Source: https://teachingsocialstudies.org/page/7/
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 04:25:24+00:00

Document:
Economic Law or Political Policy?
A problem framing the economics curriculum is disagreement about what should be included and even when there is a consensus on topics and themes, how they should be presented. The Business Dictionary, the NCSS C3 Framework, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, and the New York State 12th Grade Social Studies Framework even offer very different conceptions of what economics is. In Social Studies for Secondary Schools (Routledge, 2014) I provide teachers with a very simple definition. “Economics examines how societies produce and distribute the goods and services that people, communities, and nations need to survive.” But of course, it is really complex, because how societies “produce and distribute the goods and services” involves individual, business, social, and political decisions, and competition between different interests, as does defining what “people, communities, and nations need to survive.” A good example is the debate over the regulation of industry to protect the environment and human civilization from the negative effects of climate change.
Their focus is on the market process and does not include the role of labor in production or government regulation.
businesses, governments, and societies make decisions to allocate human capital, physical capital, and natural resources among alternative uses.
discuss how programs that benefit one group can be catastrophic for another.
especially children, do not choose to be poor, unemployed, or homeless.
government, but these are secondary in the,curriculum.
The idea of free markets is generally associated with 18th century Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith and his notion of an “invisible hand” self-regulating markets. Smith actually only mentioned the “invisible hand” once in “The Wealth of Nations,” his signature work. The idea was actually promoted by 20th century economists, including F.A. Hayek who described it as “spontaneous order” and Joseph Schumpeter who called it “creative destruction.” As a result of Smith, Hayek, and Schumpeter, free-market economists often describe the “invisible hand” and the supply/demand curve as “economic law.” According to Smith: “Every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can … He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention … By pursuing his own interests, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good” (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/invisiblehand.asp).
Economists from Karl Marx through John Maynard Keynes and contemporary Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman argue that political policies and government decisions actually play a much more important role in shaping modern economies than hypothesized economic laws. Most political economists argue that government intervention in modern economies is a positive benefit to society although they disagree on how active the government’s role should be.
This series of activities are designed to involve economics students in discussion of whether “economic law” or political policy should govern modern economies. The articles are edited down to less than 500 words to meet the standard for fair-use replications. They were also selected as challenging, but within the literacy expectations of students who are ready to do college-level work.
Aim: Does economic law or political policy govern modern economies?
Do Now: Read the definition of the “Invisible Hand,” examine the cartoons, and answer questions 1-4.
Invisible Hand: The term “invisible hand” was introduced by Adam Smith in his book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). It describes unobservable, or invisible, market forces that help the demand and supply of goods in a free market capitalist economy to automatically reach equilibrium (balance) at the most productive or beneficial level. – https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/definition/invisible-hand.
Questions What is the origin of the term, the “invisible hand”?How is it supposed to operate?How are the depictions of the “invisible hand” in the cartoons similar and different?In your opinion, which cartoonist has a more accurate view of how the “invisible hand” of free market capitalism actually works? Explain.
Introduction (Modeling — Reading with video): Tax policies are definitely government decisions and affect people and industries differently. Donald Trump argues that cutting taxes on the wealthy and on corporations will unleash productivity and create new jobs. He is generally supported by free-market advocates, primarily members of the Republican Party. This chart is drawn from an article from Time magazine (http://time.com/5030731/the-republican-tax-bills-winners-and-losers/). The page also includes a video presenting multiple views on tax cuts.
The ultra-wealthy, especially those with dynastic businesses — like President Donald Trump and his family — do very well under a major Republican tax bill moving in the Senate, as they do under legislation passed this week by the House . . . On the other hand, people living in high-tax states, who deduct their local property, income and sales taxes from what they owe Uncle Sam, could lose out from the complete or partial repeal of the deductions. And an estimated 13 million Americans could lose health insurance coverage over 10 years under the Senate bill.
repeal under the House measure.
Senate bill would end in 2026.
benefits the most from tax reform proposals?
3. In your opinion, are these proposals fair? Explain.
The Republican tax bills moving through Congress could significantly hobble the United States’ renewable energy industry because of a series of provisions that scale back incentives for wind and solar power while bolstering older energy sources like oil and gas production.
The possibility highlights the degree to which the nation’s recent surge in renewable electricity generation is still sustained by favorable tax treatment, which has lowered the cost of solar and wind production while provoking the ire of fossil-fuel competitors seeking to weaken those tax preferences.
Whether lawmakers choose to protect or jettison various renewable tax breaks in the final bill being negotiated on Capitol Hill could have major ramifications for the United States energy landscape, including the prices consumers pay for electricity.
