Tag Archives: social class

Summer break widens achievement gap

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Summer break may be welcomed by children but research shows that it contributes greatly to the achievement gap between students of different backgrounds:

Consider, first, the evidence for the summer fade effect. Taken together, a variety of studies indicate that students’ academic skills atrophy during the summer months by an amount equivalent to what they learn in a third of a school year, according to a review by Harris Cooper, a professor of education at Duke University, and several co-authors.

This deterioration, furthermore, varies substantially by income and race, and its impact persists even past childhood. Barbara Heyns, a sociologist at New York University who studied Atlanta schoolchildren in the late 1970s, found that although academic gains during the school year were not substantially correlated with income, summer decline was.

Subsequent studies have replicated the finding. Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle and Linda Olson of Johns Hopkins University, for example, found that the summer fade can largely explain why the gap in skills between children on either side of the socioeconomic divide widens as students progress through elementary school. Children from all backgrounds learn at similar rates during the school year, but each summer students of high socioeconomic status continue to learn while those of low socioeconomic status fall behind.

The impact is felt even years later. The learning differences that begin in grade school “substantially account” for differences by socioeconomic status in high-school graduation rates and in four-year college attendance, Alexander and his co-authors report.

This article adds some more information:

Many low-income kids actually make great progress in school from August to June, only to see much of it wiped away by an idle summer, he says. “We need to get over ourselves a little bit over our idyllic view of what summer is and what it’s supposed to be,” he adds.

A 2007 study by Johns Hopkins University researchers found that by the time students enter high school, “summer learning loss” accounts for roughly two-thirds of the nation’s achievement gap in reading between poor and middle-class students.

If the evidence is clear, how long until more districts go to reduced summer breaks or year-round school? Overcoming the culture of summer break could be difficult to do. Also, might we have a situation where wealthier districts continue summer break while less well-off districts try to combat this summer achievement decline?

“The New Elitists” are cultural omnivores

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A sociologist writes an op-ed in the New York Times discussing one of the more interesting findings in cultural sociology from the last two decades: upper-class people tend to be cultural omnivores.

You can tell a lot about people by looking at their music collections. Some have narrow tastes, mostly owning single genres like rap or heavy metal. Others are far more eclectic, their collections filled with hip-hop and jazz, country and classical, blues and rock. We often think of such differences as a matter of individual choice and expression. But to a great degree, they are explained by social background. Poorer people are likely to have singular or “limited” tastes. The rich have the most expansive.

We see a similar pattern in other kinds of consumption. Think of the restaurants cherished by very wealthy New Yorkers. Masa, where a meal for two can cost $1,500, is on the list, but so is a cheap Sichuan spot in Queens, a Papaya Dog and a favorite place for a slice. Sociologists have a name for this. Today’s elites are not “highbrow snobs.” They are “cultural omnivores.”

Omnivorousness is part of a much broader trend in the behavior of our elite, one that embraces diversity. Barriers that were once a mainstay of elite cultural and educational institutions have been demolished. Gone are the quotas that kept Jews out of elite high schools and colleges; inclusion is now the norm. Diverse and populist programming is a mainstay of every museum. Elites seem more likely to confront snobbish exclusion than they are to embrace it…

And so if elites have a culture today, it is a culture of individual self-cultivation. Their rhetoric emphasizes such individualism and the talents required to “make it.” Yet there is something pernicious about this self-presentation. The narrative of openness and talent obscures the bitter truth of the American experience. Talents are costly to develop, and we refuse to socialize these costs. To be an outstanding student requires not just smarts and dedication but a well-supported school, a safe, comfortable home and leisure time to cultivate the self. These are not widely available. When some students struggle, they can later tell the story of their triumph over adversity, often without mentioning the helping hand of a tutor. Other students simply fail without such expensive aids.

In an information age and knowledge economy, cultural capital matters. As Khan points out, cultural capital isn’t randomly distributed in society. Whether the upper classes acquire this capital through early advantages (as discussed by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers) or parenting styles (as discussed by Annette Lareau in Unequal Childhoods) or educational systems (as discussed by Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction), this is not simply a matter of taste as it can be parlayed into other forms of capital.

