Despite your legal training, you’ve decided to pursue a career in business. This career change will immediately raise a red flag for business employers. Your answer can make or break your chance of employment.

Why do you want to work in business rather than law?

The question is especially vexing if your heart has been set on working as an attorney. That’s the reason you went to law school. Even today, if you a law firm offered you a job, you’d choose it over business. But, legal jobs are scarce in this economy.

If you voice those thoughts, the interviewer will politely thank you and usher you out the door.  You’ve touched a fear-arousing hot button.

To understand the interviewer’s concerns, consider the expenses of filling an important job. An employer’s costs of the full hiring process are roughly twice the amount of the position’s starting salary.

Employers count on recouping these expenses, so they must hire an individual who will stay long enough to justify their investment. Their greatest fear is that you’ll get bored and seek employment as an attorney.  They can’t afford the risk of hiring you if there’s the slightest suspicion you’ll bail out in a year or two.

Your answer to the key question must make them feel completely confident that you’re 100% committed to a long term career in business. How can you remove an interviewer’s doubts and still give an honest answer?

For several years your life has been centered exclusively on law school. Your education and your dreams have pointed to one goal–becoming a lawyer. As a result your current employment decision is conceived in terms of leaving the law and settling for a business job.  Try reframing the choice.

How would you like a job that: (1) utilizes your legal training; and that (2) involves you in exciting and complex business ventures? Realistically, you know that many attorneys get bored with the law after a few years and end up hating their work. Contrast that scenario with a career that will be filled with ever changing challenges and will provide financially rewards commensurate with your accomplishments.

From a long term perspective, life as an attorney isn’t necessarily more attractive than the alternative. If you reach a similar conclusion, then you have a forthright answer to the job interview question. Begin with a statement that affirms your commitment to business, such as, “I’ve realized business is the only career track that’s perfectly suited to my temperament and my drive to succeed.”

Explain that during law school you recognized you’d probably become bored with the detailed repetitiveness of legal practice.  You need to use your analytic skills and legal knowledge to real world decisions and results.  You then realized you could only find lasting fulfillment in the business world.

When phrased in your own language, your answer will remove any doubts about your commitment, and you’ll ace the interview.

Jerald Jellison, Ph.D., has been a Professor of Psychology at the University of Southern California for three decades. For fifteen years he taught a skills-based course on transitioning from the university to business. Jellison is the author of Life After Grad School: Getting From A to B.

The charitable status of private schools raises strong passions, both for and against. Those in the ‘anti’ camp were heartened by the Charity Act 2006. Section 3(2) explicitly provided that there was to be no presumption that purposes in the first three headings listed in s.2(2) – education, religion, prevention and relief of poverty – were for the public benefit. The Act also required the Charity Commission to provide Guidelines on what amounted to public benefit. Section 4(6) required trustees of charitable trusts to ‘have regard to’ such guidance. The Guidelines duly appeared in 2008 and in 2009 the Commission conducted an assessment of five schools to test whether they were satisfying the requirement of public benefit. Two of the schools failed to satisfy the Commission which in 2010 accepted plans increasing the percentage of financial assistance as a percentage of gross fee income from zero to 4.9% for Highfield Priory and from 2% to 3.7% for St Anselm’s.

In 2010 the Independent Schools Council applied for judicial review of the following parts of Commission’s published Guidelines on public benefit.

- 2b Where benefit is to a section of the public, the opportunity to benefit must not be unreasonably restricted by geographical or other restrictions; or by ability to pay any fees charged
- 2c People in poverty must not be excluded from the opportunity to benefit

The Attorney General also initiated a reference to consider how the public benefit requirement might be satisfied in respect of a range of scenarios concerning a hypothetical school charging fees of £12,000 p/a. Both proceedings were heard together before the Tax and Chancery Chamber of the Upper Tribunal. The lengthy, and somewhat elliptical, decision given on 13 October reached the following conclusions.

- the law on public benefit remains unchanged from before the 2006 Act and the removal of the presumption is not relevant to the key issue of whether a sufficient section of the public benefits from the charitable purpose as this was never subject to any presumption.
- the Charity Commission’s Guidelines in 2(b) and (c) do not accurately reflect the pre-existing law with their reference to ‘unreasonable’ restrictions. Provided there is a more than merely token benefit, there is not necessarily any obligation to give the poor the opportunity to benefit. The Tribunal’s further decision of 2 December details exactly which parts of the Guidelines will need to be rewritten.
- However, a trust which excludes the poor from benefit cannot be a charity. Although no case decides the point, the Tribunal ‘…consider it is right as a matter of principle, given the underlying concept of charity from early times. (para 178)’
- ‘The poor’ for this purpose does not necessarily mean the same as it does in charitable trusts for the relief of poverty.
- A trust which by its constitution does not exclude the poor must still operate for the public benefit, ie to make ‘adequate provision other than the provision of education to fee-paying students’( para 214).

The devil, of course, is in detail. This is where the analysis of the reference at the end of the decision is particularly useful. The Tribunal gave no definitive ruling on the various hypothetical scenarios but its remarks give the following indications as to how educational charities that charge fees can show they are operating for the public benefit.

- Providing scholarships and bursaries at a figure between 1% and 10% of entrants, depending on the circumstances of the particular school, such as the size of its endowment fund, if any, its geographical location, and whether it provided a ‘luxury’ education. A higher percentage would be expected for scholarships than for bursaries.
- A 75% remission on fees of £12,000 p/a would be acceptable – a family which could afford 25% fees but no more would arguably be ‘poor’.
- Provision of all of the following: making available its internal examination papers to the public on-line; providing some forms of teaching assistance to local state schools; allowing local state schools free use of its football pitches; co-sponsoring a local academy by paying £1m over five years to its endowment fund. However, only the last of these, on its own, would suffice, assuming such payments fell within the school’s constitution.

The message for fee-charging schools is this. If you are a charity you will need to show that you are operating for the public benefit, either by providing bursaries and scholarships to between 1% and 10% of entrants or by investing heavily in co-sponsoring a local academy. Although the Charity Commission’s Guidelines are flawed and will need rewriting, it seems its 2009 assessments of Highfield Priory and St Anselm’s were correct.

Simon Baughen is a Reader of Law at the University of Bristol and as a qualified solicitor practiced in maritime law as a claims adjuster at A. Bilbrough & Co Ltd. He co-authored The Law of Unincorporated Associations with Nicholas Stewart QC and Natalie Campbell.

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Education reform is among the great American pastimes. This is activity that plays out continuously in public discourse everywhere from corner bars to capitol buildings, as well as in the day-to-day work of government agencies, university-based project teams, and private organizations. Current wrangling over the reauthorization of the federal No Child Left Act will surely throw fuel on the fire.

However, despite decades of education reform, many schools continue to struggle to support high levels of student achievement — especially schools serving large populations of poor and disadvantaged students. This decades-long struggle for deep, lasting, large-scale education reform stands as evidence of the complex problems to be solved and of the complex work of solving them. Yet seeing and confronting that complexity is, itself, no simple matter.

Rather than having a single, root cause, chronically low student achievement is often the product of systems of compounding problems in schools: for example, low expectations for student performance, weak instructional and leadership practice, centuries-old tensions between teachers and school leaders, weak coordination among instructional and non-instructional services for students, and many more.

These systems of interdependent problems require systems of interdependent solutions, implemented over time and improved with experience: simultaneous, coordinated improvements in roles, structures, cultures, technologies, and practices. Indeed, over the past twenty years, some of the most remarkable instances of large-scale school improvement in the U.S. have come from reformers pursing exactly that strategy: for example, Success for All and America’s Choice, two non-governmental organizations that have demonstrated success establishing state-sized networks of schools that use school-wide designs to improve practice and achievement.

The problem, then, is that many in the U.S. are unable to see education reform as complicated. This is, in part, because sorting out and making sense of complexity is very hard, and something that very few people have much preparation or experience in doing.

But it is also because Americans have very little patience with complexity. Our is a black-and-white, red-and-blue, PowerPoint-and-sound bite world in which politicians, the media, and even reformers advance silver bullet solutions to public education’s most complex problems — both because they believe in such solutions and because so many in the general population are open to them. These silver bullet solutions run the gamut: improved curricula, new instructional models, smaller schools and classes, professional learning communities, teacher leadership, value-added teacher evaluations, and many more.

Yet when silver bullet solutions are overwhelmed by systemic dysfunction, many are much quicker to deride the system of U.S. public education for not conforming to their methods of solving its problems than they are to adapt their problem solving methods to its complexity.

We have seen instances of reformers bucking this trend.  For example, in current debates over the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, the U.S. senate is considering “whole school reform” and the “restart” strategies for the nation’s lowest performing schools.  In contrast to targeted interventions, both would support partnerships between schools, districts, and external providers with a record of success either re-engineering existing schools or creating new schools.  However, political support for such initiatives has often been short lived, in part because policy expectations for rapid success are at odds with the time needed for such partnerships to emerge and mature.

Until more people are willing and able to see and confront complexity in public education, then we will continue to struggle to do the work of large-scale education reform any better than we have in the past — which is to say, not very well at all.

And, if that’s the case, then the presenting problem driving U.S. education reform will continue to be large number of schools that desperately need to improve. Yet the deeper problem undermining U.S. education reform will continue to lie in populist and professional reformers, themselves, and in the mismatch between their straightforward solutions and education’s complex problems.

Donald J. Peurach is an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at the University of Michigan. He is also author of Seeing Complexity in Public Education: Problems, Possibility, and Success for All.

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Abina and the Important Men is an interpretation of the testimony of a young, enslaved woman who won her way to freedom in late nineteenth century West Africa and then prosecuted her former master for illegally enslaving her.  October 21 marks the 155^th anniversary of the date that she forced a British magistrate and a jury of eleven affluent and powerful men to hear the charges she was making against an influential male land-owner.

Having encountered Abina’s testimony in the National Archives of Ghana more than a decade ago, I felt driven to turn it into an annotated graphic history both from a sense of obligation to Abina and because of an inkling that her story could speak to a cluster of political and intellectual tensions in our society and within myself.  These tensions come in the form of what I call the “liberal dilemma”.  This dilemma seems to recur in a great deal of the literature, media, and art that makes up the intellectual matrix of our society. It begins with the desire deep within liberals like me to make a better world by helping everyone claim the universal birthrights of liberty, fraternity, and equality.  Yet the liberal worldview is also intertwined with a history colonial privilege, bourgeois society and its attitudes towards the lower classes, and male patriarchy and paternalism.  Thus the acts of “doing good” that characterize liberalism include the “civilizing mission” that hid the horrors of modern empire, the state-building justifications of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the sidelining of women and people of color.

Personally, I have grappled with my “liberalness” for much of my adult life.  The child of white South Africans who opposed apartheid, I have always wanted to lead the fight against evil, yet I have had to question my assumption that I had the right to lead that kind of war.  In the classroom, I have hoped to promote a cosmopolitan knowledge of the world in my students, and an appreciation of the need to study others.  Yet I have come to wonder how we can do so without making those others the objects of our gaze when they are seemingly powerless to study us back!  Intellectually, I have had to contend with the notion that the past is another country which we can never know.  I feel deep within me the pull to search for the methodologies by which we might strive to understand the worldviews and perspectives of those who lived in earlier times, especially the people whose voices we hear the least – the seemingly powerless and the apparent victims.  Yet I have come to accept that they are often rendered voiceless, not so much by their own lived experiences as by the ways that history and historians have silenced them and rendered them objects of our gaze.

