A new study provided to Whispers from the American Institutes for Research finds that for just one year—2002—some 40 percent didn’t graduate, costing the federal income $566 million in potential taxes, state governments another $164 million and the students themselves $3.8 billion in lost income over their life.

Just multiply that by the average dropout rate of many more college classes and the cost of not graduating skyrockets. Those losses, said the report, “represent only the tip of a very big iceberg.”

…Low graduation rates also squeeze the taxpayer, said the report, because state and federal spending on them to support colleges and through grants and scholarships are wasted. A 2012 AIR report, said states spend more than $1.3 billion per year on students who drop out in their first year while the Feds drop another $300 million per year.

And it’s especially hard on states that are budgeting for higher incomes from college graduates. The biggest losers, said AIR, are California, New York, Texas, Pennsylvania and Illinois.

The report doesn’t say much about why so many college students drop out, but the things some students are doing to pay tuition is a clue. High tuition causes many students to drop out because they “have other bills that mom and dad don’t pay,” and the stress of working to support themselves and going to school at the same time becomes too difficult. (As one who worked my way through college, I can attest to that difficulty. I did manage to graduate.)

And, as Nathan Birnbaum pointed out, the Republican agenda isn’t likely to do much about the real “Dropout Economy,” or its costs.

Consider this, though: A two-thirds cut to government-funded items like Pell Grants would mean that close to 7 million low-income students would no longer be able to afford a college education. Tuition increases have long risen ahead of the rate of inflation: a two-thirds cut to state education funds could prevent that middle class kid from taking advantage of public universities.

A two-thirds cut to industry safeguards would allow corporations to pollute our air, land and water, spelling disaster for environmental and human health. A two-thirds cut to unemployment benefits would throw our parents who can’t find a job out onto the streets.

And the kicker: A two-thirds cut to federal discretionary non-security spending would sink job creation and plunge our economy back into a recession. Think you have a hard time getting a job or finding a way to pay for graduate school now?!

The GOP has a message for us: If you can’t afford to go to college anymore, tough. If your lungs have to act as the filters for coal plants and increased carbon emissions, buck up. If our bridges just happen to collapse while you’re driving on them, good luck getting compensation from the government. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, kiddies, and the GOP is coming your way bearing its teeth.

The future of low income students, at least the one the GOP envisions, isn’t much brighter.

Like most right-wing political action in recent memory, the Republican push to cut Pell grants is informed less by a judgment of whether it is effective policy than it is by ideology: the frenzy to eliminate government for the sake of it. Meanwhile, the GOP has stood staunch alongside the for-profit college industry, which you couldn’t avoid finding evidence of committing wrongdoings if you tried.

Looking for spending cuts is a worthwhile task. But a program that makes small investments in low-income students who in turn will use their educations to earn higher wages and pay more taxes doesn’t seem quite right as the first place to start slashing.

If nothing else, the low-wage jobs being created in this recession don’t require, and dropouts who are facing still face huge costs for dropping out may have even more an incentive to take them, since the jobs they were educating themselves for have been hollowed out, with most of the job growth at the low-income and high-income extremes.

And, lest we forget, the real “Dropout Economy” isn’t just lost income from college dropouts. It includes workforce dropouts — the long-term unemployed who have been unemployed for six months or longer (44% of unemployed Americans), and have just given up. An April 2010 Pew Charitable Trust report spelled out the costs of the long-term unemployed “dropping out” of the workforce, by ceasing to even look for employment.

Long-term unemployment also affects the federal budget on the other side of the fiscal ledger by reducing income tax revenue and the amount of money flowing into the unemployment insurance pool. UI benefits are taxable, but people on the unemployment rolls are receiving only a fraction of the income they would be getting if they were working. As a result, they are paying only a fraction of the taxes.

…Consider a hypothetical worker earning $50,000 in 2009. After a personal exemption of $3,650 and a standard deduction of $5,700, he would owe $6,356 in federal income taxes (excluding all other credits and deductions). But if the worker lost his job on July 1 and received UI benefits that replaced half of his wages for the remainder of the year, his annual income would decline to about $37,500. ARRA exempts the first $2,400 of Ui benefits from taxes. With the personal exemption and standard deduction, he would only owe $3,449 in income taxes—$2,907 less than if he had been employed for the entire year.

Moreover, a spell of long-term unemployment can depress a person’s wages in future jobs. When a worker is out of a job, he or she loses out on the opportunity to gain work experience and accumulate skills. This “unemployment scarring” can have

A dramatic effect on future income. one study found that on average, U.S. workers who lost a full-time job between 2001 and 2003 and found a new job by the time they were interviewed in 2004 earned about 17 percent less per week than they would have earned if they had retained their old job.

Many media reports have focused on the human toll of long-term unemployment, particularly its impact on individuals and families. Far less attention has been paid to the fiscal impact of this problem. It has been substantial: The government has spent tens of billions of dollars to help the unemployed, and it is likely to spend billions more before the economy fully recovers.

The talk in Washington seems to be all about what “we can’t afford,” and in that context “what we can’t afford” are Pell Grants, unemployment benefits, and spending to create jobs. We somehow “don’t have the money” for such things. (But somehow we can afford and do have the money for $1.2 trillion in loans to big banks.) What we truly can’t afford, and don’t have the luxury to do nothing about, is a growing “Dropout Economy” that threatens to doom hope of recovery anytime soon.

What could be more pathetic? They may have brought Boehner to his knees, but the tea partiers literally don’t know what they’re doing in the legislative process.

Of course, this is nothing new. Ignorance of how bills become laws — or that the constitution establishes a legislative body and a legislative process for all that stuff the constitution doesn’t specifically mention — goes all the way up to what passes for tea party leadership.

And usually I end explaining what I thought we all learned in our eighth grade civics classes, if not over our Saturday morning cereal. Article I of the constitution establishes Congress as a legislative body, and in Section 7 lays out the process by which legislation passes both houses of Congress, makes its way to the president’s desk, and … Well, you know how it ends if you saw that first video.

Until we can get middle school civics teachers to storm Capitol Hill en masse, can we at least ask anyone in an congressional office who shares a hallway with a tea partier to walk over with a laptop or smartphone and show them this video?

It might help if you take over a bowl of breakfast cereal for them to eat while they watch it. At least, that’s how I remember learning it.

A year ago, the black and brown “canaries in our too-long-deregulated economic mineshaft” were gasping for air. A year later, the canaries are still gasping for air, and too few seem to notice, or ask why.

Certainly lawmakers like Oklahoma Republican state representative Sally Kern don’t ask why, because the real answers are a far cry from Kern’s simple and self-serving answer.

Rep. Sally Kern, R-Oklahoma City, said minorities earn less than white people because they don’t work as hard and have less initiative.

“We have a high percentage of blacks in prison, and that’s tragic, but are they in prison just because they are black or because they don’t want to study as hard in school? I’ve taught school, and I saw a lot of people of color who didn’t study hard because they said the government would take care of them.”

Kern said women earn less than men because “they tend to spend more time at home with their families.”

The title of Janell Ross’s Huffington Post article, “Black Unemployment at Depression Level Highs in Some Cities,” pretty much says it all. Algernon Austin, Director of the Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy Program at the Economic Policy Institute agrees. “I think the title of article gets it quite right,” he said to me when during a phone interview yesterday. “There are places where we’re seeing unemployment rates of 20 percent or higher. When you see a community with that level of unemployment for as long as six months to a year, or two years in some places, I think it’s fair to call it depressed. And unfortunately there’s are a number of African american communities where it’s the case.”

In her article, Ross weaves the story of Wanda Nolan — a bank teller and homeowner with an MBA, who lost her job in September 2008 — into the bigger story of what is happening to the lives, hopes, and dreams of a generation of African-Americans in this economic crisis and recovery-in-name only.

More than two years later, Nolan is still looking for a job and feeling increasingly anxious about a future that once felt assured. Her life has devolved from a model of middle class African American upward mobility into an example of a disturbing trend:

She is among the 15.5 percent of African Americans out of work and still looking for a job.

