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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[Skip Zilla]

Hi Mike.
I received an interesting promotion from the Media Education Foundation in this morning's email for a DVD made by University of Massachusetts' economics professor Richard Wolff, titled Capitalism Hits the Fan. The MEF website provides a brief video introduction to Professor Wolff's DVD'd presentation, a full-length, but video-hampered preview, and the following written description:

With breathtaking clarity, renowned University of Massachusetts Economics Professor Richard Wolff breaks down the root causes of today's economic crisis, showing how it was decades in the making and in fact reflects seismic failures within the structures of American-style capitalism itself. Wolff traces the source of the economic crisis to the 1970s, when wages began to stagnate and American workers were forced into a dysfunctional spiral of borrowing and debt that ultimately exploded in the mortgage meltdown. By placing the crisis within this larger historical and systemic frame, Wolff argues convincingly that the proposed government "bailouts," stimulus packages, and calls for increased market regulation will not be enough to address the real causes of the crisis, in the end suggesting that far more fundamental change will be necessary to avoid future catastrophes. Richly illustrated with motion graphics, this is a superb introduction designed to help ordinary citizens understand, and react to, the unraveling economic crisis.

It seems to me that educators might better introduce the study of economics to their students based on a timely and relevant presentation such as Wolff's, than on a more abstract, textbook-101 introduction. By watching the full-length preview, I've gained an overarching view of how the American and other economies have stumbled into the unsustainable mess they're in.

[Mike]

HOMETOWN NEWS!!! SCHOOL BUDGET TIME......

Students may pay a price for being in low-cost districts
By DIANE D’AMICO, Education Writer

Published: Monday, March 23, 2009
Lynda Towns is not too proud to take hand-me-downs.
The Woodbine school superintendent has personally picked up used desks from the Cape May School District, got some old computers from Lower Alloways Creek Township, Salem County, and is borrowing bleachers from Avalon.

“Other districts can afford to replace things,” Towns said. “We cannot.”

The district’s frugality shows up in its costs. At $10,269 per student, the district has the lowest comparative education cost among small K-8 districts in the state.

Woodbine shares its category with fellow Cape May County school districts Sea Isle City and Avalon, the two highest-spending districts in the state at $35,983 and $32,384 per student according to the Comparative Spending Guide released by the state Department of Education last week. The irony is not lost on Towns.

“Other districts will offer us their used textbooks because they’re upgrading to be more in line with the state standards,” Towns said. “But if the old books are not up to the standards, how is that going to help us improve? I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but with all of our at-risk students, don’t we need the newer books even more?”

The annual spending guide compares the actual cost of educating a student among similar types of districts. It is not the total cost and does not include items like transportation, debt service or tuition paid to other districts. It is designed to give the public a glimpse at how similar types of schools spend their money, and it includes such items as median salaries and funds spent on textbooks, maintenance and extracurricular activities.



In size, Woodbine is closer to Wildwood Crest, which is budgeted at almost $18,000 per student. Most of that is on instruction, and most of that is in teacher salaries. The median teacher salary in Wildwood Crest is $72,359, while in Woodbine it’s $64,390.

Woodbine budgeted $137 per student on books and supplies, while Wildwood Crest is spending $516. Wildwood Crest allocated $3,099 per student for support services such as guidance counselors, a school nurse and librarian. Woodbine is spending $1,417 per student.

“We don’t have a guidance counselor,” said Towns, who is also the school principal. “I’ve gotten to be quite the counselor.”

She said the cost of keeping costs down also means fewer field trips, very limited art, music and extra-curricular activities, and little new technology.

... lower spending doesn’t always translate into lower property taxes. The expensive summer homes in Avalon, Stone Harbor and Sea Isle City help keep the school tax rate at less than 10 cents per $100 of assessed value in those towns. The more rural Woodbine’s residents pay 68 cents per $100, and equally rural Folsom’s school rate is $1.59 according to the state property tax database.

So while the owner of a home assessed at $1 million in Avalon will pay about $340 in annual school taxes, residents of Woodbine and Folsom, with more modest homes assessed at $100,000, would pay $680 and $1,590 respectively.

...many say money isn't everything....and i will agree.... however.... money isn't nothing either!!

What and how does money work where you are????

[Daniel Bassill]

Good article. Illustrates the disparities pretty graphically.

Do you have a link to the dept of education page with this report? Is there a tool that people in other districts can use to make this comparison?

[Mike]

Hi Daniel.... here is one of the places people can get lots of data in NJ.

I would think that most state departments have similar pages of stuff....almost too much stuff.....

http://www.state.nj.us/education/data/

http://www.state.nj.us/education/data/fact.htm

[Connie Weber]

Hi Mike,
Thought I'd add this article from The Economist in here:
"I am just a poor boy though my story's seldom told"
Neuroscience and Social Deprivation

"How poverty passes from generation to generation is now becoming clearer. The answer lies in the effect of stress on two particular parts of the brain."

"THAT the children of the poor underachieve in later life, and thus remain poor themselves, is one of the enduring problems of society. Sociologists have studied and described it. Socialists have tried to abolish it by dictatorship and central planning. Liberals have preferred democracy and opportunity. But nobody has truly understood what causes it. Until, perhaps, now.

