I was listening to global corporate NPR a few days ago.....you have to feel sorry for them being made a US Chamber of Commerce propaganda outlet. Once quality news fair and balanced now as corrupted and closed as any third world nation. NPR was using a research paper from Johns Hopkins regarding the fact that people born in low-income/poor families stay at that level. WHAT A HOOT! The entire 1950s-1970s saw the most people rise from poverty and working class to higher socio-economic levels than in any time in world history in America and Europe. It was of course strong public education, first world quality of life, and expanded employment in America that created the best in the world society. It took Ivy League schools and Wall Street with Reagan/Clinton and Bush/Obama to undue all these gains. The American people worked within the law and elections to effect change in Congress to create these booming economic and personal achievements happen while Wall Street and the Ivy League schools simply lied, cheated, and stole the gains of the American people in the past two decades----late 1980s-2010.
YOU ARE A VICTIM AND LOSER SAY IVY LEAGUE SCHOOLS AND WALL STREET IF YOU PLAY BY THE RULES!
Obama calls this EXCEPTIONAL and a Hillary for President calls this group the SMART PEOPLE. We all know that it is simply thuggery which takes little intelligence.
The study to which NPR referred was Hopkins saying that if you are poor----you will stay poor and the researcher studied the population of Baltimore. Well, Baltimore is run as a third world society with Johns Hopkins being the dictator---we call Baltimore a COMPANY TOWN. Indeed, Hopkins has made sure that no progress was made in the War on Poverty and New Deal as labor is subjugated with public policy that makes for poverty for most in the region and all of the public money-----social services, health care, Federal grants meant to aid the poor and those communities were always simply funneled from those in need to Hopkins and its development groups. Johns Hopkins runs Baltimore as leaders in an Indian city of Mumbai would so the people in Baltimore surely did not excel for the most part unless they were chosen to work for Johns Hopkins and their interests.
Meanwhile across the nation there was a renaissance with large sectors of US population climbing the economic and social ladder. Most of the CEOs of national corporations in the 1950s-1970s were graduates of public schools from low/middle-class families. So, this Hopkins research was a message Hopkins, US Chamber of Commerce, and Wall Street wanted to send------
FORGET THOSE CENTURIES OF PROSPERITY AND ACHIEVEMENT BY CITIZENS AFTER THE AGE OF REASON AND ENLIGHTENMENT----WE ARE GOING BACK TO THE MIDDLE AGES WHERE ONLY THE RICH LEAD IN BUSINESS AND GOVERNMENT AND THE CHURCH CARES FOR THE POOR MASSES!
MR THOMAS' WORLD HISTORY CLASS--AGE OF REASON
The Age of Reason was an 18th century movement which followed hard after the "mysticism, religion, and superstition of the Middle Ages". This time period presented new ideas about the founding of knowledge, the universe, and the way man viewed himself. Previously, you couldn't speak your mind in verbal or written form. During this period you were free to do that without being called a heretic. Individual happiness and liberty were finally able to come true. The medieval imperial concepts were abandoned. The Age of Reason also included the time period known as the Age of Enlightenment.
Tying all public services and programs back to church and non-profit is stepping back to the masses and their religion. We had a separation of church and state that gave us modern society with people as citizens.
This is what all repressive dictators say and then they are kicked out in disgrace. The Hopkins researcher was not wrong---- Baltimore citizens were indeed not allowed to advance in socio-economic status unless tied to Hopkins. That is the policy unfolding across the nation with neo-liberals and neo-cons. As with all repressive regimes we will send these people packing!
THE AMERICAN PEOPLE SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN ABLE TO ACCUMULATE ALL THAT WEALTH SO WE ARE TAKING IT BACK!
The researcher did do good work in showing the racial discrimination in Baltimore and the deliberate mis-identification of poor as tied to drugs and alcohol when the opposite is more prevalent.
The massive corporate fraud of tens of trillions of dollars last decade followed by a deliberate stagnation of the economy with the booms and busts was meant to take all of that wealth those social climbers accumulated and send them back to their social class-----poverty. This is why neo-liberals and neo-cons are pretending there was no fraud and corruption. The rich are trying to end the Age of Enlightenment that made citizens of all people----that created a public sector in which citizens participated in business and governance. This is the Medici complex. Sadly for Johns Hopkins it is a small private university having taken a trillion of public money to expand----but the public owns the university at this point. They aren't Medici's -----they are simply the school yard bully that steals your lunch money!
The poor subjected to all of the injustice were happy enough!
Surprised? Even Poor Whites Have It Better Than Blacks A 25-year study of blacks and whites in Baltimore finds that income status can be an equalizer, but race does make a difference.
By: Teresa Wiltz Posted: July 10 2014 3:00 AM Boarded up row houses in east Baltimore, three blocks north of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Dec. 2, 2003 Alex Wong/Getty Images
From birth, practically, we’re told—again and again—that education is the golden ticket to the American dream. This is a meritocracy! Study diligently, put the work in and you, too, can get ahead, leapfrogging over your parents on the social strata. All you have to do is grab those bootstraps and pull. Hard.
Or not.
For 25 years, a group of researchers from Johns Hopkins University tracked 800 mostly low-income schoolchildren from Baltimore from the start of first grade until they were just shy of 30 years old. In one of the very few projects to compare and contrast the lives of poor black and poor white kids, the researchers interviewed the youngsters, their parents and teachers, checking in with them regularly over the years. What the sociologists found was disheartening: The long-held truism that education trumps social class didn’t hold up. The children who were born poor tended to stay poor—no matter their race.
More often than not, one’s lot in life is determined by that of one’s parents. Almost half the kids surveyed remained in the same social class as their parents—and almost none of the kids, black or white, from low-income families graduated from college. Four percent of kids from poor homes finished college by age 28, compared with 45 percent of kids coming from more well-off backgrounds, even though the disadvantaged kids spoke of wanting to continue their educations. They, too, believed that education was the key to getting ahead.
