16% of spending by 2007.

The larger point, of relevance to countries like India, is that poverty and middle-class deprivation in the coming years will be driven by the increasing cost of health care and higher education.

Community Colleges Downsize Programs

This story interested me because I am myself a proud graduate of a community college (the one eventually built at the site in the photo above, in fact, although it was later renamed "Highland"), with the Associates Degree to prove it. Being lower middle class with divorced parents who were unable to help fund my college education, attending the local community college in my town and getting all of my basic college courses out of the way cheaply before moving on to university was a big reason why I was able to eventually earn a Bachelor's Degree without piling up any student loan debt. At the time, the tuition at my community college, though far lower than college costs today, was still about one-fourth of that of even the average public university.

Anyway, here are the details from USA Today:

Community colleges across the USA, faced with tight budgets and competing priorities, are downsizing or shuttering programs that in many cases have been held near and dear for years by students and other local constituents.

•Texarkana College in Texas is one of the latest schools to drop intercollegiate sports.
•A group of older adults is working to keep alive some version of Santa Barbara City College's continuing education division, which offers free classes in subjects such as financial planning and pastry-making.

•Starting this summer, Pima Community College in Tucson will no longer offer remediation for incoming adult students who fail a seventh-grade-level test of reading, writing and math.

Two-year schools, established to serve the needs of their local communities, "can't do it all anymore," says Suzanne Miles, Pima's interim president. She estimates the school's decision will affect no more than 2,000 students this fall.

State funding cuts are one culprit. For instance, state funding for California community colleges has been slashed $809 million, or 12%, since 2007-08. Another driver: a growing emphasis on improving degree-completion rates and retraining displaced workers. President Obama has made both central to his higher education agenda.

And thus is a sensible higher education option for working and middle class families that won't burden their children with unpayable debt slowly falling by the wayside.


Bonus: A little tune from the best damn college band from back when I was in school...and a good anthem for how I feel in middle age

Education Advocate SHOCKED That Standardized Tests Are About Corporate Profits And Not Learning

I've written here before that I always find it amusing when some individual who remains comfortably asleep in their Matrix pod has a brief moment of lucidity in which truth about a certain aspect of the system which enslaves them is revealed. If only they would grasp ahold of that one revelation and start asking larger questions, they might just wake up and start to realize the truth. Sadly, they never do.

That's a long winded introduction to an op-ed piece by a woman named Wendy Lecker that appeared last Friday in the Stamford Advocate, protesting the expanded use of standardized testing nationwide. Lecker starts off well enough:

Amid all the talk of the proposed teacher evaluation system, one major effect is not being discussed -- the exponential increase in standardized tests that these evaluations demand.

The proposed system requires one-fifth of every teacher's evaluation to be based on a standardized test. Thus, instead of having standardized tests in reading, writing, math in grades 3-8 and 10, and science in grades 5, 8 and 10, our children will now endure standardized tests in every grade and every subject, from kindergarten art to high school gym.

Is this the direction in which we, parents, want our schools to go? With the standardized tests we have now, our children's education is being narrowed. All over this state, art, music, social studies and foreign language courses are being squeezed out to prep for CMTs and CAPTs.
Not only is our curriculum being narrowed, but so is the way our children learn. They are being trained how to give canned answers to prepackaged questions, rather than learning how to think for themselves. Both teachers and students are increasingly suffering through mind-numbing scripted lessons.

Students, especially those in the neediest districts, are being denied the opportunity for a rich and varied education because of the pressure put upon districts to increase test scores in just a few subjects. Imagine what will happen when high-stakes tests are implemented in every subject. Instead of a piece of clay or a paintbrush, a 6-year-old will now be handed a worksheet. Far-fetched? It is already happening in Colorado.

This is not what I want for my children.

Lecker then goes on to ask the key question:

It makes me wonder what policy makers want from public schools. Part of the push for more tests stems from the new Common Core Standards -- touted as the answer to our achievement failures. Yet countries with national standards fare no better in educational achievement than those without. Every state has consistent standards, but achievement varies widely. And the Common Core Standards themselves have been found to be in the "mediocre" range when compared to existing state standards across the country.

