Power in America: Wealth,Income and Power

[Mike]

CEOs' pay as a multiple of the average worker's pay

The Wealth Distribution
In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2001, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 33.4% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 51%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 84%, leaving only 16% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth, the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 39.7%. Table 1 and Figure 1 present further details drawn from the careful work of economist Edward N. Wolff at New York University (2004).

Table 1: Distribution of net worth and financial wealth in the United States,
1983-2001
Total Net Worth
Top 1 percent Next 19 percent Bottom 80 percent
1983 33.8% 47.5% 18.7%
1989 37.4% 46.2% 16.4%
1992 37.2% 46.6% 16.3%
1995 38.5% 45.4% 16.1%
1998 38.1% 45.3% 16.6%
2001 33.4% 51.0% 15.5%

Financial Wealth
Top 1 percent Next 19 percent Bottom 80 percent
1983 42.9% 48.4% 8.7%
1989 46.9% 46.5% 6.6%
1992 45.6% 46.7% 7.7%
1995 47.2% 45.9% 7.0%
1998 47.3% 43.6% 9.1%
2001 39.7% 51.5% 8.8%

How does this play out in the world of education in America?

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[Mike]

Hi All....... why look at this?????

Lani Guinier has written, "What has happened is that the testocracy has been manipulated to reproduce and credentialize the already existing social hierarchy."

Educational policy and practices are not simply technical issues, by there very nature all educational decisions are inherently political and valuative. Values are located in the interiors of people and cultures. Although empiricists claim to only be interested in "hard data" and "scientifically based programs" value judgments are imbedded throughout all debates concerning education. Value judgments are made at every step of this standardized model, from what information gets into the core content standards to what items are chosen in the last step; tests.

The scientist or empiricist do not want to talk about these value issues but all one needs to do is look at the results of the most studied standardized test, the SAT, and one quickly can get a sense of what goes on with these instruments. see: http://www.fairtest.org/university/ACT-SAT for a quick look at these tests and there deep correlation to SES, race, gender etc....
Our state tests match these results.... so do yours..............duh!!!

Fairtest is an excellent resource for SAT and ACT data. Check out these links and you will see
the influence of SES, Gender, and ETHNICITY on standardized test scores.

2007 COLLEGE BOUND SENIORS AVERAGE SAT SCORES
with Score Changes From 2006
(Approximately 1.49 million test takers, of whom 53.6% were female)

http://www.fairtest.org/files/SATScores2007Chart.pdf

2006 College Bound Seniors Average SAT Scores
Approximately 1.47 million test takers, of whom 53.6% were female

http://www.fairtest.org/2006-college-bound-seniors-average-sat-scores

We have a long history of mental measurement in America.........

[Mike]

Urban Education in America........ http://sitemaker.umich.edu/rosman.356/funding_

FUNDING



- 31% of all students in the United States are concentrated in 1.5% of urban schools with total per person revenues that are only 89% of the average total pupil revenue.

- Under-funding of urban schools is affected by funding formula including low weights for compensatory education, bilingual or English as a second language programs, and attendance-based foundation programs.

- Urban students are likely to have higher rates of mobility, absenteeism, and poor health. They are also less likely to have health coverage, which decreases attendance and reduces funding based on attendance-based formula.
Children living in urban areas are much more likely to be living in poverty than children in other types of communities. In 1990, 20% of children nationwide were living in poverty. However, 30% of children living in urban areas lived in poverty, compared with only 13% of those in suburbs and 22% of those living in rural areas (Krantzler et al, 1997). A school in which more than 40% of the students qualify for reduced-price lunches or free lunch is considered a school with a high concentration of poverty.

Approximately, 40% of urban students attend schools with high poverty concentrations. This is a large number compared to the 10% of suburban students and 25% of rural students who attend such schools (Reyes et al, 2004).

Poverty comprises the “600 pound gorilla” that most affects American education today (Berliner, 2005). The concentration of poverty in a school is a major factor associated with student academic achievement.

