I'm a big fan of studying social class across the spectrum, from privilege to poverty. There are too few scholars studying "up" to see the actions and values of upper-middle class people when studying inequality.

There are exceptions: A good example of the scholarly work of studying "up" is the recent article Advantaged Families’ Opportunity Hoarding in U.S. K–12 Education: A Systematic Review of the Literature published in Review of Educational Research.

The team compiling this 2025 literature review write:

The concept of opportunity hoarding has been used by a growing number of education researchers and sociologists of education in recent years to describe the process through which relatively advantaged families (largely described in the literature as white and/or middle- or upper-middle class) secure and/or maintain scarce educational resources that favor their children at the expense of low income and/or racially minoritized young people and their families.

First, we need to attend to the starting point of this entire argument: scarce resources. Families may hoard more than their share of available public resources, and they may ensure that others won't benefit from the provision of more resources. Either way, privileged families look at the zero-sum landscape of school funding and siphon as many resources as possible from schools for other people's children and into the schools of own children.

In short, the authors argue, we can best understand the educational resources available to poor and working-class students by also studying how networks of privileged parents lay claim to those very resources.

The literature review is comprehensive: the authors review 33 empirical journal articles and 8 books, asking both what we currently understand about how these social processes work and where more needs to be known.

They identify three (sometimes overlapping) ways in which privileged parents opportunity hoard. Each section is dense, so among the highlights are these core strategies:

The creation of white space

Decades after the courts mandated an end to enforced segregation, networks of families work to protect white spaces within which to educate their own children.

Parents may fiercely defend "historic" (pre-integration) school attendance boundaries when districts try to integrate schools by assigning children from adjacent neighborhoods to previously all-white schools. Parents threaten to leave for private schools or organize against school board members who support redrawn attendance boundaries. Suburban schools that served white flight families may consolidate to build political power against efforts to consolidate suburban and urban districts into country districts. White parents may stop voting for school tax levies when they're thinking about about moving as neighborhoods become more integrated, torching the quality of the neighborhood schools behind them as they move on.

In multiple states, parents in affluent districts with impermeable racial boundaries have organized to ensure that their property taxes benefit only their children though other parents or policy makers organize for a more equitable distribution of taxes across districts.

This all then becomes self-sustaining: Well-funded schools attended primarily by upper-middle class white students are designated "excellent" in published school rankings, bestowing academic status on their children and their parents. Property values go up in those neighborhoods with "good" schools, shutting less affluent parents out of home ownership near those schools. Parents then use the cudgel of formal designations of "excellence" to fend off any changes to attendance boundaries or programming that might benefit other families.

In all these ways, parents with political power in their communities have worked to sustain segregated public schools in the name of "wanting what's best" for their own children.

School Choice and School Selection

Districts have sometimes tried to encourage voluntary desegregation of neighborhood schools by dangling carrots in front of privileged parents: Administrators will create sought-after programs (like a science focus, or dual language instruction, or performing arts) in schools serving more diverse families and then designate these schools as open enrollment to encourage voluntary desegregation. White affluent parents may then organize to get their children placed in those now-academically prestigious schools. When demand for these schools exceeds space, decision-makers may be biased toward ambitious families. Privileged parents' threats to appeal administrators' decisions against their children may also simply wear down administrators.

There is one twist to the tactic of hoarding slots in the "best" schools for privileged children: In states in which flagship universities now guarantee admission to the top percentage of graduates in state high schools (another effort at college desegregation without explicitly considering race in admissions decisions), researchers have found that some white families move to districts with lower achievement rates so that their children will be positioned to hoard these guaranteed college admissions spaces that would otherwise have gone to long-time residents. Those parents settle for fewer school resources for their children for part of high school in exchange for hoarding stress-free college admissions that they'd have had to compete for in their affluent home districts.

Organizational Routines

When schools do serve diverse populations, affluent parents work to ensure (through advocacy, appeals, and threats to leave) that their students get access to programs for gifted students, to Advanced Placement courses, or to particular teachers. Parents may advocate for their own children but also work to ensure that the structures that distinguish their children from others are maintained. It is not enough that their children are in the AP classes in a given school. It is also important that the school not dilute that status by offering more AP classes to more students.

Finally, in this section, the authors review studies of parent fundraising that allow families to deepen inequalities between their school and others by privately paying for arts or science or technology programs for their schools that are not available via public funding in other schools.

What's Not Being Studied

The authors thus recommend many additional areas of study – from learning how affluent parents across and within districts learn hoarding strategies from one another, to delving into intersectional forms of hoarding for class, gender, and racial privilege. They also note a few schools in which parents organized against others to preserve racial diversity and families who opt-in to integrated neighborhood schools rather than hoarding placement in specialized district schools. These exceptions, the authors argue, merit more study.

But in the end, the authors argue for much more study of parents' resource hoarding as part of what sustains educational inequalities:

This is a salient time to study the mechanisms that produce and maintain durable inequality in education given major cuts to public education in many U.S. school districts, neoliberal educational reforms and ideologies that contribute to increased competitiveness for “good” schools, increased competitiveness and high costs in postsecondary education, economic precarity facing many families in the United States, and a “parents’ rights” movement that centers whiteness and resists critical examinations of race and racism in U.S. schools and curriculum.

It will never be enough to study the resilience or values of poor and working-class families to explain how some children from these families make it to and through college. We'll only understand these students by locating their education within social class hierarchies in which powerful parents insist that poor and working-class students simply don't deserve good schools. It's not enough to study "imposter syndrome" as first-generation students question whether they're worthy of college. It's also essential to understand what first-gen students have witnessed as children and as college students as others used their political power to sustain systems that convey to them that they are, in fact, unworthy of the resources that more privileged children have.

My project this week has been setting up a Bluesky account for Education and Class. It's a work in progress but ...

[drumroll]

{here's how to find it though the link is wonky:}

Over there, I'll share some of my posts from this site, repost other social class-relevant content from Bluesky, and keep working to deepen our understanding of class and educational inequalities and the classed dimensions of being a first-gen student.

If you miss some of these posts in your email (or are just tired of all the email), you can follow the new account to link through to most posts via Bluesky.

If you're on Bluesky, follow the E & C account and I'll follow back.

And as always, I'd love for you all to join the conversation in the comments there or here.