“It’s a story of middle-class privilege,” says sociologist Karl Alexander, who, along with his colleagues Doris Entwistle and Linda Olson, reported their findings in a new book, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth and the Transition to Adulthood.
“When the dust settles, not very many of these [inner city] kids are moving up in life, following the path that we tell them to follow,” Alexander says. “That’s sad and that’s sobering. The challenges are very real and there are many of them. There’s not just one thing getting in the way.”
And there are more things getting in the way for poor black kids compared with their poor white counterparts, according to Alexander. Low-income urban white neighborhoods tend to be more stable and less violent than urban black neighborhoods with an almost identical income profile, he says.
Black neighborhoods in Baltimore were more likely to be upended by public works projects; highway construction or new railroad lines cut a swath through once-stable communities, sending families scattering. Ninety percent of families that had to relocate because of public works projects were African American, according to Alexander. Working-class white kids were more likely to stay in the same neighborhood, fostering stability and extended social networks.
With deindustrialization, high-paying working-class jobs all but evaporated. But of those blue-collar jobs that remained, white men were much more likely to find work, according to Alexander. At age 28, the last year the former schoolkids were surveyed, 45 percent of the white men were working in those jobs, compared with 15 percent of black men. Among the students who dropped out, only 40 percent of black dropouts were working, compared with 89 percent of white dropouts. Low-income white men in the study had the lowest rate of college attendance or completion, but they also earned double what black men earned.
Why such a glaring difference?
“We see a very clear pattern of white privilege that probably extends back a few generations to Baltimore’s boom times [in the ’40s to ’50s],” Alexander says. “I personally think there’s a lot of racism in the mix, but we can’t quantify that.”
White working-class men benefited from knowing someone who knows someone, according to Alexander. They might get a job working in, say, their uncle’s auto shop. Or their dad works in the shipyards, so that gives them an in. It’s only natural for parents to look out for their kids, Alexander says, but in so doing, this further perpetuates white privilege.
“If you look at the kids that don’t go to college, white [working-class] guys have a tremendous advantage over everyone else,” Alexander says.
Low-income white women also benefit, he says. They are the ones who marry the white guy with the good blue-collar job. And though poor white women typically had the same rate of teen births as did poor black women, they were more likely to either marry or be in long-term partnerships, the study found.
Middle- and upper-class white men were much more likely to report using drugs, binge drinking and smoking, followed by lower-income white men—findings that contradict the stereotype of inner-city black men on drugs. The study also found other interesting black-white disparities. Middle- and upper-class white men were much more likely to report using drugs, binge drinking and smoking, followed by lower-income white men—findings that contradict the stereotype of inner-city black men on drugs. These men were also more likely to have an arrest record, the survey found, while low-income black men were more likely to have a conviction: 49 percent compared with 41 percent of low-income white men. But serving time in prison didn’t hold white men back when it came to finding jobs.
Alexander, who spent most of his career at Johns Hopkins tracking these students, admits that he found the study results depressing. But he says the young adults today are anything but depressed. Most expressed a desire to continue their education. When asked what they considered being “successful” meant, many said that being alive and living a drug-free life and being able to be with their families was what mattered most to them.
“There’s a certain sentiment in this country that the only way you can be happy is to make a lot of money and have a high-status job,” Alexander says. “But on the ground, there are other things that are more important to these young people. And these are substantial values.”
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This article does not mention massive corporate fraud stealing the public's wealth but I will. Remember, government watchdogs have calculated that each US citizen is owed a few hundred thousand dollars in corporate fraud reparation. Add to that the rebuilding of a domestic economy and we are back to 50 years ago and the building of a thriving economy. The War on Poverty worked too well and that is what the attack last decade by the rich on US citizens was all about. What this article does is point to how much poverty exists today----Obama and the Federal calculations always say 17% for example. They are using measurements from the 1960s to manufacture that number. Almost 70% of Americans are at or near poverty----right where Johns Hopkins and the Ivy League schools think we should be.
THE POOR NEED TO STAY POOR IN ORDER TO HAVE THIRD WORLD WEALTH INEQUITY!!!! HOW MEDIEVAL OF THEM!
The middle-class wealth was lost to fraud and corruption and a deliberately stagnant job market that leaves many unemployed. Think where neo-liberals and neo-cons are taking the US and think where we were----it is easy to reverse this!
50 Years After the War on Poverty, Will the Middle Class Become the New Poor?
January 9, 2014 in Economic Crises
Lynn Stuart Parramore
If dangerous policies continue, more People in America will come to know poverty firsthand.
Half a century ago today, LBJ threw down the gauntlet on poverty in his well-known State of the Union address of 1964. Fired with passion and buoyed by bipartisan support, his anti-poverty group began new health insurance programs for the old and the poor, increased Social Security, established food stamps and nutritional products for low-income pregnant women and babies, and started applications to give more teenagers a chance to be successful, like Head Start and Job Corps.
Americans have greatly benefited from big-picture economic changes like the minimum wage; investments in worker training and education; civil rights policies; social insurance; and programs like food stamps and Medicaid. As Georgetown University’s Peter Edelman pointed out in the New York Times, without these programs, research shows that poverty would be nearly double what it is today. According to economist Jared Bernstein, Social Security alone has reduced the official elderly poverty rate from 44 percent, which it would be without benefits, to 9 percent with them.
Some of our most prominent citizens have enjoyed protection from life’s vagaries through one or another of these measures. President Obama’s family once survived on food stamps. Congressman Paul Ryan was able to pay for school with Social Security survivor benefits when his dad died. A mere generation before, the workhouse or the orphanage might have been their fates.
Yet middle-class Americans are increasingly in danger of learning about poverty firsthand.