Now let me explain why this book is a way for me, and I hope others, to grapple with this liberal dilemma.  It’s not because this is somehow a “rescue” of Abina’s voice.  Over the past few years, I have come to understand that Abina did not ever need rescuing for her own sake.  She was tough, she was expressive, she found for herself ways of fighting the powers that impeded her.  Rather, the book represents my realization that Abina’s voice needed to be brought out and interpreted for our sakes, because she has so much to teach us about a better way of being in the world.

This is why much of this book is actually about us.  In interpreting Abina’s story in graphic form, I and my accomplices – Liz Clarke, the artist, and Charles Cavaliere, my beloved editor at Oxford – chose to reveal everything and try to hide nothing.  Rather than pretending that we are the objective, all-knowers, we lay out clearly the limitations of our work, the ethical issues that bedevil us, the problematic relationship we have with Abina.  We also carefully place our interpretation next to the original document that bears Abina’s words.  We are, in effect, asking students and colleagues and readers to question our work, and to develop their own understandings.

As a way of grappling with the liberal dilemma this book both accepts the idea that it is good to study others and the need to question why and what we are doing when we interpret their words for ourselves.  It especially asks this question in light of the power and wealth differential between Abina and ourselves.

I will not pretend that I don’t love the Abina I have constructed in my mind, even though she is only an unreal representation of the real thing.  Maybe the real-life Abina was not the strong, individualistic, empowered survivor that we have made her out to be.  Maybe she did not see her testimony the way I see it – as a fight for the right to have a voice and be heard.   Undoubtedly, she was far more complex that we can understand from this real document.  I cry, that I cannot know the real her.  If I feel richer just from the little bit I do know, and from the yearning to know more, then I hope you will excuse me.

I do not know if Abina and I would have been friends if we were to have met.  I find myself to be a little in awe of her energy and I can accept that her experiences and mine have been very different.  But I think she and my daughter could have found happiness hanging out with each other, and I hope this book can be a way for Kaela, and many others like her, to begin asking the questions that will lead them to appreciate how the world looks through other people’s eyes, including those of Abina Mansah.  I believe striving to do so does, in fact, have the potential of making the world a somewhat better place.

Trevor R. Getz is Professor of History at San Francisco State University. He is the author of Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History with artist Liz Clarke.

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September 23

Marking the autumnal equinox in the ancient world

Sometime around September 23 each year, Earth reaches the autumnal equinox, the point when the sun stands directly above the Equator and daylight and dark are roughly equal. (The day, of course, marks the autumnal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. South of the Equator, it is the vernal, or spring, equinox. March 23 is the spring equinox in the Northern Hemisphere and the autumnal equinox in the Southern.)

These astronomical events did not go unnoticed by ancient peoples. The people of ancient Mesopotamia, or modern Iraq, divided the year into two six-month seasons, each beginning on an equinox. The Chinese celebrated the Mid-Autumn Festival around the time of the autumnal equinox three millennia ago.

Temples and observatories offer some of our best evidence for the importance societies in the ancient world placed on time reckoning.  An astronomical observatory in Kenya, carbon-dated to 300 BCE, is the earliest known example of the so-called Borana lunar calendar of 354 days. It is still used today by the Kushite herders of East Africa.  Another notable example is the Mayan temple complex known as El Castillo (“The Castle”) at, in the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico that is nearly 1,500 years old. On the autumnal and vernal equinoxes, the shadows cast by the stones that flank the west-facing staircase seem to form a diamond-back snake shape that appears to undulate down the stairs as the sun sets. While the phenomenon might be a happy accident, the pyramid is also adorned with stone sculptures showing the Mayan serpent god, possibly suggesting that the effect is deliberate. Today, thousands flock to the site each year at the fall equinox to see the effect.

The observatory is another important building at Chichén Itzá.   This domed building was aligned with the northern extreme of the path of Venus.  Here, astronomers made the lengthy and systematic observations necessary to coordinate the three different calendars that were in use in Mesoamerica from about 500 BCE,  one of which is still used today by the inhabitants  of southern Mexico.

El Caracol (“the snail) observatory, Chichén Itzá

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September 22, 1692

Six women, two men hanged in Salem, Massachusetts, for witchcraft

In the fatal climax of months of turmoil, six women and two men were hanged in Salem, Massachusetts, after having been found guilty of witchcraft. The eight were the last victims of a witchcraft hysteria that gripped Salem and other towns in Massachusetts in 1692.

The tumult began in February 1692, when several young girls began to behave strangely and complained of physical torments. Soon, the girls were accusing women in the village of being witches. Witchcraft was a capital offense at the time, and colonial leaders set up a court to investigate.  In all, about 140 people—86% of whom were women—were accused of witchcraft in Salem. Forty-seven confessed and were forgiven. Twenty who maintained their innocence were found guilty and executed. (One more died in prison awaiting trial.) Salem resident Giles Corey protested his innocence despite being pressed—that is, being placed under a wooden panel that was then weighted down with rocks. After two days of this attempt at squeezing out a confession, Corey died.

Witchcraft hysteria was a phenomenon that was not confined to Salem in this period.   Witch panics are recorded in Bermuda in 1651 and in Hartford, Connecticut in 1652-1655. And in Europe between 1450 and 1750 approximately 100,000 people—the overwhelming majority of whom were women—were tried for witchcraft; about half were executed.

Historians offer several explanations for the witch panics of the early modern period.    Climate played at least an indirect role—the entire Northern Hemisphere entered a cooling period between 1500 and 1750 known as the “Little Ice Age” in which agriculture became more precarious and the always precarious life of the peasantry became even more difficult—many of the witchcraft persecutions occurred in places where subsistence agriculture had fallen on hard times.   This was also a period of great anxiety, when religious tensions were high. Ancient beliefs in natural magic—astrology and alchemy– remained prevalent, and many people also believed in demonic magic.   Women, especially midwives or those trained as healers, were particularly vulnerable to charges of witchcraft, because the intention behind their practices was often unclear and held in suspicion.  In the case of the Salem witch hunt of 1692, the case erupted into hysteria when people charged Tituba, an African slave from Barbados who worked in the household of a Salem family, of practicing voodoo, an African-American religion which holds that evil can be removed from one person and transferred to another.   So, the witchcraft hysteria of Salem can also be seen as a clash of two worlds.

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With the new school year approaching, Social Explorer is taking a closer look at education data today and over the years. In this installment, we are looking at the rise of high school and college education through the decades.

Some of the earliest detailed census data on education came from 1850 when the census reported information about school attendance. For many decades, the census focused on literacy rates, which we discussed in part two of the back to school series.

By the mid-1900s, data on educational attainment emerged (elementary school, high school, college, etc.), adding new insight into education levels across the nation and between population groups. Using the 1940 and 1970 censuses and the 2009 American Community Survey, Social Explorer investigated these changes in detail.

Educational attainment, as measured by earning degrees, increased nearly one and a half times over between 1940 and 2009 at both the high school and college levels. The trends in the data also show that college degrees today are even more prevalent than high school degrees were in the 1940s.

Comparing genders, women have had consistently higher numbers in attaining high school degrees, while men earn more college degrees.

However, by 2009, the differences in attainment between the two genders became quite small, with men catching up to women in high school degrees and women catching up to men in college degrees.  The following tables examine this growth:

Education levels have been rising across the board, but in recent years, the number of young women attending college has increased markedly.  As of 2009, 9,219,928 women were enrolled in college, which outnumbers the 7,234,021 men enrolled.  This influx of women attending college has propelled the growth in the overall number of adult women with college degrees.

We hope you enjoyed parts one, two and three of our back to school series.  Please visit Social Explorer’s maps and reports sections to learn more about education and other data.

September 19, 1991

5,000-year-old mummy found in Alps

The mummified remains of Ötzi

While hiking through the Alps on the Italian-Austrian border, Erika and Helmut Simon, a German couple, spotted a brown shape in a watery gully below them. Scrambling down to investigate, they realized that they were looking at a human head and shoulder. Assuming the body was a climber who had been killed in a fall, they reported their find to authorities. The body was removed with a jackhammer and tourists made off with some of its clothing and the tools that were found with it.

In fact, though, the Simons had stumbled upon an amazing find. The “Iceman,” as he was quickly dubbed, was a mummified corpse from Europe’s prehistory, about 5,300 years old.  A wealth of information has been gleaned about what his life during the late Neolithic period (8000-3000 BCE) was like.

The Iceman, now renamed Ötzi, after the location where he was found, was about 5 feet 5 inches tall and weighed about 110 pounds. Scientists studied his clothes and bearskin-bottomed shoes; his copper axe, flint knife, and arrows; and the container holding embers wrapped in leaves, which they concluded was a fire-starting kit. They determined his age (about mid-forties), identified what he ate (wheat, barley, other plants, goat, and deer), and diagnosed his ailments: x-rays, for example, indicated he suffered from arthritis. Then, in 2007, a chance discovery during a scan of the body revealed what may have been the cause of his death: he had been murdered. A tiny arrowhead was lodged beneath one of Ötzi’s shoulder blades, where it had severed an artery. When he was struck, he pitched forward onto a granite slab and bled to death. At some point, the body was covered by ice, preserving it—until, a few thousand years later, when because of a warming world enough ice had melted to reveal him once again.

A reconstruction of how Ötzi may have appeared and the equipment he carried with him at the time of his death. (Getty Images)

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By Claire Potter

I love you… . the building was hit by something. I don’t know if I’m gonna get out, but I love you very much. I…I hope I’ll see you later. ‘Bye.
—Voicemail from Ken Van Auken from the World Trade Center, contributed by his widow

As a citizen, it is sometimes a jolt to realize that September 11 is now a decade in the past. As a teacher of modern United States history who ended her twentieth-century survey last fall with the attack on the twin towers, it was even more of a jolt to realize that a first-year college student who had matriculated in September 2010 might recall only the faint outlines of an event that definitively altered the course of our century. A student who entered high school in that same month would likely have been familiar with images of the smoke billowing out of the World Trade Center towers and the steaming stacks of rubble known for months as “the Pile.” But that same student would have only vague memories of adult anxieties, cars in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey train stations awaiting commuters who never came home, or the frantic efforts to reach family and friends who might have had business downtown that day. A student entering middle school this coming fall will have been merely born into the world that al-Qaeda and George W. Bush created. Regardless what level of history course you are teaching, your students will have no accurate memories of this very recent past and yet they might yearn to understand the events through which their parents and siblings lived.

As I scrolled through the September 11 Digital Archive, trying to collect my thoughts about how I might teach such very different audiences with these rich materials, I couldn’t help but think about one of my own nephews who will enter college in the fall. Several years after the attacks on the twin towers, he came across a picture of himself taken at Windows on the World, the sky-top restaurant where so many people from different nations died on 9/11, and where his great-grandmother enjoyed treating her younger relatives to lunch (Figure 1). Recalling memories of the view and his participation in this family ritual, he then turned abruptly to his toddler brother, so young that he had yet to speak his own first word. “You,” he said, “Will never go there. Because it is gone now!”