One of my favorite scholars of higher education policy is Dominique Baker who, along with Christopher Bennett, has just released a new analysis of who is most likely to get prestigious private academic fellowships. With the chaos around federal grant funding, private fellowships are ever-more important as these career-defining awards that provide time and money to pursue scholarship and creative work. Along with the unrestricted time and material support provided by these awards, recipients enjoy career-long prestige and access to elite networks.

Looking specifically at the Guggenheim fellowship, Baker and Bennett find that overwhelmingly, recipients are chosen from a very small number of elite, high-resourced universities. The rich, Baker and Bennett observe, get richer, and the scholarly work of the rich is elevated over other possible projects.

There are any number of explanations for this "stability in the status hierarchy". Many more excellent people apply for these fellowships than can be funded, and "campus prestige" can be one shortcut when sifting through the applicant pool. Wealthy campuses also have many more resources to support the development of applications: professional staff to review drafts, research assistants, internal funding supports the development of literature reviews, faculty with lower teaching loads with more time to invest in their applications. Possibly, those who work at these institutions are the most likely to seek prestigious fellowships and then to reapply after being turned down.

Or perhaps, selection committees make arbitrary decisions that scholars from these institutions are pre-screened for their potential to do breakthrough work.

Yet scholars who have come up through prestigious, well-resourced high schools and colleges and graduate schools and are then hired to work in elite places will be curious about different sort of questions than will scholars who have been denied access to each of those steps on the ladder.

As Baker and Bennett write:

There is no shortage of talent and brilliance across the country and the larger world. Funders get to decide how they identify that talent—and, equally importantly, whose talent they choose to cultivate.

The historical trends show that the longstanding methods of selection, which often overlook the cumulative advantages provided by prestigious institutional affiliation, tend to coincidentally find talent in the same places, year after year. Ignoring this reality will result in replicating the status hierarchy of the past decades, all too often rewarding those already flush with resources at the risk of slowing or even halting innovative work from those less well-connected.

The last year that I taught kids in public school was in a southern state. My school was not air conditioned. When the temperature hit the upper 80s by early May, my principal brought huge fans into the classroom, but the kids and I were still melting as we struggled to hear one another over the noise. The last six weeks of that year were a hot and sticky futile struggle to get much of anything done.

Decades of climate change later, more communities are experiencing stretches of extreme heat. Athletes on practice fields, marching bands rehearsing their formations, and even children at recess are at growing risk of heat illness and even death. Though data is incomplete, thousands of students have experienced heat-related illness and dozens of teenagers have died from the effects of excessive heat in recent years.

As with so much else, schools' capacity to prevent and respond to these new health threats depend on funding, and thus are grossly unequal. Some schools hire specialized athletic trainers and install large ice baths in special recovery rooms to quickly treat overheated students; in other schools, ill students are sent inside to sit in makeshift plastic tubs of ice water or to rest on cafeteria tables. States are setting new health standards for emergency equipment and staff training, but in many schools, these standards are yet another unfunded mandate.

There are so many dimensions to educational inequality. Now, unequal funding can mean that student in well-resourced schools are buffered from the worst effects of the extreme heat of climate change while students in schools that have long been underfunded risk serious illness or even death when participating in routine student activities.

It seems so basic that all schools should be keeping students safe. It seems so basic that all kids should attend equally-funded schools.

I'm heading out for some travel and will be back with more news about Education and Class in a few weeks.

See you then.

At the recommendation of people I deeply respect, I read Joan Willams’ 2025 book Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back . It's clearly an important question. 64% of white voters without a degree (but only 14% of Black voters without a degree) did vote for Trump in 2024). Significant numbers of lower-income people didn’t vote at all in the 2024 election. 

Who Speaks On Behalf of Working Class Voters?

Who is Williams to explain these white voters without college degrees who supported Trump? She attended Yale as a legacy student (she mentions her grandfather's time there), did a masters at MIT and graduated from Harvard Law. Her wedding was featured in the “society” section of the New York Times. She now teaches law in the Bay Area. 

She writes in the book that she speaks on behalf of the working class in part because her husband’s parents did not have college degrees and they struggled early in their marriage to understand each other because they were so different (Her husband also attended Harvard Law). She says little else about organizing with, teaching, or living among other working-class people.

White Working-Class Voters, Education, and the Election

I have a lot of questions about the book, but today I want to specifically think about her chapter on her claims about working-class voters' understanding of democrats’ and republicans’ policies on education and opportunity. Most of this discussion is in Chapter 11: “Smart People Get Ahead; Isn’t that Just Reality?”.

I want to be clear that I’m not speaking on behalf of “the working class” when I weigh the arguments in this chapter. I’m in no position to do that. I am drawing on my decades of work in the field of education. My critique will mainly focus on what Williams says about what working-class voters heard and interpreted about education from Democrats, and her interepretation of their negative reactions to those things. While she's writing about these voters turning to Trump, I will also question why she doesn't mention relevant things that Republicans (and Trump specifically) have said and done around education that have mattered in working-class lives.

I also want to be clear that I grappled for a while with how to talk about a chapter written by someone of much higher status than me, in a book blurbed by famous people. In the end, it seems fair that any author would expect the same critical read that any first-year, first-generation graduate student would get had they written this chapter as an education policy seminar paper. 

The Basic Argument

Williams argues that Democrats (and especially Obama) communicated indifference and denigration of working-class people and working-class jobs in pursuit of “college for all”. Working-class voters then supported Trump, in part because Democrats’ policies on education were “humiliating” to working-class voters who felt “left out” by Democrats’ discourse about the importance of education, and especially college.

This chapter builds on her broader argument throughout the book that Democrats have been indifferent to the very real economic precarity of many working-class communities while Republicans promise dignity and jobs. She writes at length about the core values of "the working class" through which they evaluate candidates, and while I'll say less about those "values" arguments in this post, I will consider her understanding that these voters carefully scrutinize each candidate and even remember political discourse from past presidents as they vote today.

Democrats, she writes, "began arguing that everyone should and could get a college education". In a heavily referenced book, she cites no one saying this. Also without citation, she writes that 30 years of this "college-for-all ideal was humiliating to noncollege grads, implying that they lacked the intelligence, foresight, and/or discipline to do what it takes to succeed". Democrats, therefore, "let elites off the hook for robbing non-elites of their right to a middle-class future in the richest country in the world" as they instead claimed that a college education would usher then into that middle-class life.

