Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion The Rich-Poor Divide Starts With Kindergarten

I absolutely agree that too much immigration of unskilled people who are also not thriving in schools is going to contribute to declining mobility.

But at the same time, there is a culture in the US that focuses very much on putting profits first, and this policy has gutted the middle class. It's a very complex problem and the solution will not be easy to find. But the loss of semi-skilled jobs in manufacturing may boost profits, but it's also playing a role in the everyone must go to college mentality. This mentality, in turn is creating an underclass of indebted people who aren't getting those wonderful jobs they were promised and who won't pay off their student loans for 25 years and who won't be buying houses and other things because they're too broke. And it all takes tax dollars away from states and the federal government. It's a downward spiral IMO.

And it works at the lower end of the pay scale too. Paying cash to illegal immigrants instead of paying legal workers by payroll check takes tax dollars out of the system.

How many billions of tax dollars are we losing because of this system?

Lots of quite legal people don't have what they call "public jobs" here.

"Public job" meaning one upon which you pay taxes to the public.

That's a problem come social security disability time.

I think the middle class started to retreat through the recession of the 70s, when the Japanese started eating up our automobile industry.

Muliplier affect of the autos was 1:8. So if you look in your driveway and see a non US car, you contributed to the decline of the middle class.

Yes, clearly the middle-class shopper is to blame for Detroit's hubris.

Folks... how about you all just let this thread die, instead of making Mark come over with his big stick?

How is a link to the president's hope for bringing back middle class jobs related to not making Mark the moderator bring his big stick?  I don't see how mentioning politicians & their big ideas relates to gifted education.  The kids we're here to support are not old enough to vote and the rest of us already have our own ideas about how to vote & what's happening now.  
Now, how the education system could provide for different classes of education without being elitist, segregation, not segregation, what I mean to say is setting up certain kids to be wealthy and certain kids to be poor... That's the point to NCLB and all the resistance to letting kids shine.  That's the thinking that falsely justifies intentionally hindering advanced students & "teaching them a lesson" rather than teaching them appropriate classwork.

It's obviously the "correlation is not causation" everybody here always says. It's also not fair to hinder bright kids in an effort to bring fairness to the chaotic grown up problems.

It was technically a response to the "dying thread" aspect of the sentence, not the "big stick" aspect.

I don't know how much farmshoring is going on:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmshoring

I thought we were also talking about the need for jobs in between "investment banker" and "burger-flipper".

If you don't have mid-range jobs, you end up with rich or poor and nothing in between.

The rich-poor divide is becoming a moral and intellectual divide.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/us/for-women-under-30-most-births-occur-outside-marriage.html
For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage
By JASON DePARLE and SABRINA TAVERNISE
New York Times
February 17, 2012

LORAIN, Ohio — It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.

Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America. The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree, according to Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzed government data.

Among mothers of all ages, a majority — 59 percent in 2009 — are married when they have children. But the surge of births outside marriage among younger women — nearly two-thirds of children in the United States are born to mothers under 30 — is both a symbol of the transforming family and a hint of coming generational change.

One group still largely resists the trend: college graduates, who overwhelmingly marry before having children. That is turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education.

“Marriage has become a luxury good,” said Frank Furstenberg, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

The shift is affecting children’s lives. Researchers have consistently found that children born outside marriage face elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems.