Search

The focus of this paper is inequality - primarily, income - inequality - in the United States and the historical-political context in which policies that affect inequality are being discussed. The first section gives a brief description of recent trends in the distribution of income in the United States, a picture whose most remarkable feature is the absence of change. The second section discusses the role of government in mitigating inequality and attempts to explain why the substantial increases in government programs, especially transfer programs, have not done more to change the distribution of income. The third section addresses another puzzling issue: why the equalization in educational attainment that occurred in recent years has not made the distribution of income more equal. The final section describes the current debate over equalization policies, the role of academic research in that debate, and some major choices among strategies for reducing inequality in the future. Discussants' comments on this paper are attached. One of the points made here is that, unless the whole life cycle of income and the transitory variation in time spent at work are taken into account the annual income distribution exaggerates substantially the more basic, persistent features of the existing income inequality in our society. Other issues addressed include the effects of education on income distribution, and notions of egalitarianism. (Author/AM)

This publication presents the papers presented at the Proceedings of the National Citizens Conference on Education held at the Washington Hotel, Washington last May 19-21, 1920. The purpose of the conference is to capitalize for the new era the interest in education that is springing up in all parts of the country, and to organize it for effective action, to the end that it may come out of this conference Nation-wide in extent and influence. This publication contains the following papers: (1) Aims and purposes of the conference (P. P. Claxton); (2) Some facts about the schools and their teachers (Leonard P. Ayres); (3) Adequate preparation for an adequate number of teachers to fill the schools of the United States (William C. Bagley); (4) The source of supply of teachers (David Felmley); (5) Selling the idea of good schools to the people (William Harding); (6) Meeting new tests of rural and urban life (Albert Shaw); (7) A practical program for the development of the rural school (Thomas E. Finegan); (8) An adequate program of public education (Frank Spaulding); (9) Economies in education (Charles H. Judd); (10) Education and agricultural production (Raymond A. Pearson); (11) Education and the Army (William G. Haan); (12) Education and the wage earner (Matthew Woll); (13) Education in relation to invention and research (Charles R. Mann); (14) Conference on highway engineering and highway transportation education (Albert F. Woods); (15) The new interest in education in Great Britain (Auckland Geddes); (16) The new interest in education in France (G. Chinard); (17) The new interest in education in Latin-American countries (Jacobo Varela); (18) Education as a national interest (Horace M. Towner); (19) The rural school and the rural teacher (Robert A. Cooper); (20) Education for citizenship (Carl E. Milliken); (21) The interest of the churches in education (Robert L. Kelly); (22) Education and the suffrage (Maud Wood Park); (23) Education for citizenship (Thomas J. Shahan); (24) Education for human culture (Enoch A. Bryan); (25) Training the teachers for the rural schools (John A. H. Keith); (26) Cooperation of business and industry with the schools (H. E. Miles); (27) How women's clubs can help (Philip North Moobe); (28) The interest of patriotic societies in the promotion of education (George Maynard Minor); (29) The program of the national committee on chamber of commerce cooperation with the public schools (James T. Begg); (30) What musical organizations can do (Frances E. Clark); (31) Health education a duty of the schools (Emmett Holt); (32) A new policy necessary in dealing with the salary situation (George Drayton Strayer); (33) Will the people respond? (Hugh S. Magill); and (34) Extracts from Letters and Statements from governors of States; from State superintendents of public instruction; from heads of educational institutions; and from prominent persons to the United States Commissioner of Education. An index is included. [Best copy available has been provided.]

A study of the current expressed reading interests of children in the first two years of school conducted in ten countries--Austria, Canada, England, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Panama, Sweden, and the United States--is reported in this paper. Over 2,000 children drew pictures about what they would best like to read or have read to them. They were then interviewed for additional information in an attempt to ascertain the derivation of their interests. Specific topics drawn and/or stated by the children are listed along with the categories into which topics were placed. Three of the conclusions appearing to grow out of the study are: although some significant differences emerged from country to country, there were more similarities in interests across the ten countries than differences; fairy tales and fantasies were the most preferred expressed reading interests of first- and second-year children in the ten countries; and reading interests of second-year children demonstrated more preferences for nonfictional topics than the interests of first-year children. (Author/WR)

This paper reports on research designed to explore the status of children and the relationship of patterns of child care to social structure and social change. The study is based on interviews with scholars and government officials, an analysis of statistical data and research reports, and visits to day care centers, playgrounds, and other settings in the United States, Sweden, Israel, and China. While much of the information necessary to assess the system of child care in this country has not been systematically collected and analyzed, there are a number of empirical indicators of child neglect and abuse. The current "crisis" seems to be the result of a combination of social trends of which the following appear to be major ones: (1) changes in the structure of households, (2) changes in sex roles which downgrade parenthood and child rearing, (3) loss of child care options outside the family, (4) a serious imbalance in the supply and demand for child care, and (5) the costliness of children. The role of the child and role system involved in child care which operates in different societies is also discussed. (Author/CS)