I want to highlight just a few problems with Williams' claims about what working-class voters heard and believed about democrats, since she presents these arguments as their critique, not hers:

A Key Quote, Misattributed to Obama: 

I immediately opened a search engine when I read this paragraph that builds her case that working-class voters felt demeaned by Obama’s discourse and his education policy: 

In a shocking expression of liberals’ inclination to consign anyone who did not attend college to dead-end, low-paid jobs, Obama once said: “One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer to the way that they’re supposed to be treated.” 

I sought the search engine because it was my job to know about education policy and I'd never heard Obama saying anything close to this. And I was right.

No working-class voter ever reacted to Obama saying this, because Obama never said this. 

Had Williams simply typed that quote into a search engine like I did, she’d see that it is attributed everywhere to the very problematic economist Larry Summers. The quote is from a book on the Obama presidency by elite journalist Ron Suskind. Summers served as an economic advisor for only two of Obama's eight years in office. Summers is also known for leaving the presidency of Harvard after a vote of no confidence from the faculty after sexist public comments about women in science and his conflicts with Black scholar Cornell West. Very recently, Summers resigned from his Harvard faculty job after revelations about his close friendship with Jeffery Epstein. 

Yet Williams writes not only that Obama said this but that this quote is just one example of a patterns of broader "liberal" indifference to low-wage work and to the people who hold those jobs. She does not mention any other examples of liberals saying that low-wage workers get what's coming to them.

A Sketchy Timeline For a Shift From “Reverence” for Workers’ Skills to Today’s Worker “Humiliation” Under Democrats

Williams’ writes that current denigration of workers and disrespect for workers’ skills represent a significant shift from an earlier time when those skills were “highly valued”.  Yet both endpoints of her timeline for this shift are curious.

Her support for the claim that workers were once “highly valued”? The Works Progress Administration Post Office murals of the 1930’s and 40’s that often depicted [male] workers in local industries. Yet these murals were commissioned to instill local pride in local resources and industries in the wake of massive unemployment and worker unrest during and after the depression. Their primary purpose was actually to provide artists with work. 

Williams points to these idealized murals as evidence of a public consensus around the value of manual workers, but she writes nothing about the actual conditions of that work at the time. A local post office mural might depict proud miners emerging from the coal mine to return to their cozy homes, but hundreds of miners were killed in mining accidents every year when those murals first appeared. Other authors might read about the high rates of workplace deaths and conclude that miners – and other labor – were expendable, not “highly valued”. There were 19,600 occupational deaths across the U.S. in 1937 and 120,000 permanent injuries, yet WPA murals painted during those years represented exceptionally clean, brawny, proud workers and the pristine kitchen tables where supper awaited them. 

It’s very difficult to square Williams’ argument that workers’ skills were “highly valued” with the lengthy and brutal labor strikes across the country (with law enforcement often siding with owners, not workers) during that era. 

But she presents the murals as her starting point for a timeline of a shift from public reverence for workers to their public denigration.

Her endpoint is even worse. 

A Single Curious Citation for the “Decline” of Respect for the Non-College Educated

Williams cites a single journal article summarizing a set of social psychology surveys as her evidence that attitudes toward workers substantively declined under Democrats' rhetoric.

She introduces this article saying “by 2018", “college graduates tended to blame less educated people for their social disadvantage” and held them in lower esteem than any stigmatized racial group. 

The words “by 2018” imply that she’s writing about research that documents a shift in attitudes. Yet the surveys written up in this single article did not measure change over time. It’s simply a paper published in 2018 based on recently collected data. 

And who completed those surveys?  Who are the “college graduates” in this damning study? The U.S. subjects completing the online surveys reported here were almost all employees of Amazon’s Mechanical Turks. 

What was Mechanical Turks?  

Long before any normalization of remote work during COVID,  Mechanical Turks was an early gig-economy Amazon platform on which employers posted digital piece work for pay for people to complete at home on their personal computers. These jobs were low-pay projects such as marketing surveys, labeling photo collections, or research surveys when scholars didn’t have grants to recruit more representative research subjects.

Mechanical Turks workers often tried to maximize their pay by completing as many discrete jobs a day as possible. They might earn anywhere from a penny to a dime for completing one of the surveys reported in this article, requiring them to complete multiple surveys or other tasks a day to earn even minimum wage.

Yet Williams is claiming that Mechanical Turks workers doing low-wage work at home in 2018 – workers who opted in to these research surveys among all their choices – are representative of all college graduates, and that in a day of doing multiple surveys for a dime each, they carefully represented their deepest values when answering.

I can think of many reasons why people who had gone to college but were now at home clicking on dozens of marketing and research surveys a day might punch down when responding. It seems much harder to imagine that those workers fairly represent the broader population of college educated people.

The surveys asked nothing about how respondents came to these beliefs. It's Williams own claim that people "now" denigrated workers because of national political discourse. 

In sum, Williams compares the artistic – and intentionally inspiring – depiction of workers in post office murals 80 years earlier with the 2018 survey responses of college-educated, at-home, low-wage gig workers. She believes that she’s documenting significant changes in attitude in this curious variation on comparing apples to oranges.

So what of that education discourse and policy that she claims working-class voters were hearing?

Misrepresenting Democrats’ Education Messaging as “College for All’” 

Williams writes at length about democrats’ push for “college for all” that left working-class voters feeling “very left out” and that “erased the dignity of all kinds of jobs that are important”.

She doesn’t quote a single democrat advocating for “college for all”.  She does draw inferences from other things happening during Obama's presidency.

She points, for example, to the shortage of workers in the construction trades in 2016 as evidence that the work in the trades was now disparaged. Yet economists have pointed to the massive layoffs of construction workers following the 2009 recession with many of those workers logically moving into different careers. They point to slowed immigration rates when there were fewer jobs, the reluctance of some young people to enter the trades after witnessing that dramatic boom and bust cycle of 2009, and routine retirements of a large generation of older workers as causing those shortages. There’s no evidence that potential electricians and plumbers instead enrolled in college.

She even writes later writes that college enrollment remained flat during this push for “college for all”. She writes mockingly that this is evidence that the “college for all” push “didn’t work”. She doesn’t consider that perhaps there never was such a push.

A Single Working-Class Voice, and He Was Working To Elect Democrats 

Her only quote from any working-class person about democrats and college is a single short quote from a state leader of the Unite Here union. The quote is from a long New Yorker article (written by an Ivy League educated reporter) who interviewed multiple parties around the country about competing priorities for democratic voters in the upcoming 2022 mid-term election. 

In its entirety, this labor leader is quoted saying that democrats do well with social security and medicare that are for everyone but “emphasized college too much”.

