Showing posts with label WakeUpWednesday. Show all posts

Loan forgiveness is having a moment, and while I think the most recent move is a positive step it does not address the root of the problem and is the equivalent of putting a bandaid on a severed limb. Debt, primarily student debt, is a leading cause of the racial wealth gap and if we want to see real change we have to address the root - reattach the limb if we want to stick with my metaphor.

In order to understand the solution, we have to really understand how we got here. Today we're going to talk about how college got so freaking expensive in America? Some facts:

How we compare

Americans spend 2x the amount on college tuition compared other developed countries. BUT a third of these countries cover the cost of college for students (aka keep it free for students), while one third keep the cost at or below $2,400 for students. Meaning, it doesn't have to be this bad!!

How colleges are funded

America has three types of colleges that are funded in different ways:

1. Public (i.e. state universities): 3/4 of students attend public universities. They are funded by a mix of state and local funding, tuition dollars paid by students, and federal aid. 

2. Private non-profit: Rely on endowment funds and student paid tuition for funding (not state/local funding). 

3. For-profit colleges: We don't have time for this but these are the Strayers and DeVrys of the world.


How did college tuition go up so fast?

Tuition costs have increased three-fold in the last 30 years - aka it wasn't always this bad. Over the past 30 years, faced with rising healthcare costs and requirements to balance budgets, states and local governments have been redirecting funds from education to other areas- aka defunding education (yes, when lawmakers were out here acting brand new to the idea of defunding the police they'd been doing for literal decades with education). 

As their main funding source dropped, public universities did two things:

  1. Shifted costs to the students (i.e. increased tuition)
  2. Targeted out-of-state and international students who paid full tuition. 

In order to attract the wealthiest out-of-state and international students the colleges needed either 1) high rankings or 2) to pull some stunts. Both are extremely costly, let's break it down:

Rankings are helped by some costly factors:

  1. Low student:faculty ratios (very little research supports benefits of small college class sizes and this requirement is unique to American colleges) which means to be competitive colleges need more faculty members. 
  2. High amount of faculty-published research which means faculty need to focus more time on research so even more faculty are required to support the above requirement. And colleges pay a higher dollar for the all-star researchers.
  3. "Campus life" like extracurriculars and support for students which creates a whole other set of non-academic costs like directors, program managers, deans, and service providers.
Pulling stunts are costly too - these are things like national ranking sports teams (think all-star coaching staff, player facilities to attract the best athletes) and campus amenities (state of the art dining halls, fancy dorms). 

Each year as more colleges get more competitive, the ante gets upped and it gets a little costlier to keep up, adding expenses that are not covered by a system that continues defunding the colleges, and so the cost is transferred to the students.

Defunding education is uniquely American, as is entrepreneurializing (I made that word up) education, and hence we have the most expensive secondary education in the world.

The impact of rising tuition costs on the racial wealth gap

1. Lack of generational wealth and/or lack of liquid resources = Black households take out more student loans = Black households carry more student debt = Black households have lower credit = a whole host of issues contributing to the wealth gap (ex: challenges/inability to purchase a home - Black college grads are less likely to own a home than white high school dropouts). 

2. 60% of Black college students do not graduate, and while there are a host of factors that contribute to this, when researchers correct for students receiving financial support the Black graduation rate matches the white graduation rate. But again, lack of generational wealth and lack of liquidity and other systemic issues make it so Black families are less likely to be able to provide financial support at the same level as white families.

3. The majority of high achieving, low income students (in the top 4% of students) opt not to apply to highly selective colleges due to costs. This unfortunately often puts them into more debt than if they had gone to financial-aid heavy selective colleges, but this guidance is rarely available to low income students.

4. A $1,000 increase in undergrad tuition is associated with a 6% drop in campus diversity.

5. The cost of college deters many low income students from even applying to college.


College Tuition Part 1: why college is so freaking expensive

Wednesday, September 14, 2022

ICYMI the residents of Mississippi's capital city are currently without safe drinking water or the water pressure to take a shower or flush a toilet or fight a fire. Can we just take a minute to reflect on the severity of this situation? When is the last time you were somewhere without water for plumbing? Without access to water, aka the most basic human need? 

