MITIGATING INFLUENCES

Note:  Due to technical problems beyond my control, this posting is a day late.

A former colleague and current friend, Dr. Alejandro Gallard, writes of the contextual realities that affect the effectiveness of classroom efforts.  I have shared many times in this blog the complex nature of the typical classroom and this is the case in even the most “simplified” situations:  a mono-cultural setting.  But when you add to the mix students who vary in ethnicity and cultural backgrounds, linguistic diversity, even varying ages, possible levels of poverty, long term unemployment and so forth, things can and do get scrambled and difficult for a teacher who is trying to implement a curriculum that is set by district officials sufficiently removed from that classroom.  And today, in many areas of the country, curricular writing has become a political football with varying agendas being played out.  Don’t get me wrong; I do recognize that setting curricula is a political exercise – it’s unavoidable and this is especially the case in times like ours when there is such partisan rancor all about.

Gallard introduces a concept that I believe is helpful.  He mentions contextual mitigating factors.  This is a term that encapsulates the complexities of which I refer to above.  His area of interest is science education and even in a subject area more prone to objectified content, these factors do not stay outside the classroom door.  They impede there just as much as in the more politically oriented material one deals with in civics.  One just has to mention such issues as evolution to be reminded of how political biology can be.  Then there is sex education and other family issues based on physically related concerns – e. g., vaccination – and one can see that controversy is not so far removed from science education.

Gallard’s main concerns revolve around contextual mitigating factors that influence the success rate of various ethnic populations in the field of science.  Specifically, he has been studying the factors that are at play with the relatively unsuccessful rates among Latinas.  But whatever or wherever the results are short of what is desired, I believe Gallard’s sentiments should be kept in mind:

Nothing ever happens in a classroom that doesn’t have mitigating factors that teachers need to deal with … [s]omething from the outside is always going to influence what the teacher wants to do inside the classroom.  It can be poverty; it can be contrasting belief systems or all sorts of things.  I am a strong believer that education needs to be looked at through multiple contextual lenses in which all teaching and learning takes place.  These influencing factors or contextual mitigating factors must be made explicit and dealt with before one can expect meaningful education reform to take place.[1]

For those of you who have been readers of this blog from its early days, this type of rationale might sound familiar.  Gallard can be judged to be a critical educator of the reconceptualism school of thought.  As I wrote back in those days, critical educators have interesting and useful things to tell us and we should give them our collective ear.

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[1] Bennett, S. (2015).  Closing gaps:  Meet Georgia Southern’s Goizueta distinguished chair of education.  Georgia Southern Magazine, Spring, 17(2), p. 24.

MINIMUM DIGNITY

Here’s a civics lesson.  It has to do with the issue of the minimum wage.  The Obama administration has been advocating a raise in the minimum wage:  “It’s time to give America a raise.”  Of course, business friendly conservatives oppose such a move – not surprising.  What’s a federalist’s take?

Well, here is mine.  I believe that central to federalist thinking is the value of collective members having as much as possible – that is, as much as possible within reasonable parameters – equal standing, equal consent.  That is, further, that each member of the collective is not coerced into either belonging or doing his/her expected roles within the collective, any collective.  That goes for a family, a church, a community organization, a labor union, a city, a state, a nation.  When we speak of the larger collectives, such as cities or nations, more abstract means of membership, stake commitments, and coercion are involved.  By more abstraction, a commensurable use of numbers comes into play as trends and averages are used to determine to what degree interactions are based on federated notions of membership and participation.  And with this context, such an issue as the minimum wage takes on importance.

One’s work, in a federated union, is more than just an economic activity.  For most, work takes up significant portions of one’s life; it provides sustenance both psychological and physical.  It is a communitive statement of belonging, contributing, and a source of relative importance within the collective.  To maintain the federalist character of a collective, to the extent possible, each job or career should provide certain assets:  enough remuneration so as to secure survival needs for one’s family, enough education to stay true to the value of equal opportunity, enough entertainment to support mental health, and enough time with fellow family members so that the required time away from them does not become a cause of family dysfunction.  In short, what one makes in terms of pay becomes not just a number on a ledger in some business accounting book, but a statement of human dignity.

Yet this perspective is not shared by all.  If it were, I would say the minimum wage would have, in real terms, kept up with increases in productivity.  Attempts to study this question in terms of “keeping up with inflation” can be tricky.  I prefer my above approach.  Students should be exposed to every which way it is measured – and the internet very easily can help students with that.  But a class can use my “federalist” approach and then can be exposed to an array of conservative arguments against raising the rate.  Below, I offer four such arguments derived from a book review of Arthur C. Brooks’ book, The Conservative Heart:  How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Productive America.[1]

Arguments against raising the minimum wage:

·        The main argument is that if you raise the price of anything, you lower the amount of it being purchased.  That goes for fruit, furniture, or workers’ time and labor.  So, and this is the main offense, it limits the number of people who can “earn success” – the basis of true happiness.

·        Raising the minimum wage will raise the costs of production that will be only passed on to consumers.  So, for example, an industry hard hit by this move will be the fast-food restaurant chains that are frequented heavily by low income customers.  It is, therefore, low income people who will be paying these increased costs.

·        Minimum wage increase will not hit, to a large measure, those who are meant to be benefited.  This is because a raise in the minimum wage will go to individuals above the poverty line.  Half of the beneficiaries live in family households that make over $35,000 a year and a quarter go to families that make over $75,000 a year.  A mandated raise in the minimum wage is ill targeted, missing, to a significant level, the low income population it is meant to help.

·        Last (at least in terms of this book’s offering), raising the minimum wage is not as good a policy in helping the working poor as providing earned-income tax credits which will increase the take-home pay of such workers.  Credits do this by finely targeting the benefit to those who need it.  I find this curious in that a lot of conservative rhetoric is geared toward that portion of the work force who “don’t pay taxes.”

Students can review the literature about measuring the minimum wage over time, discuss the various ways of evaluating government policy concerning the minimum wage, and then review, discuss, and evaluate the conservative arguments against raising the minimum wage using a federalist criterion I provide above.

By and by, can conservatives come up with one policy position that does not equate to higher profits for businesses?  Just asking.

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[1] Mankiw, N. G.  (2015).  Compassionate conservative.  The New York Times, Book Review section, August 2, p. 10.