Figure 1. A fixture of the New York skyline and tourist stop since the 1960s, the World Trade Center towers are seen here in March 2001, six months before the attacks of September 11. The history of the neighborhood around the towers is just one of the topics explored in the September 11 Digital Archive, which contains a wealth of documents, audio recordings, photos, and video footage related to the events of that day. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Material objects, paper records, and people have disappeared, lost in the fire and chaos of attacks on New York, the Pentagon, and the two jumbo jets full of passengers who believed they were going to California that day. But fortunately they are not gone.

In the design of the 9/11 Archive, it is easy to see the creative hand of the City University of New York’s American Social History Project (ASHP), founded in 1981 to curate the social and cultural history of the United States and promote the newest technologies and active learning methods. The workers, citizens, and survivors whose stories made history that clear September day have left their voices in the intriguing, emotional, and richly descriptive artifacts collected on, and linked to, this website. It is a particularly promising source for teaching history. The site blends the sense of discovery and ease of access that causes students to use the web as a resource in the first place with standard genres of evidence that could train those same students to use conventional archives as well: written documents, images, video, oral histories, and audio “found” objects such as voice mail and spontaneous tape recordings.

Funded by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloane Foundation, the September 11 Digital Archive is a collaboration between the ASHP, now housed at the Center for Media and Learning at CUNY Graduate Center, and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. In 2003 it was accepted as part of the permanent collection of the Library of Congress as its first major digital acquisition, and was closed to new materials the following year (Figure 2). The site designers are currently launching a redesign, now in Beta test, that promises to make the labyrinth of different projects to which the Archive is linked, as well as its own materials, more attractive and easier to navigate. While the archiving of 9/11 on the Web and in different projects around the country is by no means complete, this project is a gift for history teachers at all levels. Through it, archivists have collected their own material, as well as links to other digital collections that preserve the history of the September 11 attacks in images, video, sound, and print.

Figure 2. Student Ronnie Rogers composed this poem in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks for a Hip Hop Activism class at the East Harlem Tutorial Program in New York. Documents like this form one part of the September 11 Digital Archive, which donated its entire collection to the Library of Congress in 2003. (Courtesy of Library of Congress)

Continue reading this article >>
• History of “Ground Zero”
• Oral Histories
• Multiple Sources for Teaching

Claire Bond Potter is professor of History and American studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown Connecticut. She specializes in feminism, political history and cultural criticism, and is the author of the academic blog Tenured Radical.

In classrooms across the country on September 11, 2001, lesson plans were abruptly abandoned. Students and teachers gathered around televisions, sharing the sense that “history” was being made before their eyes. Patricia Latessa, a Cincinnati high school teacher, turned on the cafeteria television “and watched history unfold.” She reflected as she watched about how the scenes of airplanes flying into buildings would impact her students (Figure 1). “The world they knew was bifurcated, cut in half, a time before and a time after”. An unsettling day seemed to require upsetting usual practices. The British Literature teacher at the Academy of the Sacred Heart, in Omaha, Nebraska, burst into a French class during an exam, and turned on the television. At another high school, the principal ordered that the televisions be turned off at midday. Colin Riebel later recalled: “We, the students, revolted. We argued this was a huge part of our history and we had a right to know what was happening to our country. The school complied and let us watch the news again”.

Figure 1 - (Courtesy of Corbis)

Across the nation and the world, people stopped in front of television screens. The planes exploding into the World Trade Center towers were, for many, a replay of news footage. But the burning and falling buildings were viewed by many in “real time.” The footage was broadcast “live.” Live meant at the same time, so the genuine character of the experience came from temporality, not from proximity. Stopping together in time led to a sense of simultaneity, the idea of a collective experience. A different horror, of course, was experienced in Lower Manhattan, at the Pentagon, and outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the sites where hijacked planes crashed that day. People watching television sometimes felt that the crowds fleeing from the falling buildings were somehow less conscious of “what happened,” lacking access to immediate TV news coverage, an idea that was shared by many at the site of the carnage. As he escaped on foot from Ground Zero, Herbert Ouida, whose son was in WTC Tower 1 but unable to escape, heard that the twin towers had fallen, but later recalled that he “did not believe it until I got to 75th Street at my daughter’s apartment and saw what happened on tv”.

Ten years later, how will the day that disrupted our lesson plans reappear in our curriculum as “history?” Teachers may turn to 9/11’s most ubiquitous framing: the idea that this day “changed everything.” That idea was repeated over and over in 9/11 news coverage, and was a major theme during the somber first anniversary in 2002. But how do we study September 11 as a moment of change? How do we know whether it broke history in two, ushering in a new era?

“History is in good part the story of catastrophes, but most are not game-changers,” Michael Sherry emphasizes in the essay that opens this issue. 9/11 generated “nearly universal” shock, in part because the nature of the attack—airplanes flying into iconic buildings—was so unexpected and unprecedented. There were plenty of changes in the ensuing years, beginning with a reinvigoration of George W. Bush’s presidency, which had gotten off to a difficult start after a disputed election. But most post-9/11 developments, from the invasion of Iraq to an expansion of executive power, had roots in earlier decades.

For both supporters and critics of Bush administration actions, it was torture and other harsh treatment of alleged terrorists that was “most intensely defended and attacked as a break from the past.” These practices were not new, Sherry notes. The departures from the past were that high government officials authorized them, the “brazenness” with which they were defended, the reliance on legal arguments, and the “willful obliviousness to legal and practical considerations.” Discontinuities experienced by Americans, whether from overseas military engagement or from post-9/11 domestic security policy, were “not so much done to us,” he emphasizes, “as done by us.”

After September 11, “homeland” became a name for the United States. The word was a rhetorical marker, an attempt to build a conceptual line around a domestic sphere that had to be defended from an external, threatening world. Perhaps a rhetorical marker was essential during an era that, as Laura McEnaney writes, lacked “clearly delineated borders between military and civilian activity.” McEnaney’s essay compares the post-9/11 United States with other “home fronts” in American history, viewing a home front as “a constellation of domestic policies, dialogues, and daily habits.” Comparing home fronts “can raise interesting questions about what the state asks of its citizens when the country goes to war.” The post-9/11 era “does not stand out as a time when Americans found their lives changed in any significant way,” she writes. Although many claimed that time had been ruptured on September 11, and a new era had begun, “with the notable exception of members of the military and their families, very little” was asked of Americans. A terrorist alert system was created, with colors signaling heightened threats, but President Bush emphasized that “A terrorism alert is not a signal to stop your life,” but instead “a call to be vigilant.” Like the Cold War era, McEnaney suggests, American leaders “hoped that complex foreign policy priorities could be translated into simple directives to inspire people’s participation in home front defense.”

A group of Americans deeply affected in the years after 9/11 was American Muslims. Reflecting on the controversy over the building of an Islamic cultural center near the World Trade Center site in New York City, Moustafa Bayoumi notes that the passionate anti-Muslim sentiment at a demonstration against the center “illustrated how much being a Muslim in America today is to embody, quite literally, some of America’s most contested political and cultural debates.” In the past decade, Muslims in the United States have gone from relative obscurity to “a sociological dilemma.” Interest in and awareness of Islam was enhanced, but overall, negative opinions about Islam increased over time. While “hate crimes against Muslim Americans skyrocketed in the first six months after 9/11,” Bayoumi writes that “the greatest reverberation” came instead from “sweep arrests across the nation,” as hundreds of Muslim immigrants were rounded up. Various government programs targeting Muslims often led these communities to feel that they were “under siege.” Different narratives about Muslims competed for attention in American culture, but as the first decade after 9/11 came to a close, one strain was gaining ascendency: “the fabulous story the American Muslims are on a ‘stealth jihad’ to usurp the U.S. Constitution and impose Islamic law on the land.” Bayoumi sets anti-Muslim sentiment in the context of American nativism and Richard Hofstadter’s analysis of a “paranoid style” of American politics, which he argues seems to capture the belief of “the modern anti-Muslim crusader … that Islam is on the march in the country, and they are the last resistance.”

Although there were three sites of 9/11 terrorist attacks, and as Erika Doss writes, there have been hundreds of 9/11 memorials created, Ground Zero has played a central role as a site for memorializing 9/11. In May 2011, for example, after American forces killed Osama bin Laden, President Barack Obama laid a wreath at the World Trade Center site, as a way of paying tribute to all who died in the September 11 attacks. Doss suggests that memorials can be good teaching tools, enabling us to consider “how, and why, cultural memory is created, and how it shapes local and national identity.” Not long after September 11, debate over what to do with the Ground Zero site led to heated disagreement. Proposals ranged from rebuilding the towers higher than before, to creating a park, to leaving the space in ruins, like parts of post-World War II Berlin. A competition for design ideas for a memorial generated thousands of entries. The winning design then became a focus of protest, as families of the dead argued that they should “Take Back the Memorial” as the burial site for their loved ones.     Continue reading >>

Mary L. Dudziak is Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of Law, History and Political Science at the University of Southern California Law School. Her books include Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall’s African Journey and War Time: An Idea, its History, its Consequences.

With the new school year approaching, Social Explorer is taking a closer look at education data today and over the years. In this installment, we are looking at some of the earliest reported census data related to education.

The Census Bureau first reported literacy data on reading and writing in 1840. At the time, 91.5 percent of the adult white population (over the age of 20) was literate.

In 1850, the white literate population fell slightly to 89.8 percent. Meanwhile, the illiterate free colored* population (41.3 percent) was over four times as large as the illiterate white population. These literacy rates appear to be closely linked with school attendance rates. That same year, 56.1 percent of white children (aged 5 to 19) attended school while just 17.1 percent of the free colored population (aged 5 to 19) attended.

In both the black and white populations, women were less likely to be literate than men, but the gender gap in literacy rates was wider among whites (59.5 percent of illiterate white adults were female; 55.0 percent of illiterate black adults were male).

However, children were attending school at similar rates (53.3 percent of white female school age children compared to 52.7 percent of white male school age children; and 16 percent of free colored female school age children compared to 18.4 percent of free colored male school age children)—a trend which would contribute to improved literacy rates in the coming decades.

To see the regional trends in literacy rates, you can map the data using Social Explorer. For instance, take a look at these maps of the illiterate population (age 10 and up) from 1870 to 1930 to explore variations around the country and changes over time.

1870 Illiterate Population (age 10 and over)

1900 Illiterate Population (age 10 and over)

1930 Illiterate Population (age 10 and over)

For more information literacy rates for different groups, such as gender, race and foreign born, check out Social Explorer’s reports.  The census discontinued tracking literacy data in 1940, and focused more on educational attainment, which we will explore in our next feature.

We hope you enjoyed parts one and two of our back to school series.  Check back soon for part three.  We promise there won’t be a quiz, but data just might help you succeed in school.

*Early editions of the census used the terms “colored” and “free colored” population to describe African-Americans/blacks.  For another example of census terminology, see this post about Native Americans.

This report is also available on the Social Explorer blog.

It’s hard to find a job these days. This is more than just a recent graduate’s lament, it’s an increasing problem that affects college graduates worldwide. Hugh Lauder, co-author of The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Income, discussed this problem with C.M. Rubin. The interview below appears courtesy of HuffPost Education.