Jackson's schools have had to shut down and returned to virtual (reminder: this course of action is modern day school segregation and excludes poor students), restaurants and workplaces have had to shut down (loss of hourly wages = devastating impact on hourly workers who are disproportionately Black and Brown), only people who have resources to find and travel are able to obtain bottled water (poor people are less likely to have internet to search for locations, less likely to have access to reliable transportation, and due to hourly wages or health issues less likely to be able to wait in long lines to obtain water). 

There are a lot of important factors at play here that are important to understand. First, some details about Jackson, MS:
  • Population: 150,000
  • Black population: 83% of Jackson's residents are Black, making it the Blackest state in America only behind Washington, D.C. who can't get statehood because America loves to disenfranchise Black folks

The Timeline

This covers topics we have discussed in the past: school integration, state elections, and the dirty word "defunding" that we all like to lose our sh*t about when people associate with the police.

1969: We all know about Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, but lesser known is the 1969 decision Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education in which the Supreme Court told Mississippi their timeline for integrating schools was unconstitutional and they needed to integrate yesterday. This decision kicked off a decades long white flight from Jackson to whiter towns/suburbs. 

1969 - 2000: Jackson's overall population continued to decline, experiencing its sharpest drops from 1990 - on. The city was 56% Black in 1990, but by 2020, more than 80% of the city's residents were Black. I will let you draw your own conclusion about how the 70% white Republican controlled state congress thinks about resourcing their capital city when it is to their advantage to claim Black and Democratic mismanagement.  If the last few years have illuminated anything for us, it's to follow the money (aka political donations), so as wealthy white constituents left Jackson, politicians diverted funding from its own capital city to whiter, wealthier locations and causes.

The population drop also led to this equation for Jackson:
Population loss = tax revenue decrease = continued infrastructure decline = people who can afford to leave move out for places with better infrastructure = low income residents are the only ones left = the cost falls mostly on low income residents 

2020: Jackson's water infrastructure failed EPA inspections, and state legislature granted only a small fraction (6%) of the funding requested by Jackson's mayor to fix the problem. Please note, while infrastructure was being defunded, the state found plenty of funding to dedicate to abortion bans and critical race theory (🥴).

2022 (30 days ago): Jackson issues a boil advisory due to concerns about parasites, viruses, and bacteria in the drinking water. State legislators do...nothing.

Monday: A flood takes out Jackson's water infrastructure, leaving schools and businesses closed and residents without drinking water or running water. 

Common Themes

There are a lot of themes we have learned about that we see in racist situations.

  1. Importance of local elections: We need to pay attention to both our city and state wide elections. People voted in these state legislators who diverted funding for their own water infrastructure. 
  2. Systematic Disenfranchisement: As we see from the timeline, the state government has put in place systems to withhold funding from communities of color to keep them down. Also let's look at how the government has systematically kept education from Jackson students for years at this point.
  3. It's not just the south: Before you get too comfortable because Mississippi is like THE Deep South, please note that things like this are happening in every state, your city could be next.
  4. Environmental racism: City planning and infrastructure like this is a key example/

#WakeUpWednesday: The Jackson, Mississippi water crisis is rooted in racism

Tuesday, September 6, 2022


A Michigan judge ruled last week that 15-year old "Grace"* will remain incarcerated after failing to turn in homework.  The teen was put into a juvenile detention center in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic for violating probation for earlier assault and theft charges. "Grace" has ADHD, receives special education services, and struggled to keep up with the new online format of classes. After nation-wide protests and political pressure, an appeals court ordered that "Grace" be released back to her mother on Friday, but "Grace" is one of many young Black children incarcerated across the US.

I want to start this off by pointing out that plenty of people have brought to my attention, written about, and talked about the factors around "Grace" that have led to her getting locked up: she was on probation for a previous assault charge, she stole a cell phone at school, she is dangerous, etc (I don't have time or word count today to get into labeling kids as dangerous but if you do it - stop). To be honest, none of this matters. What matters is why we are locking up kids (60,000 on any given day across the US) which we know further traumatizes and has long-term negative physical and mental health outcomes, instead of providing mental health resources and family/community based interventions (again, we're talking about CHILDREN).