Middle-Class Tightrope
The gaps between the rich and poor are the widest they have been in a century, and the middle class is disappearing into the chasm. According to research by economist Emmanuel Saez, the share of income that goes to the top 1 percent has more than doubled since 1964. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, the top 1 percent has sucked up nearly all of the income gains in the first three years of the “recovery” — a stupifying 95 percent. The fluidity of American society used to be taken for granted, but now the U.S. lags behind Europe in measurements of mobility.
Not only is the climb to middle-class stability increasingly steep, the fall into poverty is more likely. The Great Recession brought home an ugly reality: nowadays it only takes one pink slip, foreclosure notice or catastrophic medical bill to push economically secure people into the ranks of the poor — even people with college diplomas and impressive resumes.
Why is this happening? Not because of some cosmic forces beyond our control, but because of misguided policies put into place by our elected officials and paid for by an increasingly out-of-touch business elite.
Energized by Ronald Reagan’s famous declaration that government is the problem, not the solution, conservatives in recent decades have sought to reduce the government’s vital role in creating opportunity and keeping hard-pressed Americans afloat. Simultaneously, they have unleashed the wild horses of deregulated capitalism, which have trampled working people. Labor unions have been crushed, wages have declined, safety nets have frayed, medical expenses have risen, and millions of Americans are now teetering on the edge of poverty.
It gets harder and harder to work your way out of dire straits. A mom with two kids toiling full-time for minimum wage at a grocery store would make about $15,000 a year, well below the poverty line of $18,498 for a family of three. But just looking at poverty figures doesn’t tell the whole story. A far larger group of Americans — around 100 million — is considered low-income, which would mean about $45,000 in income for a family of four. When you include the low-income category, census data show that the number of economically distressed Americans jumps to 50 percent. Half of us!
Former President Jimmy Carter has said that the American middle-class is beginning to look like those who lived in poverty when he occupied the White House. He attributed this reduced quality of life to the rise in tax breaks for the wealthy, an insufficient minimum wage, and electoral districts drawn to maximize political polarization.
Poverty For All?
New research shows that four out of five U.S. adults will struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives. What’s especially interesting is that the face of poverty is changing. You are still more likely to be poor if you are black or brown, but census data show that race disparities in the poverty rate have significantly narrowed since the 1970s. By the time they turn 60, a whopping 76 percent of whites will experience economic insecurity, defined as a year or more of periodic joblessness, reliance on government assistance like food stamps or income below 150 percent of the poverty line.
You read that correctly. Three out of four white people will get a chance to know economic panic before they reach retirement age.
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Before the 17th century the masses were not exposed to liberal arts and humanities in school because that was not needed to work. It was needed for those who lead---broad understanding makes for strong leadership skills. This is why Wall Street and Ivy League schools are pushing education reform that kills public education and takes people back to that tiered society of workers vs leaders. Hopkins has the Michelle Rhee privatization happening in Baltimore on steroids with the intent to expand across Maryland. This is third world policy.
Making liberal arts and humanity degrees seem unless and poor in pay is a ploy. They say------Ivy League schools can graduate all we need to perform the functions needing arts and humanities.....we write the history, literature, and create the art! That is the goal with education reform and the return to tiered learning. The citizens of Europe and America fought revolutionary wars to win the rights as citizens and Hopkins and Wall Street think they are simply going to squeeze the American people into poverty.
SIMPLY SHAKE THE NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS WORKING FOR GLOBAL CORPORATIONS OUT OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND WE CAN RETURN TO ENLIGHTENMENT AND SEND THESE MEDIEVAL TYPES BACK TO THE CLOSET!
Reading this shows the decline in US education after Reagan/Clinton education reforms of late 1980s/early 1990s where the goal was to dumb-down US education and gave us citizens who cannot read or do math. Those education reforms were written by the same Ivy League schools trying to press this education reform on the American people. The fact we have to explain why all schools need liberal arts and humanities shows the leadership needs to go!
Making the Case for Liberal Arts
June 19, 2013 By Colleen Flaherty
From states considering differential tuition that would be punitive toward the humanities to talk of tying state funding to the production of “high-demand” degrees, there’s a general sense that the humanities and social sciences are under attack. But a new report out today argues that they play a vital role in growing an informed, career-oriented population equipped for leadership in an increasingly interconnected world.
“At the very moment when China and some European nations are seeking to replicate our model of broad education in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences as a stimulus to innovation and a source of social cohesion,” the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ “The Heart of the Matter” report reads, “we are instead narrowing our focus and abandoning our sense of what education has been and should continue to be – our sense of what makes America great.”
The report notes the challenges facing the humanities and social sciences – including decreased funding and a lack of integration between K-12 and higher education – in the United States, and makes recommendations for overcoming them, in both education and the broader culture. The report seeks to advance three goals: educating Americans in the knowledge, skills and understanding they’ll need to thrive in 21st-century democracy; fostering a society that is innovative, competitive and strong; and readying the nation for global leadership.
Recommendations for higher education include making the case for the liberal arts, especially as doubts about its value grow. “[C]olleges must do their part to control costs and assure that resources are aligned with their fundamental mission,” the report reads. “But even as they do so, colleges have important work to do in explaining what the value of their education consists of, and assuring that they are living up to this promise.” The central message must be that thriving long-term in the job market depends on developing “qualities of mind: inquisitiveness, perceptiveness, the ability to put a received idea to a new purpose, and the ability to share and build ideas with a diverse world of others.”
Faculty, as guardians of the curriculum, are particularly responsible for “assessing offerings in light of high liberal arts ideals," the report says. Research-oriented course offerings are valuable, but “college and university curricula must also offer the broad-gauged, integrative courses on which liberal education can be grounded, and such foundations need to be offered by compelling teachers.” That means a curriculum that meets students' needs broadly and prepares them for the lives that await them, the report states, “not one that simply mirrors the map of current faculty specializations.”
