educational policy For all of its craziness and scariness, the 2016 election campaign has hammered home for millions of Americans the degree to which massive inequities permeate our daily lives and threaten our democracy.

Unfortunately, understanding how inequalities affect us has yet to permeate the education policy world. While the transition from narrow, punitive No Child Left Behind Act to the Every Student Succeeds Act represents real progress, there is still a widespread belief that schools are the main drivers of achievement gaps and that they can, and should, be responsible for closing them. Correcting this fallacy is critical to getting the education system we need – one that is both equitable and excellent – and will help correct some of those larger inequities as well.

In reality, the same systemic forces that have sucked most of the income and wealth from the bottom half of our population in recent decades and channeled it into the top one percent have substantially widened income-based achievement gaps. Without intentional measures to direct a broad range of educational and other resources to reversing that trend, gaps will continue to grow. And because big disparities in parents’ – and society’s – investments in children begin at birth, those resources need to be channeled early.

Many of us know that students from poor families, and especially low-income students of color, are often two to three years behind by the time they begin high school. What is far less widely known is that those same students began school that far behind. In other words, our highly inequitable school system, which consigns students with the greatest deficits to the least credentialed and experienced teachers, is doing more to maintain gaps that children brought with them on their first day of kindergarten than to create them.

A study by my colleague, Emma Garcia, finds that, in fact, students in the bottom social class quintile lagged their highest-social class peers by a full standard deviation in both reading and math at kindergarten entry. Those same students were about half a standard deviation behind on such social emotional skills as persistence, self-control, and social interactions, which are equally critical to academic, and life, success. Mind you, education researchers typically translate that “standard deviation” into two or three years of schooling. Let that sink in: one in five students start kindergarten one to three years behind, whether behaviorally or academically.

When we looked across racial groups, the gaps were smaller, and could be explained substantially by social class. Given that nearly half of black five-year-olds who started school in 2010-11, and almost two thirds of English-Language Learner Hispanic children, versus just 13 percent of their white peers, are living in poverty, however, shifting the comparison groups doesn’t improve those students’ real life contexts.

Schools didn’t start these problems. And the evidence tells us that schools alone can’t fix them.

Early fixes that will work.

Luckily, there is also some very good news on this front. Unlike fixes for our bigger, broader societal inequities, strategies for closing these early childhood gaps are well understood, extensively documented, and, miraculously, have fairly wide support across the political spectrum. A paper just published by five EPI researchers lays out both the multiple societal problems created by our failure to make the needed public investments in quality early child care and education, and the broad set of benefits to be reaped from righting that wrong.

First and foremost, an ambitious national investment in early childhood care and education would help get all our children to the starting gate in much better shape. Another recent study, conducted jointly by the National Institute for Early Education Research and the Center for American Progress, suggests that universal pre-k alone would narrow math gaps by between 45 percent and 78 percent (black- white and Hispanic-white gaps, respectively) and virtually eliminate pre-kindergarten reading gaps.

But the benefits to the investments we propose extend much further. Ensuring a living wage for child care providers would not only improve their quality of life and enhance their contributions to the economy, but help stabilize the workforce and, ultimately, benefit the children they care for. Because child care is such a burden for young families – as expensive as rent or more so in many cases – making high-quality child care available would provide a benefit of about $11,000 annually for Florida families with an infant and a preschool-aged child who are earning the state median income. And removing this barrier to women’s workforce participation would help bring American women in line with their international peers, with potential gains to the gross domestic product of as much as $600 billion annually.

As the election comes closer, we must continue to push all candidates in both parties to focus on the severe problems working Americans face. Let’s make the early childhood investments we suggest front and center. By our analysis they are low hanging fruit—politically and economically.

Elaine Weiss is the National Coordinator for the Broader Bolder Approach to Education, where she works with four co-chairs, a high-level Advisory Board, and multiple coalition partners to promote a comprehensive, evidence-based set of policies to allow all children to thrive in school and life.  Major publications for BBA include case studies of diverse communities across the country that employ comprehensive approaches to education. She has also authored two studies with EPI economist Emma Garcia on early achievement gaps and strategies to reduce them.

photo via Pixabay
photo via Pixabay

Why are families less economically secure today? After all, there’s been four decades of families seeming to have the opportunity to earn more and do better—this largely due to women’s movement into the U.S. workforce. According to a new report, women’s increased earnings and hours have been vital in the American family’s search for economic security. How has that search gone? Heather Boushey and Kavya Vaghul’s new report “Women have made the difference for family economic security” offers some answers.