To her credit, Lecker actually comes up with a good answer to her own question:

If new standards will do nothing to improve learning, why were they pushed so aggressively? The comments of Joanne Weiss, chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, are telling. She wrote in the Harvard Business Review that the Common Core "radically alters the market ... Previously, these markets operated on a state-by-state basis, and often on a district-by-district basis. But the adoption of common standards and shared assessments means that education entrepreneurs will enjoy national markets where the best products can be taken to scale."

Our children as a market for the testing and textbook industry.

Ding...ding...ding...ding...ding...ding...that is the CORRECT answer. Johnny, please tell the contestant what she's won on today's show.

Actually, I'm being a bit facetious. Unfortunately, Ms. Lecker didn't actually win anything. Having correctly identified that major motivation behind the standardized testing scam, she then proceeds to lose her nerve and become all mealy-mouthed:

Education is the key to good citizenship. The skills needed to be a responsible citizen are not those measured from a writing prompt or scantron. Students must be able to do things like analyze events in history and their impact today, discern the connections between disease and health policy, and collaborate with each other and their teachers.

Good citizenship is sorely needed in our nation today.

In 2008, the U.S. began its slide in the "competitiveness" index of the World Economic Forum, from No. 1 to its current No. 5 position. Not surprisingly, the WEF attributed this decline not to how eighth-graders did in math, but rather to our macroeconomic policies, and to the political intransigence that is preventing change.

Similarly, the officials rebuked by Connecticut's Supreme Court last week for illegally taking over Bridgeport's Board of Education had superior language skills, contending that the law requiring training of board members did not really mean "require." Their failure was in placing politics above the public good.

How can we ensure that the next generation can fix the problems we are leaving them? Our children need to be exposed to a wide variety of subjects, writing, teaching styles and personalities in order to make their own way in school and in life. Students and teachers in Connecticut have so many different life experiences and perspectives. This diversity is the key to tolerance and to innovation. However, if we insist on homogenizing our children's thinking, preparing them only for success on tests, we will indeed maintain the status quo that is stifling the progress of our society.

No doubt, Ms. Lecker. But what exactly do you plan to DO about it other than to just write a crabby op-ed article? Yes, the corporations and their profit motives now control every aspect of your child's education, from the "Pink Slime" being served in the school cafeterias, to the standardized textbooks in the classrooms, to the advertising being placed plastered on school facilities by school districts desperate to raise revenues. And you know what? That is EXACTLY the way the policy makers, whose campaign contributions come from those very same corporations, want it.

If you don't want your children exposed to all that you really have only one choice: homeschool 'em. I know homeschooling gets a bad rap because a lot of fundamentalists do it, but I have a relative who a decade ago became disgusted with the teaching of standardized test material in her local school system and did exactly that. And her three children, all of whom are reaching college age now, are doing quite well, thank you.

Because you see, Ms. Lecker, you can bitch and moan about our corporatized education system all you want. It isn't going to do you any good. Your choice is very simple, put up with it or drop out of it. Because as long as there are big bucks to be made off of it by those who really run things, there is no way your are going to reform the completely rotten edifice from within.


Bonus: At the risk of this clip being overused by the reality based community, it really is worth watching repeatedly just to keep reminding yourself of the real truth

The U.S. Air Force Is Cutting 10,000 Positions--Not That Mitt Romney Noticed

Dovetailing with similar announcements by the Navy and the Army, the U.S. Air Force today announced that it was making personnel cutbacks due to budget restraints. Here is the Air Force Times with the story:

The Air Force intends to cut its force by 10,000 airmen in fiscal 2013, but service leaders said Friday that they don’t intend to employ involuntary cuts in the active force to reach that goal.

The service says it plans to trim 5,100 guardsmen, 3,900 active-duty members and 900 reservists in the next fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.

Given these moves, you would expect that it will be much more difficult for applicants to get accepted into the military than it used to be. And given the continued crappy job market, far fewer of those already serving are going to be inclined to leave the service prior to retirement, which means less turnover.