The impact of education on individual and national prosperity has long been debated by politicians, policy advisers, business consultants and academics. However, Professor Hugh Lauder explains, “the links between education and a modern economy are much more complex than policy makers would have us believe. Education will no longer be the route to good jobs unless we fundamentally rethink the purpose of education. Rounded students are better suited to the modern economy. If we focused on creativity versus rote learning and exam passing we just might surprise ourselves”.

In an explosive new book, The Global Auction, Lauder and his co-authors, Phillip Brown and David Ashton, show how competition for good middle class jobs just got worse. Increasing worldwide competition leading to cut-priced brain power and a fundamental power shift in favor of corporate bosses and emerging economies are more than ever a threat to the prosperity of middle class Americans. To talk about this issue among other matters in our Global Search For Education series, I had the honor to chat with Hugh Lauder, Professor of Education and Political Economy, University of Bath, United Kingdom, and Head of Policy and Management Research Group.

Tell me about the background to your book, The Global Auction.

We had been working on national systems of skill formation for around 14 years. We were travelling the world interviewing policy makers in this area, and then around the turn of the century, we realized the game wasn’t just about national skill systems but also about globalization and what multi-national companies were doing in relation to skills strategies . We were given a grant to interview multi-national executives about their core strategies. These companies were based in Korea, China, Singapore, Germany, India, the UK, and the United States. It very quickly became apparent that many of the assumptions we had been making were being turned over by what was going on in the global economy. We began to understand that executives in these multi-nationals (with the rise of higher education systems in China and India for example) were moving many of the high skill jobs that they had in the west to the east because they could often get the skilled graduates in those countries for a tenth of the price. Many of the assumptions that have been made in the West about globalization have been made on the belief that the ‘head’ work would be done in the West because of our higher education and innovation systems, and that much of the manufacturing work would be done in the East. That was true up to around 2005, but it then changed dramatically. On top of this, multi-national companies were producing what we call digital Taylorism: taking the knowledge in people’s heads and codifying it into computer algorithms so that it becomes working knowledge for companies as a whole. That reduces the cost of employing high skilled workers and it very often increases the speed. For example, the NY Times reported recently that in the area of law, many of the jobs that were being done by lawyers at the bottom end of the scale, such as interns, can now be done by computer. That’s an example of digital Taylorism. The political consequence of this, we think, is that there will be many graduates whose aspirations and expectations for good work will be confounded. So this raises fundamental questions about the role of education and the role of the economy in Western countries, given that China and India and other emerging economies are not only excelling in manufacturing and services, but are excelling increasingly in the areas of innovation and development.

How does this apply to the UK educational system?

There is a tremendous amount of pressure right now for students to excel in particular tests, and what we are concerned with is the possibility that repeated testing gives them a trained incapacity to think. They don’t have the creative skill required or the interpersonal skills because they are simply learning to take a test. So we have a fundamental concern with the pressure that’s being applied to students through the intensification of the requirement for credentials. Testing and exams have taken too much of a high profile because that takes away from teachers and from students that essential interaction between them that can lead to firing of curiosity, to the development of intrinsic interest, and to a much more creative way of approaching the world.

How do you think we should be assessing students?

It’s a difficult problem. My personal view is that exams are basically selection mechanisms, a way of sorting students, and assessment should be actually about the various ways in which students can be seen to solve problems. This can be through assignments, internships, or practical problems where you can see students working through particular issues. Indeed, many of the multi national companies said that they preferred to have students come in for internships because they could get a much better understanding of those students.

What do you think about the German educational system that directs the majority of young Germans to apprenticeships supplemented by part time schooling?

Unlike many countries in the West, only about 20% of Germans go into higher education. The remainder of the young people have the right to go into an apprenticeship, which is a dual system partly of academic education and partly of applied learning on the job. This system is efficient because it does not over produce graduates, unlike countries such as Britain and America. The system is good because the apprenticeship includes a strong element of general education to do with citizenship.

What do we do to ensure the emotional health of our students in face of increasing pressure?

There are many more students going for fewer well paid and interesting jobs. I think it is difficult to reduce the competition for those jobs. I believe we need to think about the number of tests kids are taking. Are there other ways of assessing academic work, instead of pinning everything on these tests? That’s part of the answer. If you’re talking about your Tiger Mums in New York, you can see why they are doing it, and asking them to slow down is going to be very difficult indeed.

How do you see the role of teachers in improving your education system?

Poor test results have been seen as an indication that we need to improve the quality of teaching in the UK. By and large, teachers understand that they have to go through the motions on these tests, but the ideology of most teachers is much more about trying to create interest and curiosity in children rather than get them through these tests. We are about to change teacher training in this country. We are moving back to an apprenticeship model which looks more like something we had in Victorian times, where instead of universities being the training places for teachers, it’s actually being moved to schools themselves. I think that really good university training plus in-school training is really important to keep teachers in the game and interested. All the evidence still suggests that the key relationship is still between the teacher and the student, and the way in which a teacher can inspire students. Teachers have to be valued. They have to have a special status. I think that is really important.

Solutions from the last chapter of The Global Auction that you would like to share?

We don’t see education as just being about servicing the economy. Education has to be much wider than that. It has to be about citizenship. It has to be about inspiring kids about their curiosity and their academic interest and their intrinsic motivation.

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By Nancy Levit and Douglas O. Linder

So you’re going to law school this fall. Congratulations! Getting in wasn’t easy. Last year 155,000 people took the LSAT. The 201 ABA accredited law schools across the country received about 88,000 applications. Only 49,700 students matriculated.

Obviously you’re a hard worker (or you wouldn’t be coming to law school and you wouldn’t have read past the first paragraph), so you may be wondering what you can do the summer before to prepare yourself for law school.

First, let’s get the legal disclaimers out of the way.  There are no guarantees, warranties, or promises of any kind; there is no magic bullet for preparation. There are, however, a few tips toward a happier and more productive beginning that we will offer you.

1. Get Situated

More than one-third of you will be going to law school in some place other than your home or college town. It is important to have housing set up so you can move in at least several weeks in advance.  Find the stores you’ll need, arrange your banking, stock up on supplies and grocery staples. Students struggle when they land suddenly in a new town and promptly start law school. Law school requires more focus than other forms of education. It starts immediately, and is difficult at first because students may be called on to speak in class or have writing assignments due.  If you get behind in the first few foundational weeks, it will take a lot of work to catch up later.  In undergraduate lectures, you were free to fall asleep perusing Facebook.  Not anymore.

A colleague of ours, Dean Barbara Glesner Fines, has posted her wonderful Orientation speech online, emphasizing that there are better and worse times to begin law school, and the worst time to start law school is at the same time that you start (or end) a marriage, or have a new baby, or are newly diagnosed with a chronic illness. In other words, any time you’re facing significant personal challenges. Arrange for your law school computer or any upgrade at the beginning of the summer, so you have plenty of time to become familiar with it. In short, get the distractions out of the way.

Don't wait if you need an upgrade. (Image: Legally Blonde)

Related to the issue of getting situated is the idea of establishing residency for both bar and tuition purposes, depending on your state’s and your school’s rules. Top-Law-Schools.com has posted a guide to “Law School Residency Issues by State,” covering 23 states.

2. Mental Preparation

Two of the major law school stressors are a fear of failure and fear of the unknown. We’ll tackle fear of failure first, since it’s the one most often voiced by students. Nationwide, very few students are dismissed for academic deficiency. Professor Michael Olivas, who specializes in higher education law, says “In most law schools, only a small number of students fail because of poor academic performance.” It is not like the Kingsfieldian sort of imprecation, “Look to your left, look to your right, one of you won’t be here next year.” (In fact, at our law school, we say, “Look to your left, look to your right . . . you are looking at people who will be friends and professional colleagues for the next thirty years if you treat them right.”)

When students “fear failure,” often what they actually fear is not succeeding in ways to which they are accustomed. Many students define failure as not receiving grades in the top 10 percent. That means they fear something that will affect 90 percent of the class. Our suggestions are to address this conundrum head on by preparing to approach law school with a specific set of attitudes.

Come to law school to learn about the law and your “fit” with a career in the law. To be successful in law school, you must adopt a positive attitude about competition. There are many paths in the law, so you don’t have to view your fellow law students as racing down the same track as you, with only one of you being able to take home the prize. So focus on your own goals, values, and learning, not on getting better grades than everybody else.  An interesting set of studies about learning in law school shows that students who concentrate on learning objectives (“Can I explain the concept of res ipsa loquitur to my tenth grade nephew?”) actually performed better on exams than students who fretted over grades (“I wonder if I’m studying hard enough to get a B?”).

We aren’t telling you that grades are unimportant. They are important in many ways — for clerking and law review opportunities, as well as job prospects. We are suggesting that you not let either your happiness or your attitude toward law school be defined by your grades. Don’t step onto the institutional glide path, where you unquestioningly decide that you have to have top grades so that you can work at a large law firm. Think instead about your values, your strengths, your interests, and how you can build on these in law school.

Don't be a Debbie Downer. (Image: NBC)

Learn to make downward comparisons. An important study in the happiness literature has to do with Olympic athletes. It showed that the bronze medalists are almost uniformly happier than the silver medalists. Silver medalists looked upward (“Just a fraction of a second better and I would have had the gold.”), while bronze medalists look downward at all the other athletes who didn’t even make it onto the medal stand. It’s an attitude you can adopt in numerous ways. Do just a little pro bono work, law-related or not—for instance, do volunteer income tax preparation, stock the shelves at a food pantry, pitch-in on a weekend project to rehab a low-income house.  Or in your fifth week of law school look back at your first-week-of-law-school self and see how far you have come.

Uncertainty about what law school will be like also scares people. On one hand, nothing can really prepare you except just doing it. On the other hand, you can read up about law school.  Scott Turow’s One L is a classic. It’s a well-written snapshot of what law school was like at Harvard back in the 1970s. Everyone’s experiences are different, so you’re likely to find law school much different in many ways, but some things remain relatively unchanged, and it’s a very interesting read. A former colleague of ours, Corinne Cooper, wrote an article, Letter to a Young Law Student, as essentially “an anthropologist, reciting my findings on a tribe I’ve observed for many years, of which I was once a member, but whom I no longer fully live among.”

One of the best books about law school is Professor Andrew McClurg’s 1L of a Ride: A Well-Traveled Professor’s Roadmap to Success in the First Year of Law School. This fun-to-read book is by an award-winning professor who writes about the best habits to develop, and offers strategies for note-taking, studying and test-taking. Our book, The Happy Lawyer: Making a Good Life in the Law, discusses what to expect emotionally in your first year of law school, how to avoid debt-driven career choices or getting sucked into believing that only top grades matter, and how to chart a path toward a fulfilling legal career.

Some folks prescribe a specific set of reading materials (the U.S. Constitution, Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss for grammatical touch-ups, or Karl Llewellyn’s The Bramble Bush, or just reading some legal appellate decisions to understand the terminology and cadence), and various law schools offer summer reading lists: Boston College, the University of Connecticut, New York University, and Syracuse University.
We generally think reading — lots of reading — is a good thing. When we say reading, we mean reading, not studying.  There are always some students who think they should start getting a jump start on actually learning law, so they’re reading hornbooks or outlines.  We think you would be better off just reading a high volume of material in a more casual, recreational way.  You still might learn something, of course, but it’s more in a general background sort of way rather than specifically trying to pre-study for your courses.