Boushey, Executive Director and Chief Economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and research team member Vaghul used data from the Current Population survey to focus on changes in family income between 1979 and 2013 for low-, middle-, and professional-income families. They delved into the difference between men’s and women’s earnings regarding greater pay, as well as women’s earning as a function of more hours worked. They also looked at other sources of income between 1979 and 2013. more...

photo from CNN
Stephanie Coontz

Re-posted from cnn.com.

The public outrage over the “religious freedom” bills recently passed in Arkansas and Indiana caught the governors of those states completely off-guard, judging by their confused and contradictory responses.

As poll watchers, they surely knew that most Americans now oppose the discriminatory laws and practices they accepted as normal only a dozen years ago. But the politicians underestimated the pushback organized by local and national businesses, including companies with no previous record of public support for social equality.

They had better adjust to a new reality.

For the past three decades, socially conservative evangelicals and pro-business interests have been powerfully allied against government regulations, environmental initiatives and social welfare programs, while supporting lower taxes for the wealthy and pushing back against the growing diversity in America’s population.

For many, this alliance been puzzling: Other, equally devout Christians who place more emphasis on Jesus Christ’s message of unconditional love and on his denunciations of excessive wealth and neglect of the poor, have been uncomfortable with it, as have many business leaders. Their priorities, after all, are based on the bottom line. And companies that sell goods and services to the public are learning that support for discrimination — or even passive acceptance of it — threatens that bottom line.

Hence, after Indiana Gov. Mike Pence signed a law that opened a new door for discrimination against same-sex couples, the threat of boycotts and other retaliation was swift, from groups as diverse as the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the Indiana Pacers, Walmart, Eli Lilly, Apple and even the Marriott International hotel chain.

Marriott International was founded by J.W. Marriott, a dedicated Mormon, and is now run by his son Bill, also a Mormon who fully accepts his church’s teachings about traditional marriage. Yet in June, Marriott International launched a “#Love Travels” marketing campaign, aimed at attracting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender travelers with an assurance of “the company’s commitment to make everyone feel comfortable about who they are.”

Asked about the discrepancy between his religious rejection of same-sex marriage and his marketing overtures to same-sex honeymooners, Marriott pointed to the Bible’s injunction of unconditional love, but added “beyond that, I am very careful about separating my personal faith and beliefs from how we run our business.”

In 2014, global spending by LGBT travelers was estimated at more than $200 billion, and spending by this market segment is rising much faster than overall spending on travel. So Marriott worries when states start to make such travelers feel unwelcome.

Businesses seeking to develop brand loyalty among younger consumers have a special incentive to highlight their rejection of anti-gay bias. A CNN poll taken in February found that 72% of millennials nationwide believe that same-sex couples have the right to have their marriages recognized as valid. Even among white evangelical Protestants, 43% of millennials support same-sex marriage, compared with less than 20% of those their grandparents’ age, 68 and older.

It used to be that businesses could close their eyes to discrimination in areas geographically isolated from the more liberal coasts, but that is no longer possible. According to researchers for MTV’s “Look Different” anti-bias campaign, 90% of youths aged 14 to 24 agree that it is important to make their communities a less biased place, and almost 80% say that everyone has a responsibility to help tackle bias.

So who’s the “moral majority” now?

For media-savvy millennials, following that moral imperative means spreading the news about discrimination wherever it occurs and reaching beyond geographic boundaries to mobilize against it. In the first 24 hours after Arkansas passed its version of the “religious freedom” bill, the Twitter hashtag #BoycottArkansas was used 12,000 times. It then snowballed after celebrity blogger Perez Hilton tweeted it to his 5.9 million Twitter followers.

