The Librarian as Teacher, the Teacher as Learning Coach, and the Student Driving the Bus

There has been a great volume being written as of late about how instruction will happen in the fall - remote and totally online, face to face with safe social distancing, or some hybrid.  I wonder, however, whether the right question has yet to be asked.  The pieces about modality of instruction take for granted the subject matter of what will be taught.  In other words, these pieces are as conservative as they could possibly be in regard to replicating how instruction was done before the pandemic.  But a sober assessment of how things were going in that pre-pandemic state would conclude that they weren't going very well at all. Within higher ed, there has been a well-documented mental health crisis among students, which the pandemic has exacerbated.  Why not, then, opt for more radical change in an attempt to address some of the underlying issues with instruction and do that for K-12 as well as for higher ed.  This piece doesn't offer a full plan along these lines, but I hope it suggests enough that others would feel it useful to flesh out the details more.

Let's begin with a mental picture for what is being argued here.  The young Abe Lincoln who read by the light of the fire serves as an iconic representation of the solitary learner, who learns primarily through reading.  While we have no image of this, we might imagine Lincoln lying on his bed afterwards, reflecting on what he read, processing what he has been learning by asking whether it confirms his prior beliefs, challenges those beliefs, or is unrelated to his earlier thinking. Maybe some of that reflection have happened while still reading the book, pausing after a particularly interesting or challenging passage to make better sense of what he had read.  And perhaps he would reread this portion or something earlier in the book, to verify he was understanding the book well and drawing interesting conclusions from it.  Lincoln would do this entirely at his own pace and he'd be the one selecting what to read from what was available.  This is what I mean in my title by the student driving the bus.  Readers might prefer saying that the student engages in self-teaching.

Now let's consider how typical instruction occurred before the pandemic. The instructor selects the material to be read and makes the lesson plan for how that material will be covered in class.  The student's understanding of the material is subsequently assessed in a test, which is high stakes in that it matters a lot for the course grade, and the date of which is pre-specified.   There may be homework given after the material is presented in class that provides assessment in a lower stakes manner and serves as preparation for the test.  I've discussed the underlying dynamics of the situation in a post called, Why does memorization persist as the primary way college students study to prepare for exams?  The upshot is that while students may get reasonable grades under this approach, they are mostly playing an artificial game that produces only surface learning.  Indeed, school becomes a charade, regarding learning, yet still seems essential, for getting a good job after graduation.  The approach doesn't encourage nurture of the student intellectually, which is what school really should be about.  In my view, the vast mental health issues that college students currently face is mainly a consequence of this underlying dynamic.

It is important to ask (and then understand) why students don't opt for self-teaching instead, taking each class as a second path to the subject matter, while they've already or simultaneously are following their own path through the material.  Of course, some students do this.  Indeed, they self-teach outside of their coursework as well.  But such students are comparatively rare.   For the rest, consider the following:

1) There is huge pressure on students now to have a good GPA to get a good return on investment.  As tuition has been hyper inflationary for much of the past 40 years or so, (at least till the pandemic changed things) this pressure is much higher on students today than it was on me and my cohort when we went to college (in the mid 1970s).

2) Online technologies, particularly mobile devices, have had a negative impact on student reading, especially reading for pleasure.  (I'm not counting reading text messages.  I'm talking about long form reading - books magazine articles, etc.)  Students "learn" to skim rather than to read carefully and digest what they are reading.  Indeed, because they don't get enough practice at this, many students can't make good meaning of long form pieces, even if they were to put in the time to read them slowly.

3) Self-teaching seems slower and is apparently more time consuming than the alternative - to memorize the lecture notes.  This is almost certainly true at first, but someone who has a firmer understanding of foundational material can make better sense of new ideas that are built on that foundation.  Someone who memorizes only can't do this.

4) As the memorization habit hardens over the years, the student loses self-confidence as a learner.  This lack of self-confidence contributes to the student's stress.

The above is evident to me from the college teaching I've done at the University of Illinois.  Now I want to make an additional claim, for which I have far less evidence in support, but which I believe nonetheless based on my own experience.  An adult skill, part of what is referred to as "chin up leadership" is to make sense of complexity, which as I argued in this piece, Q: Did you read the book?  A: No, but I saw the movie, is to produce a narrative, one that tries to fit the facts, including those that seem to contradict the prior held worldview.  (Those who have confirmation bias tend to ignore those unpleasant facts.) We also produce a narrative when we try to make sense of what we read.  The information comes in a different way with reading (when I was a campus administrator most of the information I got came by having conversations with a variety of people on campus or with my peers at other campuses around the country) but the sense making is essentially the same.   Thus, self-teaching via reading and reflection is excellent preparation for assuming a leadership position later in life.  (It is not sufficient, as one needs good schmooze skills to be a leader. I won't otherwise talk about schmooze skills in this post, but one should keep it in mind.  College isn't producing that either but, to be fair, it's my view that those skills should develop outside of courses, not in them, and students need to want to have conversations with others unlike themselves that would develop those skills.)

Points (1) - (4) above provide the basis for a kind of Prisoner's Dilemma that many students operate under.  I will add one further point, that students over program themselves with extracurricular activities, mainly for resume building rather than for intrinsic interest in the activity.  If other students didn't do this, the student wouldn't feel obligated to be over programmed.  But since everyone else is doing it, the student can't afford not to.  This is the logic of the Prisoner's Dilemma that each student faces.  One wonders, is there anything that can cut through all of this to get the student to take a different approach, one where the student drives the bus?  I have been vexed by this question for quite some time.

I've written several posts over the years with each trying to answer this question, the answers being partial, speculative, and quite idealistic. The current post adds one more to the sequence.  Before putting some flesh on the items in the title, let me give a quick run through of those earlier posts and in so doing get to one other critical point. Learning requires some articulation of the thinking.  This can happen by producing some object that is a consequence of the learning. For the introvert, it might be the expected modality.  For the extrovert, instead, this will happen via conversation with a friend or colleague who is receptive to talking about the ideas.  Still a third alternative is to write about it.  This sort of writing is externalized conversation and what you might do if you have no object to produce and no friend to have a chat with.  This is why I turned to writing blog posts, now more than 15 years ago.  It didn't just occur to me to do that.  I had some prior frustration, writing what I thought were interesting comments on a listserv I participated in.  Those comments failed to generate the type of response I was hoping for.  So I tried, instead, to write out in the open where anyone could access what I said. Writing of this sort, the author has a conversation with an imagined reader and then hopes that real readers find the discussion interesting and useful. Sometimes the real readers indicate that with their comments, which are greatly appreciated when they show the writing has hit the mark.  Comments are also helpful even when the writing is a near miss.  The author always benefits from hearing the views of real readers to learn how their reactions differ from the those of the imagined reader whom the author was writing to.

Some years later I first tried to teach a class where the students did weekly blogging.   The class was for students in the Campus Honors Program and a subtext of the course was leadership.  By then I had come to believe there was substantial overlap between learning and leadership.  So, given my own blogging and the example of others who did use blogging for instruction, this seemed like a natural thing to do. Nonetheless this experiment produced several surprises for me.  The biggest of these was that many of the students were quiet in the classroom, preferring to listen to the flow of discussion rather than participate in it as contributors.  This was a small seminar class with high caliber students and I had not experienced this before when I taught CHP classes, though it turned out to be a portent to my later teaching. Further, most of the quiet students found their voices in writing their blog posts, while several of the very vocal students in class had a much harder time doing this online writing.  I took the lessons I learned from that experience and applied them to my subsequent teaching after I retired in the Economics of Organizations, a class for upper level students in the major, which I tried to teach in discussion mode though there were many more students than in the CHP classes, and many of the Econ students demonstrated the issues with reading for understanding that I described above.

