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0:12
- Hi, my name's Jordan Conwell, I'm an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and I'm going to be talking about inequality in education for the 2020 CUNY Inequality by the Numbers workshop. I want to start by saying that I hope everyone and their families are doing as well as is possible during this tough time. I really enjoyed being together with everyone in New York at CUNY last summer, and I hope we're together again next summer.
0:38
I'm going to be talking about a number of dimensions of inequality in education, primarily income and wealth, and race. I'll be going over a lot of work on general trends in these areas since the mid-20th century to the present. I'll be talking about some of my own work on these topics, and also be spending some time talking about how the coronavirus crisis may influence some of these patterns moving forward. I also want to add that one of the things I most enjoyed about the workshop last year
1:04
was the office hours, and kind of the discussion that we were able to have together. And I will have a link at the end of the slideshow for my email, as well as a link to sign up for my virtual office hours for any of the students or attendees who would like to talk about these issues further, or talk about how they may influence and help their own research, I'd be happy to have those conversations in the future. So with that, I will get to the slideshow. "Inequality and Education."
1:34
So I want to do three things in the time that we have together today. I want to talk primarily about the state of the field, so I'll be talking about inequality in educational achievement and attainment, which are the two most common measures of educational stratification, from the mid-20th century to the present. And I'll be talking about a couple different axes or dimensions of inequality: income, wealth, parental education, and race.
2:00
I will briefly plug some of my own research on these topics, which has primarily dealt with intersections of some of these axes of educational inequality, also from the mid-20th century to the present, particularly having to do with the intersection of race and income inequality. And then we've been asked to discuss, if relevant, what are the perspectives from our own research, from our own fields, on how the coronavirus pandemic
2:25
may influence the topic, and there are many ways that the coronavirus pandemic is likely to influence educational inequality along the lines I'll be discussing, so I want to take some time there, as well.
2:40
So first, state of the field. What I have in these call-out boxes are some books and articles that I've found important to my understanding of this topic of educational inequality from the mid-20th century to the present, and may be worth considering to have on your bookshelves as students of inequality, even if you don't study education. So one of the big takeaways from this body of research is that educational gaps, so in both achievement and attainment,
3:08
between children of high- versus low-income parents have increased from the mid-20th century to the present. One of the most notable studies on this topic came from Sean Reardon, in the 2011 edited volume that you see on the left here, "Wither Opportunity?", edited by Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane. And what Reardon did was put together 12 national data sources and track differences in the math and reading achievement of children whose parents had high versus low incomes.
3:37
One of the very famous charts from this study looks like this. What you see on the trendline here is the gap in reading achievement across birth cohorts from 1943 through 2001, from the datasets listed on the right panel there, under Study. And the trendline is the gap between the reading achievement of children whose parents are at the 90th income percentile versus the 10th income percentile, which is referred to the 90/10 gap. And the trendline clearly shows there
4:07
that across these birth cohorts, there has been a large increase in the reading achievement gap between the highest versus the lowest income children, from somewhere about .6 standard deviations for the birth cohorts in the early 1940s to about 1 1/4 standard deviations for the birth cohorts born around 2000.
4:30
And particularly in the later part of the time series, you see a second fitted trendline there for the period from, the birth cohorts from 1975 until about 2000.
4:42
This is also the case if we want to look at stratification in terms of educational attainment. So this is a study that came out in Demography in 2017 by Greg Duncan and colleagues about income inequality in children's educational attainment or completed schooling at age 24. So, this is actually set up kind of similar to the Reardon graph. This is the gap in years of schooling completed between children of top versus bottom income quintile parents,
5:15
and the X-axis is year turned 14 from 1968 to 1996. And we see a similar story, which is that over time, over this time period, these gaps have increased quite markedly from a low of about two years of schooling advantage for children of top income quintile parents
5:33
for those who turned 14 in the mid-1970s, so born in the late 1950s, all the way up to a high of about 2 1/2 years of schooling among more recent cohorts.
5:48
So last year, I talked about some of these topics having to do with income. Another area of this research that is growing, we may ask ourselves, "Well, what about wealth?", which is another dimension of inequality that's been a topic of this workshop in the past, and may be this year, as well. And the story of wealth is actually pretty similar. So this is another Demography paper using data from the PSID, with an outcome of completed schooling again, in this case, at age 25, by Fabian Pfeffer,
6:18
about wealth gaps and completed schooling. And we see a very similar story here. So the comparisons in the top panel of this table are for cohorts. The solid line, born between 1970 and 1979, the dashed line, born between 1980 and 1989. And these are outcomes by wealth quintile, instead of income quintile. And we see for all of these outcomes, high school completion, college attendance, college degree, and college degree given attendance, the dashed lines are showing us that
6:52
there's been more inequality by parental wealth in these outcomes for the later cohorts, born between 1980 and 1989 than there was in the earlier cohorts, born between 1970 and 1979.