And yet, as reported by Current.com, here was Willard Mitt Romney's brilliant suggestion last Monday on how young adults can pay off their student loan debt:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Monday told a high school senior not to expect any help from the government for college tuition unless he joined the military.

At a town hall-style campaign event in Mahoning Valley, Ohio, a student who was hoping to go to college next year asked the candidate what assistance he would provide “with regards to college tuition.”

“Recognize that college is expensive,” Romney explained. “You don’t want to have huge debts. I know that it would be popular for me to stand up and say I’m going to give you government money to make sure you pay for your college. But I’m not going to promise that. What I’m going to tell you is shop around, get a good price.”

“I feel that if you are willing to serve your country in the military for instance, that’s a place where we’re going to say, ‘Yeah, we’ll give you help,’” the candidate added.

Bad enough that the predatory student loan industry is saddling so many students with onerous debts, but now the likely Republican presidential nominee is advising them them to join a military that is downsizing and may well not even have a position for them.

Yet Romney went on to laughably contend:

“Don’t take on too much debt, and don’t expect the government to forgive the debt that you take on. Recognize that you’re going to have to pay it back. I want to make sure that every kid in this country that wants to go to college gets a chance to go to college.”

I swear, you really can't make this shit up.


Boston: Just because Romney is also from Massachusetts. To answer the question posed by the song, Willard has no Earthly idea

Translating teaching to learning

I have an op-ed in Mint today which explores a data-driven, child-centric approach to improving the abysmal student learning levels in our primary schools.

Pink Slime: It's What's For Lunch At Your School

You know things are getting crazy in this country when a "food product" that has even been rejected by McDonald's is deemed suitable school lunches. Here is Common Dreams with the details:

"Pink slime," the mixture of connective tissue and beef scraps also known as "Lean Beef Trimmings," made news last month when McDonald's announced it would no longer use the controversial product. However, a report today shows that the U.S. Department of Agriculture thinks it is still a suitable product for the nation's children, as it is going to purchase millions of pounds of the product for the national school lunch program.

Okay, that sounds pretty gross. What are the particulars?

Partners in ‘Slime’: Feds Keep Buying Ammonia-treated Ground Beef for School Lunches

Made by grinding together connective tissue and beef scraps normally destined for dog food and rendering, BPI’s Lean Beef Trimmings are then treated with ammonia hydroxide, a process that kills pathogens such as salmonella and E. coli. The resulting pinkish substance is later blended into traditional ground beef and hamburger patties. [...]

The USDA, which plans to buy 7 million pounds of Lean Beef Trimmings from BPI [Beef Products, Inc.] in the coming months for the national school lunch program, said in a statement that all of its ground beef purchases “meet the highest standard for food safety.” [...]

...the USDA now finds itself in the odd position of purchasing a product that has recently been dropped by fast-food giants McDonald’s, Burger King and Taco Bell.

You have to love the audacity of an administration which basks in the publicity of a First Lady who is supposedly all about getting children to eat healthy that does nothing to stop practices like this. Hey, liberals and progressives, when are you going to get it through your thick skulls that Obama the champion of the people is nothing but a Hologram, and his wife is merely part of the image?

The story itself ends with a priceless quote:

Retired microbiologist Carl Custer told The Daily:

“We originally called it soylent pink. We looked at the product and we objected to it because it used connective tissues instead of muscle. It was simply not nutritionally equivalent [to ground beef]. My main objection was that it was not meat.”

Nope, but I would gather that it s a lot cheaper. Which means the government doesn't have to pay as much while the company makes a big fat profit. Everybody wins. Well, except the kids, of course.


Bonus: Next up, The Jimbo Burger

Student Loan Delinquency Hits $85 Billion

As I've said before on this blog, sometimes I hate being right. I've asserted a number of times that predatory student loans are another massive financial bubble just waiting to pop, and now here comes the confirmation from Bloomberg:

About $85 billion in U.S. student loan debt, or 10 percent of the outstanding balance, was delinquent in the third quarter of 2011.

Of the 37 million borrowers who have student-loan balances, 14 percent, or about 5.4 million people, have at least one past due student-loan account, according to a report posted today on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s website.

