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Kathy Newman
Professor of English, Carnegie Mellon University

I started following Ed Schultz, the beefy, loud mouthed, pro-labor MSNBC anchor on Twitter a year ago last spring, when Pennsylvania education cuts were starting to reverberate across the state, forcing thousands of K-12 schools to cut art, band, music, drama, and science programs. Right around this time, the Pittsburgh Opera decided to give Governor Tom Corbett a lifetime achievement award for his contributions to the arts, and Pittsburghers staged a raucous rally to protest Corbett’s award and to bring attention to the cuts. Schultz caught wind of the statewide crisis and helped to focus attention on it by giving it ample coverage on his show.

Schultz, occupying the coveted 8:00 PM slot for two years, from 2011 to 2013, was the only MSNBC host who seemed to be following the school cuts as closely as I was. Watching Schultz I had the feeling—one I rarely get from the mainstream media—that he was speaking for me and the thousands of other “little people” across the country who were losing their jobs, their homes, their schools, their unions, their homes, their healthcare, and their dignity in the wake of the great financial collapse of 2008.

During his education coverage last spring, I watched The Ed Show almost every night, but over the course of Schultz’s tenure at MSNBC I didn’t watch as often as I should have, and now I feel bad. In March of this year Schultz announced he was moving to 5:00 PM on Saturdays and Sundays later in the spring. He claims that he “raised his hand” for the assignment, but it’s hard to believe that he would give up a prime time weekday slot, voluntarily, for a weekend gig. (more…)

By Patrick J. Finn
Associate Professor Emeritus of Education, University at Buffalo, State University of New York

In her recent post Kathy Newman discusses the lengths to which schools go to improve students’ high-stakes test scores and reminds us that parents’ income is the best predictor of students’ performance on standardized tests.  Nevertheless, when working-class public school students perform poorly on high-stakes tests we say to the teachers, “It’s your fault.  Teach better!”  What we get is teachers who teach worse:  lessons become scripted and rote.  And we say to students, “It’s your fault.  Try harder!”  What we get are students who become even more alienated and less motivated.

Of course, lurking behind the whole issue of high-stakes testing is our faith in the concept of the concept of meritocracy.  Only when meritocracy is rigorously defined and the assumptions underlying it are stated explicitly, does it become problematic.

Meritocracy starts with the assumption that, by and large, all American children start kindergarten or first grade on a nearly equal footing and as they progress through the grades those who are smart and work hard earn good grades are placed in high-status school programs, enter high-status, high-paying professions, and end up with a lot of money, status, and political power regardless of the social status of their parents.  On the other hand, students who are not smart and/or do not work hard earn poor grades are placed in low status school programs, enter low-status, low-paying occupations, and end up with little money, status, and political power regardless of the social status of their parents.

But since most children of affluent parents become affluent adults and most children of working-class parents become working-class adults, meritocracy leaves us with the conclusion that most children of affluent parents are intelligent and hard-working (the logic of merit), while most children of working-class parents are lazy and lack intelligence (the logic of deficit).

There is, however, a better explanation: school success is tied to systematic inequalities that persist from generation to generation.  Working-class children are not as well prepared for primary school as more affluent children, and they often attend different schools or are assigned different classes.  And those who have high SAT scores do not have the same access to higher education as more affluent students with similar or lower test scores.

These are fairly apparent instances of structural inequality, but there are less obvious structural phenomena at work.  Many working-class students see high-status knowledge and cultural capital as useless and even antithetical to their working-class identity.  They develop oppositional identity, defining themselves different from schoolteachers or people like them.  At the same time, the schools generally ignore any sense of importance or entitlement students may have as working-class people. So the students resist teachers’ attempts to teach, and unlike most other students, they often find affirmation for their resistance in their homes and communities.