3. Summertime

You may hear that you need to have a legal job the summer before law school.  We disagree.  If you already have the opportunity to work in a law firm or government agency, that is great. Go for it. But a pre-law school summer legal job isn’t necessary.  Professor Alan Childress offers the advice to work hard (in a non-law job) and perhaps to travel, so that you will be ready to settle down to law school. Students posting on the “Wish I Would Have Known” blog echo his advice: “take a pottery class or travel someplace awesome or read some great non-fiction. It’ll give you at least as much to talk about in an interview than working as a glorified file clerk somewhere.”

You can also learn more about the law school that you’ll be attending. You may think you read enough about your law school during the application process. Drill deeper now. Take some hours to play around on your law school’s web site. If you explore, you’ll see things you haven’t noticed before—an interesting fall lecture on class actions, an Association of Women Law Students pancake breakfast planned, or a professor’s bio that shows he shares your passion for kayaking.

You can find people who share your interests. Many law schools have student emissaries and almost all have a coordinator of student services. Especially if you’re attending law school in a new state, consider calling or emailing your school and ask to be put in contact with representatives from unofficial groups, like a curling club or a running group. Do seek the advice of mentors. You’ll probably find a very supportive community ready to embrace you and offer guidance. It’s like one of the last lines in the book that sparked an interest in law for many of us, To Kill a Mockingbird, when Atticus confirms Scout’s discovery that “[m]ost people are” essentially kind and helpful “when you finally see them.”

Speaking of which, do re-read To Kill a Mockingbird. Reading this classic before law school is analogous to playing “We Will Rock You” before a sporting event.

Nancy Levit and Douglas O. Linder are law professors at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law and authors of The Happy Lawyer: Making a Good Life in the Law.

Versions of this article also appeared on The National Jurist and Concurring Opinions.
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An analysis using 120 years of census data

By Sydney Beveridge, Susan Weber and Andrew A. Beveridge, Social Explorer

The U.S. Census first collected data on librarians in 1880, four years after the founding of the American Library Association.  They only counted 636 librarians nationwide.  Indeed, one respondent reported on his census form that he was the “Librarian of Congress.”  The U.S. Census, which became organized as a permanent Bureau in 1902, can be used to track the growth of the library profession.  The number of librarians grew over the next hundred years, peaking at 307,273 in 1990.  Then, the profession began to shrink, and as of 2009, it had dropped by nearly a third to 212,742.  The data enable us to measure the growth, the gender split in this profession known to be mostly female, and to explore other divides in income and education, as they changed over time.

We examined a number of socioeconomic trends over the duration, and focused in on 1950 the first year that detailed wage data were recorded, 1990 at the peak of the profession and 2009 the most currently available data.¹ We looked at data within the profession and made comparisons across the work world.

For the first 110 years of data, the number of librarians increased, especially after World War II.  In 1990, the trend reversed.  Over the past 20 years, the number of librarians has dropped by 31 percent, though the decline has slowed.

Considering the nation today, the states with the largest librarian populations are: Pennsylvania, Illinois, New York, Texas and California.  Meanwhile, the states with the highest concentrations of librarians (or librarians per capita) are: Vermont, D.C., Rhode Island, Alabama, New Hampshire.  Table 1 in the appendix gives the count and proportion of librarians by state in 2009.

Median Earnings

The Census Bureau has kept records of librarian wages since 1940.  Median² librarian wages (whether full-time or part-time) increased until 1980, though they were a lower percentage of the median wages of all workers.  Indeed, between 1970 and 1980 librarian wages declined nearly $4,000—more than twice the drop of median wages across all professions.  (This wage drop was in the context of the Oil Embargo in the mid-1970s, and the economic fall-out that that caused.)  In 1990, librarian median wages declined further and were the same as those for all workers, but by 2009 they had gained in relative terms, and reached their peak of $40,000.  (All these figures are adjusted for inflation.)  By 2009 the typical librarian earned over one-third more than a typical US worker.  According to the Census results, librarians have enjoyed consistently high employment rates.  For instance in 2009, the unemployment rate among librarians was just two percent–one-fifth the national rate.

A Feminine Profession

Today, 83 percent of librarians are women, but in the 1880s men had the edge, making up 52 percent of the 636 librarians enumerated.  In 1930, male librarians were truly rare, making up just 8 percent of the librarian population.

Gender and Education Wage Differences

Librarians working full-time earned more than the national median income in 1950 and 2009, but incomes dipped below the national median in 1990.  Female librarians consistently out-earned women elsewhere in the labor market.  However, when tracking education and wages, librarians with BA degrees (or graduate degrees) consistently earn less than their counterparts elsewhere in the labor market.

Looking at gender, male librarians out-earned female librarians in 1950 and 1990, but by 2009, median wages for the two sexes were within $100 of each other.  The gender wage gap has essentially closed for librarians with college degrees, but among those without college degrees, the gap remains and is 50 percent larger than for those working in other professions.

Race

The librarian field has been and continues to be a predominately white profession.  In 1920, the first non-white librarians were recorded in the census sample.   (Asian and Native American librarians not until 1960)  In 1950, there were 990 African-American librarians, representing 2 percent of the total librarian population.  In 1990, that number rose to 27,958 or 9 percent of the total librarian population, much closer to the African-American population nationwide (11 percent).  As of 2009, there were 15,128 African-American librarians, representing 7 percent of the population.  (In 2009, 89 percent of librarians were white while the whole population was 82 percent white.)

Marriage

In 1880, one in three librarians were married.  The wedding bell rate declined to less than one in ten in 1920 before turning around and rising for the next several decades.  Today, the marriage rate among librarians is the highest it has ever been with 62 percent of librarians married in 2009.

Education

In 1940, when education data for librarians debuted, 45 percent of librarians had completed at least four years of college.  That proportion has risen over the decades to 86 percent in 2009, over three times the national rate of 28 percent.

Age

Librarians skew older with 64 percent of them 45 years or older, and 40 percent of them over 55 years old.  The librarian population has aged over the past couple of decades.  In 1950 and 1990, only 42 percent of librarians were 45 years or older, but by 2000, 64 percent were at least 45 years old.

Public and private

In 1950, 37 percent of librarians worked in the private or nonprofit sector while 62 percent worked in a public setting (the remaining 1 percent were self-employed).  In 1990, 48 percent of librarians worked in the private or nonprofit sector, with men and women represented in almost equal numbers.  In 2009, the number of librarians in the private or nonprofit sector decreased to 32 percent.  Thus a large fraction of the decline in the number of librarians has come from their decline in the non-public sectors.

Conclusion

Starting from a very small beginning, librarians grew into a large profession after in the mid-20^th Century.  Like other professions related to the media: books, newspapers, magazines, recorded music and movies, the internet seems to be having an effect on the field, as it has faced a significant decline since 1990.  That decline seems to have slowed substantially since 2000, as librarians adjust to and find new roles in the internet age and the extensive increase in information that it has brought about.

*      *     *     *     *

Notes:

[1] This analysis, which is preliminary, is based upon the original Census materials organized by the Minnesota Population Center.  They are available as the Integrated Public Use Micro-data Samples (IPUMS).  Available at www.ipums.org.  In 1880 the samples include all of the Census responses in the entire country.  Most decades the data only include a sample, generally one or five percent.  As such the results presented are subject to sampling error, as well as issues related to Census response in general.  Work is underway to make it possible for analyses such as this to be conducted in Social Explorer funded by the National Institutes of Health.

[2] The median represents the person in the distribution who is in the exact middle.  It is usually used rather than average to depict typical wages and salaries.

By Dennis Baron

A rant in Salon by Kim Brooks complains, “My college students don’t understand commas, far less how to write an essay,” and asks the perennial question, “Is it time to rethink how we teach?”

While it’s always time to rethink how we teach, teaching commas won’t help.

Teachers like Brooks commonly elevate the lowly comma to a position of singular importance. But documents in which a misplaced comma can mean life or death, or at least the difference between a straightforward contract and a legal nightmare of Bleak House proportions, are myths, just like the myth that says Eskimo has twenty-three words for snow (twenty-eight? forty-five?). More to the point: understanding commas does not guarantee competent writing.

As for comma misuse, well, just look no further than the United States Constitution. Originalists see every word and punctuation mark of that founding document as evidence of the Framers’ intent. Constitutional commas set off syntactic units or separate items in a list, just as we do today (though don’t look for consistency of punctuation in the Constitution: sometimes there’s a comma before the last item in a list, and sometimes there isn’t). But what does the good-writers-understand-commas crowd make of the fact that the Framers and their eighteenth-century peers also used commas to indicate pauses for breath, to cover up drips from the quill pens they used for writing, or like some college students today, for no apparent reason at all?

Take, for example, the comma dividing adjective from noun in this excerpt from Article I, sec. 9:

No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid . . .

Or this one from Art. II, sec. 1, separating direct from indirect object:

The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation . . .

We don’t separate the subject from the verb with a comma, except in the Constitution:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. [Art. III, sec. 3]

Or the first and third commas of the Second Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Any student turning in essays with commas like those would be marked wrong.

Plus a contemporary writing teacher would spill a lot of red ink correcting all those unnecessary capital letters in the Constitution, and the jarring it’s for its in Art. I, sec. 9—because no one but “students who can’t write” would use them today:

No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it’s inspection Laws. [emphasis added]

Oh, and don’t forget that the Framers wrote chuse for choose (more red ink: they did this six times), or that little problem with pronoun agreement in Article I, sec. 5, where each House is both an its and a their, “mistakes” that today’s teachers might signal with an ominous “see me!”:

Each House shall keep a Journal of its Proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such Parts as may in their Judgment require Secrecy. [emphasis added]

Did the Framers do right by the law, but wrong by standard English? Did they learn the rules before they won their license to break them, much as they broke from their former colonial masters? Whatever the explanation, it’s clear that any writing teacher would grade them down, or maybe even write them up in Salon, for not understanding commas and for violating the laws of language. But if you’re radical enough to argue that the Constitution contains errors, you’ll need not just a lot of red ink but also a joint resolution of Congress followed by approval of three-fourths of the states if you want to correct them.

My point, if you’re waiting for the sound bite, is that mastering commas has little to do with standard English, and mastering standard English—if standard English can even be defined—doesn’t guarantee good writing.

The oft-repeated demand to rethink teaching by teaching more grammar is not the answer (and teaching the comma is not teaching grammar, it’s teaching punctuation). When American schools began requiring grammar in the nineteenth century, teachers, not students, complained that the subject was too hard for them. They were told by school authorities, “Just stay a page ahead of your students, you’ll do fine.” When after a few decades of mandatory grammar lessons it became evident that student writing still wasn’t where it needed to be, the schools dropped grammar as deadening and ineffective. With student writing still an issue, critics want grammar back in the classroom. If nothing else, this cycling in and out of grammar should tell us that writing and grammar aren’t really connected.

There’s a reason to study grammar: it reveals the structure underlying human communication, and human communication is, well, it’s what we do. But studying grammar won’t help us communicate better any more than studying the internal combustion engine will help us to be better drivers.