Wind and solar are two of the fastest-growing sources of power in the country, providing 7 percent of electricity last year. Sharp declines in the cost of wind turbines and photovoltaic panels, coupled with generous tax credits that can offset at least 30 percent of project costs, have made new wind and solar even cheaper than running existing fossil-fuel plants in parts of the country.
In different ways, direct and indirect, the House and Senate bills each imperil elements of that ascension. A Senate bill provision intended to stop multinational companies from shifting profits overseas could unexpectedly cripple a key financing tool used by the renewable energy industry, particularly solar, by eroding the value of tax credits that banks and other financial institutions buy from energy companies.
The House bill’s effects would be more direct, rolling back tax credits for wind farms and electric vehicles, while increasing federal support for two nuclear reactors under construction in Georgia. Fossil fuel producers are under little pressure in either bill and some would stand to benefit: The Senate legislation would open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil drilling, while a last-minute amendment added by Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, would allow oil and gas companies to receive lower tax rates on their profits.
The tension between new and old energy was on display this week at a White House event to promote the Republican tax legislation, where a coal plant employee from North Dakota thanked President Trump for a provision in the House bill that would drastically reduce the value of the production tax credit for wind.
The wind industry has warned that the House language, which would reduce the wind tax credit to 1.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, from 2.4 cents, and change eligibility rules, could eliminate over half of the new wind farms planned in the United States.
3. In your opinion, are these policies fair? Explain.
4. Does government policy support the idea that the “invisible hand” is operating or that economies are driven by political decisions? Explain.
An insidious trend has developed over this past third of a century. A country that experienced shared growth after World War II began to tear apart, so much so that when the Great Recession hit in late 2007, one could no longer ignore the fissures that had come to define the American economic landscape. How did this “shining city on a hill” become the advanced country with the greatest level of inequality?
Our current brand of capitalism is an ersatz capitalism. For proof of this go back to our response to the Great Recession, where we socialized losses, even as we privatized gains. Perfect competition should drive profits to zero, at least theoretically, but we have monopolies and oligopolies making persistently high profits. C.E.O.s enjoy incomes that are on average 295 times that of the typical worker, a much higher ratio than in the past, without any evidence of a proportionate increase in productivity.
If it is not the inexorable laws of economics that have led to America’s great divide, what is it? Part of the answer is that as World War II faded into memory, so too did the solidarity it had engendered. As America triumphed in the Cold War, there didn’t seem to be a viable competitor to our economic model . . . Ideology and interests combined nefariously. Some drew the wrong lesson from the collapse of the Soviet system. The pendulum swung from much too much government there to much too little here. Corporate interests argued for getting rid of regulations, even when those regulations had done so much to protect and improve our environment, our safety, our health and the economy itself. But this ideology was hypocritical. The bankers, among the strongest advocates of laissez-faire economics, were only too willing to accept hundreds of billions of dollars from the government in the bailouts that have been a recurring feature of the global economy since the beginning of the Thatcher-Reagan era of “free” markets and deregulation.
The American political system is overrun by money. Economic inequality translates into political inequality, and political inequality yields increasing economic inequality . . . So corporate welfare increases as we curtail welfare for the poor. Congress maintains subsidies for rich farmers as we cut back on nutritional support for the needy. Drug companies have been given hundreds of billions of dollars as we limit Medicaid benefits. The banks that brought on the global financial crisis got billions while a pittance went to the homeowners and victims of the same banks’ predatory lending practices.
The problem of inequality is not so much a matter of technical economics. It’s really a problem of practical politics. Ensuring that those at the top pay their fair share of taxes — ending the special privileges of speculators, corporations and the rich — is both pragmatic and fair . . . Widening and deepening inequality is not driven by immutable economic laws, but by laws we have written ourselves.
1. Based on this report, who benefits the most from current economic policies?
Some 15 years ago, searching for a consistent way to compare wages of equivalent workers across the world, Orley Ashenfelter, an economics professor at Princeton University, came upon McDonald’s. The uniform, highly scripted production methods used throughout the McDonald’s fast-food empire allowed Professor Ashenfelter to compare workers in far-flung countries doing virtually the same thing. The company also offered a natural index to measure the purchasing power of its wages around the world: the price of a Big Mac. Some of his findings are depressing. Real wages — measured in terms of the number of Big Macs they might buy, declined over the first decade of the millennium widely across the industrialized world.