For economists, that number may sound awful, but it’s not surprising. The nation’s overall unemployment rate sits at 8.8 percent and the rate among white Americans is at 7.9 percent. For a variety of reasons — ranging from levels of education and continuing discrimination to the relatively young age of black workers — black unemployment tends to run twice the rate for whites. Yet since the Great Recession, joblessness has remained so critically elevated among African Americans that it is challenging longstanding ideas about what it takes to find work in the modern-day economy.

Millions of people like Nolan, who have precisely followed the oft-dictated recipe for economic success — work hard, get an education, seek advancement — are slipping backward. Even as they apply for jobs and accept the prospect of a future with less job security and lower pay, they remain stalled in unemployment.

Trading down has become a painful truth for much of working America, but this truth becomes particularly stark when seen through the prism of race. Only 12 percent of all Americans are black, but working-age black Americans comprise nearly 21 percent of the nation’s unemployed, according to federal data. The growing contrast between prospects for white and black job-seekers challenges a cherished American notion: the availability of opportunity and upward mobility for all.

Sue Kern probably hasn’t heard Wanda Nolan’s story, or others like it.

It is a familiar story; so many “trading down” who have only recently “traded up” to what they thought, and what they were taught, was the “American Dream.” it was so familiar, in fact, that I was sure I’d read it before. I had. Nolan’s story is much like that of Chrissandra Walker, one of the 2 million unemployed Americans the GOP told to “Drop dead” in November, when the House failed to vote on a measure to continue emergency unemployment benefits. Like Nolan and millions of other, Walker followed the “oft-dictated” recipe for economic success. Walker, 50, worked since she was 12 year old, earned a college degree in health care administration, and eventually earned $100,000 annually as a nursing home executive. After losing her job, Walker ended up supporting herself and her daughter on $11,000, plus what she earned selling home-cooked meals out of her apartment at $10 a pop.

And the same conservatives who fought to extend tax cuts for the wealthy resisted extending unemployment benefits for Walker and other like her.

I heard echoes of Charles Jenkins’s story in Nolan’s, too. Jenkins, 55, was working as a driver for a transportation company when he was hospitalized due to a serious illness in 2009. With no sick leave to fall back on, Jenkins was terminated. Unemployed for nearly a year, Jenkins said he applied for “10 to 12 jobs a week,” without success. He began working as a community organizer for the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, through the Targeted Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) Emergency Contingency Fund subsidized employment program.

“There are no jobs, especially at a living wage,” Jenkins said at a Chicago rally in March of last year. “I should be as important to Congress as a big Wall Street bank.” He wasn’t. Conservatives killed 240,00 jobs, including Jenkins’s job, when GOP senators refused to reauthorize the TANF Emergency Contingency Fund program. Instead, the GOP decided to make Jenkins one of 1.4 million unemployed black men.

Nolan’s story is probably much the same as some of the 500 people who applied for just 120 positions when a new International House of Pancakes restaurant opened up in D.C. in November. IHOP management allowed the Washington Post access to the applications, which “read like a diary of the recession,” as people with college degrees, experience workers, retirees, and former government employees vied for a chance at “a life of pancakes and $3.32 an hour plus tips.”

While conservatives call extending unemployment benefits “misplaced compassion,” reserve their compassion for the top 1%. and withhold unemployment benefits in order to encourage people to “reenter the private sector,” millions of unemployed Americans have been trying to “reenter the private sector,” in some cases desperately applying for any job they can find, only to discover that the private sector neither wants nor needs most of them now. For every one person who does”reenter the private sector,” usually for far less money than they were making before, there are four or five more who won’t find work because there’s no work to find.

Nolan’s story could be what the future holds for Rosemary Hicks. She graduated magna cum laude from Tuskegee University in May 2010, with a degree in sales and marketing. The first in her family to earn a degree, Hicks applied for 30 jobs in just five months. Like many graduates, she found herself competing with recently laid-off older workers, with years of experience, who were desperate enough for work to take the entry-level positions Hicks and other graduates seek.

Hicks and other young African Americans who “need to know the American dream is still obtainable,” but may find it placed beyond their reach if the unemployment crisis Ross describes in African American communities continues unnoticed, unmentioned, and unabated.

Conservatives like Sue Kern don’t know these stories, and apparently don’t care to. Confederative like Kern call the unemployed “spoiled”, “lazy” “drug users” who “don’t want to work.” They’re unemployed “because they want to be” or because they “want a homeless life” and should “get off their backsides” because there are “lots of jobs available”, but won’t because unemployment benefits (a “necessary evil”) are “too much of an allure.”

Meanwhile, congressional conservatives seek to add hundreds of thousands more to the ranks of the unemployed, and offer no plans for job creation, as though the jobs will magically appear.

There’s a high price paid for both the GOP’s rhetorical and political attacks on the unemployed. I’ll cover those, and their visceral depiction in Janell Ross’s article, in my next post.

Now it appears that, a couple of decades late, science supports my study habits.

For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing.

…But individual learning is another matter, and psychologists have discovered that some of the most hallowed advice on study habits is flat wrong. For instance, many study skills courses insist that students find a specific place, a study room or a quiet corner of the library, to take their work. The research finds just the opposite. In one classic 1978 experiment, psychologists found that college students who studied a list of 40 vocabulary words in two different rooms — one windowless and cluttered, the other modern, with a view on a courtyard — did far better on a test than students who studied the words twice, in the same room. Later studies have confirmed the finding, for a variety of topics.

The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time, the authors say, regardless of whether those perceptions are conscious. It colors the terms of the Versailles Treaty with the wasted fluorescent glow of the dorm study room, say; or the elements of the Marshall Plan with the jade-curtain shade of the willow tree in the backyard. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.

I know there are people who concentrate better in quiet conditions, or even in silence, but I’ve never been one them. If anything, I find it harder to focus when things are “too quiet,” let alone silent. In high school, I kept the radio going why I did my homework. In college, when I studied in the dorm, I’d have music going. If I tried studying in silence, I invariably ended up fleeing the library or the dorm for the student center, the campus “quad” or some other place where there sights, sounds, people, and noise.

Even now, if I’m working from home, I have the television on to keep things from getting “too quiet,” or I head out to the nearest coffee spot with wifi. Even if I’m reading, it’s likely the television is still on.

For whatever reason, my mind needs the background noise. I’ve always attributed it to my ADD. The reality is, because of my ADD, my mind is going to wander no matter what. My experience is that having music on or the television on gives it some place to wander to. It also makes that wandering finite where silence could make it infinite (or at least much longer), because the distraction is finite. The song, show, or commercial that caught my attention will end, and give me the opportunity to re-focus on the task at hand. If it’s too quiet, my mind might wander indefinitely.

Other parts of the article didn’t hold true for me, as well. I’m absolutely a believer in different learning styles.

Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas.

No two people learn the same way, and sometimes I think our cookie-cutter approach to education favors some learning styles over others. It wasn’t until I was in college that I realized how I learned and how I learn best.

I found out I was definitely not an “auditory” learner. I attended lectures, and enjoyed many of them, but remembered nothing of them once I left class. I tried taping lectures, but quickly found I’d forget to listen to the tapes. Taking notes during lectures helped somewhat, but I found I could never quite keep up. Writing down one idea or concept, I’d often miss the next one. Again, I think my ADD played a significant role, since I wasn’t diagnosed or treated until my mid-thirties.

What saved me was my love of reading, and my ability to write. (OK. Writing didn’t do me much good when it came to math and science, but it helped immensely in the other classes that served to balance out my grades.) I found that if I learned more when I did the reading, took notes on my reading and/or highlighted important information. I got better grades too. The lectures basically supplemented my reading. (But, again, I found I learned and retained more when there was some degree of interaction and student participation.)

Since then, I’ve kind of carried on my own ongoing “independent study” of whatever has interested me since then. I still read, take notes, underline/highlight what I want to remember, and (of course) write about it all eventually.

And I’ve never stopped learning. So, I must be doing something right.

Every night I help our seven year old with his homework. In the event he doesn’t have any, then we work on other things with him to help him in school; like handwriting practice or going through his math flash cards. He’s a bright kid, bright enough to have been placed in an advanced math class — which, in the first grade, means he’s already taking on some second grade math. His teacher also says he’s one of the best readers in his class, which I think is due to the fact that we started reading to him at an early age and keep him reading with regular trips to the nearby public library.