What can make writers better is more writing. Writing more doesn’t always work: the best writers sometimes fall flat, the worst sometimes fail to improve, and the mediocre may stay stuck in the middle. But writing, both for practice and for real, works better to improve writing than sentence diagrams, comma drills, and mantras like “a noun is the name of a person, place or thing” (should there be a comma after place?). The problem, for the schools, is that writing takes time. It’s a messy process. Improvement isn’t linear. It requires one-on-one feedback from an engaged audience. It’s labor-intensive. It can’t be taught by machine. It’s expensive.

On the other hand, writing is also something that, thanks to the digital revolution, more and more people are doing not just for work and school, but also voluntarily, for their own benefit. Schools tend to dismiss the kind of writing that appears on Facebook, Twitter, IM, texting, and blogs as trivial, even detrimental to the development of good writers. But maybe we should rethink how we teach by looking at what writers do when they tweet and post. And that in turn might shed some light on what writers do when they write essays, poems, grant proposals, quarterly earnings reports, or constitutions. (Hint: they don’t check Strunk and White every time they’re not sure where to put the comma.)

Avoid needless explosions: Excerpt from the journal kept by Theodore Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber.
Kaczynski wrote with a copy of Strunk and White by his side. It didn’t help.

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. You can view his previous OUPblog posts here or read more on his personal site, The Web of Language, where this article originally appeared. Until next time, keep up with Professor Baron on Twitter: @DrGrammar.

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By Ron Avi Astor

Imagine attending nine schools before graduating from high school. Dealing with the emotional strain of having to end and restart friendships every year. Never establishing a lasting relationship with a favorite teacher. Being barred from participating in a favorite sport because you don’t meet residency requirements.

Further imagine the frustration of falling academically behind because completed courses in one state aren’t credited in another. And all this is happening while mom or dad is on his or her fourth tour of military duty overseas.

For the 1.3 million children of military families currently enrolled in public schools, this world is not imaginary. It’s a cost of national security that doesn’t show up on spreadsheets. Yet many struggle through public schools that are unaware of — and unprepared for — the special challenges of the military lifestyle.

In January, President Obama took an important step in addressing the generations-long neglect of military children by issuing a directive, “Strengthening Our Military Families,” that proposed ways to help these children get the best public education possible. Congress, meanwhile, can make an important difference now as America continues its longest war in Afghanistan and remains engaged in Iraq and Libya.

Since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than 2 million children in military families have attended public schools. Most of these schools are near military bases. But because both campaigns relied heavily on the Reserves and National Guard, many military students also enroll in schools far from a base.

How are they faring academically? A Rand Corp. study released in April shows how a parent’s deployment can affect their children’s work in school. Researchers looked at the achievement test scores of more than 44,000 Army children in North Carolina and Washington state whose parents were deployed 19 months and longer between 2002 and 2008. They found that the students’ reading and math scores were significantly lower than their civilian peers, and that falling achievement was greater the younger the student.

Problem is that teachers, principals and staff in public schools are ill prepared to provide support for military students with falling grades. Only a handful of university schools of education currently offer any program or course on the special challenges of the military lifestyle — frequent mobility, prolonged deployment and sudden death. In addition, educational research literature doesn’t coherently provide guidance for teachers on how to handle the classroom challenges surrounding this lifestyle.

No wonder a 2010 Blue Star Family survey found that one of the main reasons why military families believe that the general public does not appreciate the sacrifices they make was the absence of support for their children in the public schools.

Not all schools are unwelcoming. With the help of the U.S. Navy, some in San Diego and Hawaii, both hosts of major military bases, offer a one-stop shop on the first day of school where entering military students and their parents can survey potential classes, check out available tutors, learn about extracurricular activities and meet new classmates. Other schools celebrate military culture by setting aside days – the Marines’ birthday, for example — to recognize important events in military history.

The upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act offers several opportunities to help military students.

For starters, Congress should fund an electronic system that would send the academic records of transferring military students to their new schools. This would minimize any delay in delivering tutoring or counseling support to students who need it and help prevent them from falling behind due to a loss of course credits.

As part of reauthorization, Congress should fully fund the Military Impact Aid program, which provides supplemental money to public schools serving military students. This is especially important at a time when states are cutting public school funding to balance their budgets.

And the best teaching practices found at public schools with large numbers of military students — and in Department of Defense Educational Activity schools – should be extended to all military families. For example, some schools in Hawaii have transition centers where volunteers or paid staffers help arriving military students adapt to their new schools and hear out their parents’ concerns. Such centers should be common to all military-connected schools and should be a condition of receiving additional federal money.

Longer term, helping military children get a good public education may require that we view them as members of a distinct American cultural group. Military families readily agree they make up a subculture with its own history, rituals, values, music and experiences. Department of Defense schools on bases accommodate this culture in their curriculum and support networks — and student achievement is comparable to that of their civilian peers.

Public schools serving a high percentage of military students could similarly create a welcoming and supportive environment by adjusting their curriculum and holiday schedules to respect the military culture. The payoff could be better academic performance.

The men and women of our armed services deserve all the support they need to do their jobs. Making it easier for their children to navigate and achieve in public schools should be part of that support.

Ron Avi Astor, a professor in the schools of social work and education at the University of Southern California, is project leader of Building Capacity in Military Connected Schools, a partnership between USC and a consortium of eight public schools districts that aims to improve the educational experiences of military students. He is author with Rami Benbenishty of School Violence in Context: Culture, Neighborhood, Family, School, and Gender.

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By Gordon Thompson

Baby boomers have not only fundamentally shaped our modern world, but also how their children (and grandchildren) perceive that world.  The generation that gyrated with hula hoops and rock ‘n’ roll also embraced British pop music (among other things) and have bequeathed this aesthetic to today’s college students.  On campuses across North America, students amble to classes with “Beatles” patches on their book bags while their college radio programs often include music by the Rolling Stones, the Who, and the Kinks.  At Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York a few years ago, a Facebook survey identified the Beatles as the favorite campus musical artists, followed closely by Bob Dylan.  Given the continuing importance of a band that dissolved in acrimony over forty years ago, a question arises: does this subject merit inclusion in the college curriculum?  The answer is clearly, yes.

As an ethnomusicologist teaching in a music department, I encounter the opinion that my classes on India and on pop music should reside at the periphery of a core curriculum that focuses on Euro-American classical music.  I certainly think that the tradition of Bach and Beethoven I studied as a music-major in college represents a real contribution to human cultural history; but I also now see it as but one tradition of music of many.  The musics of the rest of the world (notably India and China with their long histories and rich theoretical literature) offer other examples.  But what about pop music?  What can we learn from that?

The college classroom allows opportunities for reflection on many things, including how culture responds to various environmental changes (whether natural or human) with few things reacting as quickly to new contexts as popular music.  Situating sixties British pop in the postwar era helps students understand the music, if not the world that shaped the lives of their parents and indirectly their own upbringing.  Indeed, as the first wave of baby boomers (or what the British refer to as the “bulge” generation) approaches age 65 and retirement, the sixties ease into the category of “history.”  By way of comparison, the beginning of the great depression stood in closer proximity to college students in 1964 than the Beatles’ dissolution does for students in 2011.

As Britain fought against the Axis powers from 1939-1941, she borrowed heavily from the United States and Canada to finance the effort, coming to the brink of defaulting on her loans.  The US eventually joined the battle, more than two years after the beginning of that conflict, but the war sorely undermined Britain’s financial independence.  In the postwar years, while the United States implemented the Marshall Plan and contributed to the rebuilding of Europe, Britain concentrated on how to pay back its war loans, delivering its last payment in 2006.  In this environment, subsequent Labour and Conservative governments imposed significant duties on imports from America and abroad, inversely making foreign goods and culture highly desirable, especially for the bulge generation who looked for a way to distinguish themselves from the grey austerity of their parents.

Postwar Britain faced food and petroleum rationing, a staggering trade imbalance, a debilitating national debt, and a public demotion on the world stage while at the same time an internal dialogue raged about social class and generation.  By economic necessity, postwar Britain had taken to adapting foreign recording technology for domestic consumption, as when EMI created their own versions of the recording equipment that Americans had themselves confiscated in Germany.  Moreover, the British took to reinventing many things musical, including guitars, amplifiers, and rock ‘n’ roll.  But this thirst for the foreign involved more than American culture.  When the Beatles adopted the hairstyle of their German college student fans in Hamburg, they mixed a unique amalgam of Western culture.

A collision of demographics, economics, and technology led to an explosion of pop music in the 1950s and 1960s.  Pop music by necessity rapidly evolved and embraced folk, jazz, and classical elements, not to mention reflecting the burgeoning culture of globalization.  For this new stew of influences, London proved the perfect cauldron.  A London pop musician such as Georgie Fame in the early sixties could have African musicians in his band (Speedy Acquaye), along with aspiring British jazz musicians (John McLaughlin) to reinterpret American music with a Latin flavor (e.g., “Yeh Yeh”).  UK clubs buzzed with musical innovation.

With the Beatles’ arrival in North America, the cultural dialogue came full circle.  Notably, British musicians had learned how to reinterpret Americana and successfully sell it back to the Americans, a skill that sat at the core of the Beatles’ expertise.  When my students watch a video of the Beatles’ premiere on The Ed Sullivan Show from February 1964 and see the screaming teenagers jumping in their seats, I drop a quick aside that “these could be your parents and grandparents.”  The comment always earns a discernable chuckle of recognition.  The students have met the audience, and the audience is us.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Check out Thompson’s other posts here.

By Dennis Baron

“It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”     –Barack Obama

The bumper sticker on the back of a construction worker’s pickup truck caught my eye: “If you can read this, thank a teacher.”

This homage to education wasn’t what I expected from someone whose bitterness typically manifests itself in vehicle art celebrating guns and religion, but there was more: “If you can read this in English, thank a soldier.”

It was a “support our troops” bumper sticker that takes language and literacy out of the classroom and puts them squarely in the hands of the military.

It’s one thing to say that we owe our national security and the survival of the free world to military might. It’s something else again to be told that we need soldiers to protect the English language.

But according to this bumper sticker, any chink in our armor, any relaxation of our constant vigilance, any momentary lowering of the gun barrel, and we’ll all be speaking Russian, Iraqi, or even Mexican.

Supporters of official English argue that it’s the language of democracy — the language of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, not to mention the “Star-Spangled Banner,” “American Idol” and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” (it doesn’t matter that Millionaire was a British show first, since Americans were British once themselves). English, goes the claim, is the “social glue” cementing the many cultures that underlie American culture. As Teddy Roosevelt said back in 1918, “This is a nation, not a polyglot boarding house.”

But apparently even the official language laws that states, cities, schools and businesses have put in place aren’t doing the job, so what we really need is to put a gun to people’s heads to make them use English.

Only that won’t work. The large number of translators killed in Iraq, or drummed out of the army for being gay, are two of the many indicators that our armies aren’t keeping the world safe for English.

The linguist Max Weinreich is credited with quipping that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. But guns can’t literally keep a language safe at home any more than they can effectively seal a border to keep other languages out.

In a bold act of regime change and a glaring breach of homeland security, French streamed across the English borders in the 11th century along with the Norman armies, but French soldiers were unable to convert most of the Brits they encountered to the parlez-vous, at least not in the long term.

