James P. Brochin
The teaching strategies/content objectives envision roughly 8 days of lesson plans, which a focus on roughly four areas of content/research, one for each two-day segment. (see classroom activities below for more detail) I have organized the content and research below to correspond roughly to that plan. Teachers who may want to use this unit will get academic/content background below.
1) The middle class
What is the middle class, and who belongs?
A working definition of the middle class includes, but is not limited to, adequate income to assure that individuals and families will be able to 1) pay bills as they come due, 2) afford higher education, 3) afford health care/health care insurance, 4) be better off and better education than their parents and grandparents, and 5) a belief that such things are attainable.
What does it take to be considered part of the middle class these days? The vast majority of American adults agree that a secure job and the ability to save money for the future are essential. The public is more evenly split when it comes to owning a home and having the time and money to travel for vacation. But one thing is now less likely to be seen as a requirement: a college education.
About a third of women (35%) say that a college education is needed to be in the middle class, but only 26% of men say the same. Millennial women
outpace Millennial men
in educational attainment, and indeed the gap in opinion is wider between women and men who are ages 18 to 49 than among those ages 50 and older.
What accounts for a drop in Americans’ view of college education as a necessity for entering the middle class? Here are some possibilities: the prohibitive costs and the long term costs of paying back huge loans, a drop in the view that an education is a necessity for, but not a guarantee of, the first good paying job, and that a college education is not intrinsically valuable. In my view of middle class societal norms, a college graduate was a status symbol, not so much as for what it brought economically, but because it provided a well rounded intellectual and cultural enrichment. The idea of colleges being primarily an expensive form of trade school could be a phenomenon born of economic insecurity caused by events such as the Great Recession. Course distribution requirements still exist in many institutions, but for those schools that don’t require a form of liberal arts focus, students are more tempted to follow a narrow and career-oriented plan.
In a Pew Research Center Article, “Despite recovery, fewer Americans identify as middle class” by
Rakesh Kochhar
and
Rich Morin,
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/01/27/despite-recovery-fewer-americans-identify-as-middle-class
/
Americans see themselves less optimistically than before. Note, the data was gathered for the article’s publication in 2014, as American’s still struggled with recovering from the Great Recession. An updated study might show more optimism and more identification with the middle class.
2)
Income and wealth inequality
Income inequality in America is at historic levels. The poorest half of the US population owns 2.5% of America’s wealth, while the top 1% owns 35%. Growing inequality and lack of upward mobility affect every aspect of our society.
Three aspects of inequality will be part of the unit: inequality of income, consumption, and wealth. In general, wealth is the most unequally distributed of the three, consumption the least. In America, for example, the Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality in which 1 represents maximum inequality and 0 a perfectly egalitarian society) is 0.78 for wealth and 0.63 for income, but only 0.40 for consumption. Common to all measures, however, is the upward trend over the past 30 years.
The growing gap in income (including non-wage income like returns on investment or capital gains) is even starker. Between 1979 and 2007, the real incomes of the richest 1 percent almost tripled, while the real incomes of the median household inched up only about 25 percent—Inequality in wealth (the sum total of household savings, home equity, investments, and debts) is starker still [click here for graphic]. The richest 1 percent claims about a third of the nation’s wealth; the top 5 percent claim over 60 percent. These shares have grown steadily over the last generation.
Inequality has grown more in the United States than other countries. Among the world’s wealthy countries (those with an average adult wealth of $100,000 or more), the U.S. ranks dead last on the relevant inequality measures. Economic segregation—the likelihood that Americans live in enclaves of wealth or poverty—has hardened. Economic mobility, by any measure, remains weak.
How best to make some of the data clearly understood by students? A number of resources, from within and outside our seminar offer accessible graphics and charts which illustrate the data. One which is particularly useful is from Desilva, “The Many Ways to Measure Income Inequality”,
Pew Research Center
. In a recent report, for instance, the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
noted that “in OECD countries, the richest 10% of the population earn 9.6 times the income of the poorest 10%.