The versions of my class in fall 2012, 2013, and 2014 went reasonably well, even with the issues of student reading that I mentioned.  But in 2015 there was a noticeable drop off in the class and I became discouraged about teaching as a result. I'm not sure why this drop off happened, but for the first time I started to wonder whether my own particular interventions in student learning were doomed to fail because those interventions amounted to too little and too late.  So I wrote this post,  The Holistic First-Year College Course - A Non-Solution.  It envisioned extending the type of interventions I had been doing in my upper level class and instead doing them in a seminar for first-year students that would be so intensive it would be the only course students would take.  Regarding intensity of intervention, it had a chance to significantly impact how students go about their learning.  But it was non-solution for several reasons.  The biggest were: (a) what students would want to opt into this alternative instead of taking the regular curriculum being offered? (b) teaching the class represented way too much work for an individual instructor so even if it were tried once with me that instructor that probably couldn't be replicated, and (c) the campus wants to think its current way of doing things in the classroom is reasonably effective, so an experiment that demonstrated otherwise would be unwelcome. In spite of those limitations, I found the overall idea intriguing, so I didn't abandon the notion altogether.

A few years later I wrote another post in this vein, A Summer Camp for Teaching College-Level Reading and Learning to Learn.  It addressed some of the deficiencies in the prior post.  The intervention would be even earlier in the student's career, the summer after 11th grade.  The selection problem was addressed as well.  Academic summer programs for high school students typically attract elite students.  The students chosen for this summer camp would be different, closer to average students.  It also explicitly got at teaching how to read better and in so doing incorporated both individualized reading (where the student does drive the bus) with common group reading, along with appropriate feedback for both types of reading.   The downside in the proposal is that it would be quite expensive.  To get the students to be willing to participate they would need to be paid at approximately the same rate as if they were working a summer job.  This was assumed necessary to get them willing to participate and to keep them engaged in the camp rather than goof off. The staff would need to be compensated as well.  So this idea would require some foundation to buy in and support it as an experiment for several years.  I wouldn't know how to pitch this to a foundation, but if we ever get past the pandemic, maybe somebody else would take up the mantle and make the summer camp for college reading a reality.  If that were to happen and if in tracking the students who did attend it turned out they performed better in college than their observationally equivalent peers, then maybe subsequent camps could charge the families of the attendees and make the idea sustainable.  Alternatively, maybe some of the ideas could filter down into the high schools (and junior high schools) to encourage students to read better and be more self-directed in their learning.

This more recent post, Is Now an Apt Time for College Students to Embrace The Creative Attitude? was written after the pandemic hit and stay-at-home orders were issued.  It makes note of a rather grim economic fact that might defeat the Prisoner's Dilemma logic students had been dealing with prior to the pandemic.  The labor market, previously strong for college grads and college students seeking internships, has become very soft. Further there is a great deal of uncertainty as to how long it will stay that way.  The academic credentials students have already amassed have depreciated accordingly.  The incentive to acquire yet additional academic credentials has diminished as a result.  Further, the quality of instruction during the pandemic may reasonably be expected to diminish to accommodate the safety needs.  That too may diminish the value of the academic credentials.  So, a good case can be made for a student to take a gap year while staying at home.  Then, instead of merely idling or doing waste of time activities, the student could engage in reading and learning to self-teach that way.  The opportunity is there to do that and it might be the best alternative that is available to the student.

Would the student stick with it?  If the student is living with mom and dad and if they can't tell whether the student is engaged in serious reading and self-teaching, then this might require more discipline than the student can muster.  Further, if we now bring in the student's mental health into the picture, with the student apt to be feeling anxious and depressed, won't that make it even less likely that the student would stick with it?  So, one wonders if academic resources were brought to bear to help the student, could that improve the likelihood that the student will persevere and develop self-teaching skills that will last a lifetime. This post will noodle on that possibility.

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Pretty early in the semester when I teach Economics of Organizations, I tell the students they must learn the line, assume a can opener, as part of their general education in economics.  A little while later I gesticulate wildly while telling them that if I'm waving my hands, that means I'm giving a bs explanation and they shouldn't take it seriously.   I don't have an answer here as to how to address the business processes that would need to be aligned to make the proposal here make sense.  So, I'm waving my hands here.  Let me illustrate those business process issues.

If a student does take a gap year, how can the university devote resources to that student as there will be no tuition paid in this instance?  Alternatively, if the student opts to take independent study credits and thus pays tuition, will that bring forth the requisite university resources?  I want to note that during the time I've taught since retirement I got paid under contract each time I taught my class.  I've also served as the adviser for independent study projects that students would do.  I only did that for students I had taught previously.  And I did that as a volunteer activity.  Traditionally, such work was simply part of the service that faculty do.  It wouldn't warrant an overload payment.   Then, too, there are limits in place for how many credits can be taken as independent study.  So, if the student was paying tuition, then it would be rational to take other courses that in total would add up to a full load.  But that would end up completely defeating the purpose in taking time out to learn about self-teaching via reading.

On the other hand (remember that Harry Truman wanted a one-arm economist because he hated the phrase, on the other hand) those who follow the news in higher ed are aware that many faculty are losing their jobs at universities that are experiencing declining enrollments and don't have the revenues coming in to keep paying these faculty.  What will these people who are laid off do?  Would they want to give a try at being a learning coach for a college student, provided that they could make a few shekels from doing so?  There is also that the experience from this past spring is that instruction can be delivered online, even if the quality in doing so is a a step or two down from face-to-face instruction.  Might online instruction coupled with individual learning coaches end up as the new form by which learning takes place at the college level, especially if students en masse succeed in developing their own self-teaching skills under that approach?   I have no answer to that question.  I bring it up here now, simply to suggest that the new normal after the pandemic is over may be quite unlike what teaching and learning was like before we ever heard of the coronavirus.  And if that is possible, then experiments now to demonstrate the viability of an alternative approach may make sense.

The connection between student reading and student performance, particularly in college, is understood but it remains in the background.  Implicitly, the teaching and learning centers on our campuses around the country have whitewashed the issue by advocating that if the instructor applies the right pedagogical approach then real learning will occur, independent of the student's reading.  I think we need to back away from that idea.  Instead, it should be paramount that students learn to direct their own learning through their reading.  For elementary school children, this is a natural goal, one that I believe was achieved by the better students of my day.  For students who have graduated from high school, this is much more of a challenge.  Brain plasticity will tend to be far less for such students.  Nevertheless, given that the pandemic has made school anything but business as usual, this is an opportunity to try and make headway with those students who want to give it a go.

To show what I have in mind, I'm going to begin with my own elementary school experience and use it as metaphor for how things might work now.  We had two different types of reading instruction.  One was individualized reading, where the kid chose the book to read for that week.  On making that choice I had different pathways.  My dad would take me to the Windsor Park Public Library on Saturday.  I would return the book from the week before and then go to look for this week's book.  Early on, the librarian showed me where to look for books that might interest me.  Later, as I began to understand the library layout, I would do that myself.  Something similar happened with the library at P.S. 203.  And my parents also bought us a fair number of books that were on the bookshelf at home. So I had ample materials from which to choose.  Each student kept a notebook where the student entered the date when reading the book was completed, the book title, and a sentence about the book.  Once in a while there was a student-teacher conference to discuss the readings.  The teacher would use the notebook entries to make the conference more valuable.  Also, there were book reports done in class by a few students who had read the same book.  This provided another way to see what the students were getting out of the reading plus it was marketing of the book to other students in the class.  Some of the individualized reading happened from magazines (Weekly Reader, Junior Scholastic) rather than from books.  I don't recall how that was incorporated into the process, but with that I do want to note the variety of readings available to students.

The other method of reading instruction was SRA, which aimed at developing the student's reading comprehension and reading speed.  For elementary school kids, perhaps the two are both important.  For college kids, I care a great deal about reading comprehension but not much at all about reading speed. Much more important is whether the student can become absorbed in the reading and make that the student's total universe.  As the students these days are so into multiprocessing, this itself is an enormous challenge.

There is a question about whether the individualized reading informed the SRA and vice versa.  To the extent that this is about working vocabulary, students probably can't make good sense of the reading when many of the words are unknown to them and they don't have the patience to stop and look up those words.  The SRA approach was to use the color of the materials as an indicator of reading difficulty.   I don't recall any attempt to line up the individualized reading with what color I was currently on in SRA.  Maybe that happened unbeknownst to me.  But perhaps the librarian's guidance about books I might choose wasn't informed that way.  Likewise, my parents may not have gotten outside advice regarding the books they purchased for me. It is an issue we'll return to below.