America has crossed a threshold where it is no longer a good business model or political strategy to be intolerant of diversity, whether that pertains to race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation. Since 2011, the majority of children that have been born in the United States each year are members of racial or ethnic minorities. Hispanics are projected to account for most of the growth in the labor force between now and 2060.

Women now lead men in educational attainment. And more than half of Americans live in states where same-sex marriage is legal. Business leaders and politicians who ignore or offend these constituencies do so at their own peril.

Stephanie Coontz teaches at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and is director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families. She is the author of “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage.” 

This Chair RocksAshton Applewhite is a Council on Contemporary Families expert and has been recognized by the New York Times, National Public Radio, and the American Society on Aging as an expert on ageism. Her new book, “This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism,” was just published in April 2016. She blogs at “This Chair Rocks,” where you can follow her ongoing insights, speaks widely, and is the voice of “Yo, is this ageist?” Ashton’s work is a call to wake up to the ageism in and around us, embrace a more accurate and positive view of growing older, and push back. She agreed to answer a few questions for us:

Q: First, a challenge: what’s one single thing you “know” with certainty, after years of research into modern families?

AA: One of the biggest obstacles to the well-being of modern families is the all-American myth of self-reliance—that people can and should “go it alone”—and we don’t call it out enough. That myth, which equates needing help with physical frailty and weakness of character, serves none of us well—least of all caregivers, people with disabilities, and older people (increasingly overlapping circles on the Venn diagram of life). more...

Thompson“New Maternalisms”: Tales of Motherwork (Dislodging the Unthinkable). Edited by Roksana Badruddoja & Maki Motapanyane (Demeter Press, 2016).

When academics focus on a concept that is rooted in a fundamental human experience, they often retreat to detached and aggressive scholarly postures. This natural defense against graying the lines between personal and professional can lead to the driest literature. The authors included in New Maternalisms clearly reject this approach, choosing instead to get their hands dirty while grappling with the sticky task of conceptualizing motherhood. Contributor Isabel Sousa-Rodriguez defines maternalism as a field of study, that ‘strives to explain the complexity of “mothering” – subdividing motherwork according to biological and social reproductive functions.’ This definition contrasts with that of the OG political movement , lending double entendre to the concept of a ‘new’ maternalism. Despite its jargon rich title, this collection of essays is personal and accessible.

The editors, (former CCF Boardmember) Roksana Badruddoja & Maki Motapanyane note academia’s historic failure to recognize the voices and agency of mothers. In response, they bring together a diverse collection of essays that explore the ways in which societal structures and culturally grounded ideologies prescribe definitions of good mothering and limit women’s agency. In turn, these works illuminate the perspectives, strategies and resilience of marginalized motherhood.

The list of authors could be considered a list of invitees to a maternalist scholar’s dream dinner party. Layering the voices of emerging scholars, expert practitioners from the field, and skilled theorists the collection of essays reads like a conversation among kindred spirits across disciplines. The editors’ openness to including scholars with diverse academic experience and personal backgrounds is a kindness not only to the emerging scholars included in the collection, but to the reader. At times fearlessly raw, the authors admit to and struggle with the limitations to their own views of mothering while exploring examples of motherhood across a diverse array of cultural contexts. The effect is refreshing.

The contributions challenge both patriarchal and feminist concepts of mothering. They do this by presenting the realities of mothering within the contexts of marginalized demographics (e.g. mothers who are undocumented, same sex, homeless, indigent, and/or who have disabilities) and marginalizing experiences (e.g. mothers who carry genetically engineered children, work in the sex industry, have their children conscripted as soldiers, or feed their babies formula, as opposed to breast feeding). The issues raised are at once timely, given recent Supreme Court cases (e.g. constraints experienced by mothers living in mixed immigration status families and mothers in single sex marriages) and timeless, such as mothers struggling with identity after the loss of a child.

In short, the editors give us an education in what Badruddoja names in her own contribution to the collection, “the unschooling that is deeply needed around our cultural imaginations of motherhood”. Transitioning through the chapters, I found myself relating to, sympathizing with, and being irritated by the authors. In other words, I found the collection both engaging and challenging. Based on my, admittedly, limited experience as an educator – and my shamelessly extensive experience as a student – that is what I’d call pedagogical gold.