A modified teaching paradigm ensues.  Teachers give easy assignments and provide step-by-step directions.  Classroom control becomes a paramount concern;  teachers refuse to negotiate with students in fear of losing authority.   Many teachers of working-class students see their mission as producing border crossers—students who believe in meritocracy, are academically inclined, and willingly adopt middle-class values, tastes, and interests. But many working-class students who have these qualities are defeated by structural barriers, while those who succeed are held up as proof that meritocracy works. (more…)

By Tim Strangleman
Sociologist at the University of Kent

A kind of class war has broken out on the streets of the UK over the last week or so since the death of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Since her death was announced, the media has been full of people either paying tribute to her for ‘saving the country’ or condemning her for reigning over unprecedented deindustrialisation. Among these sound bites, the one that has become a constant refrain from those on the right has been that she ‘saved us from the unions.’ One particularly depressing manifestation of this was on a TV political panel show when young male audience member – he looked about 16 – said ‘well, imagine where we would be if we still had the unions.’ I can’t be certain, but given his accent – still one of the best ways in the UK to tell someone’s social origins – he was almost certainly working-class himself.  I started to think, yes, just imagine if we did have a stronger union moment . . . but maybe that’s for another blog.

Essentially what has been occurring here over the last week or so is a rewriting of history by the right – one where class is never far from the surface. Britain of the 1970s was portrayed as industrially backward with a terminal industrial relations problem. The right argue that the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 turned back this economic and social decline and created a brave new world.

Britain in the 1970s was, however, a complex place, not one dimensional as it’s being portrayed by the right. Although far from perfect, Britain was in this period a far more egalitarian society, in part due to near full employment, of course, but also because of a collective sense of fairness shared by both political left and right.  This is encapsulated for me in British media writer Andrew Collins’s memoir of the period ‘Where did it all go right? Growing up normal in the 70s’.  Collins spent his youth in the English midlands, and while he was undoubtedly middle class, he wasn’t that different socially, culturally, or economically from his working-class peers. They would have attended the same schools, lived on the same streets or at least nearby, and so on. In part because of the kind of egalitarianism that Collins describes, 1976 was recently identified as the year when the British people were statistically about as equal as they had ever been – and possibly ever will be. They were also the happiest. After this period, the post-war consensus began to be eroded most notably by Thatcherism, as director Ken Loach has recently shown in a moving and thoughtful film on the social and economic reforms of the post-war Labour Government and the later breakdown of the consensus.

While the Tories were elected in part because they tapped into worries about unemployment, by using an image of a long dole queue with the tag line ‘Labour isn’t working,’ instead of ending unemployment, they drove it up.  Almost one million people were unemployed in 1979, but that rose rapidly in the early 1980s to 3 million and has never since fallen below one million.  And who has experienced the most job loss since from the 1980s onward? Yes, you guessed it: the working class, who lost jobs in coal mines, factories, shipyards, and steel mills.  These industries were closed as a result of either disastrous neo-liberal industrial policies, or, as was the case with the coal industry, simple political spite.  But the right wants us to remember Thatcher for ‘saving us from the unions.’ (more…)

Ellen Bravo
Director, Family Values @ Work Consortium

Listen up, working moms and dads:  Rep. Eric Cantor has a deal for you – more time to spend with your family! What’s not to like?

Except for one hitch: You get to spend more time with your family only after you’ve been forced to spend more time at work away from your family. And your boss gets to decide when you take that extra time you’ve earned.

After some reflection on why women have deserted the Republican Party, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor gave a speech laying out the GOP plan to “Make Life Work” for working families.

Enter the Working Families Flexibility Act of 2013, sponsored by Rep. Cantor and his Tea Party colleague Rep. Martha Roby. Instead of being paid time and a half for overtime, workers may be offered comp time – a paid hour and a half off in the future in exchange for an extra hour on the job this week.

Need to go to your kid’s school play? Take your dad to the doctor? Heck – you could even save time for when the baby is born. Whatever you like.

Here’s the problem: the boss may decide that the slot you requested could “unduly disrupt” the business, reject your request, and tell you to take the time when work is slow. The comp time you are allowed to use may not coincide with your kid’s play, your dad’s cholesterol check or the baby’s arrival – but hey, we can all be a little flexible, right?

Also, those who need overtime to pay the bills are likely to be passed over when the overtime shifts are assigned; for them this bill represents a pay cut. Supervisors may well prefer co-workers who say they’re fine with comp time instead. (more…)

Kenneth Quinnell
AFL-CIO

At a time when it seems nearly every state legislature is assaulting the rights of working families, Minnesota’s House and Senate are bucking the trend and are likely to soon send Gov. Mark Dayton a series of strong pro-working family bills. According to Minnesota AFL-CIO Communications Director Chris Shields, this is the first time in 20 years the state government has been unified under one-party control, with the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party holding the governorship and the majority in both houses of the legislature.