Even before the financial crisis struck, the wages of McDonald’s workers in the United States, many Western European countries, Japan and Canada went nowhere between 2000 and 2007, a period of steady, though unspectacular, economic growth in most of the developed world. In the United States, real wages actually declined . . . Faced with a tightening labor market and besieged by a vocal, combative movement demanding higher wages for America’s worst-paid employees, McDonald’s, Walmart and other large employers of cheap labor have offered modest raises to millions of workers scraping the bottom of the job market.
The battle for public opinion is fought mostly on ethical grounds — pitting the healthy profits of American corporations and the colossal pay of their executives against bottom-end wages that force millions of workers to rely on public assistance to survive. But what is often overlooked in the hypercharged debate about corporate morality is how a similar dynamic is taking hold around the industrialized world.
Lane Kenworthy, a professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego, has disentangled the evolution of household incomes over the last three or four decades. The wages from work, he found, are playing a diminishing role for a growing swath of the labor force . . . A combination of sluggish employment and stagnant wages has forced more families to rely on the public purse in many developed nations.
In Canada, for example, labor market earnings for the bottom fourth of the income ladder grew by roughly $25 a year between 1979 and 2007. Government transfers increased by $78. For Canadian households one rung higher — between the 25th and the 50th percent of the earnings distribution — there were no increases in labor market compensation. All gains came from the government. In Germany — often portrayed as the gold standard of the postindustrial labor market — the entire bottom half of households experienced shrinking earnings from work. They only got ahead because of rising government benefits.
Perhaps it is simply that the demand for skill in the modern job market has grown faster than its supply. The United States, notably, hasn’t increased educational attainment at the rate the labor market requires. And the economy simply doesn’t need as many less-educated workers as it once did.
The top 10 percent of earners took more than half of the country’s total income in 2012, the highest level recorded since the government began collecting the relevant data a century ago, according to an updated study by the prominent economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty. The top 1 percent took more than one-fifth of the income earned by Americans, one of the highest levels on record since 1913, when the government instituted an income tax. The figures underscore that even after the recession the country remains in a new Gilded Age, with income as concentrated as it was in the years that preceded the Depression of the 1930s, if not more so.
High stock prices, rising home values and surging corporate profits have buoyed the recovery-era incomes of the most affluent Americans, with the incomes of the rest still weighed down by high unemployment and stagnant wages for many blue- and white-collar workers.
The income share of the top 1 percent of earners in 2012 returned to the same level as before both the Great Recession and the Great Depression: just above 20 percent, jumping to about 22.5 percent in 2012 from 19.7 percent in 2011 . . . [R]icher households have disproportionately benefited from the boom in the stock market during the recovery, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average more than doubling in value since it bottomed out early in 2009. About half of households hold stock, directly or through vehicles like pension accounts. But the richest 10 percent of households own about 90 percent of the stock, expanding both their net worth and their incomes when they cash out or receive dividends.
The economy remains depressed for most wage-earning families. With sustained, relatively high rates of unemployment, businesses are under no pressure to raise their employees’ incomes because both workers and employers know that many people without jobs would be willing to work for less. The share of Americans working or looking for work is at its lowest in 35 years. There is a glimmer of good news for the 99 percent in the report, though. Mr. Piketty and Mr. Saez show that the incomes of that group stagnated between 2009 and 2011. In 2012, they started growing again — if only by about 1 percent. But the total income of the top 1 percent surged nearly 20 percent that year. The incomes of the very richest, the 0.01 percent, shot up more than 32 percent.
operating or that economies are driven by political decisions? Explain.
This behavior was hardly surprising. Hospitals run for profit are also less likely than nonprofit and government-run institutions to offer services like home health care and psychiatric emergency care, which are not as profitable as open-heart surgery. A shareholder might even applaud the creativity with which profit-seeking institutions go about seeking profit. But the consequences of this pursuit might not be so great for other stakeholders in the system — patients, for instance. One study found that patients’ mortality rates spiked when nonprofit hospitals switched to become profit-making, and their staff levels declined.
These profit-maximizing tactics point to a troubling conflict of interest that goes beyond the private delivery of health care. They raise a broader, more important question: How much should we rely on the private sector to satisfy broad social needs? From health to pensions to education, the United States relies on private enterprise more than pretty much every other advanced, industrial nation to provide essential social services. The government pays Medicare Advantage plans to deliver health care to aging Americans. It provides a tax break to encourage employers to cover workers under 65. Businesses devote almost 6 percent of the nation’s economic output to pay for health insurance for their employees. This amounts to nine times similar private spending on health benefits across the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, on average. Private plans cover more than a third of pension benefits. The average for 30 countries in the O.E.C.D. is just over one-fifth.
