{"id":67,"date":"2005-06-02T12:24:27","date_gmt":"2005-06-02T16:24:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2005\/06\/02\/if-johnny-cant-do-the-math-can-you\/"},"modified":"2007-02-13T16:06:07","modified_gmt":"2007-02-13T20:06:07","slug":"if-johnny-cant-do-the-math-can-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2005\/06\/02\/if-johnny-cant-do-the-math-can-you\/","title":{"rendered":"If Johnny can’t do the math, can you?"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a> File this one under my favourite rant heading (“Work does not<\/strong> make you free”): interesting article, Too much homework can be counterproductive<\/a>, which reports on a study by Penn State researchers, David P. Baker and Gerald K. LeTendre, who published a book, National Differences, Global Similarities: World Culture and the Future of Schooling<\/a>. The claim I found most intriguing is that economic disparity in households actually leads to an exacerbation of educational disadvantage when homework is piled on as an educational panacea. It seems that given more homework, poorer kids or kids from more stressed homes will fall behind educationally, vs. “catching up” with economically better-off peers. I bet this will include kids from stressed out two-income households, too. These are increasingly strung out homes slipping into less secure middle-class status. As John Ralston Saul noted in this article<\/a> (which I cited a couple of days ago),<\/p>\n

Why did an unprecedented increase in money supply translate into a dearth of money for public services? And why did this growth in new moneys enrich mainly those who already had money? Why did it lead to a growth in the rich-versus-poor dichotomy and a squeezing of the middle class? Why did many privatisations of public utilities neither improve services nor lower costs for consumers but instead guarantee revenues to the new owners while leading to a collapse in infrastructure investment?<\/p>\n

People noticed that the financial value of the great breakthroughs in female employment had somehow been inflated away. Abruptly, a middle class family required two incomes.<\/strong> [emphasis added] They noticed that in a mere 25 years CEO salaries in the US had gone from 39 times the pay of an average worker to more than 1000 times. Elsewhere the numbers were similar. <\/em> [More…<\/a>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Some of the pushback to LeTendre & Baker’s interpretation of the data is directed at their contention that the US has more homework assigned than other high-test-score result countries like Japan. (See the Amazon link to the book, and the one comment so far to the article.) While there might be room for reviewing the data in terms of comparing the US to, say, Japan, I find it interesting that no one is commenting on Baker & LeTendre’s assertion that test results basically tell us something about class structure within a given society. That seems to be something not many Americans want to hear about — that class matters, or that, egads, it exists<\/em>. Why? Because that p.o.v. is inimical to the American Dream, to an unquestioning belief in Bootstrap Philosophy? …Meanwhile, US CEO salaries have “gone from 39 times the pay of an average worker to more than 1000 times.” Hmm, makes you wonder, doesn’t it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

File this one under my favourite rant heading (“Work does not make you free”): interesting article, Too much homework can be counterproductive, which reports on a study by Penn State researchers, David P. Baker and Gerald K. LeTendre, who published a book, National Differences, Global Similarities: World Culture and the Future of Schooling. The claim […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[600],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-yulelogstories"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}