We’re already repeating all of the above with our 2 1/2 year old son, reading the same books to him, etc. Both boys have had college savings plans since infancy. But without some direct action to relieve long-term unemployment and avoid its long term consequences, I fear we’re preparing for a world that won’t exist when they graduate and are ready to enter the workforce.

While education is helpful, college graduates have also fallen into the ranks of the long-term unemployed. They represent 15.9% of the long-term jobless, compared with 14.9% of all unemployed workers. Those with high school degrees who haven’t been to college comprise 40.7% of long-term unemployed, compared with 37.8% of all unemployed workers.

These are the numbers for current graduates, of course. Our oldest would be in the Class of 2021 and our youngest would be class of 2025, assuming 12 uninterrupted years of schooling, and advancing accordingly. Right now, the jobs deficit will impact them according to how it impacts us, and how it impacts state education funding. The projections for the class of 2010 are not inspiring.

Commencement is supposed to be filled with hope, but for the class of 2010, these are grim times. Over the past year, the unemployment rate for college graduates under age 25 has averaged 9.1 percent. For the roughly half of high school graduates under 25 and not in college, the average is 22.8 percent.

Worse, a deep labor recession, like this one, may be more than a temporary hardship. It could signal a long-term decline in living standards.

Where you start out in your career has a big impact on where you end up. When jobs are scarce, more college grads start out in lower-level jobs with lower starting salaries. Academic research suggests that for many of these graduates, that correlates to overall lower levels of career attainment and lower lifetime earnings.

Tough times for college grads mean even tougher times for high school graduates, because fewer jobs mean more competition from college-educated workers. In the past year, 59.5 percent of young high school grads on average had a job, compared with 70.2 percent in 2007.

This is how an economy shrinks, or it’s at least one way an economy shrinks, and permanently at that. For these graduates, the scenario looks pretty much like what Austan Goolsbee described in a 2006 New York Times column.

And as economists have looked at the economy of the last two decades, they have found that [Stanford Business School economist] Dr. [Paul] Oyer’s findings hold for more than just high-end M.B.A. students on Wall Street. They are also true for college students. A recent study, by the economists Philip Oreopoulos, Till Von Wachter and Andrew Heisz, “The Short- and Long-Term Career Effects of Graduating in a Recession” (National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 12159, April 2006. http://www.columbia.edu/~vw2112/papers/nber_draft_1.pdf), finds that the setback in earnings for college students who graduate in a recession stays with them for the next 10 years.

These data confirm that people essentially cannot close the wage gap by working their way up the company hierarchy. While they may work their way up, the people who started above them do, too. They don’t catch up. The recession graduates who actually do catch up tend to be the ones who forget about rising up the ladder and, instead, jump ship to other employers.

Today’s graduates are competing with workers like George from the previous post, who have been laid off after years of work, only to find themselves in such a dismal market that they are willing to take the entry-level jobs that graduates have traditionally sought, even if it means doing the same work for significantly less money, to support a significantly reduced standard of living. Graduates then, compete with high school students for the kind of positions that were summer jobs for the latter.

It sounds vaguely like something I read recently.

This is equivalent to a lower standard of living. In the competition for a chance to work, the man with a lower standard of living will underbid the man with a higher standard of living. And a small group of such thrifty workers will lower the wages of that industry. And the thrifty ones will no longer be thrifty, for their income will have been reduced ’til it balances their expenditure…

It sounds like a recipe for creating a permanent and all-but-inescapable underclass. The writer of the above, by the way, wasn’t addressing the present U.S. economic crisis, or even any aspect of the global economy. That was Jack London describing the griding poverty of London’s East End circa. 1902, where 500,000 of the city’s poorest citizens lived in squalor a short taxi ride away from the wealthiest areas of London, in The People of The Abyss.

(It’s worth noting that London was writing fifteen years after the events of “Bloody Sunday” and the unemployed marching on Trafalgar Square, as well as the media attention generated by the “Jack he Ripper” murders brought the griding poverty of the East End into sharp focus. London writes more than a decade after reform efforts inspired by those events. But he also wrote before the government’s National Insurance Act of 1911, establishing sickness benefits for workers and unemployment benefits for some trades where periodic unemployment was common.)

Perhaps we are yet a ways from Victorian era disparities and the levels of unemployment but where we are headed if current trends continue looks pretty grim— or pretty great, depending on your outlook.

But the picture painted by Don Peck in his March 2010 Atlantic article, “How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America”, suggests we’re on our way.

There is unemployment, a brief and relatively routine transitional state that results from the rise and fall of companies in any economy, and there is unemployment—chronic, all-consuming. The former is a necessary lubricant in any engine of economic growth. The latter is a pestilence that slowly eats away at people, families, and, if it spreads widely enough, the fabric of society. Indeed, history suggests that it is perhaps society’s most noxious ill.

The worst effects of pervasive joblessness—on family, politics, society—take time to incubate, and they show themselves only slowly. But ultimately, they leave deep marks that endure long after boom times have returned. Some of these marks are just now becoming visible, and even if the economy magically and fully recovers tomorrow, new ones will continue to appear. The longer our economic slump lasts, the deeper they’ll be.

If it persists much longer, this era of high joblessness will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults—and quite possibly those of the children behind them as well. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar white men—and on white culture. It could change the nature of modern marriage, and also cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a kind of despair and dysfunction not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years.

The world that Peck portrays, in an article to dense with information to quote without practically reposting it in full, is hardly a future many people would wish for themselves, their children, or the children’s children. He writes of an economy in “a hole that is more than 10 million jobs deep,” which is the number of jobs required to get us back to even 5% unemployment. That we could do in two years if we returned to double the 1990s rate of job creation.

That may be a conservative estimate. But it means that meager increases in monthly employment numbers — that are considerably reduced when taking factors like seasonal employment, etc., in to consideration — won’t get us there. Not even close.

Instead of addressing the root of the economic crisis (and the deficit, by the way) we opt for short term, band-aid, solutions that can’t begin to address the entirety of the challenge before us.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, we are not digging ourselves deeper into an economic hole if we spend to create jobs, extend unemployment benefits, and keep people in their homes, etc. We are digging ourselves deeper by steadfastly refusing to do so. And that’s merely perpetuating the current status quo, which will make playing catch-up unlikely, at best.

New jobs will come open in the U.S. But many will have different skill requirements than the old ones. “In a sense,” says Gary Burtless, a labor economist at the Brookings Institution, “every time someone’s laid off now, they need to start all over. They don’t even know what industry they’ll be in next.” And as a spell of unemployment lengthens, skills erode and behavior tends to change, leaving some people unqualified even for work they once did well.

Ultimately, innovation is what allows an economy to grow quickly and create new jobs as old ones obsolesce and disappear. Typically, one salutary side effect of recessions is that they eventually spur booms in innovation. Some laid-off employees become entrepreneurs, working on ideas that have been ignored by corporate bureaucracies, while sclerotic firms in declining industries fail, making way for nimbler enterprises. But according to the economist Edmund Phelps, the innovative potential of the U.S. economy looks limited today. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, he and his co-author, Leo Tilman, argue that dynamism in the U.S. has actually been in decline for a decade; with the housing bubble fueling easy (but unsustainable) growth for much of that time, we just didn’t notice. Phelps and Tilman finger several culprits: a patent system that’s become stifling; an increasingly myopic focus among public companies on quarterly results, rather than long-term value creation; and, not least, a financial industry that for a generation has focused its talent and resources not on funding business innovation, but on proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, and arcane financial engineering. None of these problems is likely to disappear quickly. Phelps, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on the “natural” rate of unemployment, believes that until they do disappear, the new floor for unemployment is likely to be between 6.5 percent and 7.5 percent, even once “recovery” is complete.

Innovation will continue to be limited, because we will eventually cease to support the things makes innovation possible. Kids who get to school hungry, stay hungry, and are crowded into classrooms of 30+ or more, as school systems layoff teachers and even close some schools don’t usually grow up to be innovators, or even able to support as workers the new markets and fields innovation may create. Nor do parents whose biggest worry is where they money to buy groceries and pay for utilities is going to come from have time to spend reading to their kids or helping with homework. They certainly can’t vouch for the importance of education by example. If the parents even managed to earn a college degree where will it have gotten them?