Our reliance on private enterprise to provide the most essential services stems, in part, from a more narrow understanding of our collective responsibility to provide social goods. Private American health care has stood out for decades among industrial nations, where public universal coverage has long been considered a right of citizenship. But our faith in private solutions also draws on an ingrained belief that big government serves too many disparate objectives and must cater to too many conflicting interests to deliver services fairly and effectively.
Our trust appears undeserved, however. Our track record suggests that handing over responsibility for social goals to private enterprise is providing us with social goods of lower quality, distributed more inequitably and at a higher cost than if government delivered or paid for them directly.
At the Philips Electronics factory on the coast of China, hundreds of workers use their hands and specialized tools to assemble electric shavers. That is the old way. At a sister factory here in the Dutch countryside, 128 robot arms do the same work with yoga-like flexibility. Video cameras guide them through feats well beyond the capability of the most dexterous human. One robot arm endlessly forms three perfect bends in two connector wires and slips them into holes almost too small for the eye to see. The arms work so fast that they must be enclosed in glass cages to prevent the people supervising them from being injured. And they do it all without a coffee break — three shifts a day, 365 days a year. All told, the factory here has several dozen workers per shift, about a tenth as many as the plant in the Chinese city of Zhuhai.
Take the cavernous solar-panel factory run by Flextronics in Milpitas, south of San Francisco. A large banner proudly proclaims “Bringing Jobs & Manufacturing Back to California!” Yet in the state-of-the-art plant, where the assembly line runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, there are robots everywhere and few human workers. All of the heavy lifting and almost all of the precise work is done by robots that string together solar cells and seal them under glass. The human workers do things like trimming excess material, threading wires and screwing a handful of fasteners into a simple frame for each panel.
Team G: What Happened to the American Boomtown?
The metro areas that offered the highest pay in 2000 have grown by some of the slowest rates since then, while people have flocked to lower-wage metros like Las Vegas, Phoenix and Charlotte, N.C. Similarly, the metros with the highest G.D.P. per capita are barely adding workers relative to much less productive areas. Some people aren’t moving into wealthy regions because they’re stuck in struggling ones. They have houses they can’t sell or government benefits they don’t want to lose. But the larger problem is that they’re blocked from moving to prosperous places by the shortage and cost of housing there. And that’s a deliberate decision these wealthy regions have made in opposing more housing construction, a prerequisite to make room for more people.
Compare that with most of American history. The country’s economic growth has long “gone hand in hand with enormous reallocation of population,” write the economists Kyle Herkenhoff, Lee Ohanian and Edward Prescott in a recent studyof what’s hobbling similar population flows now. Workers moved north during the Great Migration and west out of the Dust Bowl. The lure of the Gold Rush made San Francisco a boomtown after the 1850s. The rise of the auto industry helped triple the size of Detroit between 1910 and 1930. Other northern cities like Cleveland similarly swelled as they became manufacturing hubs. Los Angeles grew to a city of more than a million in the 1920s as film sets, oil wells and aircraft manufacturing promised opportunity. Seattle boomed after World War II, as Boeing did. Houston’s population took off as it became the center of the country’s energy economy.
Posted on January 6, 2019 January 18, 2019 Categories UncategorizedTags curriculum, Decision Making, Economic Policy, Economics, High School, Inquiry, Krugman, TaxesLeave a comment on Economic Law or Political Policy?
Michael Pezone is a retired social studies teacher who taught at the High School for Law Enforcement and Public Safety in Jamaica, Queens. He organized his classes around research and writing projects for teams and individuals, oral presentations, class discussion, and civic action. This project was developed for Participation in Government classes. Many of his students had difficulty presenting their ideas in writing and supporting them with evidence. This project was designed to support students who will be taking the New York State English/Language Arts Regents Exam. Many of the students in his classes took the exam more than once so they can earn a diploma.
While changes in the larger society are needed to address problems like poverty and homelessness, there are things schools can do to help students affected by these issues. Your group is tasked to write a practical and reasonable proposal to the principal to suggest a school wide homework policy that might better serve all students, including our most needy students. (“No more homework, ever!” is NOT a practical proposal). Use information from the documents below as well as outside information to complete the project.
Be 150 words that are extremely well written. Your proposal must be typed in friendly letter format (the format will be projected on the smart board during class).