That’s it. 

That’s all the reporter chose to include from what likely was a longer interview. Yet Williams’ presents this quote as evidence that democrats pushed college for everyone humiliated workers by inferring that non-college workers "lacked the intelligence, foresight, and/or discipline to do what it takes to succeed".

We are to infer this humiliation from the quote of the Unite Here union leader, yet Williams doesn't mention that Unite Here, invests heavily in fund-raising and volunteer canvassing to elect democrats in every election cycle. They endorsed, donated to and provided thousands of campaign volunteer hours to both of Obama's campaigns, as they did for HRC's, Biden's, and Harris's campaigns and those of state and local democrats.

It’s difficult to understand why she’d quote a union leader who was actively organizing union members to elect democrats as part of her argument for why working-class voters supported Trump. 

Was It Working-Class Voters or Williams Who Didn't Hear Obama Speak of Job Training?

When she describes how Obama talked about education, she says nothing about how many times he proposed ambitious vocational training and upskilling programs as labor markets shifted to more skilled work.

Because I was working at a campus with close times to local community colleges during Obama’s presidency, I knew about how Republicans killed many of those programs: “First Jobs” training for young workers; free community college for workplace skills or college access; his annual “back to school” talks at high schools where he correctly talked about most higher-wage jobs requiring education beyond high school and specifically said that didn't always mean college; his Upskilling Initiative proposing federal funding for partnerships with local unions and industries to train local workers for emerging new fields and new technologies in existing fields.

Obama was correct that with the demise of unions and union-sponsored job training, most high school students would have to get additional training and education to find jobs with decent pay. He said in proposing each of these job focused initiatives that "education" was vital for success. When he erred, it was in implying that more training would create opportunity when job growth remained slow after the 2009 recession. 

But Williams simply never writes anything about working-class voters' perceptions of any of Obama's worker initiatives (though he spoke of them in widely publicized settings as his State of the Union addresses). She writes nothing of what working-class voters thought about the GOP refusing to fund any of Obama's job training proposals. 

She also doesn't mention the broader context within which Obama did talk about improving access to college.

The "Lost Decade" of College Funding

Williams speaks of the 2009 recession and the workplace, but she never mentions the devastating decade for state funding of public higher education during Obama's presidency. She never reports what working-class voters thought about the “lost decade” of cuts to state schools and colleges after the 2009 recession, especially in states under Republican leadership. Those cuts to college funding meant that colleges had to delay planned enrollment growth, cancel planned new degrees, and were less able to support access for first-generation students who wanted agriculture degrees to modernize the family farm or to be elementary teachers.

Anything that Obama said about college was against this backdrop of state legislatures allowing public colleges and universities to languish as those campuses were also forced to raise tuition to cover some of the cuts. And thanks to the very Republican President Reagan, students now had to take out loans because other federal financial aid had been cut:

People working in public higher education – including working-class voters working as staff – were keenly aware of painful cuts to public colleges. It's Williams’ own argument that if Obama talked about college access, he intended to denigrate workers without college degrees. It seems not to occur to her that he was speaking to people who knew how deeply budgets had been cut for the public community college and state universities in their own backyards and how long-lasting those cuts were in many states. It seems not to occur to her that she was speaking to people who were facing lost dreams of college for their own children because of cuts at the state level.

Loud Silences: Republicans' Support for For-Profit Colleges That Exploited the Working-Class

It’s not Williams’ job to write an entire history of this era of education policy, but while she builds her case that Obama’s policies and discourse “humiliated” working-class voters (without quoting anyone claiming to have been humiliated), she never mentions the exploitation and subsequent real humiliation of working-class families in the GOP’s strong support for for-profit colleges and trade schools created by Wall Street Investors. These “colleges"aggressively recruited working-class students with promises of job training that would lead to good paying jobs. Instead, hundreds of thousands of people graduated from these places deeply in debt (assisted by staff who helped them submit loan applications) and unemployable.

Worse, as what the case of some of my students, these colleges folded while students were mid-program, leaving them in debt with nothing to show for their efforts. Those students knew they'd been duped, and were deeply humiliated.

Williams never mentions that Obama’s administration finally regulated these for-profit schools or that Obama’s DOJ (and Kamala Harris’s Attorney General office in California) ensured that tens of thousands of students who had attended these for-profit schools had their student loans discharged. People in many working-class communities knew neighbors and family who had their predatory loans erased. But Williams does not tell us what they thought about that relief from crushing debt provided by democrats.

Nor does she mention, in explaining Trump’s re-election in 2024, that after Obama's debt cancellation, Biden cancelled the debt of hundreds of thousands more for-profit college students who had been duped into going deeply in debt for worthless for-profit beauty and business and tech programs that opened everywhere with support from Republicans.

Williams does not mention that Trump himself started a fraudulent for-profit "university" that targeted single parents, the elderly, and other economically vulnerable people. She does not mention his legal maneuvering to avoid accountability for lying to these students or him finally settled $25 million in legal claims by former students only as he prepared to run for president.

Williams counts how many times Obama used the word "smart" to describe his policies and projects (even when he spoke of digital "smart" grids) as signaling a cult of “smartness” that excluded workers. She does not quote any working-class voters about why they might have been focused on his vocabulary but were relatively unbothered by Republicans' support of wealthy investors who profited when taking students' loan checks and veterans benefits at all those worthless for-profit colleges.

Centering Elite Colleges in the Working-Class Imagination

Claiming again that she’s documenting a shift in education over time, Williams writes that “college, once celebrated as the great leveler, has become a way to perpetuate class privilege”. She infers that working-class voters now recognize this shift and blame democrats.

Yet college was never a great leveler, and even more troubling, she writes only of Ivy League campuses in claiming that "colleges" once leveled playing field but now have ever-more competitive admissions, as if working-class voters are attuned to shifts in admissions at Harvard and Yale.

She’s flat-out wrong about the history of Ivy League admissions: we know that there has been almost no change in the socio-economic diversity of the Ivies in a century. Ivy League campuses have always been havens for wealthy students that perpetuate class privilege. Always.  And the Ivies have never enrolled more than 1% of all undergraduates, so even had they ever recruited more low-income students, their impact on “leveling” would have been minimal.  

She’s flat-out wrong again when she writes that admissions to the “top schools” has become much more competitive because so many [privileged] parents are desperate to pursue diminishing opportunities. 

