How Would You Feel If Someone Wrote, "We Need Fewer Women In Congress?"

Women make up just about 51% of the population. Women hold 98, or 18.3%, of the 535 seats in the 113th US Congress-- 20, or 20.0%, of the 100 seats in the Senate and 78, or 17.9%, of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives. So, objectively, you would have to be an idiot to not see that there is a real need to elect more women to Congress-- as well as to elect a woman president and more women throughout the government. But not bad ones. Replacing, for example, a progressive senator like Brian Schatz with a more conservative woman, Colleen Hanabusa-- who's record even on women's health issues isn't nearly as good as Schatz's-- is doing anyone any good, except making the percentages look better.

Yesterday Nancy Pelosi, who was the first female Speaker of the House-- as well as one of the best speakers in history and certainly the best Speaker in recent times-- was on Melissa Harris-Perry's MSNBC show talking about the need for more women in Congress. I doubt she has women like Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Virginia Foxx (R-NC), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Martha Roby (R-AL) in mind. These women work actively against policies are in the best interests of women who don't happen to be in the top 1% of income earners. I'm certain what Pelosi wants to see more women like this elected. More women like Barbara Lee (D-CA), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Judy Chu (D-CA), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Donna Edwards (D-IL)...

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm in the middle of reading Rana Husseini's classic book on women's activism in the Middle East, Murder in the Name of Honour. Conservatives in Jordan-- like conservatives everyone and throughout time-- have fought long and hard to keep women from achieving any sense of equality. I'll get into the psychological infirmities the conservatives suffer when I discuss Husseini's book in greater detail. But I do want to point out a Parliament Deputy Mahmoud Kharabsheh insisting that brothers have the right to murder their sisters if they suspect the sisters are bringing "dishonor" to the family-- like by being the victim of rape. He adamantly opposed an initiative to overturn a law that permits this, claiming "the control over women prevents sexual diseases and mixed paternity." He claimed he wanted women to be protected, respected and afforded dignity, but added, "Jordan is still a male-dominated society and men are more capable than women are. Women have not developed themselves yet; they are not experienced enough, having not held high positions in authority as men have." Now there's a self-fulfilling prophesy of the universal conservative mind-- even if you believe that the only thing men are more capable of them women in pleasuring their own puds.

Let's forget for a moment that Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is the chair of the House Tea Party caucus, an anti-Choice fanatic and one of the most viciously anti-LGBT Members of Congress and let's make believe she's just a normal conservative congresswoman. Can you call her desire to shred the social safety net "anti-woman?" She doesn't just want to privatize Social Security and wreck Medicaid, she wants to ween everybody off Social Security and Medicare. Lee Fang recorded her in 2010 addressing a conservative group in St. Louis using fake Glenn Beck stats as the justification for ending Social Security.

Is the country too big to fail? No, the country can fail. We can, we’re not invincible. And we’re so close now to being at that point because the thing is, as Glenn Beck said last night, it is true. The $107 trillion that he put on the board. We’re $14 trillion in debt, but that doesn’t include the unfunded massive liabilities. That’s $107 trillion, and that’s for Social Security and Medicare and all the rest. You add up all those unfunded net liabilities, and all the traps that could go wrong we’re on the hook for, and what it means is what we have to do is a reorganization of all of that, Social Security and all. We have to do it simply because we can’t let the contract remain as they are because the older people are going to lose. So, what you have to do, is keep faith with the people that are already in the system, that don’t have any other options, we have to keep faith with them. But basically what we have to do is wean everybody else off. And wean everybody off because we have to take those unfunded net liabilities off our bank sheet, we can’t do it. So we just have to be straight with people. So basically, whoever our nominee is, is going to have to have a Glenn Beck chalkboard and explain to everybody this is the way it is.

Is that anti-woman? Well... not anti-rich women. This comes from the Social Security Administration:

• With longer life expectancies than men, elderly women tend to live more years in retirement and have a greater chance of exhausting other sources of income. They benefit from Social Security's cost-of-living protections because benefits are annually adjusted for inflation.
* Women reaching age 65 in 2011 are expected to live, on average, an additional 20.7 years compared with 18.7 years for men.
* Women represent 56 percent of all Social Security beneficiaries age 62 and older and approximately 68 percent of beneficiaries age 85 and older.

• The Social Security system is progressive in that lower-wage earners receive a higher percentage benefit than higher-wage earners do. The system returns a greater percentage of pre-retirement earnings to a lower-wage worker than to a higher-wage worker. Women who are low-wage workers receive back more benefits in relation to past earnings than do high-wage earners.
* In 2011, the median earnings of working-age women who worked full-time, year-round were $36,500, compared to $48,000 for men.

• In 2011, the average annual Social Security income received by women 65 years and older was $12,188, compared to $15,795 for men. Social Security provides dependent benefits to spouses, divorced spouses, elderly widows, and widows with young children.

• In 2011, for unmarried women-- including widows-- age 65 and older, Social Security comprises 50 percent of their total income. In contrast, Social Security benefits comprise only 36 percent of unmarried elderly men's income and only 31 percent of elderly couples' income.