SI columnist doesn’t like having “sports sociologists” commenting on football and concussions

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A Sports Illustrated columnist takes issue with some recent comments from a sociologist about the future of football considering the growing knowledge about concussions:

Jay Coakley, a “sports sociologist” at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, recently said to a New York Times reporter, “”Football is really on the verge of a turning point here. We may see it in 15 years in pretty much the same place as boxing or ultimate fighting.”

A few things about that:

(1) Can we do a story on this topic now without input from a “sports sociologist”?

(2) That’s crazy.

That puts the NFL in a nice, hedge-rowed suburban box. That’s not where the NFL lives.

I haven’t done a study. Maybe someone has. But I’ve covered the NFL for close to 30 years. It is not Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. A majority of its players — and certainly, its stars — did not grow up with free and easy access to golf courses, tennis courts or any of the other options that parents evidently will be turning to now. I did a book with the former Chad Johnson. He grew up in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami, host of the pre-Super Bowl riot in 1989. Chad wasn’t exactly hanging out at Doral, practicing flop wedges.

Chad is more typical of the league than not. This isn’t to say parents or guardians of kids playing football in places like Liberty City are OK with their charges getting concussed. It’s to say that opportunities there are constricted, but the talent is not. If you want to declare, as Coakley did, that football faces UFC-status, you must also ignore the sociology of the game. Which is a strange thing for a sociologist to do.

A few thoughts:

1. I’m not sure what this writer has against sociologists. Jay Coakley is a sociologist who has written a lot in the sociology of sports, including being a co-author for a textbook on the subject that is now in its 11th edition. Perhaps the writer doesn’t think sociologists are qualified to talk about this specific subject? Perhaps the writer doesn’t think academics can really talk about sports? Both of these ideas seem silly: sociologists of sports do study things such as these and perhaps have more data and evidence to argue on this topic than the accumulated observations of journalists.

2. The writer argues that Coakley is suggesting football is more of a suburban sport (remember: a majority of Americans live in suburbs) while he suggests more NFL players come out of more desperate urban situations and will continue to see football as one of the only ways out, concussions or not. Both commentators could be right: perhaps there will always be some people who will want to play football while those with other options, given their class and income, choose other sports or vocations. But, having a sport with only lower-class urban residents could still change the sport; at the least, talents like Tom Brady would never become part of the game.

Race and gender divides in the creative class

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Another excerpt from Richard Florida’s new book suggests there are race and gender divides in the creative class:

A number of commentators have argued that women are better suited to the kinds of work demanded by the knowledge economy. Indeed, it is true that women make up the slight majority of the creative class, accounting for 52 percent of its members. It’s also true that a greater fraction of employed women hold creative class jobs (37.1 percent) than employed men (32.6 percent).

But Mellander and I found that creative class men earn about 40 percent more than creative class women—$82,009 versus $48,077—a gap of nearly $35,000. Some of this can be explained by differences in work experience, skills, education, and longer work hours. But even when we control for these factors, creative class men still outearn creative class women by a substantial $23,700—nearly 50 percent of the average salary for creative class women…

Race is the source of substantial divides within the creative class. More than eight in ten (80.9 percent) of creative class jobs are held by whites, who make up just 74 percent of the nation’s population. The rest are more or less evenly split among the three remaining racial groups—African Americans (6.8 percent), Hispanics (6.2 percent), and Asians (6.1 percent).

There is an interesting racial division of labor, so to speak, within the three great socioeconomic classes. Asian-Americans are by far the most heavily represented in creative class work. Nearly one-half (47 percent) of them work in creative class jobs, compared to roughly one-third (34 percent) of whites, 24 percent of African-Americans, and 18 percent of Hispanics.

Do I have to buy/read the book to get Florida’s solutions to this issue?