Labor force participation and occupational structure and their changing trends in our society are addressed in this paper. The problems of not being able to find employment are also important, and unemployment is also examamined. Findings indicate that there are declining proportions of males in the labor force with greater decline among black males than among white males. There is some evidence of increasing labor force participation among younger black males. Both black and white females show increasing rates of labor force participation, with white females having lower rates but increasing more rapidly. Blacks have approximately twice the unemployment rates of whites. While whites still show generally lower rates than blacks, the differences are not as great within age by education by sex categories. The cohort analysis of occupational trends indicates that black females are making more rapid occupational gains than are black males. When the ration of black to white median earnings is taken as a measure of income differential and this ratio is examined by years of education, it is found that based on males who worked 50-52 weeks out of the year in 1969, the ratio of black to white earnings declines with increasing education all the way up through sixteen years of education. (Author/AM)

Presented are a summary and working papers of a seminar that included participants from the Regional Development Program of the Organization of American States and heads of universities in Latin America and Canada. Following a brief overview of the issues, topics discussed are: (1) intercultural contact; (2) internationalization of the university; (3) international education; (4) educational reform; (5) some guidelines for international education; (6) an international curriculum; (7) the new University of the America's; (8) internationalization of the United States; (9) international education exchange; (10) the college and the urban community; (11) university education as a communication process; and (12) internationalizing the curriculum through the arts. (Author/KE)

To determine more rational and economical methods for serving the information needs of the public, a series of studies have been sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries. Libraries in the United States are characterized as independent agencies supported from governmental and private sources and serving a local clientele. Steadily rising costs of operation associated with population growth, increased publishing rates, higher wages, and other factors have led to reduced quality of services. Efforts to share costs through interlibrary loan and other cooperative arrangements have only partially alleviated the financial problems and have done little to improve the quality of services. The ultimate solution is seen as a more systematic national approach designed to optimize available resources in order to achieve more rationally defined goals. There remain a number of unresolved questions concerning the configuration of national resource collections, bibliographic organization and access, communation and delivery methods, and coordinating mechanisms. A strong leadership role by the Federal Government seems mandatory for establishing and maintaing a comprehensive, higher quality information service. (Author/PF)

Using data sets from several American and British studies, this study compares the process of status attainment in the U.S. and Great Britain. The overall social mobility from generation to generation is very similar in both countries, as are the relative effects of social origin and individual ability on educational attainment and social status. Although the American educational system is more open and competitive than the British system, the qualities that lead to high levels of attainment are very much the same in both countries. These findings are interpreted in relation to Lipset's analysis of the two countries' value systems and Turner's contrast between "sponsored" and "contest" mobility patterns. It is suggested that the two countries use quite different mechanisms to bring about largely the same result. (Author/JG)

Penal systems of European countries vary in educational programs and humanizing efforts. A high percentage of Soviet prisoners, many incarcerated for ideological/religious beliefs, are confined to labor colonies. All inmates are obligated to learn a trade, one of the qualifications for release being evidence of some trade skill. Swedish institutions, leaders in humanizing efforts, offer vocational/industrial training, continuing education, and follow-up educational programs. The Finnish penal programs, although limited to elementary instruction, indicate a strong progressive strain. Education is a feature of all penal institutions in England. Of the French inmates involved in education, about one-fourth are enrolled in correspondence courses. Italy, prohibited by legislation from organizing schools in prisons, provides vocational training. Elementary academic education is provided in Portugal, Yugoslavia, Poland, Greece, and Hungary; vocational training is emphasized in Belgium and Poland. Dutch penal staffs provide impressive group therapy experimental programs. In the United States, programed instruction and college education provision are current trends. Although a national strategy for adult basic educational training exists, General Education Development (GED) research is lacking. Vocational training, which is often provided, is weak. (EA)

The origins of the education of blacks, especially in the South, are traced, in order to comprehend the current educational situation. Two questions are investigated: first, whether the conclusion of the Civil War marks the beginning of a new educational era for the nineteenth century blacks; and second, whether there have in fact been real educational gains that go beyond normal expectations. The historical review in the first section indicates that it is not until the early twentieth century that the chains of the industrial education concept even began to be removed; and that any serious attempt to equalize expenditures for schools in the South does not occur until the 1954 court decision. A second section examines the demographic aspects of education. It focuses first on illiteracy, then on school enrollment, and finally an educational attainment. In the comparison of black-white education, however measured, a basic difficulty in making statistical comparisons arises: that of percentage increases. It is much easier for the oppressed groups to exhibit significant percentage gains than it is for the advantaged groups. Quantitative, if not qualitative, progress in Negro education has occurred at least in recent years despite a system that did everything in its power to block it until recently. (Author/AM)