As many as 47 percent of student-loan borrowers “appear to be in deferral or forbearance,” and didn’t have to make payments as of the third quarter, according to the report. The district bank reported last week that debt from educational loans in the fourth quarter was $867 billion, higher than credit-card debt, according to a survey of consumer credit. Special attention should be paid to these student-loan delinquencies compared with other household debt, the authors wrote.

“Some special accounting used for student loans, not applicable to other types of consumer debt, makes it likely that the delinquency rates for student loans are understated,” wrote the economists, Meta Brown, Andrew Haughwout, Donghoon Lee, Maricar Mabutas and Wilbert van der Klaauw.

Note the two portions of this report I highlighted in bold, both of which indicate that the problem is far worse than the headline figure. Nearly half of the loans are held by people who are going to college right now or have just graduated, who have not yet discovered or are just now discovering how bleak their prospects of finding a good job are even with that degree the placed themselves deeply in debt to obtain. Secondly, accounting gimmicks are also likely helping to hide the extent of the problem, just like in the mortgage industry.

The big question is just how long it will take before students and their parents finally begin to realize that there has been a sea change in the economy and that a college degree is no longer a ticket to the American dream of middle class respectability. Blind faith is ll that is holding up this whole creaking edifice, but then again you could also say that about the economy at large.


Bonus: They say you gotta have faith...but you should never have Blind Faith

Kaplan College closing Pembroke Pines (Florida) Campus

Sounds like trouble is a-brewing at another one of America's largest and most predatory for-profit colleges. Here is the South Florida Business Journal with the details:

The Kaplan College campus in Pembroke Pines will close in 2013, according to its website.

The for-profit university is a subsidiary of the Washington Post Co., which has experienced trouble in its education division. Over the past few years, Kaplan Continuing Education laid off 137 people in Fort Lauderdale, Kaplan University eliminated 55 jobs in South Florida and Kaplan Virtual Education let go of 88 workers in Hollywood.

The admissions practices at Kaplan College’s Pembroke Pines campus were criticized as misleading to students in a 2010 Government Accountability Office report. The college closed admissions there for a few months in late 2010. Its enrollment dropped from 160 to about 53.

Note which company it is that owns Kaplan. So do you still trust the Washington Post to give you the straight scoop regarding the nationwide scam that is for profit colleges?


Bonus: If Kaplan College ever fields a football team, this really should be the fight song

Student Loan Debt Is Stifling Home Sales

Today must be the day for posting news articles that confirm previous assertions I have made here before on TDS. Dove tailing with this morning's post about how the jobs now being added to the economy are lower paying and have fewer benefits than those destroyed during the financial crash, here comes a story from Bloomberg Businessweek about how student loan debt is helping to stifle a recovery in the housing market:

Last year outstanding education debt passed credit-card debt for the first time, according to Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org, a student loan website. Totaling close to $1 trillion, America’s mounting pile of outstanding student debt is a growing drag on the housing recovery, keeping first-time home buyers on the sidelines and limiting the effectiveness of record-low interest rates.

According to a recent Federal Reserve study, only 9 percent of 29- to 34-year-olds got a first-time mortgage from 2009 to 2011, compared with 17 percent 10 years earlier. “First-time home buyers are typically an important source of incremental housing demand, so their smaller presence in the market affects house prices and construction quite broadly,” Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said at a homebuilders’ conference in Orlando on Feb. 10.

Recent college graduates carry an average debt load of more than $25,000, limiting their ability to qualify for mortgages even if they’re able to land a job in a market with an unemployment rate of 9 percent for 25- to 34-year-olds. Dubbing it a “student loan debt bomb,” the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys (NACBA) warned on Feb. 7 about the effects of rising student debt on recent graduates, parents who co-signed their loans, and older Americans who’ve gone back to school for job training.

“Just as the housing bubble created a mortgage debt overhang that absorbs the income of consumers and renders them unable to engage in consumer spending that sustains the economy, so too are student loans beginning to have the same effect, which will be a drag on the economy for the foreseeable future,” John Rao, vice president of the NACBA, said on a conference call.