The crucial breakthrough was made three years ago, when Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania showed that the working memories of children who have been raised in poverty have smaller capacities than those of middle-class children. Working memory is the ability to hold bits of information in the brain for current use—the digits of a phone number, for example. It is crucial for comprehending languages, for reading and for solving problems. Entry into the working memory is also a prerequisite for something to be learnt permanently as part of declarative memory—the stuff a person knows explicitly, like the dates of famous battles, rather than what he knows implicitly, like how to ride a bicycle.

Since Dr Farah’s discovery, Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg of Cornell University have studied the phenomenon in more detail. As they report in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they have found that the reduced capacity of the memories of the poor is almost certainly the result of stress affecting the way that childish brains develop."

[Mike]

Hi Connie and all...... WE HAVE MUCH WORK TO DO!!!

"The Cradle to Prison Pipeline: America’s New Apartheid"-
Marian Wright Edelman's

Release Date: February 6, 2009


Incarceration is becoming the new American apartheid and poor children of color are the fodder. It is time to sound a loud alarm about this threat to American unity and community, act to stop the growing criminalization of children at younger and younger ages, and tackle the unjust treatment of minority youths and adults in the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems with urgency and persistence.

So many poor babies in rich America enter the world with multiple strikes against them: born without prenatal care, at low birthweight, and to a teen, poor, and poorly educated single mother and absent father.

At crucial points in their development after birth until adulthood, more risks pile on, making a successful transition to productive adulthood significantly less likely and involvement in the criminal justice system significantly more likely.

As Black children are more than three times as likely as White children to be poor, and are four times as likely to live in extreme poverty, a poor Black boy born in 2001 has a one in three chance of going to prison in his lifetime and is almost six times as likely as a White boy to be incarcerated for a drug offense.

The past continues to strangle the present and the future.

Children with an incarcerated parent are more likely to become incarcerated. Black children are nearly nine times and Latino children are three times as likely as White children to have an incarcerated parent.

Blacks constitute one-third and Latinos one-fifth of the prisoners in America, and 1 in 3 Black men, 20 to 29 years old, is under correctional supervision or control.

Of the 2.3 million in jail or prison, 64 percent are minority.

Of the 4.2 million persons on probation, 45 percent are minority; of the 800,000 on parole, 59 percent are minority. Inequitable drug sentencing policies including mandatory minimums have greatly escalated the incarceration of minority adults and youths.

Child poverty and neglect, racial disparities in systems that serve children, and the pipeline to prison are not acts of God.

They are America’s immoral political and economic choices that can and must be changed with strong political, corporate and community leadership.

For the entire article…. And a very good web site -

http://www.childrensdefense.org/child-research-data-publications/da...

BE WELL.../mike

[Ian Carmichael]

And community leadership includes educational and church communities - for, rightly led, a vision of difference, an alternative world view, a world of possibility is possible. In a working educational community, a different future can be envisioned, a different mindset can be presented. SES can be seen as simply a number, like height, weight, eye colour, blood pressure, etc. It, no more than any of these others, is a destiny.
It's hard not to get on a preaching soapbox at this point - because it's a point of transformation/conversion. (Are we going to accept karma as an iron law and acquiesce to a tacit caste structure, or are we going to see that the true kingdom places all at an equal footing, value and place in the wider community?)

(Valid) Statistics are descriptors, not predictors... We'd be foolish to ignore the information, but then it's our choice how we interact with the descriptors - we can acquiesce, or we can rebel. (Eg: if the demographic trends for locality x are increasing average age, decreasing population - the acquiescers will plan to fit to the projections reduce youth provision, schools, pre-schools, ante-natal services etc. The revolutionaries will plan to change it - how can we attract/retain younger people, improve schools, pre-schools, show off our housing and other facilities...)

[Ian Carmichael]

Ruby Payne (somewhere) cites some information about visual acuity - that in dark environments, as in many low SES living environments, one part of the eye's visual receptors (rods or cones, I don't remember which) do not develop well, and this affects a variety of spatial skills, such as recognition and sorting capacities.

[Daniel Bassill]

I've launched a Tutor/Mentor Program Locator new resource today that is an interactive map of Chicago, showing where tutor/mentor programs are needed, locations of 266 different tutoring and/or mentoring organizations, and locations of poverty and poorly performing schools. We'll be working out bugs for a while and I'd appreciate feedback.

In this Program Locator we provide two levels of information beyond locations of tutor/mentor programs. In the Assets section you can see the distribution of faith groups, businesses, hospitals, and universities, who are in different parts of the city, and who could be more strategic in supporting the growth of tutor/mentor programs in the parts of the city where they operate.

In the Government section you can see political districts, combined with assets maps, and program/poverty/school maps. The elected official can use this to mobilize resources to support the growth of volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in parts of his district where they are needed. So can anyone else in the district.

I hope you'll help me draw users, and a few donors, to this resource. We can write about where the problems are located until "h@!!" freezes over. Or we can mobilize resources to build and sustain programs in high poverty areas that help kids through school and into jobs.

If other communities would like to duplicate this process in their own community, I'm open to exploring ways to collaborate.