The commission applauds the efforts of some colleges and universities that already have created strategic planning groups and reform measures to invigorate liberal arts instruction, and encourages dialogue across campuses to share best practices. It also praises efforts to promote greater integration across curricular domains. “Interdisciplinary research centers, which often stand at the crossroads of the arts and sciences, offer opportunities for undergraduates to take a direct role in exploration, and to bring the parts of their study into a coherent whole,” says the report, which also encourages the increasing diversity of online course offerings in the humanities.
The study’s recommendations for K-12 education also have implications for academe. Citing a disconnect between primary, secondary and higher education, it calls for college and university faculty “to reach out to their teaching colleagues in K-12 schools, and teachers should be encouraged to participate in the broader intellectual exchanges that has been, for decades, the purview solely of higher education.” That means lifting the professional status of teachers, as well as their professional qualifications. Fewer than 30 percent of public high school teachers are taught by a history teacher with a degree and certification in history, for example, and this may be reflected in student learning outcomes: In 2010, just 45 percent of high school students demonstrated at least a basic understanding of U.S. history, according to one cited study. The commission encourages states and school districts to facilitate the entry of advanced degree-holders into K-12 teaching through revised certification procedures and fellowships, as well as federal loan forgiveness programs.
It also recommends the creation of a humanities-focused national initiative similar to the STEM Master Teacher Corps proposed by President Obama last year to attract and retain talent and encourage teacher cooperation to advance discipline education across the country.
James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, said the report succeeding in making the critical point that the humanities aren’t at odds with career-oriented education, but rather underpin them.
By fostering a deep appreciation for the past and contextualization, “what the humanities prepares you for is a trajectory,” he said. “Humanities education may not prepare you for a job, but humanities education prepares you for a career.”
Additionally, he said he agreed with the report’s support emphasis on having trained historians teaching history in U.S. schools. “A teacher cannot properly convey content knowledge unless a teacher has an understanding of the discipline.”
In a statement, Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, also praised the commission's work. "The goals and recommendations offered in the report certainly will spark a much-needed, national conversation about the imperative to foster the critical thinking, complex, problem-solving, and written and oral communication skills of all Americans," he said.
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Obama doesn't necessarily dislike liberal arts----he was hired to create a structure for job-ready workers and that is what education reform does. It is job-training from K-career college. Forget the broad education that readies people to be citizens and leaders!
TRAINING PEOPLE FOR JOBS----HOW DID WE EXCEL FOR DECADES WITHOUT THIS MODEL?
We weren't maximizing corporate
Obama: Liberal Arts waste of timeObama: Liberal Arts waste of time
Going to college for a degree that you cannot even use, that was President Barack Obama’s thoughts about graduating with a liberal arts degree.
It was reported that President Obama made remarks about liberal arts and criticized the effectiveness a degree in liberal arts would have in training people for jobs.
“[A] lot of young people no longer see the trades and skilled manufacturing as a viable career. But I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree. Now, nothing wrong with an art history degree — I love art history. So I don’t want to get a bunch of emails from everybody. I’m just saying you can make a really good living and have a great career without getting a four-year college education as long as you get the skills and the training that you need.”
Obama said this as an attempt to encourage American manufacturing to what it used to be by changing the way people are trained for jobs.
Obama isn’t the first person in politics to frown upon liberal art studies.
According to Inside Higher Ed., Mitt Romney and Governor Pat McCrory also had a lot to say about liberal-arts disciplines. Oddly, all three politicians received a liberal-arts degree.
This all began when Obama gave a speech early in 2014 at a General Electric plant in Wisconsin on the need to improve jobs training programs nationwide. The overall point of Obama’s speech was effective and wasn’t controversial at all, but the inner details of it left people feeling disappointed.
“There was a survey conducted of over 500 business leaders, like heads of companies, and all said that people with liberal arts education brought good communication skills, good analytical skills and good contextualizing skills to any job,” said director of Women’s and Gender Studies program in N.C State, Deborah Hooker. “A knowledge of history and literature, as well as a knowledge of science and technology, is important for all sorts of sociopolitical reasons.”
While many people believe that this is true, and that the liberal-arts are just as important as any other major that students work for, Obama disagreed at first in his speech, but later apologized.
“Let me apologize for my off-the-cuff remarks. I was making a point about the jobs market, not the value of art history,” said Obama as he went on saying that art history was one of his favorite subjects in high school.
Mercy College’s very own Dean of Liberal Arts and Professor of Humanities had a lot to say about Obama’s comment.
“He did apologize but given the context in which he was speaking to the GE people in Wisconsin, the remark was not off the cuff which is what he said in his apology letter,” said Dean Miriam Gogol. “The reason I say that it wasn’t an off the cuff comment is that his remark fit in directly with his primary message which was about job driven training programs. But in my judgment as dean, it was more than just an unfortunate comparison.”
Liberal arts can go under multiple categories, but for the majority of colleges, a liberal arts degree often includes the four traditional branches: humanities education in which students specialize in classical languages, such as Latin and Greek, modern languages, where students are required to study at least three languages, mathematical-scientific education and economical and social-scientific education, where students are required to study economics, world history, social studies and business informatics.
Gogol states the importance of a liberal arts education and career training.
“Students need both. They need preparation for jobs, and they need an education that teaches them how to think. They need both,” she stated. “People need the bread, and they need the rose. They need an intellectual foundation, and they need critical thinking and creative interdisciplinary reasoning. They need to learn how to think outside the box, which is a huge part of one’s life.”
Mercy College has its very own School of Liberal Arts, which Gogol feels strongly about. “The School of Liberal Arts at Mercy College is a foundation. We are a combination for a liberal arts school at Mercy; we have combined the professional and the non-professional.”
Not many students know about Obama’s comment toward the GE workers. Out of the many who were asked, only one of them knew it, about but didn’t have much of a comment.