People aged 25 to 34 made up 27 percent of all home buyers in 2011, the lowest share in the past decade and six percentage points below their 33 percent share in 2001, according to the National Association of Realtors. “Students coming out of college are burdened with more debt than traditionally they have been, and they are also coming into an economy that is underperforming previous recoveries,” says Rick Palacios, a senior research analyst at John Burns Real Estate Consulting in Irvine, Calif.

Palacios says first-time buyers are key to a housing recovery because they allow current owners to move into larger, pricier homes. “Move-up buyers need somebody to purchase their homes to move,” he says. “You need that first leg in the recovery to materialize.”

Since the overall number of first-time home buyers has fallen, people aged 25 to 34 still accounted for 52 percent of that group last year, near the average since 2005, according to the Realtors group. Still, almost 6 million Americans in that group lived with their parents in 2011, up from 4.7 million when the recession began in 2007, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

That quote from Bernanke really makes my head hurt given that every Federal Reserve policy since the financial crash has been designed to prop up the big banks, and yet there he is admitting that the economy cannot recover unless real people have money in their pockets. The housing market remains deeply mired in the doldrums despite the Fed's Zero Interest Rate Policy driving 30-year, fixed rate mortgages below 4%. Bernanke is basically admitting that the Fed policy has been a complete failure, and yet still no one in authority has called him on it.


Bonus: If you've got the time, here is "Loan Me a Dime"

It's Layoff Notice Time For Local School Districts Again

It's usually around this time of year that school districts around the country facing budget deficits start issuing layoff notices to teachers and other school employees in anticipation of some of them losing their jobs before the next school year. None this year have been as dramatic as the announcement by the Woonsocket, Rhode Island, school district, as reported by WPRI.com:

The Woonsocket School Department is considering issuing pink slips to all 700 district employees.

The school committee will discuss the possibility at a special meeting Wednesday night.

The move would give the district more flexibility to handle anticipated budget cuts.

The Woonsocket Teachers Guild plans to challenge the plan. They're urging residents of the city to stand up for the teachers, saying that the termination notices would disrupt the quality of education for their children.

"While not all educators receiving notices would actually be let go, giving termination notices to all teachers and paraprofessionals sends the wrong message to the community about the city's commitment to public education," said Teachers Guild President Jeffrey Partington in a statement.

Ummmm, actually, Mr. Partington, you and your membership may not like it, but the move is actually sending a message that you and the community desperately need to hear: business as usual as you and everyone else in this country has known it their whole lives is over. It's time to adjust to the new realities. If your membership wants to save their colleagues' jobs, everyone needs to take a pay cut. It sucks, but there really isn't much of an alternative. Even soaking the rich with much higher taxes (a move I strongly favor from a basic fairness standpoint) would only serve to kick the can on this problem down the road for a short time before it becomes inevitable anyway as state and local government revenues continue to collapse.

If it is any comfort to you, Woonsocket is hardly alone. Check out these other school layoff headlines around the country from the Daily Job Cuts website for just this month alone:

The Elk Grove Unified School District CA - 100+ Layoff Notices

Update: Long Beach Unified School Board CA - Approves 308 Layoffs

Saugus Union School District CA - 80

Paradise Unified School District CA - 31 Job Cuts on Board Meetings Agenda tonight

The Temecula Valley Unified School District CA - Vote Tuesday on 120 Layoffs

Saugus Union School District - 84 Layoff Notices

Portsmouth RI Schools - 29

East Providence RI - Layoff Total reaches 37

Lakota Local Schools Ohio - 69 Proposed Layoffs

West suburban Indian Prairie District 204 IL - Considers 100 Layoffs

Canton Central School District NY - 44 Layoffs Possible

San Lorenzo School District CA - 133 Pink Slips to Temporary Teachers

Virginia Beach Schools - Budget Cuts Could Mean Layoffs

Utica NY Schools - 150 Job Cuts Next Year, Worst Case

Philadelphia School District - 90

Paradise Schools CA - 31 Layoffs Approved

Staunton (Virginia) Schools - 42

Athens School District PA Considers Closing Three Elementary Schools

And I'm sure there will be plenty more to come during the next couple of months.