7:08
This is a stylized fact from this study. It's one of the most, to me, kind of breathtaking stylized facts that I've seen in a study in this literature on income and wealth in quite some time, and I thought it was worth sharing with you. So Pfeffer writes that, "While it is a misperception "that a great majority of children "from wealthy households graduate college, "it is certainly the case that many college graduates come "from households with significant net worth,"
7:34
and again, we're talking about wealth here, we're talking about net worth, which is assets minus debts. "In this analytic sample, half of all college graduates come "from a household with more than $190,000 in net worth, "and a full 1/5 come from a household "with a net worth of at least half a million dollars."
7:51
So I looked online just to get a sense of, what are the net worth percentiles? Where in the net worth distribution are these college graduates coming from? So if we convert these numbers just using some figures from 2016, a net worth of $190,000, again, that's your assets minus your debts, falls in between the 60th and 70th wealth percentiles, and a net worth of $500,000 is at about the 80th percentile. So Pfeffer's reporting here that in the PSIE data,
8:20
about half of college graduates are coming from a household with net worth that is higher than somewhere between the 60th and 70th percentile, and a full 1/5 of them are coming from households in the top fifth of the wealth distribution. And so this should give us a sense of the shape of college completion with regard to parental wealth.
8:47
A couple other trends that have been going on at the same time that educational inequality by income and wealth have been increasing, gaps by parental education have not been increasing, they have remained remarkably stable. This is an NBER working paper that came out in 2019 from Eric Hanushek and colleagues. And this graph on the right of this slide is 13-year-olds' reading achievement by SES, with SES measured as parental education and home possessions. And we see, the SES measured that way,
9:21
that these various gaps are very stable over time. There are some dips, but overall, we see stability in this trend, which is a stark contrast to what we saw in terms of increasing trends for income and wealth inequality.
9:39
Of course, the perhaps most measured and most discussed gap in the literature on educational inequality since the mid-20th century has been the Black-white achievement gap, the difference in test scores between Black and white students on average. And so while income and wealth gaps in education have been increasing while gaps by parental education have remained stable, the Black-white achievement gap has markedly decreased. So this is another figure from the Reardon study,
10:07
and one that's also gotten a lot of attention. So this is, the red line is that income gap in reading across these cohorts that we saw earlier, but now, this blue dashed line is the Black-white achievement gap. And we see that as the income achievement gap has increased, the Black-white achievement gap has actually decreased, in basically similar magnitude in the opposite direction, so from about 1 1/4 standard deviations at the earlier part of this observation period
10:32
to about 3/4 of a standard deviation in the latter part of the observation period for those later cohorts. There have been a number of volumes of books and journal articles written on reasons for this decrease in the Black-white gap,
10:50
some of the reasons that the trends have been uneven over time, including a book called "Steady Gains and Stalled Progress," edited by my colleague Katherine Magnuson at UW and her colleague Jane Waldfogel. But the one stylized fact here that is perhaps most relevant to our discussion is the fact that this gap has decreased markedly at the same time that the income and wealth gaps have increased.
11:17
As Reardon notes, so what does this mean? Why does this matter? And as Reardon notes, "At the same time "that family income has become more predictive "of children's academic achievement," as we've just seen, "so have educational attainment, "and cognitive skills become "more predictive of adults' earnings." So what this is getting at here is that the income returns to educational attainment, and even small increments of measured and unmeasured skill, or perceived skills and abilities,
11:49
these fine gradations, have also all increased at the same time that family income has become more predictive of children's achievement. So, "As the children of the rich do better in school "and those who do better in school "are more likely to become rich, "we risk producing an even more unequal "and economically polarized society," as has been noted by, here in The New York Times on the left, and the Economic Policy Institute in the middle,
12:11
and I like this picture here from The Atlantic on the right, of this baby holding this coin. And that particular headline makes clear that we're not necessarily talking about the children of the 1%, or the .1%, or the .001%. We're talking about really the top 10% of the children
12:31
of the most advantaged of the upper middle class and above. So we're actually talking about a bigger swath of the socioeconomic status distribution among those with children than we are for some of our other questions and problems of inequality.