I developed a pattern with my booking reading.  I would start with one book in a new genre.  For example, I received a birthday present (perhaps when I was 9, maybe when I was 10) of The Black Stallion's Sulky Colt. I liked it.  Then I would get other books by Walter Farley in the Black Stallion series from the library.  Eventually I would stop with this line of reading, either because my interest waned or because I had read all the books that were available.  At this point, I was ready to start on a new genre. This is where I might solicit a recommendation from a librarian or from my teacher.  (In sixth grade the school librarian was my teacher.) The new genre could be quite different from the previous one. I was open then to different possibilities and not nearly as locked into what I like to read as I am as an adult.  But it may be that the librarians and teachers could offer up their recommendations for me based on their experience with other kids, so I was likely to be happy with their suggestions.  That too is an issue we'll consider below.

For the truth in advertising part of this piece, there are pleasure reading books I've started as an adult that I never finished.  (Gravity's Rainbow and Ulysses are the two obvious ones.  They are both still on my to-do list, but there is no sense of urgency in getting back to them.)  And there are academic readings that either I did read through but didn't understand much of it (Keynes' General Theory) or could only get through part of it, without understanding the bit I did read (Kant's Critique of Pure Reason).  But I chose the titles here specifically because they are tough readings, which even good readers might not get through or make good meaning of.  My focus in the below is on readings meant for adults but are intended for a broad audience.  My contention is that college students at the University of Illinois should be able to make good meaning of such pieces.

Here is an example from that CHP class I taught where I first used blogging in my teaching.  Let me remind the reader that CHP students are among the elite students on campus.  We had a class session early in the semester on Atul Gawande's essay The Bell Curve, one of my favorite pieces and a good read even now. Subject-matter-wise, I thought students would have intrinsic interest in this particular piece, as it is about what it takes to really achieve excellence in a situation where performance can actually be measured objectively.  During the prior sessions (this was the fourth class session) I had led the discussion.  After the third one, the students expressed a desire to have more control, and I acceded to their request.  This was the first session under these new group dynamics and it may have mattered for the outcome.  Also, I had instituted post-class surveys so students would comment about how the discussion went that included Likert-style questions and a paragraph question where the students could comment.

The session itself was interesting for me in that I bit my lip on several occasions rather than chime in, though I had the urge to do that. But the session was a failure in terms of making good meaning of Gawande's essay.  As is my wont, I wrote a review and critique of that session and posted it to the class site.  We changed our in-class method after that to be a hybrid where the students led some of the time and I led at other times.  And we didn't have a replication of this instance where the students didn't make good meaning of the reading, but I'm not sure if that's because they worked harder to understand things or if I gave the answer as to what the reading was about earlier in the discussion. To the extent that it was the latter and the students were still not making good meaning of what they read, I'm quite sure the explanation was lack of practice in doing so.  As I mentioned above, the quiet students actually produced more interesting writing in their blog posts, some evidence that they were getting the readings but didn't feel compelled to show that in class.

I want to relay one more example.  This one does not involve an elite student and happened a few years later.  It was the only time I supervised an independent study from a student who didn't get an A from me in the prior class.  This student was kind of awkward in communicating but eventually did signal an interest in doing more economics under my supervision.  Since we had students blogging as a mechanism already from the prior course, I suggested he read a piece or two, then write a post about what he read, and I would comment on that and we'd go from there.  The first piece I recommended was The Streak of Streaks by Stephen Jay Gould. Although Gould was an evolutionary biologist, this is a foundational essay in Behavioral Economics, especially the part of the essay where he introduces Linda the Bank Teller.  The essay was a book review on the subject of Joe Dimaggio's famous streak, getting a hit in 56 straight games.  The underlying question - was Dimaggio on a hot streak?  Or was this something to expect normally from a hitter as excellent as he was?  Underlying this is whether we humans perceive a player to be hot even when that's not really happening.  The student disappointed me by writing about some other baseball player, which for reasons that elude me, he thought was appropriate.  He didn't address any of the issues in Gould's essay.  I expressed my irritation in comments on the post.  Soon thereafter he dropped the independent study and took his blog down. Our expectations about how the independent study would unfold never came close to being aligned.

I have had subsequent independent studies that went well and cases where students have shown they made good meaning from the assigned readings.  But there have also been incidents where the students clearly didn't get it and, I fear, the latter is far more frequent than we care to admit at the college level.  This provides one strong reason why the students want to memorize the lecture notes and spit back the results on the exams. But even if they get satisfactory grades this way, it should count as a failure of the system, not a success.

* * * * *

Let's now begin with the following question.  How would one go about assessing a student's current reading level, where the assessment itself was either neutral or actually encouraging the student to do additional reading post assessment?  My view is that it must be assessment via friendly conversation, not via written test, and that conversation itself must be seen as part of an ongoing conversation that will persist thereafter.   Imagine that it is the librarian doing the assessment but for the purpose of identifying interesting reading materials for the student, not to report the results externally. The student may have expressed interest in certain subject matter, so if possible, at least some of the readings on which the assessment will be based should pertain to that subject matter.  But other readings might be more generic, so to better make comparisons with other students, and then identify popular readings from that peer group which might be shared with the student.

If the reading program envisioned in this post is even modestly successful, the student should grow in reading ability and confidence, which one would hope contributes to the student wanting to embrace self-teaching. So, an assessment done once, up front, will have a limited shelf life.  Further the assessments themselves will be imprecise. This gives a reason to do them periodically and thus explains why there should be an ongoing conversation between the student and the librarian.  It may also be that at a time before the next assessment is scheduled the student requests recommendations for other reading, outside the genre of the current readings, or within the genre if all current readings have been read.  Perhaps this sort of request can be handled by an email exchange.  But my experience is that students are frequently quite imprecise in their formative thinking.  So, it may warrant a conversation as well to get at what the student really wants.

There then is the question, how does the student get access to the readings after receiving the recommendations from the librarian?  I'm not current on how that question might be answered, but I do want to note here that students from lower income households might well be at a disadvantage.  If they would otherwise benefit from this program, their access issues must be resolved in a way that they have as much access as every other student in the program.  Whether this is done by providing eReaders and having downloads of rentals that the program pays for or having paper reading materials circulate via the mail, I cannot say.  The program needs to find a solution that is reasonably effective.  I want to note, in addition, that effectiveness must balance access to the materials with combating the student tendency to multiprocess with their smartphones.  Reading long form material should demand full concentration by the student and print may be better able to facilitate that.  It should be the librarian who acts as the agent of the student in providing good access to reading material, as providing access to reading materials is a normal library function.  The program will flounder unless this function is done well.

Let us turn to the coaching of the student. For some it may seem strange to think of the teacher as the coach, but not the one who sets the readings.  The coaching part is fully consistent with Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) principles.  Teaching is response.  Teaching is answering a student question.  Teaching is commenting on a student paper.  Teaching is being empathetic when a student expresses a negative opinion about what is happening in the course and then offering supportive advice to help the student counter the negativity. We still conceive of teaching as lecture and thus the language - to deliver instruction - remains part of the vernacular.  (I really wish we could abandon that phrase, but it seems too embedded to do that.)

Now don't get me wrong.  I loved to lecture on the math models in my economics classes, filling the blackboard with equations written in chalk or with appropriate diagrams that are hand drawn, particularly when I was teaching graduate courses.  And lecture is surely the way the vast majority of presentations to professional audiences are conducted.  But those audiences possess strong self-teaching skills, and many will have read the paper before the professional presentation has begun.  That is not the situation with typical undergraduates, at least the ones I've seen in my classes.  We've already been through how they behave in points (1) - (4) above.  This effort is intended to make these students strong self-teachers.  They won't be that at the outset.  Lecture is not a good approach for such an audience.

Now let's turn to how the coaching will seem from the student perspective.  Because the student drives the bus, the coaching must be opt-in for the student.  In other words, if the student prefers the student can simply meet with the librarian on occasion and otherwise go it alone.  And if the student tries that for a while, begins to flounder, but doesn't want to give up, the student can opt into the coaching then.  This needs to be made plain to the student up front.  With that, the student should be encouraged to have a first meeting with the coach, just to see how it goes.  Thereafter, the student can control how frequently future meetings are scheduled and what the student would like to see get done at those meetings.