Bonus: Someday this will be the only high school left

Broke Buffalo School District Provides Free Plastic Surgery To All Teachers

You can't explain this. No, I mean really, you can try all day and you will never come up with an explanation for this story from a local Buffalo television station that makes any sense whatsoever:

As thousands of teachers face layoffs across the country, teachers in Buffalo, New York are getting lipo? Yep. And nose jobs and whatever else they want. All on the taxpayers' dime. How is this happening?

This Buffalo plastic surgeon has a lot of happy patients. Dr. Kulwant S. Bhangoo says, "Let's just suppose I was a woman weighed 300 pounds, and I lost 150-160 pounds."

Indeed, that's what happened to Buffalo school teacher Valerie Akauloa, but it's not just the results that make her happy, it's the sweet deal that she gets.

The sweet deal that all the 3,400 teachers in Buffalo are eligible to get under one of their insurance plan options, they are billed nothing for any plastic surgery procedure, such as botox, liposuction, tummy tucks, and there is no deductible.

Linda Tokarz teaches second grade and says she gets regular treatments. She says, "I think its great for us. I wouldn't want to see it taken away."

Dr. Kulwant Bhangoo has been a plastic surgeon in Buffalo for almost four decades. He says, "I feel the teachers have paid their dues and it would be wrong to take it away from them."

While he does have plenty on non-teacher patients, Dr. Bhangoo does say three out of every 10 are Buffalo teachers and the school district's insurance covers every single penny. They will come in for hair removal on their face, liposuction, breast enhancement, and rhinoplasty.

Dr. Bhangoo is one of many plastic surgeons who advertise in where else the teachers union newsletter.

Last year, Buffalo's schools spent $5.9 million on plastic surgery which is also known as a cosmetic rider. And Buffalo teachers have had this rider for nearly four decades.

Now you might think Buffalo's school district must be flush with cash to be offering perks like free plastic surgery, right? Wrong. Louis Petrucci, the president of the Buffalo Board of Education says he is projecting a $42 million deficit in next year's school budget.

You don't have to be a brain surgeon to know that a plastic surgeon or a teacher would like this policy more than the typical taxpayer. But the teachers will tell you there is more to the story. They say the teachers contract with the city expired nearly a decade ago negotiations for a new one have failed.

And they add they are woefully underpaid.

That last sentence might be true, but its hard to feel any sympathy for a group of people who didn't long ago demand that this utter frivolous benefit be dropped so that maybe they could get a better pay raise. The story doesn't explain it, but I would really like to know what brainiac thought providing free plastic surgery to the teachers was a good idea in the first place.


Bonus: This video is dedicated to the Buffalo public school teachers

Corporatocracy In Action: Seeking Money, Texas Schools Turn to Advertisements

I guess it isn't enough that everyone who doesn't make a conscious decision to try to avoid being overexposed to our relentless media culture is now bombarded with advertising nearly every waking minute, nor that children are sucked into the hologram's vortex while still wearing diapers. In a desperate scramble to raise revenues, school districts in Texas have now decided to turn their school buildings and buses into billboards for corporate America. Here is the New York Times with the details:

The rooftop of a suburban high school is not a location that companies usually consider prime advertising real estate. But in Humble Independent School District, it may be. The district’s high school lies directly in a flight path for Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston.

Although the rooftop plan has yet to come to fruition, Humble I.S.D. has already sold the naming rights to nearly every piece of its football stadium, including the entryway, the press box and the turf. Its school buses carry advertisements for the Houston Astros and local hospitals, among others.

The school district is pioneering a practice that an increasing number of districts across the state are adopting: selling advertisements on pieces of school property to help make up for some of the money lost through state budget cuts.

Advertising revenue can benefit school districts that primarily have two sources of income — what they receive from local taxpayers and what they get from the state and federal governments.

But with school leaders under pressure to find creative financing sources and few state-level guidelines about what is appropriate, some researchers who study the impact of ads in schools question whether schools fully grasp the consequences of commercialism creeping into public schools.