“In 2011 and 2012, bill after bill was introduced to curtail the rights of working Minnesotans,” says Minnesota AFL-CIO President Shar Knutson. “This new legislature has an opportunity to chart a new course and produce positive change for middle-class families.”

And it looks like the legislature is taking that opportunity. Shields notes a number of bills that look likely to pass, including an extension of unemployment insurance payments for workers who are locked out by their employers, which is very likely to pass as part of a jobs bill. In a state that is home to not only the American Crystal Sugar lockout, but lockouts for both the Minnesota Orchestra and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, that provides some relief to workers who are locked out from earning a living.

Shields also is confident that the state’s minimum wage would soon be increased. The Minnesota AFL-CIO supports the House bill, which both raises the wage to $9.95 over several years and indexes it to inflation, to the Senate version, which only raises the minimum to $7.75. So far, the bills also have avoided what Shields calls the “tip penalty.” In Minnesota, tipped workers get the full minimum wage (plus whatever tips they earn), unlike much of the rest of the country, where tipped workers get a lower base minimum wage. (more…)

Kathy Newman
Professor of English, Carnegie Mellon University

I just returned from a rousing three-day street corner teach-in called “Occupy the Department of Education,” held in Washington DC. I wanted to occupy the DOE because, for me, what started as a fairly straightforward involvement in a movement against massive education cuts in Pennsylavnia has evolved into a sense of urgency that we must reverse the damage that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and corporate education reforms are doing to public education.

This week my nine-year old son will be “opting out” of the high stakes test given in the Pittsburgh Public Schools (the PSSA).  The test is used to grade my son’s school on its annual progress (Adequate Yearly Progress as defined by NCLB). I wrote an editorial about my decision to have my son opt out of the test, which has been seen and/or shared by at least 50,000 people in the last week. A companion piece at a lively blog called The Answer Sheet at The Washington Post is also generating considerable traffic. Apparently, I’m not the only parent who’s concerned about high stakes testing.

Many of those parents are, like me, middle class.  But the emerging movement against school reform might be even more important for the working class.

My son’s school, Pittsburgh Linden, is a magnet school in Pittsburgh’s East End, one of the wealthier parts of the city—near the universities and the hospitals. Because it’s a magnet Linden students come from at least six different zip codes and from a variety of racial, ethnic and economic backgrounds. 70% of the students are African American, Asian, Hispanic, or two or more races, while the remaining third are white. About 35% qualify for the federally funded lunch program, suggesting that despite the tony neighborhood, many of the students come from poor and working-class homes.

When NCLB was enacted the rhetoric was about fixing schools that served the poorest and most disadvantaged students. But a decade into NCLB, it is clear that high stakes testing is not improving our schools. These standardized tests are being used to assess the student, the teacher and the school, and depending on the outcome, they may be punished or rewarded.

But even before any formal punishments, these tests are forcing a narrowing of the curriculum. At Linden and at thousands of public schools across the country, much of the school day is devoted to pre-tests, practice tests, test prep, and test taking strategies. State budgets cuts have made the situation even worse, and the combination has left my son and many others without band this year (he was going to start the clarinet), and with many fewer hours of library and music each week. Middle-class kids (including my own son, who is learning piano) might get music lessons outside of school, but for working-class students, the narrowed curriculum cuts off their opportunities. (more…)

Jack Metzgar
Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Roosevelt University in Chicago

I’ve had it with “the white working class.”  Not the actually existing part of the working class that is white, which is composed of complex and interesting people most of whom don’t vote like I think they should, but rather the fictional character who got so much attention during this year’s election campaign.

The fictional character is a white guy who works in a decrepit factory or drives a truck.  He drinks boilermakers (not wine and never a latte) and is good at bowling rather than golf.  Depending on political point of view, he is a “culturally confused but good-hearted racist” or a “salt-of-the-earth real American who loves God and guns and hates both gays and Wall-Street bankers.”