Critical, then, is for the coach to earn the student's trust and make good steps toward that in the first meeting.  On the specifics of that conversation, I would leave it to the participants.  But on the tone, the coach must be gentle and judgmental/non-judgmental, a term I'd like to explain further.  In a nutshell, the student needs feedback about how things might be done better.  To determine appropriate feedback of that sort, the coach needs to understand the situation as much as possible.  That's the judgmental part.  On the other hand, there is absolutely no reason to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down on the student performance until now. In education circles that is called summative assessment.  The coaching should refrain from it.  Progress can be made and when that happens the progress needs to be noted.  Still more progress can be made after that.

I have some experience coaching students and wrote about it here. Some of the students in that CHP class wanted the coaching.  This is the sort of student I'd envision wanting to participate in the reading program.  Some of the particulars of the coaching are discussed in that Summer Camp post linked above.  One real reason that students don't make good meaning of what they read is that they don't understand that the reader needs to provide some context in order to get at what the writer is driving at.  Absent appropriate context, there can be substantial misinterpretation of what is read.  How to construct appropriate context is a skill that the student can develop.  That is part of what the coaching should be about.

I believe in formative writing as a way to learn, which is why I have my students blog.  I would encourage the student to write in a formative way for the coach to read and respond to.  (It could be in an email message, or a Google Doc, or some other form.  At issue is not so much the particular technology but whether others can see this writing, particularly the librarian.) An additional aspect of the coach that I've found over the years is that even when students are on the right track, they tend to be abrupt and stop after taking a first stab at the idea.  Part of the coaching, then, is for the student to be able to consider the implications of that first stab and learn to push the ideas further.

Under the circumstances, some of the coaching may be more of a "virtual pat on the shoulder" to calm the student in these stressful times.  Also, the student may have practical issues to deal with if working at home that impact the reading but are not directly about the reading. The coach may be able to help with that.  And some of the coaching may be on particular issues with reading - determining the meaning of a word from the sentence and paragraph where it is used versus looking the word up in a dictionary and possibly building a glossary of new words that the student confronts in the reading.  I'm not sure there is one right answer that fits all students regarding how to manage this.  The coach should make clear that they will try little experiments in process and see how it goes.  The student shouldn't quit on the process too early, but if after a while it doesn't seem to be working then something else should be tried.  Life lessons about persistence yet dealing with failure definitely need to be part of the process.

I want to expand here on the virtual pat on the shoulder comment.  The coach should not pry into the student's personal life.  But if my experience is any indicator, once a degree of trust is earned the student is apt to be quite forthcoming about matters outside the reading and the coaching.  At this point the coach needs to make a judgment call whether to engage in some of these matters or not.  Among the issues that we know have impacted many students - before the pandemic - is loneliness.  The coach may start to play the role of friend in that case.  And if the coach has relationships with other students, who seem to be approximately in the same place regarding the reading, perhaps the coach arranges a group call to create a different dynamic and allow the students to engage each other in a virtual environment.  Again, this would have to be opt in for the student.   If it did happen, it could be a mixture of conversation about the readings and purely social stuff.  If the students seemed to express a preference for the latter and I were the coach, I would encourage them to meet again in the near future without me being present.

One last point to consider about the coaching is whether the coach has private conversations with the librarian about the student.  If that is to happen, the student needs to be aware of the conversations and approve that they occur, but then not to expect to learn the substance of the conversation unless the coach or the librarian choose to reveal what was said.  One can imagine the information flow between librarian and coach could more finely tune each of the activities.  But it is possible from one of them to bias the other in an unproductive way.  So, there are judgments that need to be made about which is more likely if this is to occur.

Now let's consider the student as the driver of the bus, in regard both to the what the student wants to read and to how much time the student wants to devote to the reading.  A student who is otherwise on a gap year should have ample time and will look to fill the time in a good way.  But because of the general predilection for the student to over program, perhaps by taking online courses from another institution, the student may not have as much spare time as expected.  This will matter as to how successful the reading program might be.  In the post on the creative attitude linked above, the goal was to become so absorbed in the reading that the student would lose all sense of time and sense of self.  If the student could achieve that on a regular basis, it would be quite an accomplishment.  In contrast, if the student struggles to be able to do this, the student should try to understand the obstacle(s).  The coaching might then be directed to removing the obstacle(s) or getting around them in some manner.

Regarding the choice of what to read, let's consider various ways to partition reading material: (a) fiction versus non-fiction, (b) short stories or magazine articles versus full length books, (c) junk versus serious material, (d) easy to read versus difficult (this one might be relative to where the student is as a reader at present), and possibly other distinctions that matter to the student.  As the student gets to drive, the choice of these is ultimately up to the student.  But the coach might discuss with the student why to focus on one of these, for a time.  Ultimately, the student needs to be aware of the goal that the reading should be tied to a sense of being able to self-teach on matters.  So, the student should mark progress on achieving that goal and these choices then should, at least in part, be driven by wanting to achieve that goal.

* * * * *

It is my view that learning to teach oneself should be the main goal of K-16 education, even as having the ability to teach oneself is expressed by learning particular subject matter.  Our emphasis on grading and on GPA in school, unfortunately, ends up putting the emphasis elsewhere, on the grades themselves.  If students can learn to self-teach in the lower grades, they will sail through school thereafter.  Alas, many students don't learn this even after they are well into college.  We should not give up on these students, however.  We should give them a real chance to make up for their deficiencies.  The program sketched above is an attempt to do that.  Now would be a good time to try it.  If others agree, maybe together we can work to bring resources to bear to make it a reality.

What would Thoreau think? What would Orwell think?

I'm having nightmares about hanging chads.  This is my mental placeholder for all sorts of shenanigans that could happen around the next election, where as a consequence the outcome is in doubt when it actually should be a landslide, and where the vote counting in some state(s) ultimately gets decided by this Supreme Court.  Let us note that the last time this happened, in 2000, the decision ultimately led to WMDs and America at war, which has ripped the nation apart ever since.  But now things seem worse, much worse.  Here is an incomplete list that focuses only on the present. 

• The CDC announced that the actual number of people who have been infected with the coronavirus is much higher than what has been reported.  The reported numbers are incredibly grim.  If it is much worse than that, we might never be able to turn this around. And based on how other countries have been doing, this is strong evidence of clear mismanagement by government.  We need correct management.  And we need it now.
• There is a rumor floating about that if Ruth Bader-Ginzburg passes away before the inauguration (she is on chemotherapy for cancer that has returned) that the Republicans will ram through a replacement Supreme Court appointment, even if Biden has been elected the next President, and completely at odds with how McConnell didn't take up the Merrick Garland nomination that President Obama made.
• Federal Officers deployed in Portland Oregon, wearing military fatigues and driving in unmarked cars, so unidentified but likely employees of D.H.S. and members of a specialized border patrol group there, have been detaining protesters, sometimes injuring them. Their objective is to suppress the protests, though their presence seems to be having the opposite effect.    In Michelle Goldberg's most recent column, she quotes the Yale Historian, Timothy Snyder, who is an expert on what happen when a country is on the path to fascism.  He warns that paramilitary groups who support the current national leader interacting with the local police is a sign that we've reached the end of this path.  The Trump administration is planning to deploy these agents to other cities, without invitation from the local authorities. Further, because they are otherwise not identified, right-wing vigilantes could readily impersonate Federal agents and bring about massive violence on the streets in this manner.
• CNN had a piece yesterday about election experts fearing that Trump will dispute the results of the election in the event of a Biden victory.  This could lead to Trump embracing strong-arm tactics to stay in office. 

So, it would seem, America is on the path to fascism, if not already there yet. Those in BlackLivesMatter have taken the moral high ground, practicing civil disobedience via peaceful protest.  Indeed, the electorate has clearly changed its views about racism.  At the ballot box, this should signify a substantial victory for the Democrats.  This would be the way that the system auto-corrects itself.