The proliferation of companies like Steep Creek Media, which acts as a middleman between districts and would-be advertisers, has made it simpler for schools to get into advertising. Steep Creek offers an attractive proposition for schools — and business is booming, according to its owner and founder, Cynthia Calvert, who represents 35 districts and has had to turn down handfuls of clients.

In exchange for what usually amounts to a cut of 40 percent of the profits, the company lures potential advertisers with a diverse menu of placements: on buses, textbook covers, in-school television monitors, scoreboards and Web sites.

Districts have the ultimate say over what ads they accept, but Steep Creek handles all the work in between, including graphic design.

Easier access to advertisers may not always translate to a more thoughtful process for schools, however.

“There doesn’t seem to be a real handle on the part of the school districts for what they are getting into,” said Faith Boninger, a researcher with the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who studies how advertising in schools affects students.

Ms. Boninger said many districts entered into advertising agreements with an attitude of “let’s do it, we need the money” without understanding the psychological and educational costs to students.

Having advertisements in schools is not consistent with the teaching of critical thinking, Ms. Boninger said. And what is being sold — fast food, for instance — can run counter to subjects being taught, like nutrition. She added that the polarized gender stereotypes and materialist perspectives that may come with exposure to advertisements had been shown to harm students’ self-esteem.

Gee, ya think? If anything, advertising is the antithesis of critical thinking. Its whole aim is to get people to respond emotionally and impulsively and then act in a way that is likely NOT in their best interest. (My God, Loser, if you don't go into hock in order to buy our shitty product, then you aren't cool and all your friends are gonna LAUGH at you!) It is in no way, shape or form conducive to learning and would not be allowed anywhere near a classroom in any society that was serious about educating its young people.

It's no accident that during the past couple of generations as television, advertising and now the Internet have become more and more sophisticated, our public discourse has corroded so dramatically. Whacked out charlatans like Lyndon LaRouche used to be ostracized from mainstream political discourse. Nowadays, however, the likes of Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, Sarah Palin and Rick Perry are treated by the media as serious presidential candidates despite routinely making reality challenged pronouncements that would have made even LaRouche blush. That can only happen in a society in which reason and logic are no longer valued by a substantial percentage of the population.

It's a sad state of affairs, and I see no indication that it is going to turn around for the better any time soon.


Bonus: It was bad enough when they started using the media to try and "educate" us dumbasses back in the 1970s...thinking back on it, these silly videos never helped my learning one damn bit even though I'd seen them so many times I could recite the songs by heart

Income inequality and educational outcomes

Widening income inequality is arguably one of the biggest challenges facing the economy and society in both developing and developed countries. Addressing it assumes greater significance given the dynamics of forces shaping global economic trends. For a variety of factors, these forces institutionally favor children from families with higher incomes.

Children from more well-off families have numerous socially institutionalized advantages that put them well-ahead of those from poorer families. One, they are most likely to attend the best or better schools. Two, their parents can afford to spend more time and resources with them and show much greater interest in their education. Three, their social and family environment is much less likely (than that of children from poorer backgrounds) to be detrimental to the child's learning process. Four, they attend good early childhood education centers and other learning institutions, which gives them a head start when they join school. Finally, they are more likely to have exposure to various other non-school based, formal and non-formal literacy related platforms.

The Times has an excellent article that points to a sharp spurt in learning achievement gap over the past few decades between children from rich and poor family backgrounds.

A Stanford University study has found that the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students had grown by about 40% since the 1960s, and is now double the testing gap between blacks and whites. It analyzed 12 sets of standardized test scores starting in 1960 and ending in 2007 and compared children from families in the 90th percentile of income and children from the 10th percentile. It highlights the increased role of family incomes in determining children's learning levels,

"The relationship between parental education and children’s achievement has remained relatively stable during the last fifty years, whereas the relationship between income and achievement has grown sharply. Family income is now nearly as strong as parental education in predicting children’s achievement... a given difference in family incomes now corresponds to a 30 to 60 percent larger difference in achievement than it did for children born in the 1970s."

Another study by University of Michigan researchers that uses data from nearly 70 years finds the imbalance between rich and poor children in college completion — the single most important predictor of success in the work force — has grown by about 50 percent since the late 1980s.