While many people believe liberal arts is a waste of four years in college, it realistically is a help, not only for career advancement, but in self-improving one’s overall life.
“I didn’t start out as a dean. I started out in English and I had no idea where I was going to go, I found myself, and it took a long time. I was drawn to passion, and then I went forward in it. (Studying liberal arts) won’t let you go backwards,” said Gogol. “We all need the intellectual foundation, and need that capacity to think outside the box, and that’s where liberal arts comes in.”
YOU ARE A VICTIM AND LOSER SAY IVY LEAGUE SCHOOLS AND WALL STREET IF YOU PLAY BY THE RULES!
Obama calls this EXCEPTIONAL and a Hillary for President calls this group the SMART PEOPLE. We all know that it is simply thuggery which takes little intelligence.
The study to which NPR referred was Hopkins saying that if you are poor----you will stay poor and the researcher studied the population of Baltimore. Well, Baltimore is run as a third world society with Johns Hopkins being the dictator---we call Baltimore a COMPANY TOWN. Indeed, Hopkins has made sure that no progress was made in the War on Poverty and New Deal as labor is subjugated with public policy that makes for poverty for most in the region and all of the public money-----social services, health care, Federal grants meant to aid the poor and those communities were always simply funneled from those in need to Hopkins and its development groups. Johns Hopkins runs Baltimore as leaders in an Indian city of Mumbai would so the people in Baltimore surely did not excel for the most part unless they were chosen to work for Johns Hopkins and their interests.
Meanwhile across the nation there was a renaissance with large sectors of US population climbing the economic and social ladder. Most of the CEOs of national corporations in the 1950s-1970s were graduates of public schools from low/middle-class families. So, this Hopkins research was a message Hopkins, US Chamber of Commerce, and Wall Street wanted to send------
FORGET THOSE CENTURIES OF PROSPERITY AND ACHIEVEMENT BY CITIZENS AFTER THE AGE OF REASON AND ENLIGHTENMENT----WE ARE GOING BACK TO THE MIDDLE AGES WHERE ONLY THE RICH LEAD IN BUSINESS AND GOVERNMENT AND THE CHURCH CARES FOR THE POOR MASSES!
MR THOMAS' WORLD HISTORY CLASS--AGE OF REASON
The Age of Reason was an 18th century movement which followed hard after the "mysticism, religion, and superstition of the Middle Ages". This time period presented new ideas about the founding of knowledge, the universe, and the way man viewed himself. Previously, you couldn't speak your mind in verbal or written form. During this period you were free to do that without being called a heretic. Individual happiness and liberty were finally able to come true. The medieval imperial concepts were abandoned. The Age of Reason also included the time period known as the Age of Enlightenment.
Tying all public services and programs back to church and non-profit is stepping back to the masses and their religion. We had a separation of church and state that gave us modern society with people as citizens.
This is what all repressive dictators say and then they are kicked out in disgrace. The Hopkins researcher was not wrong---- Baltimore citizens were indeed not allowed to advance in socio-economic status unless tied to Hopkins. That is the policy unfolding across the nation with neo-liberals and neo-cons. As with all repressive regimes we will send these people packing!
THE AMERICAN PEOPLE SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN ABLE TO ACCUMULATE ALL THAT WEALTH SO WE ARE TAKING IT BACK!
The researcher did do good work in showing the racial discrimination in Baltimore and the deliberate mis-identification of poor as tied to drugs and alcohol when the opposite is more prevalent.
The massive corporate fraud of tens of trillions of dollars last decade followed by a deliberate stagnation of the economy with the booms and busts was meant to take all of that wealth those social climbers accumulated and send them back to their social class-----poverty. This is why neo-liberals and neo-cons are pretending there was no fraud and corruption. The rich are trying to end the Age of Enlightenment that made citizens of all people----that created a public sector in which citizens participated in business and governance. This is the Medici complex. Sadly for Johns Hopkins it is a small private university having taken a trillion of public money to expand----but the public owns the university at this point. They aren't Medici's -----they are simply the school yard bully that steals your lunch money!
The poor subjected to all of the injustice were happy enough!
Surprised? Even Poor Whites Have It Better Than Blacks A 25-year study of blacks and whites in Baltimore finds that income status can be an equalizer, but race does make a difference.
By: Teresa Wiltz Posted: July 10 2014 3:00 AM Boarded up row houses in east Baltimore, three blocks north of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Dec. 2, 2003 Alex Wong/Getty Images
From birth, practically, we’re told—again and again—that education is the golden ticket to the American dream. This is a meritocracy! Study diligently, put the work in and you, too, can get ahead, leapfrogging over your parents on the social strata. All you have to do is grab those bootstraps and pull. Hard.
Or not.
For 25 years, a group of researchers from Johns Hopkins University tracked 800 mostly low-income schoolchildren from Baltimore from the start of first grade until they were just shy of 30 years old. In one of the very few projects to compare and contrast the lives of poor black and poor white kids, the researchers interviewed the youngsters, their parents and teachers, checking in with them regularly over the years. What the sociologists found was disheartening: The long-held truism that education trumps social class didn’t hold up. The children who were born poor tended to stay poor—no matter their race.
More often than not, one’s lot in life is determined by that of one’s parents. Almost half the kids surveyed remained in the same social class as their parents—and almost none of the kids, black or white, from low-income families graduated from college. Four percent of kids from poor homes finished college by age 28, compared with 45 percent of kids coming from more well-off backgrounds, even though the disadvantaged kids spoke of wanting to continue their educations. They, too, believed that education was the key to getting ahead.
“It’s a story of middle-class privilege,” says sociologist Karl Alexander, who, along with his colleagues Doris Entwistle and Linda Olson, reported their findings in a new book, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth and the Transition to Adulthood.
“When the dust settles, not very many of these [inner city] kids are moving up in life, following the path that we tell them to follow,” Alexander says. “That’s sad and that’s sobering. The challenges are very real and there are many of them. There’s not just one thing getting in the way.”