There are two components of systemic racism that play a big part "Grace"'s experience and that of thousands of young Black children across the country:

1: The Adultification of Black Girls
A 2017 Georgetown Law & Poverty Center study found that "adults believe young Black girls need less nurturing, protection, support, and comfort than white girls of the same age, and that black girls are more independent, know more about adult topics, and know more about sex than white girls". We see this at play in all kinds of stats:

  • 20% of female pre-schoolers are Black, but Black girls make up 54% of female preschoolers with one or more suspensions
  • Black girls are suspended five times more than white girls
  • black girls are 2.7 times more likely to be referred to the juvenile justice system than their peers
Adultification of Black girls leads to believing Black girls need less protection and less support than their peers and leads to more incidents in police use-of-force against Black girls, less mentorship and leadership opportunities offered to Black girls than their peers and less empathy and compassion towards Black girls compared to their peers. Additionally, Black girls are sexualized and more likely to be penalized at school for wearing the same thing as their peers.


2. The School to Prison Pipeline
You may be familiar with this concept from the #30DayEducationChallenge The school to prison pipeline is a national trend in which students are funneled out of public schools into the criminal justice system. This looks like school resource officers (SROs)- even when controlling for poverty, kids attending schools with SROs have FIVE times the rate of arrests for disorderly conduct. Zero tolerance policies play a big part here as well - once students are suspended they are three times more likely to be involved in the juvenile justice system within one year. Things like this lead to students disciplined in the juvenile justice system for issues that would normally be handled at school. 

What can we do?
While "Grace" has been freed, there are thousands of others in her situation. When we hear about these things, here are a few actions to take (as shared by the IG community)
  • Contact the judges involved
  • Email/call mayors, governors, county execs demanding release
  • Donate to ACLU
  • Sign petitions (change.org, etc)
  • Find gofundme pages to support legal fees and families
Things we should be supporting long-term to eliminate this problem:
  • More support in schools (i.e. social workers instead of police)
  • Training for teachers and school staff 
  • VOTE
  • More accountability in social services
  • Support initiatives that value Black and brown childhoods
  • Invest in education (what are your local politicians committed to? use your vote)
  • Mental health resource and support in schools and communities

Shareable resources:
📖 "Girl Interrupted" (report, 20 minute read)
📺 End Adultification Bias (Youtube video, 4 minute watch)
🖥Graphic

See yall out there.


#FreeGrace Explained

Saturday, August 1, 2020

Hello and welcome to #WakeUpWednesday, a segment where I scream into the blackhole of social media about things we should know. Last week on IG we discussed the role of white people in the recent, highly publicized, black murders. You can view the whole conversation in my highlights.

Syllabus:



 Actual things I have heard people say:
"I'm white, it's not my place to [step up, speak out, march, fight] about Breonna Taylor or Ahmaud Arbery."
The response:

1. The recent murders of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor have reminded us of a very, very big American problem. If either of them were white they would be alive. And if either of them where white and murdered in circumstances like this, there would have been charges immediately. Ahmaud's murderers were charged after significant public pressure MONTHS later, Breonna's murderers TBD- it's been a month. This is a really familiar story and it just keeps happening. The pattern here is racism (systemic, institutionalized, blatant, etc), and the racism that causes/allows this is a white problem. Look, I know none of us directly caused this, but these constructs are created by, enabled by, maintained by white people and white systems. The only people who can stop them are...white people.

2. Processing these murders and living with the trauma is enough. White people need to bear some of this load. The whole article is important but a few stats:
When experiencing microaggressions, the target loses vital mental resources trying figure out the intention of one committing the act. These events may happen frequently, making it difficult to mentally manage the sheer volume of racial stressors. The unpredictable and anxiety-provoking nature of the events, which may be dismissed by others, can lead to victims feeling as if they are “going crazy.” Chronic fear of these experiences may lead to constant vigilance or even paranoia, which over time may result in traumatization or contribute to PTSD when a more stressful event occurs later.