And while the Royal Navy helped spread English around the globe as part and parcel of the British Empire, what really undergirds English today as an international language isn’t military might, but the appeal of global capitalism, science, computer technology, t-shirts, and good old rock ‘n’ roll.

Immigrants coming to the United States are learning some English; their children are learning a lot of English; their children’s children are speaking almost nothing but English. And the only soldiering involved in the process is when the immigrants or their children join the Army.

On the other hand, the military is more frequently associated with suppressing language than with protecting it. Remember the World War II slogan, “Loose lips sink ships”?  Wartime is all about not talking in any language.

Which is why it’s even more important to keep language a matter of civil rights, not a military issue. Yes, it’s important to support the troops. But the freedom to use language, any language, even an immigrant language, is even more vital to the nation in times of war or other crises, when every language including English seems like the language of the enemy, and when it’s easier to feel antipathy towards immigrants and others who seem outside the mainstream, than it is in those rare moments when things are going just fine and it seems o.k. to let people say whatever they want in the language of their choice.

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. You can view his previous OUPblog posts here or read more on his personal site, The Web of Language, where this article originally appeared.

You may remember the short-lived controversy that arose this summer about student government elections at the Nettleton Middle School in Mississippi: school officials had allotted student council positions according to race, with eight positions open to white students, four to black students. The school was quick to abort this policy once it came to national attention; when asked about why it had been implemented in the first place, the superintendent commented that it had been an attempt to “ensure minority representation and involvement in the student body.”

This December marked the 56-year anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court case that called for an end to segregation — giving us the opportunity to evaluate the influence of this case on American schools half a century later. The dubious intention of Nettleton school officials only grazes the many issues surrounding segregation in public schools: in recent years, Americans have argued over everything from the racial segregation of high school proms to whether English as a Second Language ought to be taught by immersion or in separate classrooms (or even separate schools). In some urban school districts where non-white students predominate, school officials have abandoned the fight for integration in order to focus their attention on improving the education offered at these schools so as to close the racial achievement gap.

In her new book In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark, Martha Minow demonstrates that the decision of Brown v. Board continues to reverberate in our society, often in surprising ways. Many school districts in the United States have failed to fully become entirely integrated with respect to race: writes Minow, “Schools in fact are now more racially segregated than they were at the height of the desegregation effort.” But there are also many other ways that schools have become more segregated — by gender, sexual orientation, immigration status, socioeconomic background, religion, and disability. And the strategies of Brown v. Board are now used by advocates of “school choice,” who believe that school vouchers, tax credits, magnet schools, and charter schools are one way of achieving integration.

In this excerpt from In Brown’s Wake, Minow discusses one experiment in segregation: the Harvey Milk High School in New York City, created as a safe-haven for gay and lesbian students.     –Hanna Oldsman, publicity intern

The New York City public school system, in conjunction with a private organization established to support gay and lesbian youth, founded the Harvey Milk High School in 1985 for gay and lesbian teenagers. Its goal was to create a supportive, safe place for students who faced violence, harassment, or intimidation in mainstream schools. Enrollment from the start has been voluntary. Students apply to transfer to the school, which includes transgendered teens and teens who may be perceived to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered.

The legal protections for students on the basis of sexual orientation remain ambiguous and subject to local rules, although federal courts have read Title IX of the federal Education Amendments of 1972 to encompass harassment on the basis of sexual orientation. Although some academic theorists question the analogy between race and sexual orientation for purposes of antidiscrimination law, legal advocacy organizations have followed the path carved out by the NAACP in advocating for legal protections for gays, lesbians, and transgendered people. Test case litigation is the familiar strategy, and it paid off in this area. In June 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional a Texas statue criminalizing homosexual sodomy. The majority opinion, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, explained that “two adults who, with full and mutual consent from each other, [engage] in sexual practices common to the homosexual life-style…[enjoy] a right to liberty under the Due Process Clause…to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government.” An amicus curiae brief had analogized contemporary prejudices about sexual orientation with racial prejudices prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s.

Shortly after the decision in Lawrence v. Texas, the New York school board authorized an expansion of the initial Harvey Milk High School program from two classrooms with 50 students to eight classrooms with 170 students and a full four-year high school. This decision triggered protests, especially by conservative religious groups. When state Conservative Party chairman Mike Long attacked the school’s existence, he echoed critics of racial segregation: “Is there a different way to teach homosexuals? Is there gay math? This is wrong…. There’s no reason these children should be treated separately.”

Critics also include gay rights supporters who warn that the separate schooling fails to equip these schools’ students for the real world and fails to dismantle discrimination. One critic said: “Through long, painful years we reached a consensus that we couldn’t allow segregation. This is a short-term gain and we need to look at the long-term, larger issues.” A Michigan newspaper that took up the issue opposed the separate school as well: “Advocates say that by having their own school, gays will feel more comfortable and won’t be subjected to the intimidation that many of them now face in public schools. That argument comes uncomfortably close to racial segregationists in the 1950s and 1960s who insisted that black students did best when they were ‘among their own.’ ” Yet advocates point out that because of harassment and violence, adolescents who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered are much more likely to drop out or attempt suicide than other students — and hence need a special school. Given evidence that calling someone “gay” remains a common insult among teens, sorting out how best to address prejudice and cruelty aimed at lesbian and gay students will undoubtedly pose challenges for some time to come.

A voluntary, separate school along the lines of the Harvey Milk High School may seem more acceptable in a large system, like New York’s, that includes citywide special schools in science, fashion, and other topics. Perhaps a special school for gay and lesbian students could be viewed as part of the city’s project of developing excellent magnet school with special themes. Yet it remains troubling to conceive as “voluntary” the transfer of a student to a special school in order to escape harassment at the regular school. Whether separate instruction can be equal seems less urgent than determining how to make integrated education safe. The very existence of the separate school may reduce pressure for policies of zero tolerance for harassment and violence in any school. This task is challenging legally, normatively, and practically, given that some students and parents claim that freedoms of expression and religion lie behind their critiques of homosexuality — even as other students claim they face harassment for being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered or for supporting such students. Abusive treatment of any fellow student should not be tolerated within a school setting. One court agreed with a student who claimed protection under Title IX after being harassed for advocating tolerance of gays and lesbians. New issues arise as younger students come out in middle schools that have not anticipated how to ensure their safety and well-being. Although some people object to any public school acknowledgment of the sexual orientations of students, the commitment to equal opportunity for gay and lesbian students animates most of the arguments on both sides of this issue.

Martha Minow is Dean and Jeremiah Smith, Jr., Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where she has taught since 1981, and the author of In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark. She is an expert in human rights and advocacy for members of racial and religious minorities, women, children, and persons with disabilities. Her prior books include Government by Contract; Just Schools; Breaking the Cycles of Hatred; Partners, Not Rivals; Between Vengeance and Forgiveness; Not Only for Myself; and Making All the Difference.

By Edward Zelinsky

Sixteen more billionaires have signed the “Giving Pledge” sponsored by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Signers of the Pledge commit to donating to philanthropy a majority of their wealth. New signers of the Pledge include the founders of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz.

Critics of the Giving Pledge denounce it as a public relations gimmick. Even if each Pledge signer donates a majority of his fortune to charity, his heirs will still inherent substantial wealth from what remains.

I am not one of these critics. I take Mr. Buffett, Mr. Gates and the other signers at face value and applaud their charitable intentions. I do find it interesting that certain names are absent from the Pledge. For example, despite their self-proclaimed liberalism, not a single member of the Kennedy family has signed the Giving Pledge. By the same token, no prominent movie star has signed the Pledge even though many such celebrities loudly proclaim their commitments to humanitarian causes.

Those who have signed the Pledge deserve to be recognized for their philanthropic intentions.

However, an important aspect of the Giving Pledge is troubling and I urge Mr. Buffett, Mr. Gates and the other signers to consider this problem: Their charitable donations will exacerbate the federal budget deficit. The Giving Pledge should accordingly be amended to include the federal Treasury.

When a billionaire dies without making a charitable contribution, unless he or she leaves a surviving spouse, a portion of every dollar of the estate goes to the federal Treasury in the form of estate tax. This remains true under the estate tax deal recently crafted by President Obama and the Republican congressional leadership. When part or all of a billionaire’s estate is instead directed to charity, no portion of the charitable bequest goes to the federal fisc.

For two reasons, the Giving Pledge donors should direct a significant fraction of their charitable donations to the U.S. Treasury in lieu of the federal estate taxes they are avoiding by their charity. First, their billions were created with the help of the nation’s laws, institutions and infrastructure. The signers should reimburse the taxpayers who funded this valuable public overhead and thereby help preserve those laws, institutions and infrastructure for others to come.

Second, the future economic strength of the United States is a vital cause. We should not saddle (as we are) our children and grandchildren with mounting national debt. Payments to the Treasury by the signers of the Giving Pledge will help reduce that debt.

The standard retort is that these billionaires can allocate their money more efficiently and effectively than can the federal government. Perhaps. Nevertheless, the rest of us don’t have the financial freedom of the signers of the Pledge. In fairness to us, those signers should allocate a significant portion of their charitable payments to the federal fisc – just as we are required to make significant tax payments to the U.S. Treasury.

I too might allocate my resources more efficiently and effectively than does the federal government. However, I am not afforded that chance. Instead, federal income tax is withheld from my every paycheck. To the extent that I donate to charity, some of that withheld income tax is subsequently directed by me to a charity of my choice. Nevertheless, for me and others who work for a living, the vast majority of our contributions to the federal Treasury are involuntary tax payments. We lack the practical option to send the bulk of our money to a charity of our choice – even though we too might direct that money more productively than does the federal government.

I accordingly suggest an addendum to the Giving Pledge. In recognition of the role this nation’s laws, institutions and infrastructure play in creating their fortunes, the signers should commit the first 35 cents of every donated dollar to the federal Treasury in lieu of the estate taxes being avoided by such charitable donations. The remaining 65 cents per donated dollar will still be an enormous amount of money for each signer of the Pledge to commendably direct to the charity of his or her choice.

Taxes should not just be for the little people.

As the year draws to a close, we’ve been reflecting on all the wonderful books published in 2010, and in doing so, we’ve also realized there are some classics worth revisiting. The authors and friends of Oxford University Press are proud to present this series of essays, which will appear regularly until the New Year, drawing our attention to books both new and old. Below, Duane W. Roller (author of Cleopatra: A Biography) shares his love for a book that has withstood the test of time.

Sitting on my desk, never out of reach, is one of the most durable of the Oxford World’s Classics: H. W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage.  First published in 1926, and now in its third revised edition, it has been a staple of writers for nearly a century.  Henry Watson Fowler (1858-1933) was an English schoolmaster who turned to lexicography and worked on a number of Oxford University Press dictionary projects.  But he will be forever remembered for his Dictionary of Modern English Usage, usually known by professional writers just as “Fowler.”

And what is Fowler?  It is basically an encyclopedia of the usage of the English language.  It provides a variety of nuggets on how to write English properly.  If, like this writer, you can be confused between “continuous” and “continual,” Fowler lays it out.  It tells why “if and when” should be avoided, what “sabotage” really means, and that “substitute” is usually misused.  The regular bugaboos of English usage are concisely set forth: which and that, lie and lay, it’s and its.  With a copy of Fowler within reach, no one who writes has any excuse for making a mistake.