"Wefind growing gaps between children from high- and low-income families in college entry, persistence, and graduation. Rates of college completion increased by only four percentage points for low-income cohorts born around 1980 relative to cohorts born in the early 1960s, but by 18 percentage points for corresponding cohorts who grew up in high-income families. Among men, inequality in educational attainment has increased slightly since the early 1980s. But among women, inequality in educational attainment has risen sharply, driven by increases in the education of the daughters of high-income parents. Sex differences in educational attainment, which were small or nonexistent thirty years ago, are now substantial, with women outpacing men in every demographic group."

Times points to the critical importance of early childhood education which gives children from better economic circumstances a head-start in the education race.

"Meredith Phillips, an associate professor of public policy and sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, used survey data to show that affluent children spend 1,300 more hours than low-income children before age 6 in places other than their homes, their day care centers, or schools (anywhere from museums to shopping malls). By the time high-income children start school, they have spent about 400 hours more than poor children in literacy activities."

Economix points to this intuitive explanation from a behavioural psychology perspective about the relationship between income deprivation and parenting outcomes. The implication is that well-off parents, being less likely to be hassled by their daily chores, are therefore more likely to have enough emotional energies to concentrate on their child's educational needs. They write,

"Good parenting requires psychic resources. Complex decisions must be made. Sacrifices must be made in the moment. This is hard for anyone, whatever their income: we all have limited reserves of self-control, and attention and other psychic resources... Low-income parents... face a tax on their psychic resources. Many things that are trifling and routine to the well-off give sleepless nights to those less fortunate."

Georgia College Students: "Without Food Stamps We Wouldn't Be Able to Eat"

Pardon me for being so crude, but I simply cannot think of another way to express my feelings here other than to ask the question: how many more ways can we fuck over our young adults in this country? We brainwash the poor kinds into thinking that the MUST have a college education in order to succeed in this society (even as that becomes more of a cruel lie with every passing year), send them to institutions of alleged higher learning which charge them exorbitant fees and then saddle them with massive amounts if student loan debt. And then, when some of them have the audacity to try to help support themselves by applying for food stamps, we cut off that meager support because its "too expensive." Here is a local Georgia television station with the story:

Georgia's college students are facing the prospect of the HOPE Scholarship paying less and less toward their tuition in the next few years.

So how are they dealing with rising tuition and fees?

Many are working whatever part-time jobs they can rustle up, mornings, nights and weekends. But they're also tapping into an unconventional form of student financial aid: food stamps.

The "Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program" is providing college students who qualify with $200 a month toward their groceries, making them part of the 20 percent of Georgia's population currently receiving the benefit.

Here are two students' appalling stories:

"With the budget cuts, students are definitely going to have to think of different ways to get money and finances for things such as groceries," said Danielle Ford, a GSU Junior. "So food stamps will definitely be a big help, absolutely. Without food stamps, they wouldn't be able to eat."

Taylor is a full-time student with a part-time job.

"As a full-time student, my bill usually comes up to about almost $5,000 a semester. That's tuition alone," he said.

On top of that are his books and fees and his rent for an off-campus apartment, which is $600 a month.

One of the reasons he moved out of a campus dorm, Taylor said, is that GSU was requiring him to pay, in addition to his room cost, about $1,700 a semester for the university's meal plan.

Now, living off-campus and buying his own groceries, he understands why students are tapping into the SNAP program.

"I mean, I think it helps," said Taylor, "because these are students that I know that [like me] are working, like, jobs! And they're really tight on money. These are people who actually really, really need it, and they tell me it's a big help."

Alas:

Last year, Michigan cut 30,000 students from its food stamp rolls by tightening up the requirements for approval, in order to save $75 million a year.

Sadly, these kids don't know it but they are learning some hard lessons about the new realities in modern day America. They'd be much better off dropping out of school and joining the Occupy movement than driving themselves ever deeper into debt chasing an American Dream than has long since turned into an epic nightmare.


Bonus: "Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders...here are the young men, where have they been? We knocked on the doors of hell's darkest chamber...pushed to the limits, we dragged ourselves in"