Education scholars have been writing for years about how the Ivies are now gaming their admissions data in competition with other elite schools for high rankings.  Because college rankings heavily weigh admissions rates as a proxy for quality, these schools began making it easier to apply. They began investing in actively encouraging more applications from students that they know they’ll never admit - entirely to juice high “reject rates” for these annual college rankings. These schools actively exploit the big dreams of high school students from non-elite backgrounds to boost campus prestige to elite families.

Williams herself sees the higher rejection rates of these colleges and decides on her own that this is evidence that higher application numbers are driven instead by parents’ new fears of falling. 

Worse, in centering admissions at a small number of east coast Ivy League campuses, she writes nothing about working- class families’ connections to their own state schools, though these families are at least often college sports fans and know people who have graduated from these schools. She says nothing about how working-class students who do go to college overwhelmingly enroll in nearby state universities and community colleges, nothing about how voters understand how underfunded many of these campuses are.

I find it curious that she infers that working-class voters blame Democrats for private Ivies mostly admitting the elite, while never mentioning the deep recent cuts to public colleges and universities, especially in red states.

Romanticizing Working-Class Lives

Near the end of the chapter, Williams writes that economic precarity has led ambitious privileged families to overschedule children in activities in the hopes of positioning them for success because of their "fear of falling". She quotes extensively from Annette Lareau’s 2011 book Unequal Childhoods in which Lareau contrasts the intensive “concerted cultivation” parenting of middle-class families and the “natural growth” parenting within poor and working -class families. Lareau contrasts highly scheduled childhoods in homes headed by parents with professional jobs with poor and working-class children playing with neighborhood friends after school with few structured sports practices or lessons.

Lareau does not write about the intense middle-class parents as "fearful" so much as she describes them as competitive and invested in perpetuating advantages for their own children by teaching them habits required in their own professional workplaces.

When I teach this book, students are often drawn to the independence and creativity that Lareau describes in working-class children as they spend hours of free play while more privileged peers are carpooled through a stressful schedule of piano lessons and elite sports practices.

Williams echoes that romanticization when she highlights a child named Tryec from Lareau’s book, a child who in play with neighborhood children developed, in Williams’ words, “skills in peer mediation, conflict management, personal responsibility, and strategizing”, life skills not learned by the upper-middle class children in the study like a child named Garrett.

It may be easy for an author who herself was a privileged parent to assume that child rearing styles were central to children's future success. Privileged people might assume that the skills of  “peer mediation, conflict management, personal responsibility, and strategizing” learned by some working-class children would be valued in the workplace.

Yet Lareau focused on home life, not the broader material conditions of poor/working-class families and their privileged peers. She never implied that the skills that some children learned in free play would surmount unequal material conditions in which different families live.

Indeed, Williams seems not to have read the 2nd edition of Lareau’s book, in which Lareau returns to the families she wrote about 10 years before. Tryec’s and Garrett’s lives have taken very different paths.

Ten years later Garrett, who had little unstructured time as a child, went to a high school with multiple AP classes and good college counseling that prepared him to apply to multiple elite schools. Garrett’s father had gotten a new higher-paying job, allowing his mother to stay home to invest all of her time in her sons. Garrett’s participation in costly (and time-consuming) basketball travel leagues positioned him to star on his high school basketball team. With his AP classes and graduation from a highly regarded high school, Garrett got a “full-ride” sports scholarship to a prestigious private college, though he was disappointed not to be recruited by his top school. 

Tyrec, in spite of the life-skills he learned in his less-structured childhood, was struggling ten years later. As his mother worried about his education, she transferred him among three different high schools: His under-resourced neighborhood school, a new charter school where his mother thought he might find more opportunities, and then a private school (with his parents going into debt to pay tuition) when the charter school didn’t live up to its promise.

The multiple transfers meant that Tyrec’s dreams of playing high school basketball were never possible. His close friendships were now a downfall: Tryrec followed several friends into juvenile detention, sentenced, he insisted, for things that the friends had done. Two of his friends had been killed.

Tryec had intended to go on to college, but across three high schools, no one seems to have taught him how to prepare to apply. He never took the courses needed for college admission and never took admissions tests. Quite apart from whatever he learned in creative play, the structural inequalities between Tyrec's schools and Garrett's ensured that Tyrec would enter young adulthood far behind Garrett.

Ten years after learning what Williams describes as valuable life skills through neighborhood play, Tryec had drifted through a series of minimum wage jobs in malls and fast food but was unemployed for months at a time when no jobs were available. He struggled during a year of remedial courses in community college. He then enrolled in a training program for a building trade and began work in that field at the highest wage he’d ever earned.  A short time later, he was laid off from that job.

Child rearing styles mattered to Garrett, but only because they were backed by his family's money and the wealth in his community that funded his schools. Tyrec may have learned important life skills in childhood, but there was nowhere in his community in which those skills translated into educational or workplace capital.

Williams chose to write about Ivy League admissions in this book about working-class voters' perceptions of democrats, but she does not say anything about the deep inequities in public school funding that leave so many children in red states ill-prepared as citizens or as workers.

She does not speak to how under-resourced public schools in working-class communities in many red states may matter in how voters in these communities access and interpret information about the politics that shape their lives.

Working- Class Voters are Exotic, Yet Just Like Us

The very premise of the book, that working-class voters weigh how candidates align with distinctive class-based values, seems not to have a lot of support among political scientists. G. Elliot Morris calls this belief of an informed, coherent, values-driven electorate  the “strategist fallacy in which elites map their own mental model of how they make political decisions onto all voters.

Instead, Morris argues “much political science finds that when it comes to their attitudes on the issues, voters are very fickle.”

Indeed, Morris argues, that rather than Trump's support coming from those attuned to party policy or political discourse, voters paying the least attention to politics voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2024.  When they did tune in, voters listened to polarized media and to people within their personal networks. They voted on “vibes” or "change", or attended to a handful of commercials aired near election day. Indeed, Morris documents, most voters hold contradictory beliefs about a range of political issues and may respond very differently to surveys of election priorities depending how a question is framed. 

Williams doesn't offer a lot of evivdence for her core premises that working-class voters remember remember Obama's speeches, unfunded proposals, or actions. They may well resent of him for a range of reasons, only some of which have to do with policy.

As for why some turned to Trump? Trump supporters in my own family speak of their positive memories of his supposed business savvy after watching all 14 seasons of The Apprentice when they were young. They seem not know that he was fired from the franchise after his racist comments as he announced his presidency.