In fact, according to Krantzler et al (1997), the “relationship between school poverty concentrations and school academic achievement averages is stronger than the relationship between individual family poverty and individual student achievement.”

Poverty is strongly correlated with race and ethnicity. Consequently, African-American and Hispanics are greatly overrepresented in the groups that suffer severe poverty in urban areas (Berliner, 2005).

In 1999, 17% of Americans age 5 to 24 were from families which the primary language spoken was not English. Sixty-five percent of these students’ families speak Spanish (Slavin, 2005). Due to the large Hispanic population, urban public schools have higher proportions of students with limited-English proficiency. According to Krantzler et al (1997), in 1993-94, compared to the national average urban schools had two times the proportion of students with limited-English proficiency. Students who process limited mastery of English cost more to educate.

[Mike]

A look at Data........ race and income.....

[Mike]

[Mike]

What happened to the dream?

The Silent Genocide -
Facts about the Deepening Plight of Black Men in America

In Education/Family
• Only 45% of Black men graduate from high school in the United States.
• Just 22 % of Black males who began at a four-year college graduated within six years.
• 69% of Black children in America cannot read at grade level in the 4th grade, compared with 29% among White children.
• 7% of Black 8th-graders perform math at grade level.
• 32% of all suspended students are Black. Black students (mostly Black males) are twice as likely as Whites to be suspended or expelled.
• 67% of Black children are born out of wedlock.

In Employment/Economics
• At comparable educational levels, Black men earn 67% of what White men make.
• White males with a high-school diploma are just as likely to have a job and tend to earn just as much as Black males with college degrees.
• Blacks make up only 3.2% of lawyers, 3% of doctors, and less than 1% of architects in America.
• 53% of Black men aged 25-34 are either unemployed or earn too little to lift a family of four from poverty.
• Light-skinned Blacks have a 50% better chance of getting a job than dark-skinned Blacks.
• While constituting roughly 12% of the total population, Black America represents nearly 30% of America's poor.
• 45% of Black children live below the poverty line, compared with 16% of White children.
• The net worth of a Black family in America is $6,100 versus $67,000 for a White family.
• In New York City in 2003 only 51.8% of Black men ages 16 to 64 were employed vs. 75.7% for White men and 65.7% for Latino men.
• White men with prison records receive far more offers for entry-level jobs in New York City than black men with identical records, and are offered jobs just as often - if not more so - than black men who have never been arrested.

In Incarceration/Crime:
• In 2001, the chances of going to prison were highest among Black males (32.2%) and Hispanic males (17.2%) and lowest among White males (5.9%).
• Blacks account for only 12% of the U.S. population, but 44 % of all prisoners in the United States are Black.
• Blacks, who comprise only 12% of the population and account for about 13% of drug users, constitute 35% of all arrests for drug possession, 55% of all convictions on those charges, and 74% of all those sentenced to prison for possession.
• In at least fifteen states, Black men were sent to prison on drug charges at rates ranging from twenty to fifty-seven times those of White men.
• In 1986, before mandatory minimums for crack offenses became effective, the average federal drug offense sentence for Blacks was 11% higher than for Whites. Four years later following the implementation of harsher drug sentencing laws, the average federal drug offense sentence was 49% higher for Blacks.
• 1,172 Black children and teenagers in the United States died from gunfire in 2003.
• A young Black male in America is more likely to die from gunfire than was any soldier in Vietnam.
• The Justice Department estimates that one out of every 21 Black men can expect to be
murdered, a death rate double that of U. S. soldiers in World War II.
• 1.46 million Black men out of a total voting population of 10.4 million have lost their right to vote due to felony convictions.

source: http://www.blackstarproject.org/home/images/facts/deepeningplightbl...

[Connie Weber]

Michael,
I think you are starting up a course here on Fireside, and thank you so much. We need to look squarely at what's going on. I can see you can show us how to see.
And then I wonder, what's next? So if we know, what do we do?
Would you like me to invite some UM professors in African-American studies to comment? (I think I could get them, parents of a class student and summer-camp student).
We could make quite a study of this.