• In 2011, 48 percent of all elderly unmarried females receiving Social Security benefits relied on Social Security for 90 percent or more of their income.

• Elderly women are less likely than elderly men to have significant family income from pensions other than Social Security. In 2010, only 22.6 percent of unmarried women aged 65 or older were receiving their own private pensions (either as a retired worker or survivor), compared to 27.3 percent of unmarried men.
* Participation in employer-sponsored retirement plans is increasing for women in today's workforce. In 2011, 55.2 percent of women employed full-time participated in an employer-sponsored public and private sector plan compared to 52.5 percent of men. Women generally receive lower pension benefits due to their relatively lower earnings.

Sure, Pelosi wants to see more women in Congress, but I bet she'll be supporting Jim Graves when he runs against Bachmann next year. Last week, Graves, a successful businessman with a clear middle-American perspective, told me he's focused on "fixing" Social Security. His plan is very different from what Bachmann says and in contrast to Bachmann's voting record. "Let’s be clear," he began, "in that Social Security is an earned benefit that hard working Americans have paid into over the life of their working careers-- they’ve earned it, it’s not an entitlement."

Here are some of the specific ways he feels we can bolster and strengthen Social Security:

1. Let’s broaden the contribution base to all income. Why should rich folks that get their incomes from “carried interest,” “preferred dividends, and all forms of unearned income not pay into the pool? Hard working folks that get their income through a payroll should not carry the entire burden.

2. Adjust the income cap from $113,700 to a sustainable level. By expanding the tax base to all personal income (earned and unearned), the income cap should be adjusted to an amount needed to keep the Social Security Trust Fund solvent for a projected 75 year period. The average folks in my district make about $50,000 per year, so they are paying in on 100% of their incomes. All the while those with massive amounts of unearned income pay little if any into the fund.

...What we do not want to do is privatize Social Security that only defeats the purpose of the program. Social Security is to protect and provide a safety net for our seniors when they get to an age that they should be able to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Privatizing the program is great for the rich, but it destroys the program for those that most need it. The entire reason that Social Security works is that it creates a pool for the social good-- it averages the risk over a larger demographic. And we definitely do not want to move the retirement age up from 65 years like Bachmann and Ryan would like to do. If you worked your entire life laying bricks, hoisting boxes, building houses…your back is sore and body is tired.

Well, Of Course Rich Kids Are Smarter Than Poor Kids

My pal Roland teaches in an inner city elementary school in one of the toughest neighborhoods in L.A. Everyday he comes home exhausted and frustrated and drained. "Maybelline was suspended again," he seems to tell me more often than I ask him if he wants to eat at Ink or M.A.K.E. Maybelline is 8. I remember when he first told me about her at the beginning of the semester. He said he thought she might be a genius, definietly the smartest child in his class. He seemed excited to play a role in helping her reach her potential. Now he's relieved when she doesn't terrorize his other students, steal their lunches and pencils or just beat them up. Maybelline's probably not going to Harvard or Stanford (where Sean Reardon teaches education and sociology). More likely she's going to end up at the Central California Women's Facility outside Chowchilla. Essentially, she has no parents; no idea who her father was and her mom's a junkie, in and out-- mostly in-- jails and prisons. Maybelline lives with her unemployed grandfather.

Did you read Reardon's OpEd in the NY Times over the weekend, No Rich Child Left Behind? He didn't mean the kind of rich Maybelline is. She doesn't have to study for her tests-- she never does-- but she aces them anyway. What a shame that society will squander that kind of richness! "Here’s a fact that may not surprise you," offers Reardon: "the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion." And the differences are growing-- gigantically.

One way to see this is to look at the scores of rich and poor students on standardized math and reading tests over the last 50 years. When I did this using information from a dozen large national studies conducted between 1960 and 2010, I found that the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago.

To make this trend concrete, consider two children, one from a family with income of $165,000 and one from a family with income of $15,000. These incomes are at the 90th and 10th percentiles of the income distribution nationally, meaning that 10 percent of children today grow up in families with incomes below $15,000 and 10 percent grow up in families with incomes above $165,000.

In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race.

The same pattern is evident in other, more tangible, measures of educational success, like college completion. In a study similar to mine, Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski, economists at the University of Michigan, found that the proportion of students from upper-income families who earn a bachelor’s degree has increased by 18 percentage points over a 20-year period, while the completion rate of poor students has grown by only 4 points.

...In San Francisco this week, more than 14,000 educators and education scholars have gathered for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. The theme this year is familiar: Can schools provide children a way out of poverty?

We are still talking about this despite decades of clucking about the crisis in American education and wave after wave of school reform.Whatever we’ve been doing in our schools, it hasn’t reduced educational inequality between children from upper- and lower-income families.

Part of knowing what we should do about this is understanding how and why these educational disparities are growing. For the past few years, alongside other scholars, I have been digging into historical data to understand just that. The results of this research don’t always match received wisdom or playground folklore.