Yet Williams has written a book to explain the distinctive political lives of  working-class voters that describes them as engaging in politics much like the professionals among whom she lives in a very blue part of the country.

This assumption may explain why it is so hard in so much of the book to know when Williams is conveying her own criticisms of democrats and when she's speaking knowledgeably about white working-class voters. Throughout the book, she seems to simply assume that they pay attention to what she attends to. Yet at the same time, their interpretations of those same political moves require book-length explanation.

Yet in the end, incumbents often lose midterms as voters come to better understand what they voted for, as "change" drives a lot of voters, and because voters are fickle.

Indeed, it appears that Trump himself has already lost the support of many of the lower-income white voters who put him into office. It's not that their core values have changed. It's that they now have to pay closer attention to him since his actions are affecting so many lives.

When Publishers Pay Ivy League Legacy Graduates to Explain Others

In the end, Williams’ book matters because every election now is high-stakes and every election will now be close and people who advise politicians blurbed the book.  It matters because a publisher understood that a legacy Ivy League graduate with multiple elite advanced degrees could write a book-length account of the political lives of white voters without degrees, without claiming any sustained contact with the working-class beyond her in-laws.

It also matters because had a first-generation graduate student turned in an essay this weakly referenced in a first-year seminar, her academic career would likely be in jeopardy. She likely would not have been given the benefit of a doubt, let alone a book contract. No one would assume that she had important things to say if she couldn't verify quotes or if she stripped political discourse from historical context.

That first-gen student taking a run at graduate school would have to instead work really hard to ever get the mic to explain the circumstances of her own life to more powerful others, on her own terms. And, she'd have to think carefully about how to begin, given that those more powerful others are the ones now holding that mic and telling her story.

I often read in the first-gen student literature about the importance of a sense of "belonging" for student success and retention. It's common for researchers to explore how to deepen first-gen students' "belonging" through such things as extracurricular activities, leadership opportunities, community-building events for first-gen students, or personal connections to faculty All are good for building social and emotional ties to others on campus, and all focus primarily on how first-gen students themselves might learn to navigate these new relationships and activities.

It is much less common to find studies that instead document the social interactions within extracurricular activities or faculty encounters that communicate to first-gen students that they do not belong in the first place.

I therefore dove into Bonnie Stewart and Thu Thi Kim Le's new paper Mapping Belonging in Higher Education: Tracing Relationality Across Digital and Place-Based Literature. I've followed Bonnie Stewart's deeply thoughtful work on digital education for years, and have long appreciated her critical perspectives on educational discourse.

Here, Stewart and Le consider "belonging" within the broader, shifting political contexts of higher education in the U.S. because students are seeking "belonging" within specific institutional structures :

However, especially in popular discourse, the terms [belonging and sense of belonging] also tend to elide any direct mention of race, structural inequities, digital disenfranchisement, sector underfunding or any of the various stressors and changes in higher education.

Reviewing literatures within the broader field of education, within digital pedagogies, and within placed- based education, Stewart and Le argue for moving beyond study of students' individual emotional sense of connection and acceptance to also study their experiences of stigmatization and discrimination, since "belonging" is inherently about the power of others to include or exclude:

Efforts to cultivate belonging – in any learning modality – require deliberate engagement with learners’ experiences and with the power relations to which they are subject.

The authors also call for readers to recognize that students may well refuse"belonging" as an act of agency, as they refuse membership in groups and settings that deny their identity and worth.

Why, they ask, would students seek to uncritically "belong" within social structures that replicate inequalities that have worked against them and their communities:

Schools and institutions nonetheless reflect and often replicate societal power structures and logics of dominance to the detriment of SoB [Sense of Belonging], particularly for students whose lived experiences of the learning environment are navigated via marginalized embodiments and identity roles within those power structures.

Most first-generation students are navigating colleges at the intersections of class, race, gender, sexuality, and/or disability. In many places now, they have less access than ever to the analytical tools that might enable them to better understand any of these dimensions of their lived experiences. In many places, staff for personal support are stretched to their limits. In most places, faculty are exhausted.

I'm all for extracurriculars, leadership development, and meaningful connections to faculty and staff. I'm also all for listening very closely to students about the barriers they have always experienced within these social interactions, and how those barriers may now be intensifying.

I'm also all for learning much more about how student leaders, staff, and faculty are learning to question their own assumptions of entitlement and power now that first-generation students are seeking their rightful places on campus. Stewart and Le's paper is a very good reminder that the power inherent in many campus actors' ease and sense of ownership is central to whether others will ever sense that they, too, "belong".

The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford has created an interactive tool by which we can trace economic and racial segregation in schools. As readers of this site would predict, racially segregated schools are likely also to be economically segregated.

You can toggle for a quick big-picture overview by state and district. On the screen shot heading this post, darker green states have higher numbers of children attending schools with high concentrations of free-lunch eligible* students; the darker dots represent schools and districts with high concentrations of free-lunch eligible students in some buildings. The map allows you to search for and view metropolitan areas, regions, counties, school districts, schools, and neighborhoods. You can also see data on segregation trends from 1991-2020. You can explore intersections of racial and economic segregation and track trends in each over time.

In my home town in Wisconsin, nearly 1/3 of all students are free-lunch eligible, though economic segregation in schools has dropped slightly since 1991, perhaps because the district has been closing and consolidating schools.

In Seattle, where I now live, 26% of students are free-lunch eligible and the district has become modestly more economically segregated over the decade, perhaps because of rising housing costs in some neighborhoods, the high numbers of families who send their children to private schools, or the savviness of privileged parents in navigating the options for transferring out of neighborhood schools.

The Seattle map clearly shows the concentration of schools where fewer than 10% of students are free-lunch eligible (light dots) and others where more than 60% of students are from lower-income families (the darker dots).

Why does it matter? Students in schools with higher concentrations of poverty are likely to have less-experienced teachers who may also be teaching outside of their areas of expertise. They're likely to have fewer AP classes, and in the cafeteria, there are fewer conversations about the range of possible paths that young people might take after graduation. Buildings are likely to be older. Parents are much less likely to be able to privately supplement funding when district and state budgets fall short, so there may be fewer counselors, teachers, field trips, enrichment activities or working computers.

Sean Reardon, the director of the project describes the intent of the tracker:

“The American Dream will remain out of reach until all of our children have equal educational opportunities. My hope is that this data will help in the hard work of bringing the dream closer to reality.”