Richard Florida argues “class decides everything”

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In an excerpt from his new book, Richard Florida argues “class decides everything”:

But numerous indicators and metrics suggest that class does structure a great deal of American life. America lags behind many nations – from Denmark to the United Kingdom and Canada – in the ability of its people to achieve significant upward mobility. America’s jobs crisis bears the unmistakable stamp of class. This past spring, for example, the rate of unemployment for people who did not graduate from high school was 13 percent, substantially more than the overall rate of 8.2 percent and more than three times the 3.9 percent rate for college grads. At a time when the unemployment rate for production workers who contribute their physical labor was more than 10 percent, unemployment for professionals, techies and managers who work with their minds had barely broken 4 percent…

As fallible as Marx might have been about some things, his focus on class (not to mention his analysis of the tendency of capitalism to sporadically lurch into crisis) was eerily prescient. Marx was the first to see that class was deeper than income or education, or where different groups of people lived or what they could buy. It stemmed from their relationship to the economy, or as he referred to it, “the social relations of production.” Capitalism had only recently overturned the old feudal order of the agricultural age and replaced it with a distinctive class structure of its own, defined by two principle classes. Marx identified the bourgeoisie or capitalist class as those who owned and controlled the means of production; the proletariat or working class was comprised of those who performed physical labor. The rub, of course, was that members of the working class were only paid for a portion of the economic value they created. The owners’ profits were derived from the workers’ “surplus value” — the value they created but were not compensated for…

Three classes now predominate. In addition to the Working Class, which makes up just one in five workers (down from more than half in the 1950s) are the 40 million plus members of the Creative Class, who use their creativity in their work, roughly a third of the workforce; and the 60 million plus members of the Service Class who prepare and serve food, perform janitorial functions, take care of children and old people, and perform routine clerical and administrative functions. The Service Class accounts for some 47 percent of the work force.

These new class divisions undergird virtually every feature of American life.

I detect some ambivalence here: does class really decide everything or is that the interpretation of the headline writer? Perhaps more importantly, how do the effects of class stack up in (substantive) significance compared to other factors like race, gender, educational attainment, and where people live? This goes back to some older debates in sociology involving scholars like William Julius Wilson: is it really race or class that drives outcomes?

This excerpt also does not make clear all the classes into which Florida would place Americans. Three are mentioned here (service, creative, and working) but they would make up roughly 150 million people (hard to figure exactly from this cited paragraph), leaving out over 150 million Americans. Of course, Florida has some interest in the doings of the creative class so I wonder if his analysis is equally adroit in assessing the other categories.

All that said, I assume sociologists would like that another voice with some clout is reminding people that class matters whether some Americans want to believe it or not. It will be interesting to see, however, how many people buy Florida’s larger analysis and claims or whether they would prefer to stick to the creative class ideas which have proved popular.

Should we care that Apple pays its retail store employees relatively little money?

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The New York Times has a long piece about what Apple pays its retail store workers. Here are some of the details:

About 30,000 of the 43,000 Apple employees in this country work in Apple Stores, as members of the service economy, and many of them earn about $25,000 a year. They work inside the world’s fastest growing industry, for the most valuable company, run by one of the country’s most richly compensated chief executives, Tim Cook. Last year, he received stock grants, which vest over a 10-year period, that at today’s share price would be worth more than $570 million.

And though Apple is unparalleled as a retailer, when it comes to its lowliest workers, the company is a reflection of the technology industry as a whole…

“In the service sector, companies provide a little bit of training and hope their employees leave after a few years,” says Arne L. Kalleberg, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina. “Especially now, given the number of college kids willing to work for low wages.”

By the standards of retailing, Apple offers above average pay — well above the minimum wage of $7.25 and better than the Gap, though slightly less than Lululemon, the yoga and athletic apparel chain, where sales staff earn about $12 an hour. The company also offers very good benefits for a retailer, including health care, 401(k) contributions and the chance to buy company stock, as well as Apple products, at a discount…

“It’s interesting to ask why we find it offensive that Wal-Mart pays a single mother $9 an hour, but we don’t find it offensive that Apple pays a young man $12 an hour,” Mr. Osterman said. “For each company, the logic is the same — there is a line of people eager to take the job. In effect, we’re saying that our value judgments depend on the circumstances of the employee, not just supply and demand of the labor market.”