[Ian Carmichael]

Thanks Mike,

Plenty to reflect about.

Has anyone surveyed the wealth patterns of legislators, government representatives etc.? How many 'poor' background Congressmen and wome are there? (Yes, I mean before election; I presume the remuneration for the inhabitants of Capitol hill and the not-so-capitaal State mounds is pretty cosy.)

[Mike]

Hi Connie and Ian.... hope this finds you well on a sunny cold Friday from New Jersey!!

For me, true educational transformation.... would include the attempt to truely change the existing realities we see in our world.

I thought it would be fun to use this space to share some of the stuff that pops in my head as i reflect of educational transformation and what the ideal can "be".

In my humble opinion, the school reform movement in America, is glossing over some deeply troubling things that are happening before our eyes. Schools are embedded in cultures and communities and with out really "looking" at some of these not too pleasant realities....

According to a Justice Department report released in July 2003, the U.S. prison population surpassed 2 million for the first time—2,166,260 people were incarcerated in prisons or jails at the end of 2002 (the latest statistics available). Since 1990, the U.S. prison population, already the world's largest, has almost doubled.

About two-thirds of prisoners were in state and federal prisons, while the rest were in local jails. The report does not count all juvenile offenders, but noted that there were more than 10,000 inmates under age 18 held in adult prisons and jails in 2002. The number of women in federal and state prisons reached 97,491.

About 10.4% of the entire African-American male population in the United States aged 25 to 29 was incarcerated, by far the largest racial or ethnic group—by comparison, 2.4% of Hispanic men and 1.2% of white men in that same age group were incarcerated. According to a report by the Justice Policy Institute in 2002, the number of black men in prison has grown to five times the rate it was twenty years ago. Today, more African-American men are in jail than in college. In 2000 there were 791,600 black men in prison and 603,032 enrolled in college. In 1980, there were 143,000 black men in prison and 463,700 enrolled in college.
Information Please® Database, © 2007 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

About 10.4% of the entire African-American male population in the United States aged 25 to 29 was incarcerated, by far the largest racial or ethnic group—

Today, more African-American men are in jail than in college.

THESE STAT'S SEEM LIKE THEY HAVE TO BECOME PART OF OUR DISCUSSION..... WILL BE ADDING MORE AS THEY COME TO MIND........

[Mike]

School discipline tougher on African Americans
By Howard Witt | Tribune senior correspondent
September 25, 2007

AUSTIN, Texas - In the average New Jersey public school, African-American students are almost 60 times as likely as white students to be expelled for serious disciplinary infractions.

In Minnesota, black students are suspended 6 times as often as whites.

In Iowa, blacks make up just 5 percent of the statewide public school enrollment but account for 22 percent of the students who get suspended.

Fifty years after federal troops escorted nine black students through the doors of an all-white high school in Little Rock, Ark., in a landmark school integration struggle, America's public schools remain as unequal as they have ever been when measured in terms of disciplinary sanctions such as suspensions and expulsions, according to little-noticed data collected by the U.S. Department of Education for the 2004-2005 school year.

In every state but Idaho, a Tribune analysis of the data shows, black students are being suspended in numbers greater than would be expected from their proportion of the student population.

In 21 states—Illinois among them—that disproportionality is so pronounced that the percentage of black suspensions is more than double their percentage of the student body. And on average across the nation, black students are suspended and expelled at nearly three times the rate of white students.

No other ethnic group is disciplined at such a high rate, the federal data show. Hispanic students are suspended and expelled in almost direct proportion to their populations, while white and Asian students are disciplined far less.

There simply isn't any support for the notion that, given the same set of circumstances, African-American kids act out to a greater degree than other kids," said Russell Skiba, a professor of educational psychology at Indiana University whose research focuses on race and discipline issues in public schools. "In fact, the data indicate that African-American students are punished more severely for the same offense, so clearly something else is going on. We can call it structural inequity or we can call it institutional racism."

