inequality

Educational Equity During A Pandemic

This post is part of our series entitled Teaching and Learning During a Pandemic, in which we invite guest authors to reflect on the challenges of the Coronavirus pandemic for teaching and learning. Our contributor today is Peter Levine, Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship at Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life. He blogs regularly on his own site. Posts in the series will be compiled here.

My wife and I have each spent many hours teaching by video this spring. While sitting in the same house, I meet online with college students who attend a selective private university; she meets with 5-to-9-year olds in an urban public school system, helping them learn to read. 

Both of us think and worry about equity: how to treat all students fairly within our respective institutions and across the whole country (even the world). And both of us discuss these issues with our respective colleagues. I suspect that many other educators are similarly wrestling with the challenges of teaching equitably while schools are closed. 

Before the pandemic, schools were already dramatically inequitable. In our state of Massachusetts, total expenditures per pupil vary from $14,000 to $31,000 among regular school districts. But the worst-funded Massachusetts district still allocates twice as much per student as Utah does. In Uganda, the government spends $2.12 per student per year on education (although many families spend more).

The Size And Legitimacy Of Gender And Motherhood Pay Gaps In Cross-National Perspective

Gender pay gaps receive due attention in high quality academic (e.g., England 2005) and non-academic research worldwide (e.g., IWPR, OECD), as well as in the media. It is often overlooked, however, that the size of the gap (and the gender difference in other labor market outcomes, such as career interruptions and their length) varies by job characteristics, such as occupational status, as well as by individual characteristics, such as age and, as discussed below, parenthood status. 

The existence of wage cuts incurred by working mothers across countries and welfare regimes (henceforth “motherhood penalties”) is a well established, albeit not always well understood, phenomenon (e.g., Budig et al. 2016; Abendroth et al. 2014). In Poland, for example, there is a common misconception that mothers do not incur such penalties. One major reason for this is that OECD reports systematically show that Poland has one of the smallest gender pay gaps (GPGs) among all OECD nations. This leads many to infer that, since the gaps are small, there must not be motherhood penalties. 

The problem is that these data do not control for important productivity characteristics, such as education, working hours, and experience. For example, in Poland (and elsewhere), women are better educated than men, which means that simple unadjusted estimates would understate gender pay gaps. The simple approaches are also misleading insofar as they do not control for occupational prestige, job complexity, and income. Studies conducted in the U.S., for example, show that the size of the gender pay gap is correlated with these variables (England et al. 2016). That is, women in high prestige, more demanding, and better-paying jobs experience higher penalties, especially when they become mothers, than women in low and medium level occupations. 

So, is the situation in Poland as rosy as the OECD estimates make it out to be?

Economic Shocks And Attitudes Toward Redistribution

In the wake of the financial crisis that began in 2007, as well as the subsequent recession, there has been a great deal of attention paid to income inequality. Specifically, there was a pervasive argument among many Americans that the discrepancies in income between the top and bottom are too large, and that the fruits of economic growth are predominantly going to the highest earners (the so-called “one percent”).

Among those who believe that income inequality is too high, the solutions might include policies such as more progressive taxation, stronger regulation, and more generous policies to help lower income families. That is, they might generally support some increased role for government in addressing this issue. Insofar as individuals’ attitudes tend to respond to changes in their own circumstances (e.g., Owens and Pedulla 2013), as well as to overall economic conditions, one would possibly expect an increase in support for government efforts to reduce inequality during and after the financial crisis.

We might take a look at this proposition using a General Social Survey (GSS) question asking respondents to characterize their support (on a scale of 1-7) for the statement that the government should reduce income differences between the rich and poor. The graph below presents the average value of this scale between 1986 and 2014. Note that higher values in the graph represent greater support for government action.

Why We Defend The Public Square

The following are the texts of the two speeches from the opening session of our recent two-day conference, “In Defense of the Public Square,” which was held on May 1-2 at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. The introduction was delivered by Leo Casey and the keynote address was delivered by Randi Weingarten. The video of the full event will be available soon here.

Remarks by Leo Casey

We meet here today in “defense of the public square.”

The public square is the place where Americans come together as a people and establish common goals in pursuit of our common good.

The public square is the place where Americans – in all of our rich diversity – promote the general welfare, achieving as a community what we never could do as private individuals.

The public square is the place where Americans weave together our ideal of political equality and our solidarity with community in a democratic political culture, as de Tocqueville saw so well.

Are Americans Exceptional In Their Attitudes Toward Government's Role In Reducing Inequality?

As discussed in a previous post, roughly half of Americans believe that government should take some active role in reducing income differences between rich and poor, though, as one would expect, this view is less prevalent among Republicans, more educated and higher earning survey respondents.

These data, however, lack a frame of reference. That is, they don’t tell us whether American support for government redistribution is “high” or “low” compared with that in other nations. The conventional wisdom in this area is that Americans generally prefer a more limited government, especially when it comes to things like income redistribution.

It might therefore be interesting to take a quick look at how the U.S. stacks up against other nations in terms of these redistributive preferences.

Do Americans Think Government Should Reduce Income Inequality?

With all the recent coverage of Occupy Wall Street and President Obama’s jobs bill, we’ve heard a lot of polling results showing that a large plurality of Americans supports raising taxes on high earners, and that this support is strong among both Democrats and Republicans.

The campaign to raise taxes on high-income households is part of a larger ideological notion that reducing inequality by such means as taxation and welfare programs is a proper function of government. Supporters (e.g., Democrats) argue that progressive taxation helps to ensure that high earners pay their “fair share” in supporting the public resources, such as schools, roads and law enforcement, that are necessary (but not sufficient) for their success. Republicans, on the other hand, tend frame the issue directly in terms of government intrusion – the government is unfairly “picking winners and losers," and stifling innovation and risk-taking. The assumption seems to be that many Americans don't care for the generic idea of government taking an active role in reducing the gap between rich and poor, even though they tend to support many of the specific means by which this occurs, including not only raising taxes on high earners, but also public education and programs like Medicaid.

So, it might be interesting to see what Americans think of the broader idea that government has a legitimate role in reducing income inequality. Let’s take a quick look.

An International Perspective On Corporate Pay

Our guest author today is Michael Tims, associate professor of biology at Montgomery College in Takoma Park, Maryland. Some of his writing can be found on his science blog, Bardo's Calculus, as well as at the Hyattstown Mill Arts Project, where he is a board member.

The growing wealth gap in the United States has worried some commentators for years. The length and breadth of the economic crisis, and the suffering it has brought with it, have moved those concerns into the mainstream. One aspect of this development that warrants more attention is the connection between declining rates of unionization, and the incredible gap between the pay of workers and their bosses.

As corporate resistance to unions has increased and union density declined, the discrepancy in pay between management and worker has grown extreme. Since the mid 1970s, the average multiple of CEO pay to worker pay has increased from 28x in 1970 to 158x in 2005, to almost 400x in 2010. . Their average "total realized annual CEO compensation" is currently $12 million, according to Governance Metrics International. During this same period, worker pay has stagnated and fallen behind inflation, despite an historic rise in workforce productivity

This phenomenon of high pay disparity in the industrial world is uniquely American, with the next highest countries being Britain (25x), Sweden (13x), Germany (11x) and Japan (10x). Claims that these pay levels represent success on the part of the CEO appear to be misleading.