And there are more things getting in the way for poor black kids compared with their poor white counterparts, according to Alexander. Low-income urban white neighborhoods tend to be more stable and less violent than urban black neighborhoods with an almost identical income profile, he says.
Black neighborhoods in Baltimore were more likely to be upended by public works projects; highway construction or new railroad lines cut a swath through once-stable communities, sending families scattering. Ninety percent of families that had to relocate because of public works projects were African American, according to Alexander. Working-class white kids were more likely to stay in the same neighborhood, fostering stability and extended social networks.
With deindustrialization, high-paying working-class jobs all but evaporated. But of those blue-collar jobs that remained, white men were much more likely to find work, according to Alexander. At age 28, the last year the former schoolkids were surveyed, 45 percent of the white men were working in those jobs, compared with 15 percent of black men. Among the students who dropped out, only 40 percent of black dropouts were working, compared with 89 percent of white dropouts. Low-income white men in the study had the lowest rate of college attendance or completion, but they also earned double what black men earned.
Why such a glaring difference?
“We see a very clear pattern of white privilege that probably extends back a few generations to Baltimore’s boom times [in the ’40s to ’50s],” Alexander says. “I personally think there’s a lot of racism in the mix, but we can’t quantify that.”
White working-class men benefited from knowing someone who knows someone, according to Alexander. They might get a job working in, say, their uncle’s auto shop. Or their dad works in the shipyards, so that gives them an in. It’s only natural for parents to look out for their kids, Alexander says, but in so doing, this further perpetuates white privilege.
“If you look at the kids that don’t go to college, white [working-class] guys have a tremendous advantage over everyone else,” Alexander says.
Low-income white women also benefit, he says. They are the ones who marry the white guy with the good blue-collar job. And though poor white women typically had the same rate of teen births as did poor black women, they were more likely to either marry or be in long-term partnerships, the study found.
Middle- and upper-class white men were much more likely to report using drugs, binge drinking and smoking, followed by lower-income white men—findings that contradict the stereotype of inner-city black men on drugs. The study also found other interesting black-white disparities. Middle- and upper-class white men were much more likely to report using drugs, binge drinking and smoking, followed by lower-income white men—findings that contradict the stereotype of inner-city black men on drugs. These men were also more likely to have an arrest record, the survey found, while low-income black men were more likely to have a conviction: 49 percent compared with 41 percent of low-income white men. But serving time in prison didn’t hold white men back when it came to finding jobs.
Alexander, who spent most of his career at Johns Hopkins tracking these students, admits that he found the study results depressing. But he says the young adults today are anything but depressed. Most expressed a desire to continue their education. When asked what they considered being “successful” meant, many said that being alive and living a drug-free life and being able to be with their families was what mattered most to them.
“There’s a certain sentiment in this country that the only way you can be happy is to make a lot of money and have a high-status job,” Alexander says. “But on the ground, there are other things that are more important to these young people. And these are substantial values.”
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This article does not mention massive corporate fraud stealing the public's wealth but I will. Remember, government watchdogs have calculated that each US citizen is owed a few hundred thousand dollars in corporate fraud reparation. Add to that the rebuilding of a domestic economy and we are back to 50 years ago and the building of a thriving economy. The War on Poverty worked too well and that is what the attack last decade by the rich on US citizens was all about. What this article does is point to how much poverty exists today----Obama and the Federal calculations always say 17% for example. They are using measurements from the 1960s to manufacture that number. Almost 70% of Americans are at or near poverty----right where Johns Hopkins and the Ivy League schools think we should be.
THE POOR NEED TO STAY POOR IN ORDER TO HAVE THIRD WORLD WEALTH INEQUITY!!!! HOW MEDIEVAL OF THEM!
The middle-class wealth was lost to fraud and corruption and a deliberately stagnant job market that leaves many unemployed. Think where neo-liberals and neo-cons are taking the US and think where we were----it is easy to reverse this!
50 Years After the War on Poverty, Will the Middle Class Become the New Poor?
January 9, 2014 in Economic Crises
Lynn Stuart Parramore
If dangerous policies continue, more People in America will come to know poverty firsthand.
Half a century ago today, LBJ threw down the gauntlet on poverty in his well-known State of the Union address of 1964. Fired with passion and buoyed by bipartisan support, his anti-poverty group began new health insurance programs for the old and the poor, increased Social Security, established food stamps and nutritional products for low-income pregnant women and babies, and started applications to give more teenagers a chance to be successful, like Head Start and Job Corps.
Americans have greatly benefited from big-picture economic changes like the minimum wage; investments in worker training and education; civil rights policies; social insurance; and programs like food stamps and Medicaid. As Georgetown University’s Peter Edelman pointed out in the New York Times, without these programs, research shows that poverty would be nearly double what it is today. According to economist Jared Bernstein, Social Security alone has reduced the official elderly poverty rate from 44 percent, which it would be without benefits, to 9 percent with them.
Some of our most prominent citizens have enjoyed protection from life’s vagaries through one or another of these measures. President Obama’s family once survived on food stamps. Congressman Paul Ryan was able to pay for school with Social Security survivor benefits when his dad died. A mere generation before, the workhouse or the orphanage might have been their fates.
Yet middle-class Americans are increasingly in danger of learning about poverty firsthand.
Middle-Class Tightrope
The gaps between the rich and poor are the widest they have been in a century, and the middle class is disappearing into the chasm. According to research by economist Emmanuel Saez, the share of income that goes to the top 1 percent has more than doubled since 1964. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, the top 1 percent has sucked up nearly all of the income gains in the first three years of the “recovery” — a stupifying 95 percent. The fluidity of American society used to be taken for granted, but now the U.S. lags behind Europe in measurements of mobility.