B. A poster that will be presented in class along with the proposal and may be selected to present to the principal. The poster should contain: A title and student names on the front of the poster; Chart(s), graph(s), and photo(s) that support your proposal, along with captions that explain what each chart, graph, photo shows. The poster should be EXTREMELY attractive with accurate information.
C. Presentations. Each group will present their proposals and posters to the class. All proposals will then be combined into one final proposal. Students will choose a team (two or three students from each class) to present the proposal to the principal. One poster will be chosen for use in the presentation to the principal.
Directions: Read the key term and documents and then complete the group assignment below.
Key Term: “Gentrification” – process of renovation of deteriorated urban neighborhoods by means of the eviction of poor residents to make way for an influx of more affluent residents.
(1) Over 1.1 million children and teens attend more than 1,800 New York City public schools. About one-third of these children live in poverty. In addition, 111,562 students were homeless at some point during the 2016-2017 school year. They are assigned homework, but they have no homes. It is as if these children are trapped in a 19th-century Charles Dickens novel about London’s poor.
(2) New York City is not a Third World country, but 10 percent of its registered students live on the street, in cars, in shelters, in abandoned buildings, in public housing double-ups, and in over-crowded deteriorating tenements with people they do not know. They often don’t have basic food, clothing, and health care, or heat in the freezing winter and air-conditioning in the sweltering summer. They don’t do homework and they don’t do well on standardized tests. Over 60 percent are chronically absent from school.
(3) Homeless children are the collateral damage of gentrification in New York City. Between 2000 and 2015 the Hispanic population of Washington Heights in Manhattan declined by over 10,000 people. There were double-digit percentage declines in Hispanic population in the gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhoods of Greenpoint, Williamsburg and Bushwick. The African American population sharply declined in Harlem and the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant. No one is asking what happened to the children who used to live in these communities.
(4) During his reelection campaign, Mayor Bill de Blasio claimed great advances in addressing homelessness and school performance. These children don’t see it. The governor and his appointees on New York State school accrediting agencies push for more charter schools and lowering teacher qualifications. It is not clear how this will make a difference in the lives of these children. The City Council is discussing a bill that will ensure families applying for places in homeless shelters receive school information. They must be kidding, but the kids don’t get the joke.
(5) Mayor De Blasio, Governor Cuomo and President Trump need to know this: Schools and teachers can do just so much to help homeless children. Children need homes. Their parents need jobs. Authorizing additional charter schools and standardized testing and AP classes are pretend solutions to very real and pressing social problems.
(6) Expect the situation to grow worse. The Trump tax scam will force cuts in a range of federal programs including medical care. Such cuts in social services will be done so that tax breaks for the rich will not increase the national debt too much. Under Trump’s plan, loss of tax breaks for state and local governments will squeeze middle-class taxpayers and force state and local governments to lower taxes and cut spending on vital social services. Already two New Jersey towns have rejected school spending increases that were expected to pass. Children from the poorest families will be amongst the hardest hit.
What percentage of all households with incomes under $50,000 lack a high-speed internet connection?
What percentage of all households with a $50,000 income or higher lack a high-speed internet connection?
Which racial group has the most broadband access?
Which racial group has the least broadband access?
In a full sentence, state the relationship between income level and broadband access.
In a full sentence, answer the question: How does lack of broadband access affect homework completion rates?
their effects on homework completion well organized and logical?
Is your explanation supported by statistics and other evidence?
Is your writing of high quality, typed, with no errors?
Do you follow a simple paragraph format?
Do you properly cite your sources?
Is the information presented accurate?
Is the poster extremely attractive?
captions for each that explain what they are showing?
Does the poster contain a title and student names on front?
Do all group members contribute to the proposal and poster?
Do all group members come on time and follow school rules?
Do all group members behave in a mature manner?
Do all group members take turns presenting their proposal and poster to the class?
As United States citizens we are given the right to vote. This opportunity allows our country to be a democracy and gives people a voice in the government. As a young adult, one would think that our generation would choose to voice their opinions for the future, since it will affect our lives immensely. Unfortunately, many individuals among my generation do not see this as a priority. Young adults, from the ages eighteen to twenty-four have the lowest voting participation rates out of everyone who is eligible to vote. This is due to the Presidential Election in 2016 between Donald J. Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Young adults share their voice and opinions on politics, but when it comes to the polls, they do not vote. Many young adults also believe that they do not have to go and vote because they believe that their voices will not be heard. In this article, I discuss the reasons behind this lack of commitment to the polls. What is the reason that young adults right out of high school do not vote? Is it the lack of teaching politics in social studies classrooms? Or, is the focus of social studies classrooms too dedicated to teaching the same past events? Furthermore, could this turn out be evidence that social studies needs to be renovated? Maybe there needs to be a class that is dedicated to current events and individual responsibility as a citizen that all students must take. I can recall when I was a student in high school, my teachers never fully expressed the importance of voting because we were not old enough to vote at that point in our lives. The presidential election of 2016 should be a warning for adolescents and young adults that our votes, in fact, do matter. All votes matter, but when it comes to the future of the United States, the younger Americans need to vote so our concerns can be handled properly.