12:47
Okay. Why has this happened? Sociologists of education typically think about explanations for differences
12:56
in children's schooling across two dimensions: families and schools, and there have been increases in inequality by income and wealth across both of these dimensions.
13:12
In terms of families, we've seen a divergence in family demographic characteristics by parental income. So these include but are not limited to maternal education, maternal age, number of parents in the household, and family size. And all of these are correlated with children's cognitive behavioral development and their educational success. So as these diverge by parental income and wealth, we are, that signals increased income and wealth disparities in children's developmental context.
13:40
So this is back to this study by Greg Duncan and colleagues from Demography. So these are gaps in mother's age and number of siblings between the top and bottom income quintile, again, with the X-axis as the year that children turned 14 in the PSID. So we see that although the number of differences in number of siblings have
14:02
increased a little bit, we see that the big moving factor here is maternal age, such that the top-bottom quintile gap in maternal age was less than two years for the earliest cohorts here, and has gone up to almost five years in the latest cohorts, in that we know from other research that while they're delaying childbearing, women are accumulating educational, cultural, and other forms of capital that they are then able to transmit to the children, once their children are born.
14:30
So we've learned recently that maternal age is a very surprisingly strong and robust correlate of children's developmental outcomes, in that of a number of other factors, and children from high income families are much more likely to benefit from this, because they're born to mothers who are older than children from lower income families, who on average are more likely to be born to mothers who are younger.
14:54
Neighborhood and school mechanisms have also become increasingly stratified by parental income. So the sociologist Ann Owens at the University of Southern California has done a lot of important work on this by herself, as well as with some colleagues. One of her studies, in a 2016 study in the American Sociological Review, Owens showed that recent trends and overall neighborhood segregation in the U.S. over the last few decades are driven almost entirely by families with children.
15:21
And the implication here is that families with children are moving to more income-segregated circumstances, we would assume because of schools for their children. And similarly, high income families without children do not show those same residential patterns, and may be more likely or more willing to live
15:40
in an area that is grittier, they might find more interesting, et cetera, because they're not worried about schools.
15:49
This means that high income children are increasingly more likely than low income children to grow up in safe and healthy neighborhoods and attend schools with achievement boosting resources, teachers, and peer cultures. And taking these together, we can think that the neighborhood and school inequality together with family inequality means that the interrelated or nested contexts of child and adolescent development, so families, schools, neighborhoods,
16:11
we can think here of folks like Bronfenbrenner, who's talked about how
16:16
these contexts are nested and interrelated, are becoming increasingly stratified by parental income and wealth. So the entire ecosystem of child development is becoming, of child and adolescent development is becoming increasingly stratified by these factors.
16:34
So here's a graph from one of Owens' papers from Sociology of Education in 2018. And we know that high income children's achievement is positively correlated with this increase in segregation. So this is school segregation, school district segregation by income, and this is the achievement of children by parental income quintile. And we see that the squares on the dotted line here, so that's the top income quintile children are, their achievement is benefiting
17:07
from increases in income segregation. The group that is benefiting probably the second most would be the fourth income quintile, the diamonds, third most, the third quintile of the squares, and then lower income children are not seeing much achievement change due to segregation. So segregation is increasing and high income children's achievement is benefiting from it.
17:33
Wealth brings us some additional mechanisms, some mechanisms that may amplify the trends that we are seeing for income inequality in families, and schools, and neighborhoods. So wealth brings with it a purchasing function of neighborhoods, so again, potentially amplifying what we already see with income. I know we had an international audience in part last year, so I'm going to give some background on how schooling works in the U.S. In the United States, public schools
17:58
are based on neighborhoods. So the quality of your neighborhood and the quality of your neighborhood's tax base determines the quality of the school that your child is going to attend. We talk a lot about private schooling, or school choice, but the fact is in the U.S. that about 3/4 of children still attend their neighborhood public school, meaning that the neighborhood that their parents are able to be in is going to pretty much determine the quality of their schooling options.