Data alone does not, of course, drive political decisions, and affordable housing policies and school assignment policies are highly political. And as always, I think that the politics of these issues would be more equitable if many more college students learned about how segregated public schools in the United States are, even as we tout schools as the great levelers of opportunity.

*Children from families at or below 130% of the federal poverty level are eligible for free school lunches.

I've written before about Anna Stansbury and Kara Rodriguez's research on social class gaps in academia. In a series of papers. they've documented how first-generation students getting PhDs earn less in academic positions, are less likely to be employed in prestigious universities, and are less likely to be tenured. When PhD holders work in the private sector, class gaps in promotion and salary are also evident.

In a new blog post for the Stone Center on Socioeconomic Inequality, Stansbury and Rodriguez write of how few organizations even collect data on socio-economic background of employees:

Gender and race have rightly become central to how researchers and organizations think about career disparities in elite occupations. But there is a glaring omission: class. Among the roughly 600 large U.S. firms whose DEI goals and reporting we reviewed in September 2024, virtually all discussed gender and race, and most discussed LGBTQ status, disability, and veteran status as well — yet only 6 percent made any mention of socioeconomic background. Socioeconomic or class background is similarly absent from most academic research on career progression.

They argue, as they have elsewhere, that too many leaders in these organizations assume that while class matters in access to education, all vestiges of class are erased while in college, so there is no need to question how class still operates throughout careers.

The blog post is a concise summary of their far-reaching technical research, and I think that more of us could share it with our campus and workplace leaders with their concluding paragraph highlighted:

Our findings suggest that researchers and practitioners should consider socioeconomic background alongside race and gender as an important axis of advantage in elite career progression. Studying it — and ultimately addressing it — requires, first, that we start paying attention to it and measuring it.

I cannot imagine what it must be like to be in debt with student loans in these chaotic political times. In just the past few years: Biden announced relief that was later overturned by the courts, then announced very promising income-based repayment plans. Trump then cancelled most of those new repayment plans that had made debt (and interest) much more manageable, and imposed more restrictions on the forms of Public Service that would "count" as work that qualified for eventual loan cancellation for people working in lower-wage public sector jobs.

Those who did get debt relief in 2025 were shielded from being taxed on the amount cancelled, because the American Rescue Plan Act clarified that student loan debt relief was not income.

But. Those protections expired in December, and now those who did get at least some of their loans cancelled may be facing unexpected five-figure tax bills.

Many students who aspire to college come from families who cannot possibly pay the costs. It is egregious to subject these people to this much financial chaos when loans were the only option available to them. Those who did get relief under income-based repayment plans are among the lowest earning college graduates.

Some forms of loan cancellation will be taxed while others will be exempt, but it is all a tremendous mess that punishes so many people for the sin of being born to low-income parents.

Meanwhile, Amazon's tax bill has plummeted this year as profits soar, thanks to new tax regulations passed by the GOP in 2025.

It's very common to find talk in the literature on first-gen students of schisms between students and their families as students learn new ways of thinking and speaking and feel that they no longer fit in with family and friends back home. I've always been curious that this literature just takes these these tensions for granted as quirks of personality or individual family dynamics. This literature so rarely considers class antagonisms as context for shifts in trust and understanding between poor and working-class families and their upwardly mobile children.

A new book by journalist Beth Macy explores the contexts of growing schisms between the the educated and those without degrees via both professional and personal lenses.

Macy grew up poor in small town Ohio as the "daughter of the town drunk" and a mother who worked multiple factory jobs. She did relatively well in school and then left for college at Bowling Green State University in 1982, funded almost fully by Pell grants and work study jobs.

Now a journalist and book author, Macy returned for extended visits to her hometown just before the 2024 election to try to better understand the "unprecedented forces that were actively turning a place I loved into a poorer, sicker, angrier, and less educated place". Beneath those questions of place are also deeply felt questions of who she now is to her family, as those extended visits included caring for her dying mother along with her siblings.

In Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America , she writes of reconnecting with friends, classmates, and family across growing divides of class, education, and politics. She spends weeks immersing herself back in her hometown, talking to teachers, old friends, local social service workers, and family to try to better understand her town where few young people now go to college. She writes of the decimated Pell Grant program, closed factories, underfunded schools, and the demise of local media (she'd been the town papergirl as a child) so that neighbors no longer knew about one another even as they were awash in polarized national messaging and online conspiracy theories. She writes of the "country club set" and others in the town who know little about one another.

And beneath many of her conversations is family and friends' suspicion of her as a college-educated liberal who left to live and work elsewhere. She is still the person who knew everyone on her paper route, was the drum major of the high school band, and can share beers with old classmates at old haunts. They trust her with many of the stories of their lives but distrust who she now is. She writes of their Trump parades and local politics with equal measures of frustration and compassion, even as siblings and former friends turn on her because of the "side" she represents.

Macy writes that she has long been aware that she's one of the few journalists from a rural working-class backgrounds in any professional room she is in. She listens, invokes shared memories as she reconnects with people, and contextualizes what she hears as she writes within broader national discourse. She writes of family estrangement around politics and religion, declining opportunity, and anger fueled by immersion in right-wing media.

Here, she speaks with journalist Andrea Pitzer at Politics and Prose about her hometown, family, and a national politics of anger and destruction:

Paper Girl is a powerful book of coming to terms with "home" being a much poorer version of what it had been, about loving family and friends who are suspicious of your core values, and about the work restoring trust between those who stay and those who leave.

Every single sentence makes clear how difficult it is bridge the divides she so carefully documents. Macy makes clear that tensions between families and their college-educated children may be experienced as private troubles, yet are also public issues that are resolved only via informed public policy. We'd do well to ensure that more first-gen students learn much more about the "unprecendented forces" that are weakening so many of their communities.

Campuses work against the interests of poor and working-class students in so many ways. The financial aid system itself often works against the interests of the very students who need financial aid. As colleges stare down cuts in state funding, donor pressures to boost sketchy college rankings, declining enrollment, and federal budget chaos, poor and working-class students can again be collateral damage as financial aid is leveraged at too many campuses to compete for privileged students.

New America has just released a report by Stephen Burd on how 32 selective private and 18 public research universities award much of their institutional financial aid dollars to students without financial need while steering lower-income families to take on predatory Parent Plus loans that they cannot afford.

