Negotiating Opportunities

Negotiating Opportunities PDF Author: Jessica McCrory Calarco
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019063443X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Negotiating Opportunities, Jessica McCrory Calarco argues that the middle class has a negotiated advantage in school. Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Calarco traces that negotiated advantage from its origins at home to its consequences at school. Through their parents' coaching, working-class students learn to follow rules and work through problems independently. Middle-class students learn to challenge rules and request assistance, accommodations, and attention in excess of what is fair or required. Teachers typically grant those requests, creating advantages for middle-class students. Calarco concludes with recommendations, advocating against deficit-oriented programs that teach middle-class behaviors to working-class students. Those programs ignore the value of working-class students' resourcefulness, respect, and responsibility, and they do little to prevent middle-class families from finding new opportunities to negotiate advantages in school.

Negotiating Opportunities

Negotiating Opportunities PDF Author: Jessica McCrory Calarco
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019063443X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Negotiating Opportunities, Jessica McCrory Calarco argues that the middle class has a negotiated advantage in school. Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Calarco traces that negotiated advantage from its origins at home to its consequences at school. Through their parents' coaching, working-class students learn to follow rules and work through problems independently. Middle-class students learn to challenge rules and request assistance, accommodations, and attention in excess of what is fair or required. Teachers typically grant those requests, creating advantages for middle-class students. Calarco concludes with recommendations, advocating against deficit-oriented programs that teach middle-class behaviors to working-class students. Those programs ignore the value of working-class students' resourcefulness, respect, and responsibility, and they do little to prevent middle-class families from finding new opportunities to negotiate advantages in school.

Middle Class Problems

Middle Class Problems PDF Author: Benjamin Lee
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 147352122X
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 183

Get Book Here

Book Description
A hilarious collection of the most agonizing real-life inconveniences faced by the iPhone-losing, polenta-burning, Eurostar-missing middle classes, illustrated by Matt Blease ‘My pug has hiccups’ ‘I've given myself a croissant headache’ ‘I just dropped batteries in my quinoa’ ‘Think I’ve forgotten how to ski’ Can't find your melon baller? Wrestling with wrapping paper? Struggling to figure out how to properly pronounce quinoa?? Get your daily trials into perspective with this hilarious collection of the top #MiddleClassProblems from around the globe. Since 2010, Benjamin Lee has run the hugely popular @MiddleClassProb account, and in this book he has selected the all-time highlights.

Dream Hoarders

Dream Hoarders PDF Author: Richard V. Reeves
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815735499
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Get Book Here

Book Description
Dream Hoarders sparked a national conversation on the dangerous separation between the upper middle class and everyone else. Now in paperback and newly updated for the age of Trump, Brookings Institution senior fellow Richard Reeves is continuing to challenge the class system in America. In America, everyone knows that the top 1 percent are the villains. The rest of us, the 99 percent—we are the good guys. Not so, argues Reeves. The real class divide is not between the upper class and the upper middle class: it is between the upper middle class and everyone else. The separation of the upper middle class from everyone else is both economic and social, and the practice of “opportunity hoarding”—gaining exclusive access to scarce resources—is especially prevalent among parents who want to perpetuate privilege to the benefit of their children. While many families believe this is just good parenting, it is actually hurting others by reducing their chances of securing these opportunities. There is a glass floor created for each affluent child helped by his or her wealthy, stable family. That glass floor is a glass ceiling for another child. Throughout Dream Hoarders, Reeves explores the creation and perpetuation of opportunity hoarding, and what should be done to stop it, including controversial solutions such as ending legacy admissions to school. He offers specific steps toward reducing inequality and asks the upper middle class to pay for it. Convinced of their merit, members of the upper middle class believes they are entitled to those tax breaks and hoarded opportunities. After all, they aren't the 1 percent. The national obsession with the super rich allows the upper middle class to convince themselves that they are just like the rest of America. In Dream Hoarders, Reeves argues that in many ways, they are worse, and that changes in policy and social conscience are the only way to fix the broken system.

The 9.9 Percent

The 9.9 Percent PDF Author: Matthew Stewart
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982114193
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book Here

Book Description
"A trenchant analysis of how the wealthiest 9.9 percent of Americans -- those just below the tip of the wealth pyramid -- have exacerbated the growing inequality in our country and distorted our social values"--

The Vanishing Middle Class, new epilogue

The Vanishing Middle Class, new epilogue PDF Author: Peter Temin
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262535297
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why the United States has developed an economy divided between rich and poor and how racism helped bring this about. The United States is becoming a nation of rich and poor, with few families in the middle. In this book, MIT economist Peter Temin offers an illuminating way to look at the vanishing middle class. Temin argues that American history and politics, particularly slavery and its aftermath, play an important part in the widening gap between rich and poor. Temin employs a well-known, simple model of a dual economy to examine the dynamics of the rich/poor divide in America, and outlines ways to work toward greater equality so that America will no longer have one economy for the rich and one for the poor. Many poorer Americans live in conditions resembling those of a developing country—substandard education, dilapidated housing, and few stable employment opportunities. And although almost half of black Americans are poor, most poor people are not black. Conservative white politicians still appeal to the racism of poor white voters to get support for policies that harm low-income people as a whole, casting recipients of social programs as the Other—black, Latino, not like "us." Politicians also use mass incarceration as a tool to keep black and Latino Americans from participating fully in society. Money goes to a vast entrenched prison system rather than to education. In the dual justice system, the rich pay fines and the poor go to jail.