Alas, such is not the case.  In our modern world of deteriorating standards and the pervasive feeling that the internet is the source for everything, the quality of written English has fallen badly.  The columnist Gene Weingarten pointed out in the Washington Post that such deterioration has affected even those places that were thought to be immune from misuse of the language: he listed nearly a dozen major newspapers, including some of the country’s most venerable, that have had grammatical mistakes.  He was not talking about the malapropisms that pervade language today (although those are frequent too), but outright errors, such as “pronounciation,” “younger” where “youngest” is meant, or “eeks” for “ekes.”  Newspapers used to be the standard of correct English: now they seem as ignorant as anyone else.

As a university teacher for nearly 40 years and an author of 10 books, I have some vested interest in proper use of the language.  Like most teachers, I can be driven to despair at student creativeness regarding the language.  It used to be that one could gently guide them along the path to enlightenment (telling them about Fowler, among other things).  Now, one has to compete with that insidious staple of modern life: the internet.  If you tell a student that a word is misspelled or used incorrectly, the student comes back with the same incorrect usage from the internet.  Case closed.  Newspaper editors, amazingly, do the same, and my local paper, at least, ignores letters calling attention to their bad grammar.  Astonishingly, one of our most distinguished literary magazines questioned something that I said because it could not be verified on the internet.

If people would only keep a copy of Fowler handy!  Does the average newspaper editor, teacher, or professional writer do this?  As I begin work on my eleventh book – as always with paper and pencil and not on a computer – Fowler is there.  When I am uncertain about something – as happened yesterday, when I was unclear about whether I was using “impressionable” correctly – Fowler straightens me out.

So if you know someone who wants to write, and wants to write properly (the two concepts sadly are no longer identical), anyone who would take comfort in knowing that (unlike many) he or she is using the language correctly, get that person a copy of Fowler.  Maybe there is hope.

Historian, archaeologist, and classical scholar, Duane W. Roller is the author of numerous books, including Through the Pillars of Herakles, The Building Program of Herod the Great, and most recently Cleopatra: A Biography. You can read his previous OUPblog post and listen to a podcast series here.

By Susan Pick and Jenna T. Sirkin

In September, our world leaders met in New York for the Summit on the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. They congratulated one another for lower child mortality rates, the increase in women’s empowerment and a reduction in the number of new HIV/AIDS cases; they lamented how far we are from reaching the eight goals we established ten years ago. But are they missing the point?

One of the Millennium Development Goals is particularly complex: achievement of universal primary education. We measure the progress made toward this goal with net enrollment ratios, the proportion of pupils who finish primary school, and literacy rates. We know that according to the UN’s 2010 report, “enrollment in primary education has continued to rise… But the pace of progress is insufficient to ensure that, by 2015, all girls and boys complete a full course of primary schooling.” Should we be encouraged? Should we be disheartened? Or should we question how telling these numbers even are? While enrollment is a crucial step toward the country’s overall social development, we have to look past the statistics and ask ourselves about the education itself.

With the numbers we are given, it is easy to speak of success when the graphs rise, and failures when the graph drops. It is critically important to see a rise in the number of boys and girls receiving primary education in the poorest countries. But what is this education we are providing them? Is it what our children need to succeed as productive adults and what a country needs to form responsible, competent and ambitious citizens?

Great thinkers have pondered this question. Brazilian educator and theorist Paolo Freire classified teaching methods as dictatorial or facilitative, the former depending on a hierarchical structure in which the teacher imparts knowledge to the student through memorization.  Where obedience is valued over analytical thinking. The facilitative method, on the other hand, values empowerment and intrinsic motivation. Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen writes that the opportunities created by an education system which reinforces freedoms and personal agency gives individuals the capabilities necessary to exercise their political rights and guarantees structural and psychological access to social services. It is this facilitative education that has been shown to make a powerful difference in poverty reduction and opportunity for people in developing nations.

Let’s take the case of Mexico, where there are various barriers to facilitative education. Government programs like Oportunidades have greatly increased school attendance with cash transfers to impoverished families, yet Mexicans still score below average on reading and math. A report from the Programme for International Student Assessment has documented Mexican students’ difficulty in analyzing data and experiments. And this despite the fact that the Mexican government has vastly increased its investment in education. Yet students’ poor performance is understandable given that two in three teachers in Mexico mainly use memorization to teach skills. The mere reproduction of knowledge and skills limits Mexicans in terms of their productivity in the job market and in other areas of their lives.

Training teachers in psychosocial life skills is the key to moving away from the authoritarian, didactic methods in Mexico. Educators must themselves have a strong sense of personal agency in order to then empower their students, and they must recognize the value of their students having such agency. And this must be the case in the home as well. At home, children are confronted with paternalistic cultural norms, meaning that blind obedience is encouraged and autonomy is discouraged. Research on family values indicates that many Mexican parents raise their children to expect discipline in the name of respect for authority figures. Therefore, shift in the exercise of control and communication within both the family and with educators is essential in sustaining a positive and participatory learning environment.

We have until 2015 to meet our deadline. As we consider our strategies for the decisive upcoming five years, yes, we must change the way we see change. We will strive for every child in every country to receive primary education. And we also need to ensure that the way in which we are shaping these children while they sit in school each day is giving them the skills to break out of the poverty cycle, and in doing so bring their countries in line with all eight Millennium Development Goal targets.

Susan Pick is a Professor of Social Psychology at the Faculty of Psychology of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. She is author and coauthor of over 270 works, has received numerous awards, holds the highest level in the National System of Researchers, and is also the former president of the Interamerican Society of Psychology. She is author with Jenna T. Sirkin of Breaking the Poverty Cycle: The Human Basis for Sustainable Development.

Jenna T. Sirkin is currently a health services researcher and a doctoral student at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University; and is also an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Doctoral Training Fellow. She has been employed and conducted research in the fields of public health, health services research and international development.

By Dennis Baron

Everybody knows that a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing. It’s one of those undeniable facts of daily life, a fact we seldom question until we meet up with a case that doesn’t quite fit the way we’re used to viewing things.

That’s exactly what happened to a student in Ohio when his English teacher decided to play the noun game. To the teacher, the noun game seemed a fun way to take the drudgery out of grammar. To the student it forced a metaphysical crisis. To me it shows what happens when cultures clash and children get lost in the tyranny of school. That’s a lot to get from a grammar game.

Anyway, here’s how you play. Every student gets a set of cards with nouns written on them. At the front of the classroom are three buckets, labeled “person,” “place,” and “thing.” The students take turns sorting their cards into the appropriate buckets. “Book” goes in the thing bucket. “city” goes in the place bucket. “Gandhi” goes in the person bucket.

Ganesh had a card with “horse” on it. Ganesh isn’t his real name, by the way. It’s actually my cousin’s name, so I’m going to use it here.

You might guess from his name that Ganesh is South Asian. In India, where he had been in school before coming to Ohio, Ganesh was taught that a noun named a person, place, thing, or animal. If he played the noun game in India he’d have four buckets and there would be no problem deciding what to do with “horse.” But in Ohio Ganesh had only three buckets, and it wasn’t clear to him which one he should put “horse” in.

In India, Ganesh’s religion taught him that all forms of life are continuous, interrelated parts of the universal plan. So when he surveyed the three buckets it never occurred to him that a horse, a living creature, could be a thing. He knew that horses weren’t people, but they had more in common with people than with places or things. Forced to choose, Ganesh put the horse card in the person bucket.

Blapp! Wrong! You lose. The teacher shook her head, and Ganesh sat down, mortified, with a C for his efforts. This was a game where you got a grade, and a C for a child from a South Asian family of overachievers is a disgrace. So his parents went to talk to the teacher.

It so happens that I’ve been in a similar situation. We spent a year in France some time back, and my oldest daughter did sixth grade in a French school. The teacher asked her, “How many continents are there?” and she replied, as she had been taught in the good old U.S. of A., “seven.” Blaap! Wrong! It turns out that in France there are only five.

So old dad goes to talk to the teacher about this. I may not be able to remember the seven dwarfs, but I rattled off Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, North America, and South America. The teacher calmly walked me over to the map of the world. Couldn’t I see that Antarctica was an uninhabited island? And couldn’t I see that North and South America were connected? Any fool could see as much.

At that point I decided not to press the observation that Europe and Asia were also connected. Some things are not worth fighting for when you’re fighting your child’s teacher.

Anyway, let’s get back to nouns. School grammar texts typically divide nouns into person, place, or thing. More advanced grammars separate nouns into animates and inanimates, or abstracts and concretes, or mass nouns and count nouns, and they further complicate matters by including phrases, clauses, and entire sentences that aren’t actually nouns but nominals that function like nouns. None of this lends itself to buckets, and none of these systems specifically mentions animals. In English, though, animals can clearly be things: “The dog is hungry. Feed it.”

However, animals can also be persons: “Babar became king of the elephants when the old king ate a poisoned mushroom and died.” They can even be ideas, like the Cheshire cat in “Alice,” or the Loch Ness monster: they’re not real, so they must be ideas. I guess an animal can’t very well be a place, but I’m sure some reader will attack me for placism, arguing yes, it can.

Babar, king of the elephants, bears an uncanny resemblance to Ganesh, the elephant god. Is Babar a person, place or thing? According to the French Wikipedia, a noun is “a thing or idea by itself.” But in French schools, it doesn’t matter whether Babar is a thing or an idea, so long as you use the correct gender of the definite article: le roi Babar, not *la roi Babar.

But that’s not the point, is it? The point is that lots of nouns don’t fit neatly into noun buckets. What is East? Is it a place or an idea? Can it exist without West? Or North and South? Calling nouns persons, places, things, ideas, or even animals, is a way to help students recognize nouns when they stumble upon them. It is not meant to limit the imagination or categorize every possible noun the mind can come up with. Anyone looking at all closely at language must see that its categories are suggestive, permeable, inconclusive. As linguists like to say, all grammars leak. Some teachers find this indeterminacy uncomfortable.

Is the point of the noun game to see whether students recoginze possible nouns as nouns, or whether their view of the universe agrees with the teacher’s? Is education fitting things into buckets, or wondering why the categories don’t fit the facts? Does education consist of grading you on how well you can play a game?

So what do I advise Ganesh’s parents to do? Forget it, that’s what. Ganesh has done more thinking about the nature of language than his teacher has. His performance in the noun game won’t keep him out of Harvard, or Ohio State. The teacher isn’t going to change. The grade is not important. It’s the thought, not the noun, that counts.

This commentary is based on an actual incident that occurred more than a decade ago. An anxious parent called the National Council of Teachers of English for advice, and I responded with an earlier version of this essay that appeared in “Inflections” (vol. 2, no. 1, 1994), a Council newsletter. The parent, who received a copy of that response, discussed the issue with the school principal, who was moved to schedule a schoolwide assembly to increase awareness of cultural diversity among students and teachers. I have no idea whether teachers at that school still prefer teaching grammar as a set of testable formulas instead of a way to explore the complexities of language.

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. You can view his previous OUPblog posts here or read more on his personal site,  The Web of Language, where this article originally appeared.