I find two things very interesting from the quoted sections above:

1. This is a reminder that we now live in the era of the service economy. While Apple may generate tremendous profits and have a really high stock price, the majority of its jobs are low wage. This is what our economy looks like today: many jobs are relatively low-trust and low-paying and not everyone will have an opportunity to parlay it into a better, more fulfilling job. One could criticize Apple for such policies but they are hardly the only company doing this and it appears to be effective for generating profits.

2. The difference in perception between Apple and Walmart is indeed intriguing. One company has a better image than the other. Both rely on similar methods as they look for ways to make their products in a more cost effective way (though they aren’t exactly operating in the same price levels in the market – it will be some time before we see Apple computers sold at Walmart), have a number of jobs overseas (or at least their suppliers do), and are looking for ways to maximize their market share. It would be interesting to know if any of the recent reports about Apple employees in China (see this NYT story about Foxconn) has influenced people’s perceptions of Apple as well as altered their consumption habits.

This story got me thinking: what would happen if US Apple retail store workers decided to unionize and demanded better wages (perhaps even a living wage)? Apparently there is an effort underway to unionize the stores:

“People have definitely listed [pay] as a top issue,” said Moll, who started the Apple Retail Workers Union in an attempt to unionize U.S. store workers. “Because of our low wages we often can’t afford to buy the technology that we sell.”

Would Apple strongly fight these efforts and if so, how much negative attention would they receive?

William Julius Wilson argues for “affirmative opportunity” rather than affirmative action

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Sociologist William Julius Wilson recently made an argument for “affirmative opportunity” rather than affirmative action:

In a paper entitled “Race and affirming opportunity in the Barack Obama era,” Wilson urges a move away from controversial quotas in favor of a merit-based system that features flexible criteria of evaluation, which assess, in addition to exam results, personal attributes such as perseverance, motivation, interpersonal skills, reliability, creativity and leadership qualities. Wilson calls this approach ‘affirmative opportunity.’ He writes:

“These new flexible, merit-based criteria would less likely exclude people who have as much potential to succeed as those from more privileged backgrounds. I call this approach, ‘affirmative opportunity’ not ‘affirmative action’ to signal a shift in emphasis away from quotas and numerical guidelines, which is how affirmative action has come to be understood—and widely resented. Instead, the emphasis is on achieving equality of opportunity, a principle that most Americans still support.”

Wilson dismisses some recent calls for a move to a class-based, rather than a race-based system, arguing that class-based affirmative action would still favor whites, who are not “weighed down by the accumulation of disadvantages that stem from racial restrictions”…

Wilson ends his paper with a plea that no-one should be able to enter a hospital ward of newborn babies and accurately predict their future social and economic position in society solely on the basis of their race and class. “Unfortunately, in many neighborhoods in the United States you can accurately make such predictions,” he says, before issuing a final call to President Obama to use the upcoming election debates to argue that ‘affirmative opportunity’ programs are the way forward in offering every American equality of life chances and putting an end to both economic and racial disadvantage for good.

It would be interesting to see some numbers in how this might play out compared to affirmative action. Couldn’t solely judging individuals open up room for more subjective judgments on factors like race and class?

Wilson’s ideas about the hospital ward sound similar to the pitch made in Waiting for Superman: do we really want children’s lives to be determined by a lottery? The documentary suggests this happens when kids are applying to better schools (only a small number are randomly selected) and Wilson suggests is taking place by which neighborhood a kid happens to be born in.

Wilson has long argued that systems to fight racism should help large numbers of Americans, not just specific groups as this breeds resentment.

Study: American “multiethnic neighborhoods are populated mainly by Latino and Asian families,” not by Whites and Blacks

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A new study in American Sociological Review shows that residential segregation still endures as “multiethnic neighborhoods are populated mainly by Latino and Asian families”:

Researchers who analyzed the mobility trends of more than 100,000 families in metropolitan areas over nearly three decades found that the majority of blacks and whites continue to live in neighborhoods with high concentrations of residents of their own race…

Sixty percent of families leaving black neighborhoods moved to a similar community and nearly 75 percent of whites transitioned from a mostly white neighborhood to another white area.