I remember, too, when I was in high school four years ago and all my social studies teachers never emphasized the importance of voting. Teachers always briefly stated the importance of the rights that we have, one being the right to vote. Before the 2016 election, there was not a recent election where the younger generation believed that they had to vote. Since the outcome of the election, this was a wakeup call to many people. Many people just believed that the person that they wanted to win, would. When the outcome was the presidential candidate that they did not want, they were the first people to complain all over social media. How can someone complain if they did not actively practice their right to vote? From my past experiences in the field at Ewing High School, my cooperating teacher expressed to the students how important it is to vote. We collaborated on a lesson about Andrew Jackson and tracing his presidency from his actions as a common man to his actions as having “king-like qualities”. Our students were curious on our views on the past election and what we believed. Together, we were honest with them. We expressed how significant it is to do your research, hear everyone’s side, and develop your own beliefs. We discussed the voter turnout and why their vote will matter someday. It is important for students to be taught that when they are of age to go out and make their voices heard.
After researching why, it is that the younger generation does not vote, I found out that the average age that voted in the 2016 election was fifty-seven (Strauss, 2018). These means that all the reforms and laws that the younger generation wants to be passed, will not. All new laws, reforms, acts, will be towards what the older generation needs. Carolyn DeWitt and Maureen Costello state that, “If there is one thing we believe in America, we believe in government of the people, by the people, for the people.” and later explain that American citizens, “…haven’t learned how to register to vote. They haven’t learned the best way to influence their elected representatives. They haven’t learned that they have power.” (Strauss, 2018). How can we be a democracy that countries want to mimic if we cannot get our own to get up and vote? Have Americans stopped caring or are we too lazy to vote? Joel Stein explains the millennial turnout and states that he, “calls millennials the “narcissistic generation,” and Jean Twenge says they are the “me generation,” stuck to their phones and uninterested in politics.” (Dalton, 2016). I do believe that millennials and people who are younger are addicted to their phones. Social media overtakes people’s lives, day to day. Instead of going out to make sure their vote counts, they will voice their opinions on Twitter or Facebook hoping that by posting their opinion it will help the vote. I agree, it is essential to voice your opinions, but if you are not going to act, then why are you choosing to not vote?
I always ask my peers why they do not bother to go vote because I understood the importance of this aspect my whole life. The answer I frequently receive is, “Because my vote won’t make a difference”. This answer, I personally feel is a selfish statement. Every vote matters no matter who you are or what you believe. If everyone who did not believe in their vote, voted, then the voter turnout would be completely different. Health care is so prominent because it is what most older people want for themselves. If the younger generation would go out and vote we could help our education systems and our futures. Caroline Beaton expresses that, “In 2016, we view engaging in politics as a personal choice, not a civic obligation.” (Beaton, 2016). This is accurate because many younger people see voting as an option and not an obligation. They believe it is not their civic duty to express what they want. If people were educated more on voting and constantly informed on the importance of it, I believe that they would go out and exercise their right to vote.
I have hope for my generation in the 2020 election. The past election was, without a doubt, a wakeup call. This article is not intended to bash the younger generation, however, to express my aspiration for them to be more active participants in the future of our country. We are the future and I believe that we will come together as one fighting for what we believe.
Integration is still sought out and remains a goal of the educational system. Diversity is something that schools want because of its positive outcomes. New Jersey is one of the most diverse states but also one of the most segregated in the nation (Clark, 2018). So how is it possible that integration is not achieved? Matt Delmont’s book titled Why Busing Failed gives a general clue as to why integration hasn’t been achieved. Many may argue that busing failed, the argument has been made repeatedly, each time looking at different reasons, typically political. However, the first proponents of busing desired it because they believed it was their moral duty and that it would improve the condition of predominantly black schools. The opponents of integration through busing believe that it is not necessary and ineffective and as a result continue to uphold segregation.