Under Pressure: The Squeezed Middle Class

Under Pressure: The Squeezed Middle Class PDF Author: OECD
Publisher: OECD Publishing
ISBN: 926415034X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 173

Get Book Here

Book Description
Middle-class households feel left behind and have questioned the benefits of economic globalisation.

The Two-Income Trap

The Two-Income Trap PDF Author: Elizabeth Warren
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465097715
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Senator Elizabeth Warren and consultant Amelia Warren Tyagi, the classic book about America's middle class -- and why economic security remains out of reach for many. In this exposé, Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi show that modern middle-class families are increasingly trapped by the grinding reality of flat wages and rising costs. Warren and Tyagi reveal how a ferocious bidding war for housing and education has silently engulfed America's suburbs, driving up the cost of keeping families in the middle class, and placing unprecedented pressure on hard-working families. Revolutionary when it was first published in 2003, The Two-Income Trap remains disturbingly relevant today. Now with a new introduction by the authors, The Two Income Trap shows why the usual remedies won't solve the problem and points toward the policy changes that would create better opportunities for both parents and children.

The Riches of This Land

The Riches of This Land PDF Author: Jim Tankersley
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1541767845
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book Here

Book Description
A vivid character-driven narrative, fused with important new economic and political reporting and research, that busts the myths about middle class decline and points the way to its revival. For over a decade, Jim Tankersley has been on a journey to understand what the hell happened to the world's greatest middle-class success story -- the post-World-War-II boom that faded into decades of stagnation and frustration for American workers. In The Riches of This Land, Tankersley fuses the story of forgotten Americans-- struggling women and men who he met on his journey into the travails of the middle class-- with important new economic and political research, providing fresh understanding how to create a more widespread prosperity. He begins by unraveling the real mystery of the American economy since the 1970s - not where did the jobs go, but why haven't new and better ones been created to replace them. His analysis begins with the revelation that women and minorities played a far more crucial role in building the post-war middle class than today's politicians typically acknowledge, and policies that have done nothing to address the structural shifts of the American economy have enabled a privileged few to capture nearly all the benefits of America's growing prosperity. Meanwhile, the "angry white men of Ohio" have been sold by Trump and his ilk a theory of the economy that is dangerously backward, one that pits them against immigrants, minorities, and women who should be their allies. At the culmination of his journey, Tankersley lays out specific policy prescriptions and social undertakings that can begin moving the needle in the effort to make new and better jobs appear. By fostering an economy that opens new pathways for all workers to reach their full potential -- men and women, immigrant or native-born, regardless of race -- America can once again restore the upward flow of talent that can power growth and prosperity.

Family Trouble

Family Trouble PDF Author: Ara Francis
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813573610
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 197

Get Book Here

Book Description
Our children mean the world to us. They are so central to our hopes and dreams that we will do almost anything to keep them healthy, happy, and safe. What happens, then, when a child has serious problems? In Family Trouble, a compelling portrait of upheaval in family life, sociologist Ara Francis tells the stories of middle-class men and women whose children face significant medical, psychological, and social challenges. Francis interviewed the mothers and fathers of children with such problems as depression, bi-polar disorder, autism, learning disabilities, drug addiction, alcoholism, fetal alcohol syndrome, and cerebral palsy. Children’s problems, she finds, profoundly upset the foundations of parents’ everyday lives, overturning taken-for-granted expectations, daily routines, and personal relationships. Indeed, these problems initiated a chain of disruption that moved through parents’ lives in domino-like fashion, culminating in a crisis characterized by uncertainty, loneliness, guilt, grief, and anxiety. Francis looks at how mothers and fathers often differ in their interpretation of a child’s condition, discusses the gendered nature of child rearing, and describes how parents struggle to find effective treatments and to successfully navigate medical and educational bureaucracies. But above all, Family Trouble examines how children’s problems disrupt middle-class dreams of the “normal” family. It captures how children’s problems “radiate” and spill over into other areas of parents’ lives, wreaking havoc even on their identities, leading them to reevaluate deeply held assumptions about their own sense of self and what it means to achieve the good life. Engagingly written, Family Trouble offers insight to professionals and solace to parents. The book offers a clear message to anyone in the throes of family trouble: you are in good company, and you are not as different as you might feel...

A New Contract with the Middle Class

A New Contract with the Middle Class PDF Author: Richard V. Reeves
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815739133
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 52

Get Book Here

Book Description
A better future for the middle class is no longer an aspiration. It is a necessity. The disintegration of the American Dream is more visible than ever before. The understanding—the contract—that existed between individuals willing to work and contribute and a society willing to support those individuals when they needed it is falling apart. Now is the time to draft a new contract with America's middle class. One that rewards work and service, improves upward mobility, and reduces inequality. In A New Contract with the Middle Class Brookings senior fellows Isabel Sawhill and Richard Reeves outline the foundations of what that new contract should be, based on discussions they had across the country with middle-class Americans. Sawhill and Reeves' recommendations provide solutions to issues that came up time and time again in these conversations: money, time, relationships, health, and respect. Some of the bold recommendations included in A New Contract with the Middle Class: • Eliminate virtually all income taxes paid by the middle class. • Raise the minimum wage and subsidize wages below the median with a worker tax credit. • Offer scholarships for those who undertake at least a year of national service. • Ensure four weeks of paid leave per year. • Align school and working hours and boost child care to help working parents. America is only as strong as the American middle-class. A New Contract with the Middle Class proposes a new way forward.