Not only is the climb to middle-class stability increasingly steep, the fall into poverty is more likely. The Great Recession brought home an ugly reality: nowadays it only takes one pink slip, foreclosure notice or catastrophic medical bill to push economically secure people into the ranks of the poor — even people with college diplomas and impressive resumes.
Why is this happening? Not because of some cosmic forces beyond our control, but because of misguided policies put into place by our elected officials and paid for by an increasingly out-of-touch business elite.
Energized by Ronald Reagan’s famous declaration that government is the problem, not the solution, conservatives in recent decades have sought to reduce the government’s vital role in creating opportunity and keeping hard-pressed Americans afloat. Simultaneously, they have unleashed the wild horses of deregulated capitalism, which have trampled working people. Labor unions have been crushed, wages have declined, safety nets have frayed, medical expenses have risen, and millions of Americans are now teetering on the edge of poverty.
It gets harder and harder to work your way out of dire straits. A mom with two kids toiling full-time for minimum wage at a grocery store would make about $15,000 a year, well below the poverty line of $18,498 for a family of three. But just looking at poverty figures doesn’t tell the whole story. A far larger group of Americans — around 100 million — is considered low-income, which would mean about $45,000 in income for a family of four. When you include the low-income category, census data show that the number of economically distressed Americans jumps to 50 percent. Half of us!
Former President Jimmy Carter has said that the American middle-class is beginning to look like those who lived in poverty when he occupied the White House. He attributed this reduced quality of life to the rise in tax breaks for the wealthy, an insufficient minimum wage, and electoral districts drawn to maximize political polarization.
Poverty For All?
New research shows that four out of five U.S. adults will struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives. What’s especially interesting is that the face of poverty is changing. You are still more likely to be poor if you are black or brown, but census data show that race disparities in the poverty rate have significantly narrowed since the 1970s. By the time they turn 60, a whopping 76 percent of whites will experience economic insecurity, defined as a year or more of periodic joblessness, reliance on government assistance like food stamps or income below 150 percent of the poverty line.
You read that correctly. Three out of four white people will get a chance to know economic panic before they reach retirement age.
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Before the 17th century the masses were not exposed to liberal arts and humanities in school because that was not needed to work. It was needed for those who lead---broad understanding makes for strong leadership skills. This is why Wall Street and Ivy League schools are pushing education reform that kills public education and takes people back to that tiered society of workers vs leaders. Hopkins has the Michelle Rhee privatization happening in Baltimore on steroids with the intent to expand across Maryland. This is third world policy.
Making liberal arts and humanity degrees seem unless and poor in pay is a ploy. They say------Ivy League schools can graduate all we need to perform the functions needing arts and humanities.....we write the history, literature, and create the art! That is the goal with education reform and the return to tiered learning. The citizens of Europe and America fought revolutionary wars to win the rights as citizens and Hopkins and Wall Street think they are simply going to squeeze the American people into poverty.
SIMPLY SHAKE THE NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS WORKING FOR GLOBAL CORPORATIONS OUT OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND WE CAN RETURN TO ENLIGHTENMENT AND SEND THESE MEDIEVAL TYPES BACK TO THE CLOSET!
Reading this shows the decline in US education after Reagan/Clinton education reforms of late 1980s/early 1990s where the goal was to dumb-down US education and gave us citizens who cannot read or do math. Those education reforms were written by the same Ivy League schools trying to press this education reform on the American people. The fact we have to explain why all schools need liberal arts and humanities shows the leadership needs to go!
Making the Case for Liberal Arts
June 19, 2013 By Colleen Flaherty
From states considering differential tuition that would be punitive toward the humanities to talk of tying state funding to the production of “high-demand” degrees, there’s a general sense that the humanities and social sciences are under attack. But a new report out today argues that they play a vital role in growing an informed, career-oriented population equipped for leadership in an increasingly interconnected world.
“At the very moment when China and some European nations are seeking to replicate our model of broad education in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences as a stimulus to innovation and a source of social cohesion,” the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ “The Heart of the Matter” report reads, “we are instead narrowing our focus and abandoning our sense of what education has been and should continue to be – our sense of what makes America great.”
The report notes the challenges facing the humanities and social sciences – including decreased funding and a lack of integration between K-12 and higher education – in the United States, and makes recommendations for overcoming them, in both education and the broader culture. The report seeks to advance three goals: educating Americans in the knowledge, skills and understanding they’ll need to thrive in 21st-century democracy; fostering a society that is innovative, competitive and strong; and readying the nation for global leadership.
Recommendations for higher education include making the case for the liberal arts, especially as doubts about its value grow. “[C]olleges must do their part to control costs and assure that resources are aligned with their fundamental mission,” the report reads. “But even as they do so, colleges have important work to do in explaining what the value of their education consists of, and assuring that they are living up to this promise.” The central message must be that thriving long-term in the job market depends on developing “qualities of mind: inquisitiveness, perceptiveness, the ability to put a received idea to a new purpose, and the ability to share and build ideas with a diverse world of others.”
Faculty, as guardians of the curriculum, are particularly responsible for “assessing offerings in light of high liberal arts ideals," the report says. Research-oriented course offerings are valuable, but “college and university curricula must also offer the broad-gauged, integrative courses on which liberal education can be grounded, and such foundations need to be offered by compelling teachers.” That means a curriculum that meets students' needs broadly and prepares them for the lives that await them, the report states, “not one that simply mirrors the map of current faculty specializations.”
The commission applauds the efforts of some colleges and universities that already have created strategic planning groups and reform measures to invigorate liberal arts instruction, and encourages dialogue across campuses to share best practices. It also praises efforts to promote greater integration across curricular domains. “Interdisciplinary research centers, which often stand at the crossroads of the arts and sciences, offer opportunities for undergraduates to take a direct role in exploration, and to bring the parts of their study into a coherent whole,” says the report, which also encourages the increasing diversity of online course offerings in the humanities.