Amy Thompson is a recovering policy wonk and a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin School of Social Work. She is currently immersed in her comprehensive exams on the development of agency in migrant children – some of whom are mothers (biological and/or structural).

It’s Almost Mothers’ Day: Why is pay for caregiving work so low relative to other jobs with similarly low requirements for formal education?

And, of course, pay me---equally. DFAT/Jeremy Miller Flickr CC
And, of course, pay me—equally. DFAT/Jeremy Miller Flickr CC

Two of the lowest paid groups of employees in the American economy are child care workers and personal care aides, according to a report just released by the US Census Bureau on February 25, 2016, providing the latest (2014) figures on how much men and women earn in each occupation.

Many of the organizations and political leaders honoring International Women’s Day last Tuesday have made a “pledge for parity,” promising to promote gender equity in pay. When most people think about what parity means, their “go to” question is whether men and women earn the same when they work in the same job and perform equally well. But we should also think about whether differences in pay between occupations are equitable. To keep the focus just on between-occupation differences, let me give some figures just for women.

Women who were child care workers in 2014 had median earnings of only $20,452 for the year. If we assume that means 50 weeks a year and 40 hours per week, those child care workers made just $10.22/hour. Personal care aides earned $21,459 a year. Many food service workers have similarly low salaries. more...

photo via pixabay
photo via pixabay

What’s going on in the South?  First a “religious discrimination” bill passed both houses in Georgia (not signed by the Governor), then North Carolina passes HB2 sold as a “bathroom bill” but allows discrimination against LGBTQ people all over the state. And now Mississippi passes a “religious freedom” bill that includes the right to discriminate not only against LGBTQ folks but also fornicators, those radical people who have sex outside the bonds of marriage (you know, the rest of us, at least sometime in our lives). Is there a contest for which Southern state can be most crazy?

North Carolina and Mississippi have suddenly become states to avoid if you care about human rights, if you are LGBTQ people, or if you know or love someone that is. Are there any Americans who shouldn’t be thinking of boycotting these states?

You might think that these new laws passed hurt transgender people only, but you’d be wrong.  These laws allow discrimination and legitimate harassment against anyone who doesn’t follow the typical expectations for how we look, or how we hold our bodies, or who we love, or who or whether we marry. These concerns about looks and bodies relate directly to what sociologists refer to as how we “do gender.” These laws try to impose one fixed and “normal” way to “do gender,” along with whom to partner and how.  But over the past 30 years that I have written about gender, I have seen dramatic changes to what is considered “normal” and whether sex outside of marriage is a crime or just another recreational activity that feels good. Many more people are open about their gender identities, and express them in a variety of ways. Our categories have changed and moved beyond a simple binary where “boys will be boys” and “girls will be girls.”

The dramatic change has been especially clear in research for my new book on Millennials. The changes in how people “do gender” pushed me to write a book I had never planned to write. Indeed, after teaching a graduate seminar where the students and I collected over a hundred life interviews from young adults, I was startled to see the dramatic diversity, and increasing confusion, around gender and sexuality among Millennials.

I talked to two groups of young people who will be much hurt by a law that allows anyone to police who can use what bathroom, or who can love whom and when. Transgender people of all ages will be hurt. In my research, every transgender respondent had stories about the trouble they had going to the bathroom, even in states without laws that require gender discrimination. One transman told me that he often leaves an event and  travels a long way home on public transportation before going to the bathroom. As he told me about life as a transman he said “I wait until we get home. We call it the trans bladder. We can wait for hours before going to the bathroom.” Think of the physical pain, holding back the release of urine and excrement to avoid being bullied. And now realize that the states of North Carolina and Mississippi have just more than legitimized such harassment, they have required it by law. What kind of rude culture legitimates bullying? Is this the new meaning of southern hospitality?