The growing gap in income (including non-wage income like returns on investment or capital gains) is even starker. Between 1979 and 2007, the real incomes of the richest 1 percent almost tripled, while the real incomes of the median household inched up only about 25 percent—Inequality in wealth (the sum total of household savings, home equity, investments, and debts) is starker still [click here for graphic]. The richest 1 percent claims about a third of the nation’s wealth; the top 5 percent claim over 60 percent. These shares have grown steadily over the last generation.
Inequality has grown more in the United States than other countries. Among the world’s wealthy countries (those with an average adult wealth of $100,000 or more), the U.S. ranks dead last on the relevant inequality measures.
Economic segregation—the likelihood that Americans live in enclaves of wealth or poverty—has hardened. Economic mobility, by any measure remains weak.
How best to make some of the data clearly understood by students? A number of resources, from within and outside our seminar offer accessible graphics and charts.
One that is particularly useful is from Deserve, “The Many Ways to Measure Income Inequality”,
Pew Research Center
. In a recent report, for instance, the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
noted that “in OECD countries, the richest 10% of the population earn 9.6 times the income of the poorest 10%.
3) Inequality of Opportunity
Equality of opportunity requires that jobs, education, and other opportunities be open to all, and, in addition, each individual is to have a fair chance to attain these goals. Equality of opportunity can be viewed from a number of perspectives.
For example, richer parents can afford to send their children to better schools and colleges and can offer financial support for housing and other expenses. “For these and a host of other reasons, where and to whom you are born is a significant determinant of life outcomes, especially in America.” “Inequality of Opportunity: The Cost of the American Dream,”
The Economist,
9/8/17, <https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2017/09/08/the-cost-of-the-american-dream>
Students will write one or more articles about inequality of opportunity at Cross—e.g. do certain students have access to better teachers and opportunities than others? One of the possible articles may involve students’ view of the unequal opportunities at Cross: the A.P. courses, honors electives, college course participation, and others.
4) Mobility/The Shrinking Middle Class?
Social mobility is defined as follows: shifting from one social status to another, commonly to a status that is either higher or lower. For example, a child of day laborers who becomes a professor achieves upward social mobility.
In sociology, social mobility explains changes (or lack thereof) in social status.
Students will measure mobility between their grandparents and parents. An article could begin as surveys addressing students’ views of their social mobility, including their views of such mobility that may have been possible for their parents and grandparents.
The literature addresses the Middle Class in many different ways. One of the most readable and brief is Chetty,
et. al
, article “The fading American dream: Trends in absolute income mobility since 1940” Rates of “absolute income mobility” – the fraction of children who earn more than their parents – by combining historical data from Census and CPS cross-sections with panel data for recent birth cohorts from de-identified tax records. Research results imply that reviving the “American Dream” of high rates of absolute mobility would require economic growth that is spread more broadly across the income distribution.”
Certain charts and graphs make some of the economics of social mobility more accessible. These include: Baseline Estimates of Absolute Mobility by Birth Cohort, (Income Measured at Age 40, and Adjusting for Family Size), and Trends in Absolute Mobility by State, and Decline in Absolute Mobility from 1940 to 1980 Cohort by State
A key resource for addressing the middle class and social mobility is The Pew Memorial Trust. Pew offers accessible, understandable articles on various aspects of the middle class experience, some of which are summarized below, not necessarily in order of relevance.
Anna Brown’s article “What Americans say it takes to be middle class” for the Pew Research Center
,
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/04/what-americans-say-it-takes-to-be-middle-class/
, directly addresses what American’s say about getting into and staying in the middle class. Brown notes the downward trend in Americans’ belief that a college education is a necessity for a middle class life.
Today, about as many Americans identify themselves as lower or lower-middle class (40%) as say they are in the middle class (44%), according to a recent
Pew Research Center/USA TODAY survey. The nationally representative survey of 1,504 adults conducted Jan. 15-19 found that the share of Americans who identify with the middle class has never been lower, dropping to 44% in the latest survey from 53% in 2008 during the first months of the Great Recession.