If those parents are todays graduates, Peck’s article makes that clear.

Todays graduates will likely earn less. According to a Yale study college graduates from 1979 to 1989, cited by Peck, those entering the workforce during a recession earn about 25% less than those who were lucky enough to start their careers during “boom times,” and they never caught up. Five, 10, and even 25 years later recession graduates were still earning 10% less than the “boom timers.” They were also less likely to work in professional occupations, and though they remained in their job for longer than average, that impeded advancement because starting in lower positions colored supervisors’ perceptions of their potential, and thus they were less likely to move up.

The picture Peck paints only gets bleaker.

When experienced workers holding prestigious degrees are taking unpaid internships, not much is left for newly minted B.A.s. Yet if those same B.A.s don’t find purchase in the job market, they’ll soon have to compete with a fresh class of graduates—ones without white space on their résumé to explain. This is a tough squeeze to escape, and it only gets tighter over time.

Strong evidence suggests that people who don’t find solid roots in the job market within a year or two have a particularly hard time righting themselves. In part, that’s because many of them become different—and damaged—people. Krysia Mossakowski, a sociologist at the University of Miami, has found that in young adults, long bouts of unemployment provoke long-lasting changes in behavior and mental health. “Some people say, ‘Oh, well, they’re young, they’re in and out of the workforce, so unemployment shouldn’t matter much psychologically,’” Mossakowski told me. “But that isn’t true.”

Examining national longitudinal data, Mossakowski has found that people who were unemployed for long periods in their teens or early 20s are far more likely to develop a habit of heavy drinking (five or more drinks in one sitting) by the time they approach middle age. They are also more likely to develop depressive symptoms. Prior drinking behavior and psychological history do not explain these problems—they result from unemployment itself. And the problems are not limited to those who never find steady work; they show up quite strongly as well in people who are later working regularly.

The effects are going to passed down from one generation to another, if nothing is done. There is much talk about our children “inheriting” the federal deficit. But if our children inherit the jobs deficit and its consequences, they will have much less of a chance at dealing with the other deficit or any number of other challenges. With the loss of employment and income comes a loss of a host of opportunities that previous generations have inherited from their middle class parents. The decline in the workforce makes it inevitable that state and local governments will make cuts in everything from education to social services that have long helped make up at least some of the difference for children of needy families — providing, if nothing else, an education and often the full stomach needed to take advantage of the opportunity.

What our children will inherit is fewer opportunities to do as well as or better than their parents. In fact, their children will likely do worse than their parents, as they will not only have fewer opportunities, but far lower expectations for themselves, based on what they see their parents struggling with. (And their parents will probably find it difficult to exhort their kids to get an education, since it will have done the parents little good to do so. The jobless economy they are graduating into now, will be little changed if the jobs deficit persists, as there will be fewer consumers, thus a lower demand for goods and services, and ultimately no need for employers to expand. If anything, it means more joblessness.

But keep in mind that this is the world that at least some conservatives are rooting for and hoping for. A world where more people are divorced from the economy. It’s their post-government utopia, a Mad Max Beyond The Thunderdome fantasy that fuels their fuels their obstruction of just about anything that might help Americans who being endlessly squeezed in this economy. If they can just fend off any possible remedies long enough, things will fall apart even more, and perhaps finally past hope of repair.

In other words, the total disintegration of the economy, the middle class, and really even our entire social structure is something to cheer for. And if long-term unemployment gets us there, so be it. But don’t take my word for it.

At almost the same time Peck published his article on how long-term unemployment could “warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years,” conservative blogger and columnist Reihan Salam wrote — for Time magazine’s “10 Ideas For The Next 10 Years” — a column about how much he looked forward to this disintegration and the rise of what he called “The Drop-Out Economy.”

Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias.

Rather than warehouse their children in factory schools invented to instill obedience in the future mill workers of America, bourgeois rebels will educate their kids in virtual schools tailored to different learning styles. Whereas only 1.5 million children were homeschooled in 2007, we can expect the number to explode in future years as distance education blows past the traditional variety in cost and quality. The cultural battle lines of our time, with red America pitted against blue, will be scrambled as Buddhist vegan militia members and evangelical anarchist squatters trade tips on how to build self-sufficient vertical farms from scrap-heap materials. To avoid the tax man, dozens if not hundreds of strongly encrypted digital currencies and barter schemes will crop up, leaving an underresourced IRS to play whack-a-mole with savvy libertarian “hacktivists.”

Work and life will be remixed, as old-style jobs, with long commutes and long hours spent staring at blinking computer screens, vanish thanks to ever increasing productivity levels. New jobs that we can scarcely imagine will take their place, only they’ll tend to be home-based, thus restoring life to bedroom suburbs that today are ghost towns from 9 to 5. Private homes will increasingly give way to cohousing communities, in which singles and nuclear families will build makeshift kinship networks in shared kitchens and common areas and on neighborhood-watch duty. Gated communities will grow larger and more elaborate, effectively seceding from their municipalities and pursuing their own visions of the good life. Whether this future sounds like a nightmare or a dream come true, it’s coming.

Here is the conservative fantasy: the dissolution of the government along with the supports and services it provides. (The longstanding goal of annihilating the Dept. of Education is is clearly achieved in this scenario.) While it’s not out of the question that Salam’s “communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim” (in a jarring appropriation of yesterday’s liberal phenomena in support of today’s right wing rhetoric and agenda) might provide, by design they won’t have the breadth or reach of that the government — our government — has (nor can they be required not to discriminate). “The Beast” is finally starved to death.

What Peck details and Salam skips over is the “collateral damage” — the millions of chronically unemployed Americans, the probably permanent consequences of chronic un-employment, permanently lowered standards of living, and generations starved of the possibilities and denied the broadened horizons that their parents and great-grandparents had — that it will take to get us there. What Peck documents and Salam almost celebrates is the end of upward mobility and the new reality that as downward mobility becomes the norm, most of us will be lucky if we can simply stay put.

Dream or nightmare, Salam is right. It’s coming. Whether you believe it’s where we’re headed or where we should end up — whether it’s a crisis or a “correction” — the fastest way to get there is the same: simply do nothing.

That’s the future scenario that worries me most where our children are concerned. It’s a crisis that can still be averted if our government takes action. But for some conservatives its a necessary and desirable “correction,” and one can still has a chance if they can forestall government action. It depends on whether you see long-term unemployment and its long-term consequences as a crisis or a “correction.”

I haven’t thought of Mr. Harrison for a while. But the recent uproar over President Obama’s speech to school children, brought Mr. Harrison — and something he said to us before we graduated — back to mind.

As we noted yesterday, President Barack Obama is slated to give an address to the nation’s school children on Sept. 8. According to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the speech will “call for a shared responsibility and commitment on the part of students, parents and educators to ensure that every child in every school receives the best education possible so they can compete in the global economy for good jobs and live rewarding and productive lives as American citizens.”

The address will be streamed live on the White House’s website, and the Department of Education has distributed lesson plans to help stimulate debate in the classroom. But many conservatives claim that Obama is attempting to “indoctrinate” the nation. Here’s commentator Michelle Malkin writing on her website:

Schools have used students as little lobbyists on everything from illegal immigration to gay marriage to anti-war activism, and most recently, [c]ensus collection. Will Obama be able to resist issuing a call to youth arms to marshal help in passing his legislative agenda?

Of course, Obama is hardly the first president to speak directly to school children. In October 2001, George W. Bush urged kids to donate a dollar to America’s Fund for Afghan Children. And in 1991, George H.W. Bush was criticized by Democrats for conducting a teleconference with students on the topic of math and science. (Hat tip to MSNBC’s First Read and Michael Roberts of Westword.)

I don’t know what Mr. Harrison thinks about the president or the speech the president plans to give to schoolchildren. But I can imagine him shaking his head with disbelief over the uproar that’s been raised in response.

It is unbelievable that something as innocuously encouraging as the president encouraging children to stay in school, listen, and work hard.

Obama intends to “challenge students to work hard, set educational goals and take responsibility for their learning,” Duncan wrote. Obama will also call for a “shared responsibility” among students, parents and educators to maximize learning potential.