The study’s recommendations for K-12 education also have implications for academe. Citing a disconnect between primary, secondary and higher education, it calls for college and university faculty “to reach out to their teaching colleagues in K-12 schools, and teachers should be encouraged to participate in the broader intellectual exchanges that has been, for decades, the purview solely of higher education.” That means lifting the professional status of teachers, as well as their professional qualifications. Fewer than 30 percent of public high school teachers are taught by a history teacher with a degree and certification in history, for example, and this may be reflected in student learning outcomes: In 2010, just 45 percent of high school students demonstrated at least a basic understanding of U.S. history, according to one cited study. The commission encourages states and school districts to facilitate the entry of advanced degree-holders into K-12 teaching through revised certification procedures and fellowships, as well as federal loan forgiveness programs.
It also recommends the creation of a humanities-focused national initiative similar to the STEM Master Teacher Corps proposed by President Obama last year to attract and retain talent and encourage teacher cooperation to advance discipline education across the country.
James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, said the report succeeding in making the critical point that the humanities aren’t at odds with career-oriented education, but rather underpin them.
By fostering a deep appreciation for the past and contextualization, “what the humanities prepares you for is a trajectory,” he said. “Humanities education may not prepare you for a job, but humanities education prepares you for a career.”
Additionally, he said he agreed with the report’s support emphasis on having trained historians teaching history in U.S. schools. “A teacher cannot properly convey content knowledge unless a teacher has an understanding of the discipline.”
In a statement, Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, also praised the commission's work. "The goals and recommendations offered in the report certainly will spark a much-needed, national conversation about the imperative to foster the critical thinking, complex, problem-solving, and written and oral communication skills of all Americans," he said.
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Obama doesn't necessarily dislike liberal arts----he was hired to create a structure for job-ready workers and that is what education reform does. It is job-training from K-career college. Forget the broad education that readies people to be citizens and leaders!
TRAINING PEOPLE FOR JOBS----HOW DID WE EXCEL FOR DECADES WITHOUT THIS MODEL?
We weren't maximizing corporate
Obama: Liberal Arts waste of timeObama: Liberal Arts waste of time
Going to college for a degree that you cannot even use, that was President Barack Obama’s thoughts about graduating with a liberal arts degree.
It was reported that President Obama made remarks about liberal arts and criticized the effectiveness a degree in liberal arts would have in training people for jobs.
“[A] lot of young people no longer see the trades and skilled manufacturing as a viable career. But I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree. Now, nothing wrong with an art history degree — I love art history. So I don’t want to get a bunch of emails from everybody. I’m just saying you can make a really good living and have a great career without getting a four-year college education as long as you get the skills and the training that you need.”
Obama said this as an attempt to encourage American manufacturing to what it used to be by changing the way people are trained for jobs.
Obama isn’t the first person in politics to frown upon liberal art studies.
According to Inside Higher Ed., Mitt Romney and Governor Pat McCrory also had a lot to say about liberal-arts disciplines. Oddly, all three politicians received a liberal-arts degree.
This all began when Obama gave a speech early in 2014 at a General Electric plant in Wisconsin on the need to improve jobs training programs nationwide. The overall point of Obama’s speech was effective and wasn’t controversial at all, but the inner details of it left people feeling disappointed.
“There was a survey conducted of over 500 business leaders, like heads of companies, and all said that people with liberal arts education brought good communication skills, good analytical skills and good contextualizing skills to any job,” said director of Women’s and Gender Studies program in N.C State, Deborah Hooker. “A knowledge of history and literature, as well as a knowledge of science and technology, is important for all sorts of sociopolitical reasons.”
While many people believe that this is true, and that the liberal-arts are just as important as any other major that students work for, Obama disagreed at first in his speech, but later apologized.
“Let me apologize for my off-the-cuff remarks. I was making a point about the jobs market, not the value of art history,” said Obama as he went on saying that art history was one of his favorite subjects in high school.
Mercy College’s very own Dean of Liberal Arts and Professor of Humanities had a lot to say about Obama’s comment.
“He did apologize but given the context in which he was speaking to the GE people in Wisconsin, the remark was not off the cuff which is what he said in his apology letter,” said Dean Miriam Gogol. “The reason I say that it wasn’t an off the cuff comment is that his remark fit in directly with his primary message which was about job driven training programs. But in my judgment as dean, it was more than just an unfortunate comparison.”
Liberal arts can go under multiple categories, but for the majority of colleges, a liberal arts degree often includes the four traditional branches: humanities education in which students specialize in classical languages, such as Latin and Greek, modern languages, where students are required to study at least three languages, mathematical-scientific education and economical and social-scientific education, where students are required to study economics, world history, social studies and business informatics.
Gogol states the importance of a liberal arts education and career training.
“Students need both. They need preparation for jobs, and they need an education that teaches them how to think. They need both,” she stated. “People need the bread, and they need the rose. They need an intellectual foundation, and they need critical thinking and creative interdisciplinary reasoning. They need to learn how to think outside the box, which is a huge part of one’s life.”
Mercy College has its very own School of Liberal Arts, which Gogol feels strongly about. “The School of Liberal Arts at Mercy College is a foundation. We are a combination for a liberal arts school at Mercy; we have combined the professional and the non-professional.”
Not many students know about Obama’s comment toward the GE workers. Out of the many who were asked, only one of them knew it, about but didn’t have much of a comment.
While many people believe liberal arts is a waste of four years in college, it realistically is a help, not only for career advancement, but in self-improving one’s overall life.
“I didn’t start out as a dean. I started out in English and I had no idea where I was going to go, I found myself, and it took a long time. I was drawn to passion, and then I went forward in it. (Studying liberal arts) won’t let you go backwards,” said Gogol. “We all need the intellectual foundation, and need that capacity to think outside the box, and that’s where liberal arts comes in.”
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