18:29
But we also do have private schooling, and of course, higher education, as costs have skyrocketed, wealth may allow, may facilitate the purposing of tuition in a way that income does not, or over and above income. The second function, insurance. This may mean that, having wealth may mean that children can identify their strengths, their abilities, their interests, including ones that are highly rewarded in the labor market but may need a longer, riskier, or more expensive period of training,
18:58
with less concern about the immediate economic payoff if they have that cushion of family wealth. And wealth also serves a normative function. Families may develop strong norms for education because they want to reproduce their wealth possession. And I should note that these points are from an article by Hallsten and Pfeffer that appeared in the American Sociological Review in 2017.
19:24
So before I turn to some other topics, I want to give kind of a theoretical summary here, specifically with reference to economic inequality, which I know is one of the main topics of the workshop. What we are seeing in these trends I'm talking about, while income wealth inequality in schooling is increasing at the same time that racial inequality may be decreasing by some measures, and inequality of educational attainment of parents is stable by some measures, we may be seeing
19:50
the multi-generational reproduction of economics, so by here, I mean income and wealth inequality in part through educational, and by here, I mean achievement and attainment, inequality. As I noted earlier, this is all happening at the same time that the returns, the economic returns of schooling are increasing, including for small increments at the top of the distributions of educational attainment and skills, as economists like Lemieux have pointed out.
20:13
So this gives us a potential that schooling, which in the United States is a compulsory social institution through the early part of children's lives, may actually serve a legitimating function for inequality.
20:26
So Picketty and Saez, in their well-known 2003 article, and then Picketty again in 2011, discuss differences in economic reproduction for those who are rentiers, whose capital is set up in such a way that it reproduces or grows
20:46
without labor market participation. But what they also pointed out is that a large share of those who have top income and wealth shares are those who are called the working rich. So these are not rentiers, these are not individuals who have capital set up in a way that it's reproducing or growing on its own. They do have top income, and in some cases, top wealth shares, but it's driven by their own labor market participation in high-rent industries, such as medicine,
21:15
academia, the tech sector, et cetera. And for these individuals, for whatever share of inequality is still driven by the working rich, their income wealth shares are undergirded by their education credentials. So the educational credentials are legitimating these positions and necessary for them, and it's possible that schooling is legitimating that type of inequality. Why is this the case? At least in the U.S., there's this continued prevalence of the ethos that educational achievement
21:43
and attainment outcomes are meritocratic, and that is what gives educational credentials the legitimating function, potentially, for this type of inequality.
21:56
Okay, I want to briefly give a plug for some of my own research on these topics that looks at intersections of some of these axes of educational inequality, also over the same period, the mid-20th century to the present. And the big takeaway here is that things actually may be slightly more complicated than what I've just told you.
22:14
So some of my work looks at intersections of race and income in children's school achievement. So this is data from three different cohorts of high schoolers in 1960, 1980, and 2009. And what I've plotted is math achievement by parental income decile for Blacks in red and whites in blue. And what we see over time is that although achievement inequality by parental income has increased within races for both whites and Blacks, and that Blacks' mean achievement
22:47
has caught up to whites' quite a bit over this time period, there are still large and significant differences in achievement between Blacks and whites who have the same income. So of course, individuals don't carry out their lives in one category of parental income, or parental education, or parental wealth. These categories intersect with others that also influence social experiences and outcomes of schooling, and this is just one example of this here. So we should not take the fact the income
23:16
and wealth gaps in schooling are increasing to mean that all individuals with the same access to income and wealth are having the same experiences and outcomes, because on average, they are not. Other restrictive traits like race, gender, and others also influence the ability to get payoffs from these background factors. So for example, in 2009, the High School Longitudinal Study, which is the most recent nationally representative data source of U.S. students that's been fielded,
23:47
we see that for example, among those whose parents have very high income, so 90th income percentile,
23:53
Black students averaged scores at about the national mean, zero standard deviations, whereas white students whose parents have incomes at the same level are about half a standard deviation higher. So, still these gaps in the most recent period amongst the highest income families.
24:10
I've also taken a look at the extent to which the family and school explanations that I've just talked about account for these differences. And the big takeaway here is that these explanations are accounting for a substantially lower share of these gaps in later periods, meaning that not only do these gaps still exist, the situation is complicated and intersectional. Some of our common explanations that we might use for a single axis of inequality such as income are actually doing a poor job
24:39
of explaining these differences as time has gone on, and this is leading us to think about other mechanisms of these particular types of educational inequality, like within school inequality is racialized tracking in course taking being just one out of many potentials, potential explanations.