But what happens if that is not sufficient to get the current regime out of office?  And what if the pandemic in the U.S. continues to escalate over the next six months, until the inauguration?  With Republicans still holding a majority in the Senate, is there anything that the Democrats can do now to prevent these dire consequences from happening? 

Apart from ideas that have surfaced in political fiction and the movies, Seven Days in May comes to mind, I wouldn't want to speculate on what might actually be done.  Instead I want to focus on just one issue, the pending budget crisis for the U.S. Postal Service, which might serve as a triggering of some sort of strong-arm reaction.  This budget crisis was getting some attention last month, but not much recently. Yet it is clearly tied to the prospect of voting by mail, which in light of the pandemic is the sensible solution.  (I jut renewed my car registration online after receiving an email from the DMV in Illinois with my personal login information.  It seems conceivable to me that we could vote online in the future, but not this time around.  We're not ready for it.)  Therefore, Trump has every incentive to block renewed funding for the USPS.  If that happens, it will require a fight-fire-with -ire reaction from the Democrats.  This should come to head in early September.

There are all these political strategists out there who must be gaming out this scenario and what might happen in the aftermath.  I hope they come up with something that will get Trump to stand down, soon. All I can think of is that some deal is made with the State of New York that he won't be prosecuted after he leaves office, coupled with a show of force from the military and security agencies, in case he doesn't stand down.

I have no idea how that might be coordinated.  But is there any alternative?

Test Post

The paragraph below was composed in Facebook Notes and copied to the New Blogger Editor.  The issue is whether the link works.

What if we used Facebook Notes as the editor and linked from it rather than vice versa. Would copying the post to blogger work?

----

The test worked.  However the new editor seems to be worse than the old one in that you have be in the link tool to test whether it works, rather than see the link merely by clicking on it in the editor.  Why this is an improvement is beyond me.  I don't like it.

Now I've clicked the update button but I'm still in the editor.  I think this is buggy and not worth rolling out at present.

America's Caste System - My Take

I've been playing a huge amount of solitaire and Sudoku as of late.  Some of that is simply malaise about our current situation with the pandemic. But a good part is an indication of writer's block.  I've had a topic for a post to write for quite a while, but I was struggling both with what I wanted to say and how to frame it in a way that makes sense. And this opinion piece from yesterday, didn't help any. It made me wonder whether I've got anything worth saying that hasn't been said already.  I hope it is not arrogant to conclude that I do have something to contribute, by overlaying economic issues onto the race issues, and then including undergraduate education into the mix, plus a variety of additional issues.  That's my aim here.

The title of my post borrows from a featured piece in last week's New York Times Magazine, America's Enduring Caste System.  And this post is meant as a sequel to a recent post of mine, Did a Change Ever Come? Will a Change Be Coming Soon?  In that piece I wrote that we tend to provide solutions before we have a full airing of the problem and then having worked through an analysis of what needs to be done to remedy it. So I welcome pieces such as that essay in the New York Times Magazine.  (The week before there was a piece on reparations, What Is Owed.)  These pieces capture grievances that should be well understood and need to be addressed.  Can we bring systemic racism to an end?  If we could, what does the path to getting there look like?

I like to use quotes or bad jokes as a way to introduce goals or big picture ideas.

Q: What do you know when you see three elephants walking down the street wearing pink sweatshirts?

A: They're all on the same team.

With this let's consider income inequality, in the 1960s and now.  These graphs from the Pew Research Center are very informative.  They compare household income distribution for a base year, 1970, to a much more recent year, 2016.  This is done by each race separately and then with a comparison across races.  The income numbers are inflation adjusted (1970 dollars are converted to 2016 dollars) so these are "real income" comparisons that are meaningful.  Household income is given on a per capita basis, to control for size of household.  So if in my household there is my wife and me, and if her income is $100,000 while my income is $50,000, then this will be reported as each of us having $75,000 of income. (These numbers are just for illustration and don't reflect our true income.) There is an unmistakable message from the data presented here.  Household income was much more concentrated in 1970.  Then, it would be fair to refer to America as a middle class society.  That is no longer true.

Further, it appears that increasing dispersion in income is an ongoing thing.  Consider the following table, which I created from Census data on household income for the period 2010 to 2015, during a time of normal economic growth.  (I made this table in the process of writing a post called, Socialism Reconsidered - Part 4 - Thoughts on Income Redistribution, where I considered a hypothetical policy to flatten the income distribution, along with some rationale for doing so.)

My value add with this information is from computing the various rows in blue labeled Differences, showing that those difference grew over time, more so for the upper quintiles in the distribution.  The upshot is the higher income households grew further away from median households in the income distribution.

If we are on the same team with those who have similar incomes to ours, and if the change didn't come in the 1960s, in spite of us being a middle class society then, how can the change happen now when our experiences are not common because the income dispersion is so great?  We should pause over this question as it doesn't have an immediately obvious response.  The best I have come up with are these questions.  Can we still all be on the same team, but play fundamentally different roles based on our differences in income?  Is there a caste system now that is more income based than raced based?  If so, how might we undo that caste system as well?  Later in this piece I will give some examples of this that are specific to education.

There is a way in which those Pew graphs are misleading.  The data are right censored at $200,000/year.  It is not that long ago (fall 2011) when Occupy Wall Street had our attention.  It gave us the language of the 1% versus the 99% - the rich versus everyone else.  Based on data here, the Pew graphs do a good job of describing the income distribution among the 99% but don't tell us anything at all about the income distribution among the 1%.  (Recall the Pew graphs present per capita household income. That would need to be multiplie by number of household members to get household income.  I believe mean number of household members is around 2.6, but I'm reporting that here without checking it for veracity.  I've done that checking in the past.) 

Indeed the 0.1%, the uber rich, have such high incomes that they couldn't even approximately be represented on the Pew graphs as currently done.  And many of them seem quite resistant to income redistribution that would take income from themselves to raise the incomes of those in the lower quintiles, ergo their intense opposition to Obamacare, which entailed just such income redistribution. For this reason, when democratic socialists advocate for policy, which surely features elements of income redistribution, they typically focus on the beneficiaries and then consider the implied income redistribution as a taking from the very rich.  Ultimately, this may come to pass, but it is definitely not an all-on-the-same-team approach. 

It may be that an all-on-the same team approach is impossible.  What may be possible, however, and what I argued in that earlier post on income redistribution, is that many in the top quintile who are not uber rich can be convinced that they should favor some income redistribution out of a sense of social responsibility. It is this notion of social responsibility which I think is necessary to push for strongly if a a change will come.  Tying that to my earlier post about race, the change didn't come in the 1960s because too many opted out.  We need an approach now where people who are well off feel compelled to opt in. Even as the country has opened its eyes about race, the connection to necessary income redistribution is not being made, as far as I can tell.  Both the NY Times pieces, the one on the caste system and the one on reparations treat the burden as if it should fall on Whites equally.  I don't think that's correct.  Poor Whites should not bear this burden at all. The well to do of all races should bear it.  We need leadership that establishes this connection forcefully.

* * * * *

Let me turn to other economic issues, which show that our economy is not working well for many people, which in turn provides a good bit of the fuel for contemporary racism.  The growth rate of per capita GDP has been slowing for some time. It is worthwhile to contemplate the possible reasons for this.  One that's been on the table for quite a while is the aging of American society.  Birth rates have been down for a while.  Recently immigration has been down too.  Life expectancy, until recently, has been up.  In an era where robots and AI provide a threat to anyone who has a job that can be automated, I'm not sure whether those explanations hold water, but perhaps they are part of it.  A different explanation is that there are no big ideas left to dramatically raise productivity, nothing like indoor plumbing, the steam engine, and the advent of electric power.  Surely the personal computer and then the rise of the Internet were both big ideas, but they've been around for quite a while now, mobile computing too.  A related explanation is that much R&D now is going into protecting already achieved profitability - to keep the economic rents coming.  This makes those earning the rents happy, perhaps, but it does nothing for the economy overall (and maybe it hurts the economy, depending on how those rents are maintained, more about that below).  In any event, if the economy isn't growing very quickly and those at the top are claiming an increasing share of income for themselves, that leaves everyone else with not much at all.