Another group of research respondents will also suffer and have thus far remained invisible in the conversation, young people who reject the binary rules of gender. In my interviews I met people who identify as genderqueer: they do not want to be the opposite gender. Instead, they reject the label given at birth entirely as they reject the categories male and female which are irrelevant to their identities… Most, but not all, of these genderqueer young people grew up girls. They are often mistaken for men, but many continue to identify their sex as female, and their gender as queer. They too report already being hassled in restrooms.  Many avoid bathrooms.  One genderqueer respondent told me that she often faces uncomfortable interactions. “Usually they look at me trying to figure out if I am a boy or a girl…they’re like ‘I can’t tell cause she’s got short hair and she wears boy’s clothes, but those lips look kinda feminine. I think she’s got tits under there.” Another person quoted RuPaul “you’re born naked and the rest is drag” as the basis for androgynous self-presentation consciously designed to be neither masculine or feminine.

RuPaul’s view of the world is good sociology. Gender identity is very powerful but how we use gender—dressing or carrying our bodies–to present how we identify ourselves is complicated, ever changing, and culturally specific.   How we choose whom to love, and whether or not they have similar genitals seems the most intimate of decisions, and not good fodder for public policy. It takes very intrusive big government to want to judge intimate relationships. To legitimate harassment of people because of their gender expression hurts not only transgender and genderqueer people, it hurts us all. To legitimate harassment and discrimination on who you love, and whether or not that love is legally sanctioned by a marriage certificate, is not religious, it is hateful. Why should any couple be subject to questioning about their marital status? Why should anyone have to dress conservatively enough to assure vigilante enforcers that they are indeed male or female? How feminine must I dress to look like a woman?

As President of the Southern Sociological Society, and a woman who raised her child in North Carolina, I am proud that my professional association has voted not to meet in any state that discriminates against any of our members. I hope many more businesses and organizations join the boycott. If anyone is at risk for discrimination, we all are.

Barbara J Risman is currently a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at CASBS. She is a Senior Scholar at the Council on Contemporary Family and  is on-leave from  University of Illinois at Chicago.

photo via pixabay.com
photo via pixabay.com

Last month, the Council on Contemporary Families (CCF) released a brief report, “The way we still never were,” to coincide with the new, revised, and updated 2016 version of Stephanie Coontz’s classic book, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. As a result, journalists identified many trends they saw as positive:

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the way we never wereAnother Quarter Century of Family Change and Diversity

Editor’s note: In 1992—the year the U.S. presidential campaign erupted into a culture war over family values—Stephanie Coontz published The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. The title itself offered the pithy concept, and the book demonstrated that diversity and change have always been hallmarks of American family life: “Leave It to Beaver” was not a documentary. This week (March 29, 2016) Coontz released a substantially revised and updated edition of The Way We Never Were. Below, she provides a brief review of ten things that have changed for the better in the past quarter century, three that have stayed the same, and two that have gotten worse.

In 1992, political leaders and pundits were predicting that changes in family forms and gender roles were leading America into disaster. Were they right? 

  1. Whatever happened to the Super Predators? In the early 1990s criminologists were predicting “a blood bath of violence” unleashed by “tens of thousands of severely morally impoverished juvenile super-predators” – all supposedly a result of rising rates of unwed births. But between 1993 and 2010, sexual assaults and intimate partner violence reported dropped by more than 60 percent. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics, the murder rate in 2013 was lower than at any time since the records began in 1960. Since 1994, juvenile crime rates have plummeted by more than 60 percent, even though the proportion of children born out of wedlock has risen to 40 percent.
  1. How about crack babies? In the 1980s and 1990s, newspapers headlined an epidemic of “crack babies” in the inner city, with kids permanently damaged by their mothers’ use of crack cocaine during pregnancy. This led to a wave of punitive legal actions against such women. But follow-up studies have since revealed that children from the same high-poverty areas who had not been exposed to cocaine in utero were equally likely to have developmental and intellectual delays as babies born with cocaine in their systems. As I documented in The Way We Never Were, the big risk to these children was the pollution, violence, and chronic stress of deeply impoverished and neglected communities – including lead poisoning damage that was going on for years before it hit the headlines in 2016 because of the disaster in Flint.
  1. Did career women start “out-sourcing” their children’s developmental care? As women gained more high prestige jobs in the late 1990s, that’s what many experts feared. In fact, however, even as mothers’ work hours increased, their child-care hours increased too, while fathers’ child-care time tripled. Today, both single and working moms spend more time with their children than married homemaker mothers did back in 1965.