“The goal of the speech and the lesson plans is to challenge students to work hard in school, to not drop out and to meet short-term goals like behaving in class, doing their homework and goals that parents and teachers alike can agree are noble,” Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman, told FOXNews.com. “This isn’t a policy speech. This is a speech designed to encourage kids to stay in school.”

But in advance of the address, the Department of Education has offered educators “classroom activities” to coincide with Obama’s message.

Students in grades pre-K-6, for example, are encouraged to “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals.”

Teachers are also given guidance to tell students to “build background knowledge about the president of the United States by reading books about presidents and Barack Obama.”

Actually, it’s unbelievable and at the same time frighteningly believable, as I think back on Mr. Harrison’s words.

Mr. Harrison’s teaching was not the learning-by-rote we’d grown used to over 12 years of schooling, nor was it “teaching to the test.” It was Mr. Harrison, coaxing us out onto the ice, with no specific destination, no map to tell us how to get there, and no assurance that we would have anything remotely solid under our feet along the way. He ventured out, and then tossed us a rope.

Mr. Harrison and I couldn’t have been much more different. He was a devout Christian, and I was a high school senior reading the gnostic gospels, thrilled to have discovered them in the midst of my Baptist upbringing, and flirting with a spiritual seeking that would lead me in a far different direction.

He was rather conservative politically. I was a gay teenager, coming out and becoming so outraged by the Supreme Court’s Bowers v. Hardwick decision that I stopped standing for the pledge of allegiance. I couldn’t manage to say the words “liberty and justice for all” without spitting them out. Not only did he not make me do so, but he smiled and nodded, seeming to understand when I explained why. (Another teacher, my math teacher, assumed my reasons for not standing, and declared “Well, you can’t very well say there is no God, since so many people believe there is.” I didn’t bother telling her my reasons.)

When I wrote letters to the school board, and encouraged my classmates to do so as well, in opposition to an attempt to ban certain books in our school system, Mr. Harrison was encouraging. He was supportive, though he didn’t personally approve of some of the books in question. (Others, in fact, were on his reading list.) Perhaps he thought the ideas in those books were not as dangerous as the attempt to suppress the books and the ideas they contained. Or perhaps he trusted the young minds he was charged with nurturing could handle those ideas.

Perhaps he felt confident that he’d taught us well enough to use our minds critically — to examine and question what were read, what we were given, or what we were told — that we could make up our own minds.

Critical thinking is purposeful and reflective judgment about what to believe or what to do[1] in response to observations, experience, verbal or written expressions, or arguments. Critical thinking may involve determining the meaning and significance of what is observed or expressed, or, concerning a given inference or argument, determining whether there is adequate justification to accept the conclusion as true. Hence, Fisher & Scriven define critical thinking as “Skilled, active, interpretation and evaluation of observations, communications, information, and argumentation.”[1] Parker & Moore define it more narrowly as the careful, deliberate determination of whether one should accept, reject, or suspend judgment about a claim and the degree of confidence with which one accepts or rejects it.[2]

Critical thinking gives due consideration to the evidence, the context of judgment, the relevant criteria for making the judgment well, the applicable methods or techniques for forming the judgment, and the applicable theoretical constructs for understanding the nature of the problem and the question at hand.[2] Critical thinking employs not only logic but broad intellectual criteria such as clarity, credibility, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, significance and fairness.

Perhaps he was confident that he’d instilled in us the intellectual courage to tolerate the inherent uncertainty of the process of critically examining not only what we read and what we were told, but the beliefs and assumptions we brought to the discussion.

Principle: To think independently and fairly, one must feel the need to face and fairly deal with unpopular ideas, beliefs, or viewpoints. The courage to do so arises when we see that ideas considered dangerous or absurd are sometimes rationally justified (in whole or in part) and that conclusions or beliefs inculcated in us are sometimes false or misleading.

To determine for ourselves which is which, we must not passively and uncritically accept what we have “learned”. We need courage to admit the truth in some ideas considered dangerous and absurd, and the distortion or falsity in some ideas strongly held in our social group. It will take courage to be true to our own thinking, for honestly questioning our deeply held beliefs can be difficult and sometimes frightening, and the penalties for non-conformity are often severe.

Perhaps he was proud, even, that he equipped us as best he could and instilled in us enough perseverance to seek out truth for ourselves rather than wait to have it handed to us.

One day, towards the end of our senior year, as we were talking about post-graduation plans (everyone in my graduating class was headed for a college or university somewhere), Mr. Harrison talked about some of the classes behind ours.

“You people,” he said to our class, with a hint of pride, “already have your own ideas. I can’t mold you. But people coming after you,” he said as a note dismay crept into his voice, “come to my class and they sit here and wait for me to tell them what to think.”

During many class discussions, Mr. Harrison indulged and even encouraged my tendency to play “Devil’s Advocate,” questioning the popular interpretations or assumptions about a book or a piece of literature. Perhaps he just wanted someone to start the discussion. But perhaps he saw in my face and those of several of my classmates, a spark of recognition of — and desire for — the freedom he wasn’t so much giving us as guiding us towards.

Mr. Harrison was less concerned with what we thought, whether we thought rightly or correctly, or whether we thought what we were “supposed to” think. He was concerned that we learn how to think. He was less concerned about where we ended up than that we knew how we were getting there and why we going there.

The parents fretting about the possible “indoctrination” of their children — by hearing from a president who came from modest beginnings but was carried far by his intellect, the education available to it, and his good sense to take advantage of it — are probably worried more about what their children think than that their children learn how to think.

Perhaps they fear that a return of that favorite toddler-to-kindergarten question, “Why?”, coming from children who question their pat answers might underscore their own ignorance (already so vividly displayed).

Obama’s scheduled “stay-in-school” speech to students on Tuesday.

Throw some superintendents and teachers into that category, too. They unfortunately are giving in to pressure from outraged parents and now saying the president’s speech won’t be shown to their students.

How absurd. And how disrespectful of the office of the President of the United States.

On Sunday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan put the best face on the issue, trying his best not to criticize the sheer nonsense spouted by right-wing parents around the nation.

“At the end of the day, if the president motivates one C-student to become a B-student or one student who is thinking about dropping out to stay in school and take their education seriously, it’s all worth it,” Duncan said on “Face the Nation.”

The parents who are thinking of pulling their kids out of school on Tuesday are engaging in outrageous behavior.

Oh, and ignorant behavior, too.

Ironically, their panic that the beliefs they’ve taught their children would be undermined by an encouraging speech from the president suggests that the shakiness of those beliefs; so unquestioned and untested that the sand they’re built upon shifts at the announcement that the president might tell their children to stay in school.

Just before I graduated, Mr. Harrison paid me a very touching compliment. During the two years he taught me, we had gotten to know and like one another. I’d challenged him, and he’d challenged me, and developed a mutual respect. The father of two daughters, he said to me on the day I was leaving his class for the last time that, while he didn’t have a son, if he did have one he would be very proud if he had a son like me.

I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean he’d like to have a son who was exactly like me, but that he’d be very proud of a son who displayed the independence of thought, a passion for knowledge, a knack for questioning, and the ability to think critically that I’d learned from him, or that he spotted and nurtured in me.

What he saw, and what concerned him in the classes coming after us then is in evidence all around us, now has a seemingly unshakable hold on on at least one political party — turning it into a party in which what one believes is more important than what one knows, where critical thought has been banished, “facts” are founded in belief, and knowledge — that kind borne of born of uncertainty and tested by questioning — is the enemy.

That’s more than just a problem for one political party, or the families pulling their children from school on Tuesday, but for the country as a whole. We can see all around us — from the march to war in Iraq, to the crashing of our economy by people who ignored the warnings signs that contradicted their free market fundamentalist beliefs, to the health care townhalls where reasoned discussion is abandoned in favor of fisticuffs and shouted slogans.

If I worked for the White House communication team, I’d have had the president just say the obvious: that the best way students can help their country is to stay in school and work hard, so that they may learn not what to think but how to think. With any luck, they might have a teacher like Mr. Harrison, just as I did.

School will soon start again, and countless LGBT youth will return to classrooms all over the country. Some will return to schools where they find support and protection from harassment — where administrators and teachers work together to ensure a safe learning environment to all students.

Some won’t.