There are other ways the economy is evidently failing that become apparent either when you look at specific sectors of the economy or if you consider big negative externalities that the economy produces.  On the latter, our over reliance on fossil fuels and its impact on global warming has to be the biggest one, along with our inability to self-regulate in a big and consistent way in anticipation that weather-wise, things will be getting still worse. (As I'm writing this piece, I had to stop yesterday afternoon and turn off the computer because of a horrific thunderstorm that came through the area, which produced incredibly large balls of ice in a terrible hailstorm.)   And we don't yet have a good answer for this.

Here are some sector specific ways the economy doesn't work well.  Finance as a sector is way too large, attracting far too many of the graduates from our elite universities. The benefits that the sector produces may be largely illusory, as anyone who has been tracking the stock market as of late will know.  The real economy is in a horrible recession now, the stock market not so much.  Further, those benefits are not broadly shared, so they contribute to the rising inequality in society.  I would argue that much of the so-called financial gains are really nothing more than income transfers from labor to capital.  Oliver Stone's movie, Wall Street, dates back to 1987.  It's a dark picture of compassionless management run amuck, yet perhaps a spot on depiction of the plutocrats who rule the roost over the Republican Party as if it is their puppets.

There is also something fundamentally wrong with how we do our news, mainly on TV, but also on the Internet, and in the various publications.  News should be boring, for the most part.  It should be about the details of potential policy debates or if not that then about major events in our economy, described in an expansive way.  To understand these at some depth requires a detailed analysis.  In other words, it should be a slug to get through.  Mostly, however, we're not getting that.  News competes with other entertainment for the viewer's attention.  News if done in a boring way would lose that competition, expect perhaps for a sliver of the population that consider themselves eggheads. What alternative for news wins the competition more broadly? We've known the answer to this for well over a century.  We called it "yellow journalism" back then, when the news was done exclusively by print media. Now, on TV, there is an added aspect - stoking the audience into a frenzy.  Anger, it turns out, can be addicting.  The audience comes back for more of the same, perfect for generating lots of revenue from the commercials, even while it is terrible for the audience in getting a nuanced picture of what's going on and in maintaining good mental health at the same time.

Something similar is happening with our social media too, where the design seems to promote addiction of the users.  But there is an added aspect with social media that is even more insidious.  The user's online history is tracked in detail and curated by the social media provider, which is interested in making a buck, nothing more. Our privacy is compromised as a result.  And the approach doesn't auto-correct, as the ad supported model has trumped the subscription model.  This is frightening.

However, regarding racism, the biggest failure happened in manufacturing, which has been in decline for upwards of 30 years, has hollowed out the industrial Midwest and converted it into the rust belt, and wrecked havoc on non-college males who couldn't make the adjustment by finding other work (less well paying) in the service sector. Much of this decline, I believe, was inevitable, both the off shoring of the jobs, as elsewhere workers with the same productivity would accept much lower wages, and the automation of work, an issue that has been with us at least since Charlie Chaplin's masterpiece, Modern Times. Where I find major fault is with policy makers who could have anticipated this decline.  For non-college males, construction jobs have to be a reasonable substitute for manufacturing jobs.  And our decaying infrastructure needs massive reinvestment, which we're reminded of every time we drive down a road full of potholes. Yet this infrastructure reinvestment has not been forthcoming. 

Among the White working class who used to have manufacturing or construction jobs, the Vietnam War drove them into the arms of the Republicans, as they were strongly pro war (and anti those who were against the war, notably the hippies).  Nixon became their guy.  Even as Nixon pursued his Southern strategy, I believe it was his hawkishness on the war that brought these voters into the fold.  But the Republicans kept playing the race card in subsequent elections, well after the Vietnam War was a thing of the past.  The Republicans found a winning strategy in combining a low-tax small-government approach, which economically was against the interest of working class Whites, by continuing to play the race card, and rounding it out by appealing to Fundamentalist Christians, particularly in regard to repealing Roe.

But this picture is incomplete.  There was an interesting interview in the New Yorker recently, How to Confront a Racist National History, which uses the experience of how Germany, post WW II, dealt with the Nazi period and the horrors created then, as a partial model for how the U.S. should confront the legacy of Slavery. The comparison is imperfect, no doubt.  It is, nonetheless, useful.  Prior to becoming Nazis, many of those German males must have felt a huge sense of emasculation.  Having lost WW I and having to bear very harsh reparations for that was part of it.  Then the world fell into the Great Depression and all became its victim except for the very rich.  Among a certain fraction of the population, as described here in a piece about contemporary politics, their values are focused on Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity.  These people are prone toward racist attitudes, which economic dislocation surely exacerbates.  An obvious message for us now, if we want to reduce the racism from such people, materially improve their economic situation so that it is not quite so desperate and, maybe, becomes even comfortable. 

The following is an absurd suggestion from me, I know.  But the social scientist in me wants to know about the family history of those White cops who do horribly violent things to Blacks.  Is there a history of overt racism in their families?  Is there a history of economic dislocation, where the parents once had good jobs in manufacturing but then lost those?  It's not the story now.  The story is about ending systemic racism.  Yet I think we need to have a better handle on the overt racist personality.  To defeat it, we need to know its cause. The NY Times Magazine pieces I cited above seem content to ascribing the cause to the system.  Yet there are Whites who try hard to treat others with decency, regardless of their race.  These other Whites live in the same system.  Why then the different responses?  That needs to be understood.

* * * * *

Hugo Long.  This is a bad joke about when we played street football, and what we said to the kid who was out of the play but nonetheless ran a pass route.  It's a commentary on this post, which I'm still writing this Monday morning, though I had intended to finish it yesterday.

I want to turn now to higher education as a microcosm of the caste system.  I do this in part because I have more direct experience to bring to the discussion when considering higher ed.  But it is also because I believe that the overt racism of some members of the police and White nationalists is quite different from what tends to happen on campus, which I would argue is mainly a consequence of provincialism rather than overt racism, though there is surely some of the latter and perhaps a continuum between the two rather than just one or the other.  I wrote about this a few years ago in a post called Provincialism and Freedom of Speech in the Classroom.  It gives some examples where cultural differences rather than racial differences caused tension.  Further, the first example is about student antagonism to the instructor on account of that cultural difference (and possibly because the instructor was a woman).  This can't be readily explained by a historical power structure.  It is something else going on.  Here is the most relevant bit from that post.

In her (the instructor's) mind provincialism didn't just reflect a limit on experience.  Many people have limited experiences through no fault of their own.  Provincialism requires a closed mind that is not willing to challenge preconceptions nor have experiences that might contradict those beliefs.

One reason for the provincialism is the geographic proximity of the students enrolled at Illinois when they were in high school.  Back in 2017, I actually made a Google Map of the hometowns of the domestic students in my Economics of Organization class.  (There were a few international students, who aren't include here.)  If you zoom out you can see the few students who were from out of state.  By zooming in, you see the vast majority of students were from the northwest suburbs of Chicago.  This, perhaps, explains a common cultural view by such students.  It doesn't explain a closed mindset, however.  That might be better explained by family values, religion, or some other factor such as a lack of curiosity.  This being closed to new ideas is antithetical to the values of the university, but it perhaps helps the students get through college. We know that loneliness is a significant issue for undergraduate students.  Finding students like themselves, perhaps students who went to the same high school as they did, might be considered as a coping strategy.  Fraternities and sororities might be considered in this light, though they might also reflect a determined effort to solidify provincialism, especially in that they exclude certain students who want to become members.

Sometimes this provincialism manifests as being clueless about how one's behavior might impact others.  I wrote about this in a post called Theism - "Pan", "Mono", and "A", where I described  my first experience where religion entered into my classroom.  It was inadvertent and in retrospect I invited it, but that's only because I couldn't imagine it happening ahead of time.  One student was responsible for several microaggressions against classmates, without being aware that he was doing it.  This was in a class for campus honors students, among the better students on campus academically.  My conclusion is that provincialism can pertain in certain dimensions of human interaction, while the same person is quite open to possibility in other areas, such as the discipline of study the student is pursuing.  Indeed, I felt I was reading about provincialism in this recent piece from the the New Yorker, about Silicon Valley versus the New York Times.  I wonder if other readers of that piece had a similar reaction.