To this day opinions of busing are mixed. There are individuals who wished more would be done about the situation; some think that there is unfinished business. Then there are those that are happy that it got done away with in the 1990s beginning with the Missouri v. Jenkins case. The primary result of this case was that the court ruled that a unitary education system had been achieved, therefore the state did not need to fund programs that were typically used to achieve integration. The attitude shifted due to “a lack of rising test scores” (Missouri v. Jenkins, 2018). The test scores not increasing meant that the integrated schools had done all that they could. This court decision would act as a domino effect around the country Busing was the primary method of integration in the past. It became nationally accepted in 1971 with the Supreme Court ruling that districts do indeed have the right to bus students to different schools to achieve racial integration. Despite that the decision, years later it became acceptable to take away funding from busing and integration programs once “unitary status” had been achieved. This is where busing began to be seen as a failure. Delmont argues: “Anti bussers and politicians succeeded in stopping full scale busing” (Cornish, 2016). Others were upset that busing had been done away with because they thought it was a great cause. “Busing was a major success” (Lang, Erdman, & Handley, 2016). a quote by Arthur Griffin, a former superintendent of Charlotte schools in North Carolina. He said in a documentary that he was one of the students that experienced integration and that he was thankful for it. People like him are not rare cases. There are as many people who speak fondly of busing as there are those who opposed it. The truth is that the causes for failed busing are strongly linked to people’s opinions. There are many opinions that will continue to be studied by historians to provide different narratives as to why true integration failed. “Society in general expected school desegregation to solve too many things” (Tilove, 1992).
Based on research from busing and integration in the 1970s, this paper focuses on how in the modern United States, specifically New Jersey, there are still examples of segregation. It is common knowledge that the United States values equality, especially in education. This means that there should be equal opportunity. After all, in America if you work hard enough you can succeed. This belief however was not always around. It became cemented into American society when with a set of court decisions in the twentieth century. The most recognizable decision is Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS. The decision most remembered for stating that schools cannot be separate but equal.
The most memorable piece of legislation when it comes to integration of the school system is Brown v. Board of Education, it was the foundation of the values of education in America and the first proponent of integration. Its importance cannot be denied when discussing reform to the schools. It laid down the foundation for what would be motivation to improve all schools (Wraga, 2006). The Supreme Court’s reasoning for ruling the way it did also established a set of beliefs about the American education system that would serve for the coming years as goals to be achieved and beliefs to live by. It would take many years before the nation would collectively start working to end segregation. After the civil rights act, and five more court cases, the government issued an ultimatum due to the delay in desegregation plans. The importance is that this could not have been possible without Brown v. Board of Education. The values were summarized by a Princeton newspaper article written in the twilight of busing, “It put forth a vision based on the highest principles and ideals this nation had to offer. These aimed to create a better America, a better society, by improving education for all children and by relieving both whites and blacks of their senses of guilt and inferiority, respectively” (Adieh, 1993).
Brown’s decision created values and from that point on the goals of reformers would be drawn to not only change the school system, but society. We first must look at the beginning of the movement towards school integration. Brown versus the Board of Education of Topeka; It is an argument in the historiography that has been beaten on society over and over, but nonetheless will forever hold importance in our nation, and especially in education. This court decision was truly meaningful to society. It was just supposed to be about reform, about education, but the court’s decision on the issue led to values and implications that changed the nation. If the schools were not to be segregated then why would anything have to be segregated? William G. Wraga wrote a short excerpt titled The Heightened Significance of Brown v. Board of Education in our Time. In this he argued what most historians have been arguing for the sixty plus years since the ruling; that Brown v. Board of Education was more than just a school ruling. “By insisting that all students attend school under the same roof, the high court affirmed both the importance of the concept of equal educational opportunity and, implicitly, the unifying function of public education in a Democracy” (Wraga, 2006). This was indeed the start of an affirmation by the government of the value of equality in which education was seen in many areas of the world throughout history to carry.
From the time between Brown v. Board of Education and the court decision of Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education there were other decisions in the fifteen year span. It wasn’t until the Alexander v. Holme’s decision that the government called for immediate action (Lang, Erdman, & Handley, 2016). There would be no more stalling. The Supreme Court having to make decisions after Brown proved that the latter was not enough to fix the segregation problem. The cases had to be brought to court by people who were demanding their rights since the court themselves can’t create cases. The opposition to integrated schools was prevalent throughout the twentieth century.
Busing was opposed even by presidents, Nixon was a key example. “the integration of schools, so that they will be racially balanced. This is a policy that requires busing, and it is this policy that Mr. Nixon and the Republican platform oppose when they oppose busing” (Bickel, 1972, p. 21). The Republican party gained a lot of support because of their open disapproval of busing. This meant that there was a large number of individuals out there that was not for having black and white students go to school together. The reasons varied, but generally they believed the government was wrong for imposing integration on the people. “Forced busing is depriving 90% of the American people of their civil rights and its unconstitutional” (Ruffra, 1974, p. 122).