Some students will return to schools where officials turn a blind eye to bullying and harassment. Some will face administrators who tell them “it’s only words and words can’t hurt you”. Some will return to schools in communities where people oppose protecting LGBT students from harassment. Some will contend with people who believe some students should be harassed — and that some harassment should be permitted — “for their own good.”

Some of those students will make it, but some won’t.

Some will have no one to stand up for them, or to show them how to stand up for themselves.

I hope someone tells them about Rochelle Hamilton.

A high school student who says that she was harassed by her teachers in 2007, because she is a lesbian has won a legal settlement from the Vallejo City Unified School District, officials confirmed Monday.

Under the agreement, the district will pay $25,000 to Rochelle Hamilton, 16, who had come out as a lesbian at age 13. The district will also bolster its anti-gay-discrimination training and complaint procedures for all staff and students and be monitored by the American Civil Liberties Union for five years.

… Rochelle began attending Vallejo’s Jesse Bethel High School as a sophomore in the fall of 2007, and was accosted with verbal harassment that continued for months. Most of the attacks, she said, came from her teachers and school staff.

According to Rochelle, a teacher approached while she was hugging her girlfriend and said, “This is ungodly, and you’re going to hell.”

Another teacher allegedly asked her, “What are you, a man or a woman?”

She was required to participate in a school-sponsored “counseling” group designed to discourage students from being lesbian or gay.

I hope they have adults like Cheri Hamilton in their lives.

So tell me, what’s this journey been like for you?

Cheri: It has been long and painful. With the support from De-Bug and the ACLU, I felt I finally had people who understood our pain. I had to write many letters and make many phone calls, not allowing the district to run from this. Every issue Rochelle faced and every tear she dropped, I brought it to their attention.

Meanwhile, I held Rochelle, reminding her that nothing was wrong with her, that she was beautiful inside and out. As Rochelle asked me why the teachers wouldn’t stop, I reminded her what her father and I endured for being a black and white couple, and if we would have given in to a hateful society then she wouldn’t be here. As Rochelle listened, she realized that she also had to stand up for herself and others. I was not backing down and reminded the school administrators that my daughter has a right to be herself and receive an education in their district. While Rochelle grabbed her strength from me and as I counseled her through every putdown, she gained strength, and became a shoulder or a ear for LGBTQ (lesbian gay bisexual transgender queer) friends wanting to offer any support that they needed. It reminded her how important it was for her to continue the fight for change.

What was the school’s reaction to the case and to Rochelle? Were at least any of them sympathetic or apologetic to Rochelle?

Cheri: The school and the district chose to be sympathetic, but (they were) not willing to apologize. The settlement agreement speaks loudly. Rochelle and I have not focused on a pacified five-letter word “SORRY,” but rather we fought for a six-letter word: “CHANGE.” That was our goal, and we won what we really wanted, to make Vallejo a safer learning environment for all students.

Is there a message you have for other parents of gay teens who have to go through this and don’t know what to do?

Cheri: Always have the will! You are your child’s voice! They are not heard unless you speak. Always be proud of your kids and remember how special they are. Smiles last forever in a mother’s heart. Listen to your kids and find out what is going on at their school, who their teachers are, and if your child is complaining, upset or withdrawn, find out why.

I hope someone shares with them her words of encouragement.

A gay friend told me recently that his teacher said to him, “You just want to be a girl.” I told him to write a complaint. I was so proud that now there’s something we can do. There are too many students who are harassed. Students have rights too. Young people are strong. We have a voice. There are students like me all over California who are working to make their schools and their lives better. When something is wrong, we need to stand up and make a difference. Young people like me, we’re not looking for a five letter word, “sorry.” We’re looking for a six letter word: “change.”

I go to school to learn, but the experience of standing up for myself and for my rights taught me some important lessons.

Lesson Number One: Students can take a stand against adults who discriminate. And they can win. Even when those adults are teachers.

Lesson Number Two: I have the right to be myself. You have the right to be yourself. We all have the right.

So this is my message to everybody else being discriminated against: keep fighting, be who you are ‘till the day you die, always stand up for yourself. Or, as I say in a poem I wrote: “I’m happy with my sexuality and I say it with pride you see because this is my life and this is me.”

I can tell you from my own experience that they really need to hear it.

It can make all the difference in the world.

I don’t know his name or who he is. But prior to the election I often saw him — a man probably of retirement age, sitting behind a table gathering signatures to put a property tax cut on the ballot for upcoming county elections. Every weekend, I wondered, as we walked by him with our grocery cart, if he had children. If he did, they were probably grown. I wondered if, now that they are grown and done with formal education, he was protesting having to “pay for other people’s kids” — mine included — to attend our area’s public schools, or if it occurred to him how many people he relied on who were publicly educated at some point. I thought of him again because there was a moment in Obama’s speech that spelled out why education — and more — matters to and for all of us.

It was a wide-ranging speech that held few surprises, but held so much that there was something in it for just about everyone to find something they like or something they don’t. Obama, seeming to return to, or at least allude to, a “bipartisanship” that’s proved so successful in other areas, seems open to any idea that works. Yet his speech indicated openness to some that just don’t and others that are questionable at best.

Vouchers received a passing mention, though there’s no credible evidence that vouchers work, in terms of improving student achievement, or putting private education within reach for students from needy families. Plus private schools are not held to the same standard of accountability — a theme that ran throughout the president’s speech #&8212; s public schools. Yet, Obama’s emphasis on public funding suggests that vouchers, which largely serve to divert public funds to private schools — effectively outsourcing public education — won’t be and can’t be the centerpiece of any plan to really improve education.

Merit pay for teachers, by comparison, received far more than a passing mention, with an emphasis on getting rid of “bad teachers.” Yet, teachers — dangerous, educated union members that they are — have long been the target of mutli-million dollar campaigns with the goal of seeing that more public school teachers fired, and that those who are left work for much less. Never mind that we are facing a shortage of teachers in public education already. (Obama’s plan includes extra money for math and science teachers, of which there is a shortage. But that leaves open the question of whether other subjects, and the teachers that specialize in them, are worth less.) Thus, the emphasis in Obama’s speech is disturbing in that it appears to buy into right wing frames that can only serve to undermine public education by increasing teachers’ workloads while simultaneously thinning their ranks.

Maybe I was just lucky, but through the entirety of my education I don’t recall having a truly “bad” teacher. There were some teachers who were better at reaching me than others, and some who were better at reaching other students, but no truly bad teachers. (OK, maybe one, but that’s out of all the teachers I had from pre-school through college.) Perhaps, instead of making teachers’ jobs harder, we should make teaching more attractive. (Full disclosure: My younger sister is a teacher.)

Of course there are bad teachers, but there are people in every profession who are bad at what they do. The main problem with bad teachers not getting fired is connected to the teacher shortage, not due to tenure. If you want to solve that problem by recruiting and retaining new teachers, you need to make the prospect of becoming a teacher more attractive. Part of that means having widely admired political leaders such as President Obama not make public threats to increase teacher workloads, make the profession less collegial, and fire lots of teachers. Such threats are not a very good marketing campaign for people considering a career in teaching. Because what people really want to hear about in our current economic climate is an increased possibility of getting fired.

I taught for five years myself, but I ended up leaving the profession. It is an emotionally draining experience, and it is very difficult to be a good teacher unless you can maintain the emotional engagement all of the time. I think people know this, which is why I don’t entirely understand why talk of making teachers work harder, making their profession more competitive, and making their job [less] secure is so common in America. We don’t talk about making the lives of other people who work in public service, such as soldiers and first responders–or even health care workers–in such a foreboding way. If, as a nation, we actually want to solve our teacher shortage, part of that is going to mean dropping our constant national threats to make teachers lives more difficult. That is just a really, really bad way to recruit and retain teachers.

If Obama is serious about improving education, it’s much wiser to cast teachers as our best allies in this task. Because, well, they are.

But at its heart, Obama’s was a progressive speech from a president who understands that liberty without the knowledge of that liberty (education) and the ability to act on it (health care) is meaningless, and that a government serious about preserving and expanding liberty must expand and maintain access to both, for as many citizens as possible. It’s progressive in that it’s clearly founded on the ideas that government can, should, and must play a vital role in solving a problem that impacts all of us. And it does, whether we’re parents, students, teachers, or haven’t seen the inside of a school in years.