Therefore, one wants to ask whether it is possible to educate a person out of his/her provincialism and, if so, what it would take to do that.  I don't think we know the answer to that one, but I'm guessing it would require an ongoing mentoring relationship to peel the various layers of the onion, rather than one simple lesson which gives clear evidence to counter prior held belief.  We don't let go of our beliefs very easily.  Instead, we tend to reject the evidence, at least initially.  Continuing to confront additional evidence of the same sort may create a kind of tension in the person that requires abandonment of the old belief.  But this is just a guess and it might very well be that the person opts out of the mentoring well before reaching that point.

In any event, the prevalence of provincialism makes one want to question that the beliefs derive only from the system and the history of oppression that the system embodies, as argued in the NY Times Magazine piece on America's caste system.  The following piece from five years ago, The University of China at Illinois, makes for a good read as it gives a good deal of background and detail about how Chinese students and White students at Illinois remained apart rather than intermixed with regularity in friendly interactions, in spite of the large numbers of both types of students on campus and although a priori the Chinese students would have preferred such interaction. This can't be explained by the system, because there was no earlier experience with large numbers of Chinese undergraduate students.  But whatever does explain it should be kept in mind when considering White-Black interactions on campus, as some of the same factors are likely in play.

Let me switch to a different aspect of college life that may be less apparent to outsiders, but that is evident to those who work on campus.  In a fractal way, the income inequality in our society overall gets replicated by divisions between haves and have nots on campus.  The STEM disciplines and Business are the haves.  The humanities and some of the softer social sciences are the have nots. I wrote about the issue some years ago in a post called Our Increasingly Bifurcated Higher Education System, where the focus was on faculty salaries. It is one of the main drivers behind why campuses like mine have gone so heavily into teaching faculty who are not on the tenure track.   And it is sustained by the expected starting salaries from graduates in the respective disciplines, along with the hyperinflation in tuition. 

Students have always been somewhat mercenary about why they go to college and in certain majors it seems more concentrated.  When I was a college student pre-meds had that reputation.   But the extent of it now is beyond belief and it is a major contributor to the mental health crisis among students we are currently seeing. What is especially sobering, in contrast to the non-college Whites who have lost out with the decline of manufacturing jobs, is that many of these students who are experiencing depression seem to be on the path to being winners in the the lottery that our economy presents to them.  Yet that is insufficient to keep them content, well motivated, and to avoid feeling anxiety and depression.  To me, this is a clear signal that the system is broken and we in higher education need to understand that.  My sense of the solution was expressed in a post, Reconsidering Elitism in Public Education, and my preference is that the solution would be applied to private education as well.  (But how to achieve that is beyond me.) We need for the education to be decent but not elite.  Now if students fail at school it is perceived as a disaster.  Failure should not be so frightening.  Indeed, students need to learn to fail and then after a fashion begin again with renewed determination or instead try something else that is fundamentally different.  The dread of failure is surely feeding the mental health crisis.  The system needs to see itself as largely responsible for producing that dread.  At present, we're dealing with this as if the system is fine and it's just the lack of mental health professionals that is the problem.  The system is not fine.  The mental health crisis is evidence of that.

Let's move onto considering admissions and how undergraduate admissions sustains the caste system.  Perhaps 20 years ago or so I was a member of the CIC Learning Technology Group (the CIC is now called the Big Ten Academic Alliance) and my counterpart from our sister campus in Chicago told me that my campus was not admitting enough Black students from Chicago.  I was probably vaguely aware of this beforehand, but I had no direct role in admissions, so I didn't make a big deal of it then.  Sometime later I became aware that many students who would qualify for admission didn't take the effort to apply, either because they didn't think they could afford it or because they didn't want to attend college where they were one of only a few Black students in their classes.  Our sister campus, UIC, was easier for them that way, and it was preferred by many Black students even while a degree from UIUC would be more prestigious as a credential in the labor market.

More recently, the NY Times ran a series to show how elite colleges reinforce the current income distribution more than they create opportunity for those less well off to rise and shine.  Here is the data for my campus and here is the article that describes the general issue.  To be fair, my campus has had programs to counter this apparent bias.  The one I'm most familiar with is called Illinois Promise, as I've mentored students who were part of that program.  More recently, the campus has raised the maximum income level for eligibility with something called Illinois Commitment.  Note that these programs are explicitly based on family income, not on race.  Moreover, it is my understanding that the admission decision itself may take county of residence into consideration as one of the many variables that determine admission.  But family income is not included in that, yet standardized test scores, which surely do count though not this year, are strongly correlated with family income. So, how the various variables get aggregated into a decision to admit the applicant remains something of a mystery.

There is more to it than that for considering in-state applicants.  In Illinois, the main way public education for K-12 gets funded is through property taxes.  Those taxes clearly vary by housing value.  Rich neighborhoods have much greater funding per student than poor neighborhoods, whether those poor neighborhoods are rural, and primarily White, or urban, and then primarily Black and Latinx.  It's been quite a while since I read Kozol's The Shame of the Nation, where he describes with horror apartheid schools that are incredibly under funded.  I can't remember whether any Chicago schools were included but I'm quite sure East St. Louis schools were.  Surely any approach to education that claimed it was being done by all who are on the same team would equalize funding per student regardless of race or location of the school.   Getting to that, however, will be a very heavy lift.  Based on where we are now, I wonder if it is possible.

* * * * *

I refuse to join a club that would have me as a member.

Groucho Marx

In this last section I want to take on the question of whether talking about White Privilege and White Guilt is a good way to arrive at an all-on-the-same-team approach. In particular, people my age who are not Black were raised on the story that we're a nation of immigrants.  Most of those immigrants experienced a good deal of discrimination when they arrived, for which that line from Groucho serves as an emblem.  Further, most of these immigrants arrived in America well after the Civil War, so they can't be directly connected with the evils of slavery nor with Jim Crow.  What then is the benefit about repeated talk of White Privilege? 

I'm probably going to disappoint readers on this one by taking both sides of the argument.  I do think it matters, on a case by case basis, where the person currently is on social responsibility and how far that extends.  A test of that is if many shared the same views would that be sufficient to end systemic racism?  But that may be too simple in how to consider these things.  We normally do things in increments, not all at once.  Ending systemic racism will be a process, a difficult one to follow through on.  Will we back away from the process before it has a chance to play through because some who said they would opt in got cold feet and then opted out?

Here I think it helpful to consider something called the availability heuristic, which means that people make their decisions about issues based on examples that come readily to mind.  What has become quite evident recently, is that the vast majority of White people are ignorant about the various issues and concerns that Black people live with that White people simply don't confront.  The events that have followed since the George Floyd execution have alerted everyone to the dangers of excessive police violence (even if we should have been alerted to this from prior experiences but apparently were not).  That particular threat is now available to White people.  But there are many other aspects to systemic racism that remain hidden to Whites because they don't live in segregated Black communities and don't experience all that happens there. Those are not available and I wonder if they can be made available in the absence of dramatic and viral videos that illustrate the issues.  For example, it has been reported extensively that the death rates from COVID-19 are much higher in minority communities.  But I doubt that most Whites can explain why that is nor could they explain what would need to change so that was no longer true. In the absence of full availability, the expressions White Privilege and White Guilt serve as placeholders that there is a story there that needs to be told.

Now, taking the other side of the argument, I do think that much of what needs to be done is to reduce income inequality so that we return to being a middle class society, with all races included in that vision. But this will require within-race income redistribution, something that is not getting attention now, yet I believe is absolutely necessary.   How can you argue for that except by arguing that it is the socially responsible thing to do?