Studies show that a history of school suspensions or expulsions is a strong predictor of future trouble with the law—and the first step on what civil rights leaders have described as a "school-to-prison pipeline" for black youths, who represent 16 percent of U.S. adolescents but 38 percent of those incarcerated in youth prisons.

WONDER IF THERE IS ANY RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THESE STATISTICS AND THE STATISTICS CONCERNING RACE AND OUR PRISION POPULATION??? Hmmmmmmmm....

WHO IS SUSPENDED? http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-28879940_ITM

A number of student factors are associated with disciplinary practices (Nelson, Gonzalez, Epstein, & Benner, 2003). Disproportionate minority representation in school discipline data has been documented consistently for more than 25 years. The Children's Defense Fund (1975), examining national school discipline figures from the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR), found suspension rates for Black students 2 and 3 times higher than suspension rates for White students at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. Investigators have found consistent evidence of significant minority overrepresentation in office referrals (Lietz & Gregory, 1978), suspension (Cooley, 1995; Costenbader & Markson, 1998; Skiba et al., 2003), and expulsion (Skiba et al., 2002). Skiba and his colleagues (2002) found racial differences in office referrals, suspensions, and expulsions, with African American students receiving more suspensions than all White students, even when controlling for socioeconomic status. In Massachusetts during the 2000-2001 school year, Rabrenovic and Levin (2003) found that although Hispanic and African American students comprised only 19.4% of the public school student population, they represented 56.7% of school exclusions. Zhang et al. (2004) found similar patterns of suspension practices nationally. They reported disproportionate exclusions of African American and Native American students, who were suspended more often than students from other racial subgroups.

Would this not impact how the school environment "feels" to the kids involved?
Would this not impact the sense of "BELONGING" IN A SCHOOL?
Would this not impact achievement?

Hey.... near you Connie..........
http://blog.mlive.com/annarbornews/2008/05/black_students_continue_...

Black students continue to be suspended at rates substantially higher than their white peers in the Ann Arbor Public Schools, despite an increased focus from district administrators for the last two school years.

School records show that black students received more than half of all suspensions handed out in both the 2005-06 school year (54.5 percent) and the 2006-07 school year (55.7 percent).

In those years, black students made up less than 15 percent of the district's student body.

[Mike]

MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES IN SCHOOL!?!?

http://www.examiner.com/x-796-Mental-Health-Issues-Examiner~topic24...

If the news one day suddenly reported that 1 in 5 (or 20%) of our nation’s children, ages 5 – 18, had a diagnosable health diseases such as polio, or a new strain of flu—there would be a national outcry.

If it was discovered that two-thirds of those children were not getting help, if, in fact, there were laws in place to not give them help in such a crisis, there would be a revolt of historic proportions. So why is it that when those same statistics stand for children who suffer from diagnosable and treatable mental, emotional and behavioral disorders, there is only a hushed murmur from the news and from the legislators both local and national?

Fewer than 10% of our nation’s 80,000 public schools have any type of adequate mental health facilities on staff. A recent study* found that fewer than 11% of students made it to clinics if referred by the school, outside of school; however 90% of the students with comprehensive in-school counseling services made their appointments.


Factsheet: Children's Mental Health Statistics
http://www.nmha.org/go/information/get-info/children-s-mental-healt...

General
Mental health problems affect one in every five young people at any given time. (Department of Health & Human Services)

An estimated two-thirds of all young people with mental health problems are not getting the help they need. (Department of Health & Human Services)

Studies indicate that 1 in 5 children and adolescents (20 percent) may have a diagnosable disorder. Estimates of the number of children who have mental disorders range from 7.7 million to 12.8 million. (Department of Health & Human Services)

Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

30 percent - 40 percent of children diagnosed with ADHD have relatives with the same type of problem. (Clinical Pediatrics)

ADHD is the most common psychiatric condition affecting children, estimates in prevalence in childhood range from 5 - 10%. (Clinical Pediatrics)

As many as 50% of children with ADHD are never diagnosed. (Harvard Mental Health Letter)

Bipolar Disorder (Manic-Depression)

Almost one-third of six to twelve year old children diagnosed with major depression will develop bipolar disorders within a few years. (Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry)