Almost one in ten Black people becomes traumatized, and these rates may actually be higher since diagnosticians are usually not considering the role of racism in causing trauma.  

3. The New York Times did a study and found that black teenagers experience an average of five instances a day of racial discrimination - that is 70 over the course of two weeks. That's...unacceptable. Speak up, for the kids.


 "It's hard for me to talk about racism, I'm afraid I'll say the wrong thing!"
The response:

Yes. These conversations are not easy and are uncomfortable because the system is built that way. This interview with the author of White Fragility breaks down what makes it so hard for us to talk about this, and how white people can be more aware and better at having conversations about race.


 "How do I learn more to get better at these conversations?" 
The response:

Here's a #crowdsourced reading list:

Here are some great Instagram accounts to follow: 

And a quick guide: 



We had a whole interesting conversation on IG (you can view it in my #WakeUp highlight), and this comment got the most reactions, definitely worth thinking about:



Alright, that's a wrap. Thanks for reading through - please share any resources and thoughts!

#WakeUpWednesday: The Role of White People in Black Killings

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Hello and welcome to #WakeUpWednesday, a segment where I scream into the blackhole of social media about things we should know. A few weeks ago on IG we discussed SNAP and WIC due to a PSA a lot of us saw floating around social media, and this post incorporates the original information with info/feedback collected from readers. The PSA encouraged people who do not rely on SNAP or WIC benefits to avoid shopping on the first week of the month since this is when benefits hit recipients' accounts, and to avoid buying to WIC qualified items. It's important (for a lot of reasons) to understand what all of this is and how it works.

Syllabus
USDA WIC Site
USDA SNAP Site
Immigrant Families Appear to be Dropping Out of Food Stamps (Politico)
The Trump administration plans to kick 700,000 off food stamps during a pandemic (Vox)
The Basics
  • SNAP (aka Food Stamps): Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. Federally funded program run by the USDA.
  • WIC:  The Special Supplemental Program for Women, Infants, and Children. Federally funded program run by the USDA.
Who Qualifies
  • SNAP: Can vary by state but generally a single monthly income of $1,287 or two people in the household with a combined income of $1,726. You may have $2250 in countable resources (i.e. a bank account). 
  • WIC: WIC provides assistance for pregnant women, new moms (up to six months post-partum), infants (up to first birthday) and children (up to fifth birthday) whose income is at or below 185% of the US poverty guidelines.  
How It Works
  • SNAP: Individuals/families receive a plastic card (Electronic Benefits Transfer aka EBT card) that is used as a debit card and has funds added monthly. Card restrictions prevent users from purchasing anything BUT food - EBT cards cannot purchase tobacco, alcohol, pet food, hot food, prepared food, vitamins, etc. Most states have different windows for distribution, not just the first of the month.
  • WIC: Individuals/families receive vouchers or checks to be used at local grocery stores and farmer's market for WIC-approved items only as indicated by a little sticker (below). WIC approves nutritionally fortified foods and provides nutrition education, breastfeeding support and social services. 

Why this matters
This is a HUGE topic in policy and election conversations. It's important to understand what it really is, who it benefits, and how it works to make sure you can make informed votes. Hot topics in policy conversations include:
  • Undocumented immigrants qualifying for benefits
  • Tightening the requirements for beneficiaries (on April 1 as the pandemic took over and the US experienced unprecedented unemployment levels, the Trump administration quietly enacted a requirement that any able-bodied SNAP recipient without kids will be required to work 20 hours per week. Where are people finding work right now? Won't this force people into unsafe conditions that further spread the virus by trying to meet the minimum?) 
  • Should recipients be required to pass a drug test to receive benefits?
  • Should employment be required to receive benefits? 
We had an intense conversation about this over Instagram that includes debates around drug testing/work requirements, WIC qualification, and misperceptions. This conversatoin is in my highlights under #WakeUp. 



#wakeupwednesday: snap and wic

Wednesday, May 6, 2020

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