The statistics speak for themselves; those Obama mentioned in his speech, and then some. As of last year, we’re no longer world leader in secondary education, ranking 18th out of 36 nations. We were beaten out by South Korea, where 93% of high school student graduate on time, as opposed to 75% here in the U.S. As of 2005, the U.S. ranked ninth in the percentage of our population that has at least a high school diploma, and eleventh among nations in the percentage of citizens with at least a college degree — both areas in which we were first in the world just 20 years ago. One million of our students become high school dropouts each year.

Economics factor in, as well. Or, rather, economic disparity is a major factor. Low-income students with high achievement levels attend college at about the same rate as high-income students with much lower achievement levels, meaning that income trumps achievement in terms of access to education. Our childrens’ own brains show evidence of a “wealth gap,” as children from lower-income families process information with greater difficulty than most people.

That “wealth gap” is widening right now, as a direct result of our economic downturn. In fact, our schools may be one of the worst casualties of our economic crash, as states face severe budget shortfalls, due to reduced property tax revenues, as a result of the ongoing foreclosure crisis. (Which, by the way, got worse in February as foreclosures rose by 30%.) That means schools are already facing cuts, and at a time when they’re being hit by even more aftershocks of our crashing economy.

More students are qualifying for free or subsidized lunches, as the economy sags, and at a time when schools are cutting those lunch programs. And school officials across the country have warned that more students are coming to school hungry (and without lunch money, at that).

And they’re not just coming to school hungry. They’re also coming to school sick or in need of health care they aren’t getting, because when parents lose jobs and health insurance, kids lose theirs too. (And, families dealing with job loss are likely to be dealing with foreclosure, and a host of other issues, as children’s needs go unmet.) As a result they are losing out out learning, as schools have to focus on meeting students’ medical needs. (The other choice being to ignore those needs and go on trying to educate children whose basic needs aren’t being met.)

Growing numbers of uninsured children have made it harder for educators to focus on classroom achievement without first addressing the medical needs of their students who lack health insurance or dental coverage.

Instead of notifying parents when their children are ill, school officials increasingly must help find health care, arrange transportation for sick children and often advise beleaguered parents about the health consequences of their inaction.

Schools that don’t accept the extra responsibility can lose those students to prolonged absences that jeopardize their academic advancement.

Homelessness is rising as a result of our foundering economy, even as cities and states run out of funding for services the homeless need. That includes homeless families, some morphing into “motel families,” resorting to what’s become “de facto low-income housing,” camping out in cramped rooms by the hundreds. Their increasing numbers is the reason why 1 in 50 American children are now homeless. And they are arriving in schools like a tidal wave, bringing with them all the problems that are attendant with becoming homeless.

While the problem may be worse in economically stricken regions like Southern California, where foreclosures and job losses are taking a harsh toll on families, anecdotal evidence suggests it is a growing issue nationally and one with serious ramifications for both a future generation and the overburdened public school system.

Research shows that the turmoil of homelessness often hinders children’s ability to socialize and learn. Many are plagued by hunger, exhaustion, abuse and insecurity. They have a hard time performing at grade level and are about 50 percent less likely to graduate from high school than their peers.

“Homeless children are confronted daily by extremely stressful and traumatic experiences that have profound effects on their cognitive development and ability to learn,” said Ellen Bassuk, a Harvard Medical School psychiatry professor and president of the nonprofit National Center on Family Homelessness. “They tend to have high rates of developmental delays, learning difficulties and emotional problems as a product of precarious living situations and extreme p

…Under federal law, schools are charged with keeping homeless students like Daniel from falling behind their peers academically. This can mean providing a wide range of services, including transportation, free lunches, immunizations and referrals to family services.

But with insufficient federal funding and budgets that are severely strained, many schools are struggling to meet the rising need.

The problem is only likely to get worse as job losses will probably continue to fuel the ongoing storm of foreclosures.

It’s easy to speak of “moral hazards,” and assert that these families shouldn’t have gotten into mortgages they couldn’t afford or didn’t understand (but keep in mind that foreclosures are no longer just for subprime borrowers, but now also for prime borrowers and responsible renters) when it comes to the question of keeping people in their homes, even as we continue to bail out the most irresponsible members of the financial sector. But it’s also easy to forget what that means for children whose families become homeless, or even children living in communities blighted by foreclosures, and school districts devastated by budget shortfalls — and what it means for their education.

The simple truth is that all of the major challenges we face today come to a collision point in the lives of our children, at some of the most developmentally important moments of their lives.

If you don’t yet see the teachable moment in all of this, let the president explain it for you.

America will not remain true to its highest ideals – and America’s place as a global economic leader will be put at risk – unless we not only bring down the crushing cost of health care and transform the way we use energy, but also do a far better job than we have been doing of educating our sons and daughters; unless we give them the knowledge and skills they need in this new and changing world.

For we know that economic progress and educational achievement have always gone hand in hand in America. Land-grant colleges and public high schools transformed the economy of an industrializing nation. The GI Bill generated a middle class that made America’s economy unrivaled in the 20th century. And investments in math and science under President Eisenhower made it possible for Sergei Brin to attend graduate school and found an upstart company called Google that would forever change our world.

The source of America’s prosperity, then, has never been merely how ably we accumulate wealth, but how well we educate our people. This has never been more true than it is today. In a 21st century world where jobs can be shipped wherever there’s an internet connection; where a child born in Dallas is competing with children in Delhi; where your best job qualification is not what you do, but what you know – education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity and success, it is a prerequisite.

That is why workers without a four-year degree have borne the brunt of recent layoffs, Latinos most of all. And that is why, of the thirty fastest growing occupations in America, half require a Bachelor’s degree or more. By 2016, four out of every ten new jobs will require at least some advanced education or training.

So let there be no doubt: the future belongs to the nation that best educates its citizens – and my fellow Americans, we have everything we need to be that nation. We have the best universities and the most renowned scholars. We have innovative principals, passionate teachers, gifted students, and parents whose only priority is their child’s education. We have a legacy of excellence, and an unwavering belief that our children should climb higher than we did.

If you still don’t see it, let Yvonne Bojorquez explain it for you.

I want children like Yvonne Bojorquez to have that chance. Yvonne is a student at Village Academy High School in California. Village Academy is a 21st century school, where cutting edge technologies are used in the classroom, where college prep and career training are offered to all who seek it, and where the motto is – “respect, responsibility, and results.” A couple of months ago, Yvonne and her class made a video talking about the impact that our struggling economy was having on their lives. Some of them spoke about their parents being laid off, or their homes facing foreclosure, or their inability to focus on school with everything that was happening at home. When it was her turn to speak, Yvonne said:

“We’ve all been affected by this economic crisis. [We] are all college bound students…We’re all businessmen, and doctors and lawyers and all this great stuff. And we have all this potential,” she said, “but the way things are going, we’re not going to be able to [fulfill it].”

It was heartbreaking that a girl so full of promise was so full of worry that she and her class titled their video, “Is anybody listening?” And so, today, there’s something I want to say to Yvonne and her class at Village Academy. I am listening. We are listening. America is listening. And we are not going to rest until your parents can keep their jobs, your families can keep their homes, and you can focus on what you should be focusing on – your own education. Until you can become the businessmen, doctors, and lawyers of tomorrow, until you can reach out and grasp your dreams for the future.

Those dreams for the future are not merely dreams but imperatives, if any of us are to have a hope of finding a way out of this crisis and into a better future — because none of us will get there on our own. The “You’re On You’re Own” politics and policies of the past few decades — and the luxury of pretending that what happens to you doesn’t have anything to do with me, or vice versa — is what has brought us to the point, and thus cannot carry us forward.

It is called the “ownership society” in Washington. But, you know, historically there has been another term for it; it’s called “social Darwinism” – the notion that every man or woman is out for him or herself, which allows us to say that if we meet a guy who has worked in a steel plant for 30, 40 years and suddenly has the rug pulled out from under him and can’t afford health care or can’t afford a pension, you know, life isn’t fair. It allows us to say to a child who doesn’t have the wisdom to choose his or her own parents and so lives in a poor neighborhood, pick yourself up by your own bootstraps. It allows us to say to somebody who is seeing their child sick and is going bankrupt paying the bills, tough luck.