I will close by mentioning this post, Ask What You Can Do For Your Country, which has a table in it of the amount households would pay in federal income tax at a few focal income levels and that is rendered every 5 years, starting in 1980 when Jimmy Carter was still President (though the last year is 2013 since I didn't have 2015 data available when I wrote the post).  It is worth spending some time poring over this table just to ask, what is the right amount of taxes that a household should pay in this situation?  We've changed our answer to that question repeatedly over time.  My own preference for the ideal would be to accept the first tax cut under Reagan, and hence use the 1985 numbers.  They are substantially lower than the 1980 numbers, yet much higher than in the other years given, all of which are more recent.   Would it be possible, by using a social responsibility argument, to return to that level of taxation.  Of course, it would need to be coupled with how the increased taxes would be spent.  The beneficiaries must be disproportionately at the lower income levels.  This in itself wouldn't end systemic racism.  But it would be a remarkably good first step to test the all-on-the-same-team approach.

Tipping

Tipping is an ordinary practice when you go to a restaurant for a meal, when you go to a bar for a drink, or when you buy a latte at a coffee bar.  Tipping typically does not happen for much other service work.  But now we live in extraordinary times where many of us are staying at home much of the time to avoid getting infected with the coronavirus.  Essential personnel don't have that luxury. They are out there working for our benefit.  Yet they are paid poorly.  This Thomas Edsall column gives a detailed look at the situation.

And a state-by-state survey conducted by Business.org found that “Nationwide, essential employees earn an average of 18.2 percent less than employees in other industries.”

On the other hand, most everyone is grateful to the essential personnel for the services they render.  On a walk I did recently that took me by the little shopping center not far from my house, I noticed a banner posted that thanked the essential personnel for the work they do.  I'm sure it is nice for essential personnel to hear the gratitude from the people who rely on their services rendered.  Yet there is the famous line from Jerry Maguire that is more than apropos, "Show me the money!"  And, at least for me, I'd be willing to pay more for the service rendered, if I knew that incremental payment was going to essential personnel who were involved in delivering the service.  The rest of this post is written based on the guess that there are many others who also would be willing to pay more if the payment did raise the income of essential personnel, enough so that it would be more than worthwhile to incur the costs to make that a reality.

I want to make two basic points.

(1) The companies that employ these essential personnel can't reduce their wages, once tipping has been introduced.  Doing so, which is what you'd predict would happen in a "perfectly competitive labor market" (economics jargon for saying that the market sets the going wage), would completely undermine the reason for tipping.  So, companies that did embrace the tipping would need to make a public commitment about not reducing the wages of essential personnel.  This might very well require also making public what the hourly wages for these people are. At present there seems to be a sentiment to have more transparency in employee compensation.  Having an effective tipping program might encourage that.

(2)  In the examples I gave in the first sentence of this piece, I prefer to tip in cash, even if I pay the bill by credit card.  That way I know the tip goes to the server, which surely happens in the restaurant and bar examples. At the coffee bar it is a little different.  There usually is a jar set out for cash tips.  The tips are then shared by the baristas on duty.  It's this sharing of tips possibility that I want to flesh out with this point.  My contention is that if the pool of employees with whom the tips are shared is comparatively small, then the incentive to tip is reasonably strong. But as that pool gets bigger and bigger, it dilutes the incentive to tip.  I wrote about a similar idea, why many rich people want to avoid paying taxes but are willing to give much of the their wealth to charity, in a post called Mattering Bias.  Likewise, I believe those giving tips to essential workers want their tips to matter.  That requires some mechanism that doesn't dilute the tip too much and perhaps also is able to show the person giving the tip where the money actually went.

Now I want to get into some other particulars that may be worth thinking about.  Let's consider two different examples, a) buying groceries and then tipping the cashier (plus the person who bags the groceries) and b) ordering something from Amazon that is delivered by UPS and tipping the delivery person.   In (a) you would pay the tip along with paying your bill, immediately after the service is rendered.  Even with that you wouldn't want to tip by cash now as that might increase the health risk.  So, as with the second example, all the tipping would be by credit card and thus there will be a record of the transaction, itself something to reflect on.  But in this case the size of the tip might depend on the shopper's experience at the store.  If my experience is any indication, while stock outs of some items are now part of the new normal, the real issue is how long you have to wait to get to an available cashier, after finishing shopping.  I normally go to the grocery between 6 AM and 7 AM, a time slot reserved for senior citizens.  Sometimes they have only one cashier going then.  Other times it's two.  I don't know if later in the day they have more than that or not.  But the waiting is an inconvenience.  I might tip more if I didn't have to wait.  With (b), you prepay at the time of ordering.  So the tip can't be based on the performance in that transaction, but it possibly could be based on the performance history.  I don't recall having any issue with orders from Amazon prior to the pandemic, but since then some orders have been wrong  and one never got through so I got a refund.

The point is that with the data collected, it might be possible to come up with social norms for how much to tip.  When I was a kid I believe the norm for restaurant tipping was 15% of the pre tax bill.  (I'm curious to know what people perceive was the current norm before the pandemic started.)  It seems possible to develop norms for cashiers based on - what fraction of shoppers tip, what's the average tip rate of those who do tip, how much do cashiers make in tips per hour on average, and possibly other like variables, providing this information in aggregate so as not to compromise the privacy of information of any individual transaction.  If such norms settled down reasonably quickly, the mechanism might then be effective in raising the pay of this type of essential personnel.

Likewise, this could be done for the UPS driver, although here some other relevant variables might matter.  I live in a community called Robeson West.  On most weekdays you will see a UPS truck in the neighborhood, also an Amazon Van, and reasonably frequently that will happen more than once a day.  How many stops they make in the community matters for what the norm for tips should be locally.  That sort of information, based on recent historical. data could be provided as well.  Where we used to live before moving to our current house was more in the country.  By rights, tipping at the old house should be higher, because the driver won't have as many stops in that neighborhood, and the customer should have a sense of that.  Alternatively, it may be the quality of service is lower there, e.g., the time of day that delivery is made might be much later, on average. so the items sit in the delivery truck for a longer period of time.

With these caveats, tipping of front line essential personnel might be effective and a reasonable way to raise their earnings to a more socially acceptable level.  But what about other essential personnel who are more behind the scenes?  At the grocery, these are the people who stock the shelves.  Yet they are hardly the only ones working behind the scenes.  We should go further to consider much of the supply chain, particularly the warehouses where non-perishable goods are kept, received from primary suppliers and subsequently shipped to individual groceries.  The people working in those warehouses are also essential personnel as are those who drive the trucks that move items to the warehouse as well as other trucks that move items from the warehouse to the groceries.  Will tipping of the front line personnel have any impact on the wages of those other essential personnel who are more removed from the customer?

Directly, I'm afraid the answer is no, which is why tipping should be thought of primarily as a near term answer until more comprehensive long term answers can be found.  Readers might consider raising the minimum wage substantially as the appropriate longer term response.  But our economy is very weak now and under these circumstances raising the minimum wage might very well lead to current employees getting fired.  A few years ago I wrote a post about wage subsidies, which would be a better approach under the current circumstances, and might be done in demonstration mode before it became official policy.  But setting up such demonstrations would itself take time; I'm guessing much more time than it would take to get a functional approach to tipping in order.

Returning to the wages of those more remote personnel, one might imaging that those shoppers who don't tip would not care about these workers at all.  Such shoppers would like the lowest prices possible for the items that they do buy.  Those who tip regularly, however, might be willing to accept higher product prices if it meant those remote personnel were paid better.  If so, and if those who tip regularly constitute a big fraction of the company's business, then raising wages on the more remote personnel might make good business sense as a way to build customer loyalty.  Under ordinary circumstances these sort of calculations have already been accounted for in how the company does business.  For example, contrast Trader Joe's with Walmart.  But the pandemic may have changed things sufficiently to have another look at this question.  The tipping of the front line employees would inform on this matter.

Let me wrap up with a brief mention of the logistics needed to be put in place to make the tipping discussed in this piece a reality.  Those logistics are beyond me.  For those who might be able to seriously work them through, the question will be, does it make sense to do so?  Two factors will increase the likelihood that it does make sense.  The first is that we will be living in this pandemic world for longer than we hope, perhaps another year or so.  The second is that others develop a buzz about tipping as a near term way to reward essential personnel.  I've never had a post of mine go viral, so I have no direct experience that speaks to how to create such a buzz.  Maybe readers of this piece who find the idea intriguing might have a better sense of how such a buzz can happen.  At a minimum, both of those should be considered with some care even as the idea might spread.