Collectively, these 41 universities, many of whom work closely with private, for-profit enrollment management consultants, spent $2.4 billion of their own financial aid dollars on students who lacked financial need in 2023, according to the latest data available. Nearly $2 out of every $5 these schools spent on institutional aid that year went to non-needy students—those whom the federal government deems able to afford college without financial aid. Meanwhile, more than 32,000 families of Pell Grant recipients who had either graduated or left these schools in the recent past were stuck with PLUS loans they took out to pay for their children to attend these institutions. These families carried a median Parent PLUS loan debt load of nearly $30,000 each. For many of these families, the amount they owed came close to or exceeded their yearly earnings.

As Pell Grants now cover only a fraction of the costs of going to college, we've all heard about students graduating with high levels of debt. But these Parent PLUS loans carry even deeper risk for students' families:

Unlike federal student loans, which are strictly limited to $5,500 to $7,500 per year for dependent students (those under the age of 24), PLUS loans, for much of their history, have allowed parents to borrow up to the full cost of attendance, which includes not only tuition and fees but living expenses as well, regardless of their income.

Burd writes of of the perfect storm of financial pressures giving rise to "predatory inclusion" at some of these campuses: recruiters may actively encourage low-income students to apply, then boast of the rising numbers of Pell Grant eligible students enrolled. Campuses benefit from the revenue from these Parent Plus loans regardless of whether parents can ever repay them. Privileged students, meanwhile, graduate debt free while boosting college rankings with their high GPAs and SAT scores; if all goes well, they and their parents are likely to become donors. The parents of low-income students, meanwhile, risk eventual wage garnishment or worse.

Low-income families of color who have been unable to build generational wealth because of housing discrimination may be most likely to turn to Parent Plus loans and to struggle the most to repay them. Any encouragement that we might see in college enrollment growth among poor and working-class students is tempered by the life-changing costs for many families:

As states dramatically reduced funding for their public universities and the institutions raised their prices, PLUS loan borrowing exploded. According to the Century Foundation, annual PLUS loan disbursements at public universities grew nearly 300 percent between 2000 and 2017, from $2 billion to almost $8 billion.99 In 2008, the families of University of Alabama students took out only $25 million in Parent PLUS loans. A decade later, they borrowed almost five times that amount

None of these schemes to generate campus revenue, boost college rankings, lure out-of-state students, or steer families into crushing debt address the core crises of college affordability. Nor does recent congressional action to cap Parent Plus loans do anything about the need for high levels of college debt for so many families.

By definition, Pell Grant eligible students come from families who cannot afford the costs of college. It borders on the immoral that any campus then steers those very families into crippling debt to cover those costs while awarding privileged students grants and scholarships.

It borders on the immoral that so many of these structural inequalities remain hidden from those who benefit and from those who struggle to merely stay afloat so that each assumes that they're merely getting what they deserve.

Tuition is only part of the cost of going to college, but it's a big part.

The Washington Post has compiled a searchable data base of colleges now offering free tuition to students from families with modest incomes. There are a lot of colleges in the data base.

Income thresholds vary considerably from state to state. In some states, free tuition seems to be offered at regional campuses but not at flagship research universities. Some private colleges have income thresholds that are quite high. Most private colleges seem not to be on the list.

And of course, many students will still need assistance with books, food, transportation, housing, health care, and child care.

I wonder how students in high schools like mine – where there were few resources for steering kids toward college – would ever find a database like this. I wonder if/how states are publicizing these plans, and I especially wonder how people learn about the actual costs of attending private colleges.

I wonder if students who do know that tuition, at least, will be covered will be more likely to aspire to college than students for whom the costs of college seem to be an inscrutable black box.

It likely will come as no surprise to readers of this site that researchers at Stanford's Center for Educational Policy have found that the content of college application essays is more strongly correlated with family income than SAT scores. While there has been a great deal of discussion about "test free" admissions to minimize social-class bias in admissions to selective colleges, this is the first study to document that traces of social-class are evident across other elements of wholistic application reviews.

Based on computer analysis of the essays of 60,000 undergraduate applications to the University of California, the study suggests that while coaching first-generation students on writing compelling essays may be helpful in increasing the odds of admission for some, rethinking what applicants are asked to document in their submissions may ultimately be necessary if evaluators are to fairly screen the many files from ever-larger, ever more diverse applicant pools.

Simply assuming that we already know how best to predict who will succeed once admitted – based on decades of review of conventional application materials from privileged white students – seems willfully short-sighted unless admissions teams actually do assume that privileged white students are inherently more qualified that others.

For years, college access programs (and first-gen support programs on campuses) have been based on the premise that the path to equity is trying to replicate what affluent kids have: the test scores, the grades, the counseling and networking.

In her brilliant new essay, Cassandra Salgado reflects on her own decade of work in college access spaces:

The college access field has gotten very good at teaching students to navigate systems. We decode hidden curricula, demystify admissions processes and build bridges across information asymmetries that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

This work matters. But navigation alone accepts the system’s terms. We teach students to succeed within structures whose very logic advantages affluence, then we measure our success by how well they’ve learned to operate inside that logic. Even when navigation works, it produces individual exceptions to structural patterns while leaving the patterns intact.

And she speaks of how now, she's shifting her work with high school students to also focus on very different things.

We need to ask different questions.

Not: How do we give first-generation students what affluent students have?

But: Why does college admissions require professional navigation in the first place? Who benefits from the information asymmetries that make our programs necessary? What would it look like to transform these structures rather than help individuals escape them, one at a time?

And when I read these next words, I stood, faced Chicago from where she wrote this piece, and applauded:

The honest answer is that moving beyond affluency replication requires work at multiple levels, most of it beyond what any college access program can do alone. It means developing students’ critical consciousness about the systems shaping their lives, not just their ability to navigate those systems. It means advocating for policy shifts in how we fund early education and allocating resources to underresourced schools. It means addressing the material conditions, such as poverty, housing instability and food insecurity, that shape academic performance long before any admissions metric comes into play.

All if this, she writes, requires political will that we do not currently have. Yet we are at a crucial moment of rethinking where our political will might take us next as we rebuild. And we are at a crucial moment of deciding whether/how to educate everyone on college campuses about these structural inequalities – everyone, from those who have benefitted from inequitable systems and those who have had to be so resilient just to get in the door.

I cannot wait to learn more about how she's translating these ideas in her work at the high school she directs, where, she writes, they are "redesigning our approach in order to develop students’ understanding of the systems they’re navigating, not just their ability to move through them".

Reader, this essay is a clear and concise articulation of what I've tried to advocate for across nearly every post on this site. Please read it and share widely.