Only about 19 percent of blacks and 2.4 percent of whites moved to a multiethnic neighborhood.

Both whites and blacks were more likely to move to diverse areas with new housing, while there was more of the churning effect in older neighborhoods.

While recent figures might suggest that residential segregation has decreased in recent years, there are still some stark differences. The three most interesting findings to me:

1. The long-standing black-white differences continue to matter but the positions of Latinos and Asians within American society are more fluid (partially due to more immigration in the last half-century).

2. The summary also suggested the study found that there is more diversity in neighborhoods with newer housing as compared to neighborhoods with older housing stock. A couple of things could be happening here: this could be referring to more suburban neighborhoods and it could also be the result of class differences (newer housing often being more expensive to purchase).

3. I like the emphasis in this study on tracking where people move from and move to. In other words, do people move to similar kinds of neighborhoods over time or do they move up some sort of socioeconomic ladder? It sounds like there isn’t as much movement as people might think.

Participating in culturally elite activities related to lower BMI?

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A new sociological study suggests there is a relationship between participating in certain cultural activities and having a lower BMI:

The study uses survey data from 17 nations, most of which are in Europe. In each country, a representative sample of the population was asked not only about height and weight, but also about time spent in a variety of activities. These included reading, going to cultural events, socializing with family and friends, attending sporting events, watching TV, going shopping, and exercising.A scale that measures interest in ideas, art, and knowledge—by surveying the amount of time spent reading, attending cultural events, going to movies, and using the Internet—is associated as strongly as exercise with a lower body-mass index, or BMI (a measure of weight relative to height). In other words, reading and exercise appear similarly beneficial in terms of BMI.

In contrast, people participating in other activities such as watching TV, socializing, playing cards, attending sporting events, and shopping have higher average BMI. Although time spent reading and time spent watching TV both expend few calories, one is associated with lower weight, and the other with higher weight…

So why might reading and related cultural activities be associated with thinness? The social meaning of the activity rather than the activity itself must be important for weight control. Leisure-time activities involve more than the calories burned; they also reflect differences across social groups in motives and means for good health.

These sound like interesting findings but I wonder if this is a classic example of “correlation does not imply causation.” Since these cultural activities might be related to social class, how do these findings line up with current statistics about weight (and health) by social class?

French suburbs known as “zones of banishment”

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The French suburbs are getting more media attention in the lead-up to the run-off election. This article talks about the current status of the “urban sensitive zones”:

Inside the French suburbs, referred to here as “zones of banishment” or “the lost territories of France,” the 2012 presidential elections seemed like a good time to wake up the nation.

In a small office in the suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, a group of mostly Arab and African 20-somethings hit on an idea: Create a “crisis ministry of the suburbs.” It would address France’s ignorance about the 731 areas ringing the country’s biggest cities, known officially as “urban sensitive zones,” where most of France’s non-European minorities live. Geographically, they are suburbs, but socioeconomically, they resemble the US inner city.

Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe gave the upstart “ministry” a temporary office next to City Hall. For two days, rappers, artists, and activists merrily held court with a French media that rarely makes it to the suburbs and worked on a 120-point reform plan. Several presidential candidates, including front-runner François Hollande, showed up.

But the good vibe didn’t last. Days later, Mohammed Merah, a self-styled Islamist radical born to Algerian parents in a Toulouse suburb, shot and killed two soldiers, three children, and a rabbi. The killings seemed to reinforce all the stereotypes and fears about the troubled suburbs.

A fascinating overview.

A few quick thoughts:

1. I think many Americans would have difficulty processing this given our images of the suburbs.

2. Issues of race/ethnicity and class take place all over the world. The article suggests French students hear that their country is “an egalitarian utopia without issues of race and religion” but the situation on the ground suggests otherwise.

3. It would be interesting to read a more complete story of government involvement in the suburbs. How did this happen (politically and funding-wise) and is this what the government prefers?