The most potent development over the past three decades is that the test scores of children from high-income families have increased very rapidly. Before 1980, affluent students had little advantage over middle-class students in academic performance; most of the socioeconomic disparity in academics was between the middle class and the poor. But the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor. Just as the incomes of the affluent have grown much more rapidly than those of the middle class over the last few decades, so, too, have most of the gains in educational success accrued to the children of the rich.

...It may seem counterintuitive, but schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students. We know this because children from rich and poor families score very differently on school readiness tests when they enter kindergarten, and this gap grows by less than 10 percent between kindergarten and high school. There is some evidence that achievement gaps between high- and low-income students actually narrow during the nine-month school year, but they widen again in the summer months.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t important differences in quality between schools serving low- and high-income students-- there certainly are-- but they appear to do less to reinforce the trends than conventional wisdom would have us believe.


If not the usual suspects, what’s going on? It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.



My research suggests that one part of the explanation for this is rising income inequality. As you may have heard, the incomes of the rich have grown faster over the last 30 years than the incomes of the middle class and the poor. Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool and-- in places like New York City, where 4-year-old children take tests to determine entry into gifted and talented programs-- access to preschool test preparation tutors or the time to serve as tutors themselves.

But rising income inequality explains, at best, half of the increase in the rich-poor academic achievement gap. It’s not just that the rich have more money than they used to, it’s that they are using it differently. This is where things get really interesting.

High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources-- their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school-- on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich.

With a college degree insufficient to ensure a high-income job, or even a job as a barista, parents are now investing more time and money in their children’s cognitive development from the earliest ages. It may seem self-evident that parents with more resources are able to invest more-- more of both money and of what Mr. Putnam calls “‘Goodnight Moon’ time”-- in their children’s development. But even though middle-class and poor families are also increasing the time and money they invest in their children, they are not doing so as quickly or as deeply as the rich.

The economists Richard J. Murnane and Greg J. Duncan report that from 1972 to 2006 high-income families increased the amount they spent on enrichment activities for their children by 150 percent, while the spending of low-income families grew by 57 percent over the same time period. Likewise, the amount of time parents spend with their children has grown twice as fast since 1975 among college-educated parents as it has among less-educated parents. The economists Garey Ramey and Valerie A. Ramey of the University of California, San Diego, call this escalation of early childhood investment “the rug rat race,” a phrase that nicely captures the growing perception that early childhood experiences are central to winning a lifelong educational and economic competition.

It’s not clear what we should do about all this. Partly that’s because much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits: we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich.

We’re also slow to understand what’s happening, I think, because the nature of the problem-- a growing educational gap between the rich and the middle class-- is unfamiliar. After all, for much of the last 50 years our national conversation about educational inequality has focused almost exclusively on strategies for reducing inequalities between the educational successes of the poor and the middle class, and it has relied on programs aimed at the poor, like Head Start and Title I.

We’ve barely given a thought to what the rich were doing. With the exception of our continuing discussion about whether the rising costs of higher education are pricing the middle class out of college, we don’t have much practice talking about what economists call “upper-tail inequality” in education, much less success at reducing it.

Meanwhile, not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile.

We need to start talking about this. Strangely, the rapid growth in the rich-poor educational gap provides a ray of hope: if the relationship between family income and educational success can change this rapidly, then it is not an immutable, inevitable pattern. What changed once can change again. Policy choices matter more than we have recently been taught to think.

So how can we move toward a society in which educational success is not so strongly linked to family background? Maybe we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children’s educational opportunities from the day they are born. Investments in early-childhood education pay very high societal dividends. That means investing in developing high-quality child care and preschool that is available to poor and middle-class children. It also means recruiting and training a cadre of skilled preschool teachers and child care providers. These are not new ideas, but we have to stop talking about how expensive and difficult they are to implement and just get on with it.

But we need to do much more than expand and improve preschool and child care. There is a lot of discussion these days about investing in teachers and “improving teacher quality,” but improving the quality of our parenting and of our children’s earliest environments may be even more important. Let’s invest in parents so they can better invest in their children.

This means finding ways of helping parents become better teachers themselves. This might include strategies to support working families so that they can read to their children more often. It also means expanding programs like the Nurse-Family Partnership that have proved to be effective at helping single parents educate their children; but we also need to pay for research to develop new resources for single parents.

It might also mean greater business and government support for maternity and paternity leave and day care so that the middle class and the poor can get some of the educational benefits that the early academic intervention of the rich provides their children. Fundamentally, it means rethinking our still-persistent notion that educational problems should be solved by schools alone.

The more we do to ensure that all children have similar cognitively stimulating early childhood experiences, the less we will have to worry about failing schools. This in turn will enable us to let our schools focus on teaching the skills-- how to solve complex problems, how to think critically and how to collaborate-- essential to a growing economy and a lively democracy.

Nothing really there for Maybelline-- nor for most of her classmates. Not any more than the air traffic controller fix helped them or their families or communities.