25:01
Okay, last thing I want to spend some time talking about, perspectives on the coronavirus pandemic and educational inequality,
25:08
from my discipline of sociology. And I'm going to be talking primarily about pre-K through 12th grade. There is a whole separate set of questions and concerns that come up when we think about higher education
25:23
in the pandemic, and I'm going to, again, assume that those of us who are attending the workshop are a little more familiar with those. And actually, graduate students are particularly well-suited to understand those, because not only are you learning in higher education spaces, but many of you are also teaching in them, so you're on both sides of some of the ways that this pandemic has affected higher education. I want to spend some time today talking about how it's affected K-12.
25:47
And I want to start that discussion by giving just some by the numbers, since we're in a by the numbers workshop, of the organization of school in the United States, and just to give a sense of the scale and the scope of what's happening in pre-K through 12. So between public and private schools,
26:08
in the United States, pre-K through 12th grade enrollment is about 57 million students in about 135,000 schools. So one of the things that those of us in the U.S. and those of us who may not be as familiar with U.S. schooling should keep in mind, and that's something that we often forget, given the very low priority, quite frankly, that education is given in our public policy discussions, is that we have a gigantic school age population in this country. And the coronavirus crisis has actually
26:38
gotten us to think more about the size and the scope of our nation in general, and remember that we're actually a very large country, in terms of population, and that also means that you have a very large number of school age children. I looked up, according to UNICEF, the only countries with more primary school age children, I'll use primary school age children because other countries don't have compulsory schooling as long, so we don't want to confound the estimate with drop out,
27:01
but the only countries with more primary school age children than the U.S. are China, India, Indonesia, and Nigeria. So, whatever is happening with coronavirus in schooling, in pre-K through 12, it's affecting a huge number of children. And some more background, again, for those of us from the U.S. and to maybe those who are not
27:24
in the U.S., the federal government has a relatively limited role in educational decision making, relative to many other countries with fully nationalized or centralized education systems. So, we have state departments of education within the 50 states, and within those states, the municipal public school districts run and fund schools with the local authority tax dollars, as I talked about,
27:44
with local authority and tax dollars, as I talked about earlier. Some of our districts in the U.S. are notably large. The four largest, New York City Public schools, about a million students, LA Unified, about 735,000 students, Chicago Public Schools, about 400,000 students, and Miami-Dade County Public Schools, about 360,000 students.
28:06
So one of a dizzying number of potential questions for how coronavirus may influence pre-K through 12 education inequality is that the virus has necessitated a social experiment. What happens when all of these students, 57 or so million of them, are let out of school with approximately 1/3 of the school year remaining? And this experiment, if we want to think about it in this way for at least a moment, has some additional conditions. It's not clear when they're going to be able
28:35
to come back to school, decisions about online education, grading, when and how to return, whether and how to remediate upon return for students who may need additional help are, again, run in a totally decentralized manner with states and school districts. And this has been proven out. There were multiple weeks of variation in when state governments announced school closures in March and April, when the scale and scope of this crisis became clear.
29:04
There's been even more variation in their stated plans to resume, when and how to resume schooling. So this is the question I want to focus on here.
29:18
But it's important to keep in mind that we do conduct a more controlled version of a similar experiment, at least in the U.S., every year, and it's called summer vacation. And on the right, I have here a pretty well-known cover from the U.S. periodical, Time magazine, that came out in the summer of 2010, called, "The Case Against Summer Vacation." And this popular press publication
29:47
kind of tried to introduce the public to a concept that sociologists of education and other educational researchers have been discussing for quite some time called summer learning loss, which is the phenomenon that disadvantaged children often score worse on assessments in the fall of the next school year compared to the spring of the prior year, and this is presumably due to lack of the other developmental and other inputs that they get from school that are absent during the summer,
30:11
meaning that upon their return to school in the fall, achievement gaps, for example, between high and low income students are often larger than they were at the end of the prior school year.
30:24
This is a well-known and important figure from the sociology of education, my field, by Doug Downey and colleagues. It appeared in the American Sociological Review in 2004. And the basic argument here is that even though we know that schools are unequal, and we may debate the extent to which the schools that
30:45
well-off and not well-off children attend are,
30:50
it may stand to reason that even though the differences in these students' homes and neighborhoods are very large, their non-school environments, the differences in their schools may be smaller. And if that's the case, Downey and colleagues argue that schools can be an equalizing force in children's lives, even if they are unequal, as long as that inequality is smaller than the inequality in their home environment. So what Downey and colleagues are asking us to imagine here
31:17
is basically a simple counterfactual, which is if we imagine a world where there were no schools, where the only developmental inputs that children got were from their families and their neighborhoods, we would observe, potentially, more inequality in children's outcomes than we do. Of course, we could also imagine other alternative counterfactuals, if we're going to imagine counterfactuals, such as a situation where children from disadvantaged homes and neighborhoods attended
31:42
the best schools, as opposed to what we have now, which is children from high quality homes and neighborhoods attending excellent schools, children from poor homes and neighborhoods attending poor schools.