As a demographic category that divides white voters without bachelor’s degrees from those who have that “middle-class” credential, the “white working class” concept makes sense to me, but only if its use fulfills two conditions that the political media apparently cannot manage:

• First, that we always keep in mind that “white working class” is a demographic category that clumps together more than 45 million voters who share two characteristics and only two – race, as conventionally defined, and the absence of a bachelor’s degree.  The category includes women and men of all religions (and varying levels of religious commitment) and regions. They come from big cities, suburbs, small towns, and isolated shacks in all parts of the country.  It includes Bill Gates and other fabulously rich people who never completed bachelor’s degrees, and it leaves out the many factory workers, truck drivers, waitresses, and retail clerks who did. That is, like all concepts, “white working class” is a convenience for getting a hold on the big picture, but it grossly simplifies a much more complex and varied social reality.  We need to constantly remind ourselves that there is not now, never has been, and never could be a “typical” white working-class person.
• Second, that as a demographic category for the purposes of electoral analysis, “white working class” is valuable only as part of a comprehensive discussion of the white vote in U.S. elections.

I’ve made the first point before, more than once.  Here let me concentrate on the second by detailing my conclusions about how the concept has played out in the 2012 presidential election.

After much pre-election discussion of how the “white working-class” would vote, the major news media who commissioned the massive election-day exit poll have not reported on their websites how this group actually voted.  In fact, the websites listing that information — voter-category by voter-category, state by state — in 2012 have less than 1/10^th the information that CNN had (and still has) on its web site for 2008.   But here’s what I can report based on what is available on Fox News, CNN, and the New York Times, plus some numbers from reporters who have access to the poll’s internals – most importantly, “The Obama Coalition in the 2012 Election and Beyond” by Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin. (more…)

By Jim Hightower
Author, Commentator, America’s Number One Populist

One pretty good rule in making public policy proposals is this: If you’re going to cite a source in support of your plan, first confirm that your source actually does support your plan.

Republican budgeteer, John Boehner, recently put a new deficit reduction proposal on the table, asserting that it incorporated the numbers of a plan put forth earlier by budget expert Erskine Bowles, a Democrat. Aha, gloated the GOP leader to Barack Obama as he plopped down this bit of budgetary bipartisanship – Gotcha!

Uh… not quite. Bowles promptly retorted that his numbers were not really a plan, but were simply “back-of-the-envelope” ideas, adding that the numbers are no longer correct.

And that pretty well sums up the slapdash package that Boehner called “credible.” For example, he says it “saves” $600 billion by raising the eligibility age for Medicare to 67. That’d be no problem for congress critters, who do no heavy lifting and already get full medical benefits from taxpayers. But it’s not a credible idea for millions of working class folks who actually do heavy lifting and are not able to work an extra two years. (more…)

Jackie Tortora
AFL-CIO Blog/Social Media Manager

Workers at Walmart need public assistance to afford heating their homes. Workers at Wendy’s and McDonald’s need food stamps to survive. As more and more jobs get shipped overseas, workers in the United States are clinging to the jobs that can’t be easily outsourced: food service, domestic care and retail. People all over the country are taking bold actions to shed light on the poor working conditions they face. Walmart workers protested on Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year, and New York City fast-food workers from chains like McDonald’s and Wendy’s went on strike.

The New York Times’ Eduardo Porter writes in “Unionizing the Bottom of the Pay Scale,” of two workers who on the surface, don’t have much in common. José Carrillo, a 79-year-old Peruvian immigrant from Washington Heights, and Mr. Williams, a 28-year-old single father living with a relative, both need food stamps to make ends meet. They both earn little more than $7 an hour at fast-food restaurants.

Porter writes:

Labor unions are hoping that the unusual tactics, often in collaboration with social justice activists and other community groups, will offer them a new opportunity to get back on the offensive, helping to raise the floor for wages and working conditions in the harsh, ultracompetitive economy of the 21st century.

Mr. Carrillo’s and Mr. Williams’s meager salaries also underscore the straightforward choice we face as a nation: either we build an economy in which most workers can earn enough to adequately support their families or we build a government with the wherewithal to subsidize the existence of a lower class that can’t survive on its own. We are doing neither.

Recently, the National Domestic Workers Alliance released a groundbreaking report that told the stories of workers like Anna, who only makes $1.38 an hour caring for four children in midtown Manhattan.  (more…)