Pew’s focus on “Social and Demographic Trends” produced “America’s Shrinking Middle Class: A Close Look at Changes Within Metropolitan Areas”
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/05/11/americas-shrinking-middle-class-a-close-look-at-changes-within-metropolitan-areas/
The article is more narrowly focused on objective criteria, such as income, within metropolitan areas, and the article appeared in 2016. What if the article were updated to today? Might the conclusions change?
The shrinking of the middle class at the national level, to the point where it may no longer be the economic majority in the U.S., was documented in an
earlier analysis
by the Pew Research Center. The changes at the metropolitan level, the subject of this in-depth look at the American middle class, demonstrate that the national trend is the result of widespread declines in localities all around the country.”
Pew produced a 2008 article by Rich Morin, “America’s Four Middle Classes.”
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2008/07/29/americas-four-middle-classes/
This article has a unique perspective, that there are more than one middle class, each with his or her own characteristics and resultant data. There isn’t one American middle class; there are four: 1) The Top of the Class. (well educated, mostly male, financially secure.) 2) The Struggling Middle, a group disproportionately composed of women and minorities. In fact, many members of the Struggling Middle have more in common with the lower class
1
than they do with those in the other three groups and actually have a lower median family income than Americans who put themselves on the lowest rungs of the social ladder. About one-in-six self-identified middle class Americans fall into the Struggling Middle. 3) The Satisfied Middle has everything but money; their comparatively modest incomes have not muted their sunny outlooks or overall satisfaction with their lives. This group is disproportionately old and disproportionately young; middle-aged adults are relatively scarce in the Satisfied Middle. They make up a quarter of the middle class. 4) The Anxious Middle; they make up slightly less than a quarter of all middle class Americans. and are the most dissatisfied and downbeat of the four groups. While they enjoy some of the economic advantages of the Top of the Class, they express many of the same bleak judgments about their lives as those in the Struggling Middle.
These four groups are all part of the 53% majority of Americans who identified themselves as “middle class” in a Pew Research telephone survey taken from Jan 24 through Feb. 19, 2008
Two of the groups that emerged from this analysis—The Satisfied Middle and Anxious Middle—straddle the statistical middle of the American life. But the Top of the Class and Struggling Middle seem, in some ways, anything but middle class. Why don’t those in the Struggling Middle identify with the Lower Class; after all, their median family incomes fall well below the earnings of those Americans who say they’re in the least advantaged social class? And why don’t those seemingly privileged members of the Top of the Class identify with the Upper Class, with whom they seem to share so many advantages? Taken together, this statistical typology of the four middle classes paints a nuanced picture of the American middle class and those who claim membership in it. Rather than being demographically and culturally monotonic, America’s middle class is an amalgam of distinct groups that share different outlooks on life and life experiences, a blend of young and old, black, white and Latino, optimists and pessimists, achievers and dreamers, those who are barely hanging on to the Middle Class Dream and those who are living it fully.
In Pew’s “America’s middle class is shrinking. So who’s leaving it?” by Drew Deserver,
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/12/14/americas-middle-class-is-shrinking-so-whos-leaving-it/
, the author addresses the question about who is in the middle class and who is leaving it.
The “four middle classes” theory may be very useful as a way to organize survey questions and interviews about social mobility, because they allow more thorough and subtle distinctions among the four groups that are the middle class.
Challenges and Hopes About How to Engage Students
1) How can the unit quickly get students into a dialog about the subject (s) so that they are learning from one another and so that the teacher lectures only when necessary? (This is what the learning will look like.)
2) How can students teach themselves and each other, in such a way that deepens, extends, and makes relevant the subject matter? (This is what the learning will be about.)
3) How can the unit expand the subject matter to include surveys and articles about the theme, in such a way that students see the relevance to themselves, their families, their school, and their community (making the connections).
Resources:
Resources for teacher and students include those that are contained in the annotated bibliography, and will also include visual resources, first person accounts, memoirs, interviews, and relevant film clips. The following are three samples of classroom activities (each is two days) out of a total maximum of nine 80-minute classes).