Conduct Disorder

As many as 1 in 10 children and adolescents may have conduct disorder. (Department of Health and Human Services)

Depression

Recent studies show that, at any given time, as many as one in every 33 children may have clinical depression. The rate of depression among adolescents may be as high as one in eight. (Department of Health and Human Services)

Recent studies have shown that greater than 20% of adolescents in the general population have emotional problems and one-third of adolescents attending psychiatry clinics suffer from depression. (The Canadian Journal of CME)

Juvenile Justice

It is estimates that between 118,700 and 186,600 youths who are involved in the juvenile justice system have at least one mental disorder. (The National Coalition for the Mentally Ill in the Criminal Justice System)

According to a 1994 OJJDP study of juveniles' response to health screenings conducted at the admission of juvenile facilities, 73 percent of juveniles reported having mental health problems and 57 percent reported having prior mental health treatment or hospitalization.

Of the 100,000 teenagers in juvenile detention, estimates indicate that 60 percent have behavioral, mental or emotional problems. (Department of Justice)


Serious Emotional Disturbances

Serious emotional disturbances affect 1 in ever 10 young people at any given time. (Department of Health & Human Services)

Wondering..... if our "ideal vision" of schooling in America needs to move well beyond what many currently view as the role of schooling in America?

[Mike]

Some other things to consider as we ponder the transformation of education and our ideal schools for America.

National Association for the Education of African American
Children with Learning Disabilities http://www.aacld.org/theproblem.html

A series of national studies released in 2001 by The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University concluded "school districts nationwide continue to improperly and disproportionately place minority students in special education classes despite an increase in civil rights protections and special education services over the past 25 years."

Statistics from the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Special Education Programs for Fall 2006 show that although African Americans represented just 15% of all students, they represented 21% of students in the special education category of specific learning disabilities, 29% in the category of emotional disturbance, and 33% in the category of mental retardation.

The dropout rate among minority children with disabilities has been 68% higher than whites. More than 50% of minority students in large cities drop out of school.

Other failing students act out their feelings and become behavioral problems building defenses that only get them in more trouble. The challenge of educating these children is further exacerbated by the advent of zero tolerance policies.

Statistics around these policies show that African American students are suspended or expelled up to five times more than white students even though research dispels a simplistic explanation of a disproportionate level of behavior and points to a biased system where a double standard appears to exist. (Cartledge, Gwendolyn, Teacher Education and Special Education, Council for Exceptional Children, 2001.)

While factors associated with poverty are often identified as the primary reason for the overrepresentation of minorities in special education, this common overgeneralization is refuted by findings that as factors associated with wealth and better schooling increase, African American boys are at greater risk of being disproportionately labeled "mentally retarded." (Oswald, Donald P., Coutinho, Martha J., and Best, Al M., Community and School Predictors of Minority Children in Special Education, in Racial Inequity in Special Education, 2002.)

To the extent that minority students are misclassified, segregated, or inadequately served, special education can contribute to a denial of equality of opportunity, with devastating results in communities throughout the nation (Harvard Civil Rights Project, Conference on Minority Issues in Special Education, 2000).

Certainly no easy answers to any of these problems... yet they need to be carefully considered as we discuss the transformation of our educational systems.

[Daniel Bassill]

These articles illustrate the inequity in America. The maps I show here and here show where that inequity is concentrated. These articles also illustrate how leaders in business, faith groups, colleges, hospitals and schools can use their own time, talent and dollars to help bridge the gap by connecting directly with places in poverty neighborhoods where they can provide learning, enrichment, mentoring and social capital that serves as a bridge out of poverty.

Reach out to your networks to expand the number of people who look at this information, talk about it, and act in one or more ways to help non profits in poverty areas keep these connections in place.

Here's a strategy page, showing how we're trying to help the 7th to 12th grade teens with us now, while also providing continued support to the young adults who were with us from 1993 up till now. It show an effort to keep the volunteers engaged, and to build programs in different neighborhoods where are alumni are now raising their own kids.