It’s a bracing idea, this idea that you’re on your own. It’s the simplest thing in the world, easy to put on a bumper sticker. But there’s just one problem; it doesn’t work. It ignores our history. Now, yes, our greatness as a nation has depended on self-reliance and individual initiative and a belief in the free market, but it’s also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, our sense that we have a stake in each other’s success – that everybody should have a shot at opportunity.

Americans understand this. They know the government can’t solve all their problems, but they expect the government can help because they know it’s an expression of what they’re learning in Sunday school. What they learn in their church, in their synagogue, in their mosque – a basic moral precept that says that I have to look out for you and I have responsibility for you and you have responsibility for me, that I am your keeper and you are mine. That’s what America is.

So, I hope the guy I used to see outside my grocery store — protesting against paying property taxes — saw the president’s speech and that some part of it reached him. Because the future, our future, will require the businesspersons, doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, municipal workers, mechanics, builders, firemen, policemen, etc., and all of the things that high school students like Yvonne Boroquez and even kindergartners like my son dream of being, can be, and will be someday, but only with our help, right now.

Whatever the cost may be, meeting the challenges we face in education, health care and the economy are a down payment on our future that must be paid, if we’re to have one better than our present.

Police in Wayland, Mich., are investigating an attack by two 14-year-old girls on a third girl in Wayland Union High School. The victim was identified as a supporter of gay rights. The June 10 attack was purposely recorded on a cell phone video by another female, police say.

Wayland is located south of Grand Rapids and according to the city’s Web site has a population of 3,939 people.

Police told Grand Rapids-based WOOD-TV 8, the NBC affiliate, the two girls attacked the victim because she was a “gay rights advocate.”

Chief Dan Miller of the Wayland Police told the Kalamazoo Gazette the 14-year-old victim identified herself as a lesbian.

“I guess some say she’s pretty outspoken, and the other two girls didn’t like that,” he said in the Gazette. “We were told by the two suspects it was over the sex-orientation issue that they don’t believe in.

It was around the same time that I was researching the murders of Simmie Williams and Lawrence King, both of whom were harassed in school. I guess it interested me because of that, and because I was harassed in school. But I was fortunate never to experience something like this.

First, I was never physically assaulted except for being shoved around the locker room (which was enough). I managed to avoid getting into fights by just staying out of situations that might lead to one, and by being a pretty quick talker. Second, the worst I have to worry about was finding something written about me on the bathroom wall. But being the target of a planned beating? One recorded on video, for the purpose of uploading to YouTube and every other video site, thus taking humiliation to an an entirely new level?

No. The most we had when I was in school was the bathroom wall, passing notes in class, and “meet me by the flagpole after school.” And that was bad enough.

One thing that stood out to me as I was updating the Wayland entry with the sentencing of the two main girls involved in the fight. was what one girl — said to be the main “instigator,” planning the attack, recruiting help, and being the first to grab the victim by the hair — said to the judge, in hopes that he wouldn’t sentence her to juvenile detention.

VanderLaan stood before Allegan County Family Court Judge Michael Buck on Monday, hoping to persuade him not to order detention.

“If I go to (detention), I would have to miss church, and I love church,” she said.

But Buck described the attack as harsh and premeditated, deserving a tougher sentence.

She would miss church. (Her parents got her counseling after the attack, both professional and through her church.) That stood out to me, too, given how often people use their religion to justify opposing anti-bullying programs in schools.

I wonder what they would think about what happened at Wayland Union High.

Wayland High School

On June 10, 2008 two female students at Wayland Union High School — Crystal VanderLaan and Sydnee Rae Longhurst — attacked a third female student, who was identified as a gay rights activist. Video of the attack was recorded on cell phone by another female student.

The Background

The three students who planned the attack were cleaning out their lockers at about 1:30 p.m. on June 10, the last day of school. They surrounded the victim, and the fight broke out.1)

The Attack

Witnesses said the two attackers grabbed the victim’s hair and clothing from behind.

The video shows the victim, a freshman, having conversation with another student when the two other female students attack her. Wayland Police Chief Dan Miller said that investigators knew the attack was planned from looking at the school’s videotapes, and that other students knew the fight was coming. Witnesses told authorities that the suspects had changed clothes and pulled their hair back just before the fight started.2) The suspects also approached other students and asked if they wanted to take part in the fight. The other students declined.3)

The Motive

The 14-year-old victim identified herself as lesbian.4) Chief Miller told the Kalamazoo Gazette, “We were told by the two subjects that it was over the sexual-orientation issue they don’t believe in.”5) The alleged attackers told police that they did not agree with the victim’s advocacy for gay rights.6)

The victim told her father that she had gotten into an argument with one of her attackers with one of her attackers a few hours earlier.7) The incident was precipitated by several verbal spats and incidents of name-calling between the suspects and the victim. Fellow students said the victim was often the instigator in the verbal spats.8)

The Aftermath

The victim suffered multiple cuts and bruises to her face, and a possible broken nose.9)

Video from the fight was posted to popular web video sites hours later.10)

Reports of the attack raised concerns among gay rights advocates, and re-ignited calls for the passage of an anti-bullying bill and a hate crimes bill. The anti-bullying bill passed the Democratically controlled Michigan House a year earlier, but has stalled in the Republican-controlled Senate Education Committee.11)

Because the two alleged attackers were younger than 18, the FBI did not investigate potential hate crime charges.12)

On June 30, 2008, the Wayland school board decided to expel Vanderlann for her part in the attack. Longhurst had moved out of the district by then, and could not be disciplined by the school board. The board met in closed-session for more than two hours for hearing and debate, before voting unanimously for expulsion.13)

On July 9, 2008, Miller announced that no charges would be filed against the student who recorded video of the attack. Miller had had asked the Allegan County prosecutor’s office to determine if the student’s actions showed that she was part of a conspiracy to commit aggravated assault. The prosecutor’s office decided there was not enough evidence to charge her.14)

On July 2, Vanderlaan and Longhurst were charged with aggravated assault. If convicted, they face a maximum of one year in juvenile detention and a $1,000 fine.15)

Community Response

In response to the attack, a group of Wayland area residents forged ahead with forming the Wayland Area Diversity Coalition, and plans to educate other area residents about diversity of all types: racial, religious, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, or physical and mental disabilities. The coalition organized monthly public forums, to be led by professional speakers.16)

Sentences

On September 30, 2008, Longhurst was sentenced to spend six weekends in juvenile detention and perform 20 hours of community service. “I know I did something wrong,” Longhurst said before her sentencing. She was placed on indefinite probation.17)

On Monday, November 3, 2008, Vanderlaan was sentenced to spend six weekends in juvenile detention and perform 20 hours of community service. She must also write a letter of apology to the victim. Vanderlaan’s attorney said Vanderlaan saw her behavior as “embarrassing.

Vanderlaan herself spoke to Judge Michael Buck during the hearing, hoping to persuade him not to order detention. “If I go to (detention), I would have to miss church, and I love church,” she said.

However, the country prosecutor said Vanderlaan seemed to have instigated the attack, recruited help, then was the one to grab the victim by the hair and pull her backward.

Vanderlan was required to serve her detention time over 18 days, from 6:30 p.m. Friday to 4:00 p.m. Sunday.18)

But I couldn’t resist this shocking bit about a display of  ‘live homosexual acts’ that shocked students at a Kentucky college recently.

On Friday, members of the Murray State Alliance performed live homosexual acts on campus in the Free Speech Zone. Many students were shocked, but not necessarily as the name the event implies.

Students performed acts such as reading, studying and hanging out to raise awareness about the lifestyle of gay members of the Murray State campus.

Chris Morehead, junior from Paducah, Ky., checked out Friday’s event after hearing about it through a Facebook message. He said the event was sort of ironic because the name of the event is shocking, but the activities are normal.

Too funny. I remember one Saturday night in college, that I spent with a couple of friends from the gay student group. We basically ended up sitting around at one student’s house, playing Monopoly, and one my friends said with a touch of sarcasm. “Gee, if only our parents could see this wild, hedonistic “gay lifestyle” we’re living. Just partying our way from one orgasm to another.

The game broke up into peals of laughter for about 10 minutes before we calmed down.

[Via Box Turtle Bulletin.]