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photo via pixabay
photo via pixabay

Cross-posted with permission from Gender & Society.

Since 2002, federal and state governments in the United States have spent over $1 billion from the welfare budget on marriage and relationship education programs through the Healthy Marriage Initiative. This federal policy seeks to encourage marriage and the many social and economic benefits the government claims are associated with it—less poverty and domestic violence, better physical and mental health, higher academic achievement—by helping couples develop relationship skills focused on improving communication and resolving conflict. The federal agency in charge of overseeing healthy marriage funding recommends that curricula used in marriage education programs address how couples think about gender, specifically their beliefs about differences between men and woman and what they expect spouses to do based on gender. Many marriage education curricula address these topics because gendered expectations often influence how couples experience marriage and what they commonly argue about, namely housework, childcare, and earning money.

To understand how marriage education programs funded by the government teach about gender, communication, and power within marriage, I analyzed twenty curricula approved for use in healthy marriage programs and participated in a training session, workshop, or class for eighteen of these same curricula. I specifically wanted to know if and how the curricula reinforced or challenged stereotypes of gender responsibilities—such as the beliefs that women should be caretakers and men should be family breadwinners—and whether the programs taught couples about how social inequalities between women and men shape couples’ abilities to share power and family labor.

I found that some programs assumed men and women are fundamentally different in how they think, feel, and communicate, and recommended that couples use relationship skills to overcome these differences. For example, the Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program, the most commonly used marriage education curriculum in healthy marriage programs, noted that men are more likely to pull away when couples argue, while women want to talk through disagreements. In discussing how women and men often act differently in romantic relationships, these curricula did not acknowledge how men’s greater power outside marriage often gives them more power to withdraw from conflict within marriage.

Other programs, however, taught couples to question the belief that men and women are fundamentally different and to avoid gender stereotypes in expectations of how their spouses should think and act. The African American Relationships, Marriages, and Family curricula emphasized that gender stereotypes can be harmful to relationships and that couples should learn to be flexible when dividing work and care responsibilities. Another program, The Third Option, taught couples that they should “redefine the power struggle” within marriage by prioritizing cooperation over competition, as in a doubles game of tennis where spouses are on the same team. By focusing on fairness, equality, and shared power, many of the curricula provided limited tools for challenging gender difference and power within marriage by teaching couples strategies that privilege individual abilities, inclinations, and availability regardless of gender.

Nevertheless, the strategies for verbal negotiation taught by these programs did not address how gender inequalities—such as women’s overall lower pay—often create a power imbalance between husbands and wives tilted in favor of men, even when couples share egalitarian gender views. Gendered power exists in the broader society through unequal opportunities for women and men—or what sociologists call institutionalized gender inequalities—not just between two people in a couple. Government-sponsored marriage and relationship education programs therefore have contradictory implications for promoting greater gender equality. They encourage couples to question how narrow ideas of gender “roles” shape marital conflict and unhappiness. Yet, they are funded with money diverted from welfare programs that primarily support single mothers and children, while they teach that gender is a set of individual inclinations to be discussed and negotiated rather than a relationship of power connected to larger systems of inequality and state action.

As a case of what I call interpersonal gender interventions, healthy marriage programs focus on teaching individuals that gender equality primarily lies in developing and negotiating more egalitarian gender attitudes. Yet, interventions that promote ideas about equality will have limited utility if individuals learn to develop more egalitarian beliefs in the absence of institutional changes that enable them to act on these values. Policies need to do more than help couples redefine the marital power struggle through relationship skills; they must promote equitable access to education, employment, and stable earnings that allow partners to create fair, safe, and loving relationships. Only then will partners have truly equal power to express, pursue, and achieve their interests within marriage and family relationships.

Jennifer Randles is assistant professor of sociology at California State University, Fresno. Her article, “Redefining the Marital Power Struggle Through Relationship Skills: How United States Marriage Education Programs Challenge and Reproduce Gender Inequality,” is published in the April 2016 30 (2)  issue ofGender & Society. To view the article, click here.