David F. Ruccio — American myth

And yet the myth persists. American elites and policymakers still to choose to emphasize the economic returns to education as the panacea to address socially established wealth disparities and structural barriers of racial and ethnic economic inclusion.
The question is, why?
According to Hamilton and Darity, such a view

follows from a neoliberal perspective, where the free market, as long as individual agents are properly incentivized, is supposed to be the solution to all our problems, economic or otherwise. The transcendence of Barack Obama becomes the ideal symbolism and spokesperson of this political perspective. His ascendency becomes an allegory of hard work, merit, efficiency, social mobility, freedom and fairness, individual agency, and personal responsibility. The neoliberal ideology is not limited to race. It more generally places the onus on individual actions, and more broadly leads to deficiency narratives for low achievement, but this is especially the case when considering race and other stigmatized workers. Perhaps the greatest rhetorical victory of this paradigm is convincing the masses that implicit in unfettered markets is the “American Dream”—the hope that, even if your lot in life is subpar, with patience and individual hard work, you can turn your proverbial “rags into riches.”

And so the myth of college and the American Dream is perpetuated, while the unequal distribution of wealth—across the entire population, and especially with respect to ethnic and racial minorities—which has been growing for decades, continues unabated.

Occasional Links & Commentary
American myth
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

Scott Kaufman — Noam Chomsky: Modern universities designed to ‘deprive you of your freedom’ (via Raw Story )

Noam Chomsky: Modern universities designed to ‘deprive you of your freedom’ (via Raw Story )

The World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) released an interview with Noam Chomsky recently in which the noted linguist discussed, among other things, how high student tuition indoctrinates students into corporate culture. “There’s no economic…

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Tim Johnson — Latin America becoming fertile ground for online university courses

The world of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, is roiling academia at universities in the United States, where they are labeled either the future or the downfall of higher education.

A few superstar professors pull in upward of 10,000 students around the globe into free, or nearly free, courses. But others perceive the courses as a dangerous fad that will shrink faculties, turn existing professors into glorified teaching assistants and replace meaningful classroom discussion with message boards and student-led forums.

Lost in the debate about online learning, however, is its impact in far-flung regions of the globe, places like the electrical engineering department at the University of El Salvador and the modest walk-up apartment of the Palacios family, above the medical clinic of Dr. Roberto Palacios Navarro, Roosemberth’s father.

“At school, he hardly studies. He just shows up and takes the exams,” Palacios said of his son. But it isn’t for lack of ambition. “He wants to learn,” he said.
Added the son: “I don’t like simple things.”

McClatchyDC
Latin America becoming fertile ground for online university courses
Tim Johnson — McClatchy Foreign Staff

Yves Smith — How did Quebec Students Mobilize Hundreds of Thousands for Strike?

It’s telling that the fact that hundreds of thousands of people in Quebec have been striking for over two months has gone virtually unreported in the US. This Real News Network interview helps explain how protests against tuition hikes have evolved into a broad based effort to reverse the neoliberal policies of the incumbent provincial government.

Read it at Naked Capitalism and watch the video
How did Quebec Students Mobilize Hundreds of Thousands for Strike?
by Yves Smith

Same thing is happening with students in Chile.

"It’s the Socioeconomic Segregation, Stupid"

In moving beyond No Child Left Behind in ways that are humane, effective, and efficient, we must implement education policies that challenge economic inequality rather than increasing it, which will require an about-face for most politicians on both sides of the aisle of the corporate jet.  One thing that schools can do in this regard is to take seriously the research by James Coleman, which has been ignored or misused since it was published in 1966, just one year after Congressional approval of the first ESEA in 1965.

Coleman’s findings are here summarized by Coleman scholar, Gerald Grant (2009):"Simply put, Coleman found that the achievement of both poor and rich children was depressed by attending a school where most children came from low-income families. More important to the goal of achieving equal educational opportunity, he found that the achievement of poor children was raised by attending a predominantly middle-class school, while the achievement of affluent children in the school was not harmed. This was true even if per-pupil expenditures were the same at both schools. No research over the past forty years has overturned Coleman’s finding . . . (p. 159)." 

Coleman also found that the longer that poor black children were stuck in low SES schools, the lower their achievement moved in comparison to middle class children.

Read it at Common Dreams

On US Education: It’s the Socioeconomic Segregation, Stupid
by Jim Horn
(h/t Rohan Grey via Twitter)

Education is arguably the single most significant economic factor, in that it is the sine qua non of survival and progress, fundamentally influencing everything else. As such it is foundational.