31:52
So even if that difference is smaller, we could imagine alternative ways to set this up. But this is one stylized argument about the world that we're in, and the point that this is, one of the points that this is making or implies is that schools, even if they're unequal, are holding inequality together. They are resulting in less inequality than we would observe if they did not exist. So the pandemic has done a couple things. It's substantially increased children's time
32:19
in their greatly unequal non-school environments, so not just the summer, but
32:24
the remaining three months that were still going in the school year, and then any delays that come in the fall, and comes of when we're able to get back to school. And unlike summer, their somewhat, although perhaps less, unequal schools are attempting to support their learning in these non-school environments within the constraints of the school's own resources and those of children's non-school environments. So we can choose whether we want to talk politically right, left, or center,
32:56
tech, education, a number of periodicals have picked up on this, whether we want to talk about the digital divide, we can talk about the homework gap, but schools and homes are unequally prepared to do this because of existing inequalities.
33:19
A few other takeaways beyond the fact that we know that the infrastructure needed to support this kind of learning is unequal, by the same dimensions, we have other inequality like race and class, this pandemic has reminded us of a couple additional things with regard to school. First, schools do more than teach children reading, writing, and arithmetic. For many disadvantaged children, schools provide food through the school breakfast and school lunch program.
33:48
There's been a lot of writing about the small percentages of children who've been able to get breakfasts and lunches in the way that they were used to in school, now that school's out. Schools also provide mental and physical health checks for children, and safety and supervision, and this is not only important for children, but this is also, as we've noticed and been reminded recently, this is a crucial economic function. In the U.S., we do not have any kind
34:14
of robust and standardized affordable system of childcare, especially once children age beyond their early childhood years. And so another thing that schools do is they allow parents to go to work. And so some of the pressure to reopen schools, perhaps even over the summer, is going to come out of the economic necessity of parents wanting to go back to work or work from home in ways that are deemed more economically productive without the burden of childcare.
34:37
And we know, of course, both from our expectations from prior research and testimonials from what's happening right now is that we should keep in mind that the labor of having children at home is not equal by gender, it is primarily falling to mothers and women. Schools also provide children sense of community, friendship, and social bonds with non-family adults in what the sociologist, James Coleman, referred to as social closure.
35:02
Also, the coronavirus pandemic, unlike summer vacation, is directly worsening key axes of educational inequality we discussed earlier in ways that will be difficult to fully reverse, particularly, income and wealth differentials and racial differences. It is reasonable to assume, then, that educational gaps will be worse when children are next assessed, and we'll soon be seeing a lot of research on this, I'm sure, including causal work analyzing the pandemic as a national experiment,
35:29
so be on the lookout for that work.
35:33
Other things to keep in mind. The next step for high school students, for example, of course, is college. We've seen a lot of writing about questioning what our standardized tests like the SAT and ACT can do when it's long been known that these tests suffer from various types of bias, based on race, based on students' preparation and social class. This is another instance where the dimensions of those biases may be increasing, and how are we going to consider,
36:01
how are we going to administer the tests, how are we going to consider scores from this period? These are all some of the many questions. What about high school grades?
36:11
What are schools going to do, how are they going to grade, and how are colleges and universities going to consider those grades? And these particular sets of questions remind me of books like "The Chosen," by Jerome Karabel, or "The Credential Society," by the sociologist, Randall Collins, which is that our educational system is undergirded by these credentials. And what we know from both of those books and other books is that these credentials are not doled out fairly or equally,
36:40
and they have within them more than just merit. They are opportunities that are, to achieve them,
36:50
that are unequal, and there's even more pressure on this system than there was before. So these are some of the things that we should keep in mind, and we'll be looking out for as we move forward.
37:02
All right, that's all I have. I appreciate you listening. Again, my email's here, as well as a site to sign up for meetings with me during my office hours. I will be conducting those via Zoom for the foreseeable future, and I'd be happy to chat about anything I've said here, ways that you may think it could be relevant to your own research. Thanks.
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