White Americans do not support busing or school reforms that involve integration to this day. The source What Americans Think about Their Schools is a compilation of research that was put together through surveys. The survey would ask different Americans of various backgrounds questions on what they thought about the school system and the schools their children attended. What was found was that Americans generally wanted change in education. Americans both care about their schools and want them to improve. Though adults give the nation’s public schools only mediocre grades—a plurality confer a “C”—they are willing to invest more money in public education and they are reasonably confident that doing so will improve student learning” (Howell, 2017). Everyone seems to want the education system to improve, and are willing to pay to make those changes.
There is a reform that is being proposed to improve the education of low income students. Since typically low income students come from schools that are typically minorities, the schools that are generally attended by a majority of white students have higher incomes, thus better opportunities, and as a result better education. An example of this is Hopewell Valley Central High School which is ninety percent white as opposed to Trenton Central High school which was majority black with a very small white population. The reform calls for, “proposals to enable parents, especially low-income parents, to exercise greater choice over their children’s education through school vouchers, tax credits, charter schools, or home schooling” (New Jersey Department of Education, 2017). These reforms are trying to be introduced with the goal of creating equal opportunities for all students despite their background. Reforms like this have the values of Brown v. Board of Education in mind.
It seems that a lot of Americans, especially white Americans, still don’t want reforms that include the government intermingling the races. This attitude is the same as it was when busing first began in the 1990s. One argument against busing that many would probably still agree with today, from a Kentucky organization in the 1970s to oppose busing: “It is true, some districts are rich in children, but poor with poverty, but because some of our children must suffer from poverty–should we insist the rest suffer along with them?” (Ruffra, 1974, p. 122). Integration and plans that involve the education system being equitable. Are often seen as negative by White Americans, because they feel that their children’s level of education should not be reduced to aid the education of others. This has not changed, and is evident that it has not changed when going back to look at the research data on what parents think about education reform. “A plurality of the general public supports choice initiatives. African Americans and Hispanics express more support for school choice than do white Americans”. The fact that the African American and Hispanic population are more willing to reform the system means that they are not content with it. A majority of white Americans however want to keep things the same. This means that they think their educational system should not be tampered with as they are satisfied. “Few education reforms inspire as much debate as do proposals to provide low-income families with vouchers that would allow them to send their children to private schools” (Howell, 2017). This is yet another example of a group of privileged individuals wanting to keep others out.
Since the early days where the government proposed desegregation there had been individuals that were against the idea. When there was no more legally mandated segregation but instead segregation by the people, the idea of integration was introduced. Though integration became enforced by law, many found ways to oppose it. “Forced busing has created an economic segregation…Parents who could afford to have enrolled their c0hildren in private schools to avoid crosstown busing, thereby segregating the underprivileged from the more affluent” (Ruffra, 1972, p. 122). This then becomes an issue that is beyond the power of the government. Private schools are not illegal, but they’re existence harms the cause of integration. That is one reason why New Jersey is still very segregated. Most of the schools in America are as well, but there is one example of reintroduced busing in Boston that might spark a movement to busing a second chance. “But while integration is still a process, METCO has made a big difference in education. The most recent research of the program shows that nearly 90 percent of METCO’s black and Latino students graduate from high school on time, and they score higher on state achievement tests than their peers in Boston Public Schools” (Cornish, 2016). The METCO program acts much in the same way that busing did. It takes students away from schools in their neighborhood and sends them to majority white schools in a different area. The program cites success in improving the education of minority students and thus fulfilling the values of educational equality of Brown v. Board of Education. We are still nowhere near an equal educational state but perhaps we can give integration a second chance and change that.
Adieh, B. (1993). Princeton periodicals. Daily Princetonian. Retrieved from https://lapa.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/fellow_ahdieh_cv.pdf.
Bickel, A.M. (1972). Busing: What’s to be done? New Republic, 167 (12), 21.
Missouri v. Jenkins Case summary and case brief.(2018). Legal Dictionary. Retrieved from https://legaldictionary.net/missouri-v-jenkins/.
Ruffra, J. (1974). Should Congress curtail the use of busing for school desegregation? Congressional Digest, 53 (4), 122.
Wraga, W.G. (2006). The heightened significance of Brown v. Board of Education in our time. Phi Delta Kappan, 6, 424.

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