The urbanization of the black population is a relatively recent phenomenon. Historically, migration has been the major source of the growth of the black population in the large cities of the North, yet the migration from nonmetropolitan to metropolitan areas has been going long enough to have established a substantial black population in the cities--blacks now account for about 21 percent of the total for central cities, and substantially higher fractions in some of them. The migrant population is a relatively young one, as is normal for rural-urban migration, and population growth resulting from an excess of births over deaths is an increasingly important element in the growth of this population group. The indications are that the black population of the central cities is increasing though at a rate less than that during the late 1960's and that it will continue to increase. The migration from nonmetropolitan areas to the central cities is greater than that from the central cities to nonmetropolitan areas. The volume of movement between suburban areas and nonmetropolitan areas is relatively small, and the moves in one direction virtually offset the moves in the other. The prospects are that the population will become even more a metropolitan area population, and for the near future, it is likely to remain primarily a population in the central cities of the larger metropolitan areas. (Author/AM)

Many of the more than 140 shortwave broadcasting services currently in operation have programing specifically intended for an audience in the United States, yet relatively little is known about the shortwave listening audience in the United States. This study focuses upon the shortwave listeners who regularly monitor international broadcasts. A questionnaire was sent to the 675 members of the Newark News Radio Club in March, 1973. Of these, 304 questionnaires (45 percent) were returned. From the data the following conclusions could be drawn: (1) Regular listeners tend to be highly educated males with the clear majority over 30 years of age; (2) The regular listener tunes in to shortwave broadcasts nearly 17 hours per week; (3) Hobby and interest in logging distant stations were first and second while the third, fourth, and sixth most often noted reasons for monitoring international broadcasting services among listeners related to news and information received through the broadcasts; (4) News, commentary, and documentary (in that order) were the most preferred program types among listeners; and (5) The four favorite international services are Radio Nederland, Radio Australia, BBC, and Radio Canada International. (DGC)

This report, given at a special meeting on children's literature held in Tehran, presents an examination of titles from foreign languages which have been recommended for acquisition and use in elementary school libraries serving kindergarten through grade six in the United States and which are commercially available for purchase. The report is based on two lists of titles of imaginative literature--fiction for grades four through six and easy reading for preschool through third grade--recommended in "The Elementary School Library Collection: A Guide to Books and Other Media" and shows that although a wide variety of quality publishers in the United States have issued foreign children's stories, two-thirds have only one or two recommended titles in print, mostly from European languages. (JM)

The structures of primary and secondary general education in a number of industrialized countries are compared to show that there are all possible combinations of educational "systems" that are, in most cases, the outcome of a remote historical legacy. This legacy, regardless of its merits, should not be considered as inviolate, but rather should be subjected to new thinking time and time again, to allow for new factors (political, social, economic, cultural, scientific, and so forth) conducive to its evolution. The countries under consideration are the six member countries of the European Economic Community and the United States, Great Britain, and the U.S.S.R. The organizational structures of vocational and technical "secondary" education are not considered. The problems of reforming the structures of secondary education are not abstract: the difficulty does not lie in conceiving a system considered as ideal, but in conceiving transitional systems, concrete ways of changing over from the present parallel stream system to the reformed system, and in accepting the difficulties arising from this transition. (Author/IRT)

The conference, held in Boston on February 25, 1928, was called by the United States Commissioner of Education to address problems concerned with the professional preparation of rural school teachers. It was attended by persons engaged in the special preparation of teachers, supervisors, and administrators for rural school positions representing 30 States. This bulletin contains abstracts of the addresses delivered at the conference. These abstracts were prepared from copies of the addresses or abstracts of them furnished by the speakers who prepared or delivered them. The abstracts cover: the use of activity analysis in constructing curricula for rural teachers; analysis of duties pertaining to the job of teaching in the one-room school; the nature and extent of curriculum differentiation in the training of rural school teachers; the rural curriculum as judged by graduates; the follow-up activities of a teacher-training institution with its graduates in rural schools; adjustment of the supply of and demand for qualified teachers--the State's problem; State legislation and regulations to guarantee an adequate professional staff for rural school positions; application of standard courses to the specialized needs of rural teachers; in-service training for rural school teachers--needs and facilities; and recent progress in preparing the personnel for positions in rural education. (NQ)

The aesthetic preferences of 224 Jamaican children and 558 previously-studied American children are reported in this paper. Both samples of subjects included male and female children from advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds. The age groups studied were 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds and a combined group of children 7-years-old and older. Each child was asked to identify an ideal representation (the "nicest") of a geometric figure from a card containing it and two other less perfect representations. Four figures were used, and each figure appeared on three cards. A consistent choice of the ideal representation of the figure on all three cards was scored as a positive response. Data tables present the differences in percentages of positive scores for each age group in both the American and Jamaican samples. Also, differences between the scores in age groups are compared cross-culturally for the upper and lower class samples. Concluding discussion contends that the findings tend to confirm the notion of the development of an aesthetic sense of abstract form as a part of the normal maturational process. (SDH)

Further developing a theme that has characterized several recent EDUCOM conferences, the 1974 EDUCOM Fall Conference focused on "Computing and Networks in Higher Education." Included in the conference program were papers and discussions on approaches to solving the organizational and financial problems of networking used in both the United States and Canada. The specific topical sections were: (1) national computing policies, (2) integrating CATV and computing instruction, (3) computers and the learning process, (4) networking for instruction, (5) management of systems and institutions, and (6) communication and innovation. (Author/DGC)