Class Differences in Education

At NYT, "College Made Them Feel Equal. The Virus Exposed How Unequal Their Lives Are":

This is a sobering piece that will give insight into the plight of those trying to improve their lot. College Made Them Feel Equal. The Virus Exposed How Unequal Their Lives Are. https://t.co/kYNuiLDp3M

— Jose de Jesus Ortiz (@OrtizKicks) April 4, 2020

The political science class was called “Forced Migration and Refugees.” Students read accounts of migrants fleeing broken economies and seeking better futures, of life plans drastically altered and the political forces that made it all seem necessary.

Then suddenly, the subject matter became personal: Haverford College shut down and evicted most students from the dormitories as the coronavirus spread through Pennsylvania.

Like many college courses around the country, the class soldiered on. The syllabus was revised. The students reconvened on a videoconferencing app.

But as each logged in, not everyone’s new reality looked the same.

One student sat at a vacation home on the coast of Maine. Another struggled to keep her mother’s Puerto Rican food truck running while meat vanished from Florida grocery shelves. As one young woman’s father, a private equity executive, urged the family to decamp to a country where infections were falling, another student’s mother in Russia couldn’t afford the plane ticket to bring her daughter home.

“Now Russia is about to close its borders,” Sophie Chochaeva told her classmates, in the days before the country did. She was one of 135 students still on campus, in a dorm room she called “the cozy foxhole,” as the world outside became a ghost town. “This crisis is exposing that a lot of people don’t have anywhere to go.”

The outbreak of the coronavirus — and the accompanying economic devastation that has left 10 million people almost instantly unemployed — has put America’s class divide on full display. Gig employees were the first to suffer, with many of their jobs vanishing without unemployment benefits. Office employees retreated to work-from-home arrangements while janitors cleaned the buildings they fled and delivery workers brought packages to their doorsteps.

But college was meant to be different. For decades, small liberal arts schools like Haverford, a short ride from Philadelphia, prided themselves on being the “great equalizer,” offering pedigrees not just to the scions of East Coast elites but also to the children of first-generation immigrants. Scholarships filled in for family money. Students ate the same cafeteria food in the morning and bunked in the same creaky beds at night.

No longer — at least not while the virus spreads through the country.

“It’s as though you had a front-row view on American inequality and the ways in which it was disguised and papered over,” said Anita Isaacs, the course’s professor who has taught political science at Haverford since 1988. The first gulf war, the Sept. 11 attacks, the Great Recession — she had seen them all through the eyes of her students.

“There’s been nothing like this before,” she said.

Several nights before the class was to reconvene online in late March, Professor Isaacs received an email from one of her teaching assistants, Tatiana Lathion, a college senior whose parents own the food truck. Their source of income was on the verge of liquidation as stay-at-home orders loomed in Jacksonville, Fla., where they lived.

“I’m not sure my savings will allow them both to survive this quarantine and still keep the business,” she wrote. She said she was thinking of getting a part-time job at a grocery store.

Wasn’t college supposed to get her away from all that?

“I have this panic moment that it’s literally for nothing now,” Ms. Lathion wrote to her professor.

Ms. Lathion had not thought she would attend college...

Still more.

Let's Have a National Conversation About the American Ghetto

From Michael Grable, at American Thinker, "A National Conversation about the American Ghetto":

The Left has long argued ad populum that disproportionately white police forces and disproportionately black prison populations prove American law enforcement institutionally racist.

That's essentially the perception behind, for example, the Left's long campaign against racial profiling as a police engagement technique.

Media sensationalism this year about two black deaths at the hands of white policemen inflamed the argument, while the president of the United States, the attorney general of the United States, the mayor of New York, and race-hustling entrepreneurs from Al Sharpton on down to any brother in the street with a bullhorn jumped on the black-while-walking bandwagon.

Here, however, is one standup law-enforcement professional, Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke, Jr., who begs to disagree.

Sheriff Clarke publicly condemns anti-police populism as the Left's deflection of an urban reality with which he's professionally all too familiar and for which the Left's all too politically responsible. "This deflects," says Sheriff Clarke:

against the real thing that we need to have a conversation about in this country and it's the American ghetto. And that's where most of the policing unfortunately has to be applied. The American ghetto has chronic poverty, high unemployment where people can't find meaningful work, and kids shackled to failing public schools ensuring that they won't reach their God-given potential. This creates a permanent underclass in this country and ensures that this group of people will continue to live life at the bottom. That's the kind of conversation that we need to have, as to how these failed liberal government policies have led to the creation and emergence of the welfare state. And that characterizes the American ghetto. Let's have that conversation and get off this nonsense that it's the policing profession that needs to be transformed. There's nothing wrong with the policing of, or institution of, policing in America.

The very civil rights movement with its war on poverty which was to have rectified American racism has, instead, perversely perpetuated it in the creation of a permanent underclass living life at the bottom of an urban ignorance, criminality, and violence which most requires the very policing against which its political beneficiaries now rail. That's a pretty "fundamental transformation" of at least one aspect of America. And it's a transformation of which no American should ever be anything but ashamed...

Keep reading.

Sad that.