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Chetty et al. (2022) say county density of cross-class friendships (referred to here as "adult-bridging capital") has causal impacts on social mobility within the United States. We instead find that social mobility rates are a function of county density of family capital (higher marriage rates and two-person households), community capital (community organizations, religious congregations, and volunteering), and mean student achievement in grades 3-8. Our models use similar multiple regression equations and the same variables employed by Chetty et al. but also include state fixed effects, student achievement, and family, community, schoolbridging (cross-class high school friendships), and political (participation and institutional trust) capital. School-bridging capital is weakly correlated with mobility if adult-bridging is excluded from the model. R-squared barely changes when adult-bridging is incorporated into the model. When it is included, mobility continues to be significantly correlated with the achievement, family, and community variables but not with school-bridging and political ones. We infer that county mobility rates are largely shaped by parental presence, community life, and student achievement. To enhance mobility, public policy needs to enhance the lives of disadvantaged people at home, in school, and in communities, not just the social class of their friendships.

In assessing the current and future role of universities in the nation-states in which they are chartered and funded, it is useful to ask, When are universities societal leaders as societal and constructive change agents, and when are they followers, reinforcing the existing political order? As discussed in the book, "Neo-Nationalism and Universities: Populists, Autocrats and the Future of Higher Education," the national political history and contemporary context is the dominant factor for shaping the leadership or follower role of universities -- what I call a political determinist interpretation. We often think of contemporary universities, and their students and faculty, as catalysts for societal progress -- the Free Speech and Civil Rights movements, Vietnam War protests, the anti-Apartheid movement, Tiananmen Square, and more recently the pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong. Universities can be, and have been, the locus for not only educating enlightened future leaders, but also for opposing oppression and dictatorships. But universities have also proved over their history to be tools for serving the privileged, and reinforcing the social class divisions of a society; they also have been factories for errant theories that reinforce the worst of nationalist tendencies. Universities are both unique environments for educating and mentoring free thinkers, entrepreneurs, and citizens with, for example, a devotion to social change, or for creating conformists -- or all of the above. How might we assess whether universities are followers or leaders in their societies? This essay considers this question, offering a framework for evaluating the follower or leader role, and with particular attention to the emergence or, in some cases, re-emergence of neonationalist leaders and autocratic governments.

Past research demonstrates the degree to which extracurricular activities, paid work, and major family responsibilities impinge on student academic trajectories. Largely absent from this body of work is consideration of the ways in which schools and teachers mitigate the adverse consequences of out-of-school obligations and choices on academic outcomes. In this paper, we seek to understand when, and for whom, teachers and administrators exercise their power to accommodate students' out-of-school time commitments. Analyzing 61 interviews with teachers and staff at five high schools that serve predominantly low-income students and survey responses from teachers across the state (N=601), we assess how teachers describe student responsibilities and accommodate student responsibilities outside of school. We identify the ways teachers portray the classed nature of different student responsibilities and the kinds of solutions they provide to help resolve the tensions between student responsibilities and academic life. We find that school staff describe a range of student responsibilities and identify these responsibilities as connected to students' social-class status. Teacher responses to student responsibilities are largely individual and ad hoc. When administrators report addressing the impacts of student responsibilities through structural change, this change often specifically centers students' paid work (usually intensive paid work that contributes to family finances) while neglecting other types of responsibilities (such as caregiving).

Recent efforts to understand aggregate student loan debt have shifted the focus away from undergraduate borrowing and toward dramatically rising debt among graduate and professional students. We suggest educational debt plays a key role in social stratification by either deterring bachelor's degree holders from disadvantaged and underrepresented backgrounds from pursuing lucrative careers through advanced degree programs or imposing a high cost for entry. We speculate that the ongoing personal financing of advanced degrees, changes to funding in higher education, and increasing returns to and demand for post-baccalaureate degrees have created a perfect storm for those seeking degrees beyond college. We find that aggregate increases in borrowing among advanced degree students between 1996 and 2016 can be explained in part by increasing enrollment rates, particularly among master's degree students, and large, secular increases in graduate and professional students' undergraduate and graduate borrowing. In contrast to undergraduate debt alone, the burden of educational debt among graduate borrowers appears to have fallen on students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and historically underserved students of color more so than their more advantaged counterparts and on women more so than men. However, we also find that median advanced degree wage premia over those of bachelor's degree holders are substantial for many who graduate with advanced degrees, but are particularly high for African American and low-SES graduates, complicating simple conclusions about the stratification of debt at the post-graduate level.

Positive social mobility benefits individuals in terms of personal advancement and the nation in terms of productivity. There are other social benefits aside. Education, including higher education, is widely understood to be a key contributor to social mobility. However, without a measure of universities' impact on social mobility it is difficult to assess their individual or combined contribution to this agenda and therefore to understand fully the value of university education to individuals, to the country and its taxpayers. The author sets out to identify a measure of universities' contributions to social mobility, combining the social distance travelled by graduates and the number of graduates transported. In this paper, Professor David Phoenix, the Vice-Chancellor of London South Bank University, proposes a new English Social Mobility Index (SMI). Incorporating the number of students from disadvantaged backgrounds and the distance they travel after they enter their higher education institution, the English SMI provides a new way of understanding the contribution of universities to social mobility. [Foreword written by Nick Hillman.]

Despite the growing ideological divisions, there has been a surprising political convergence on some issues related to urban policy, social services, and housing. From the spread of charter schools and school choice to the expansion of home ownership through financial deregulation, it is apparent that liberals and conservatives agree. Yet these points of agreement hide or exacerbate racial and economic segregation, and geographically concentrate its deleterious consequences. The Obama Administration's embrace of urban charter schools and school choice is emblematic of this convergence, yet in fact, charter schools are even more segregated than regular public schools. Despite lack of evidence of their efficacy, and strong empirical support for benefits of school integration, Administration officials fail to describe the achievement gap as a reflection of metropolitan segregation. Establishing racially homogenous charter schools in urban neighborhoods, even where charter schools are successful, is but the latest example of what George Romney's allies dismissed as "gilding the ghetto." George Romney had a better approach. He understood that the suburbs themselves must be desegregated so that disadvantaged children could attend predominantly middle class schools in their own neighborhoods. He was defeated in his efforts, and partly because of this defeat, the achievement gap between black and white children has not narrowed nearly as much as it might have done in the last half century. It is unlikely to narrow much further without revisiting the imperative of residential integration in the metropolitan areas. (Contains 126 endnotes.)

This research assumes a relatively stable lifeworld for young people. For example, it assumes that the meaning of volunteering or service is sufficiently similar across multiple contexts to remain a valid and stable indicator. By extension, it also assumes that the lifeworld of young people today is not undergoing a period of rapid, and perhaps even radical, change. This research began with the assumption that it is possible that a series of structural and environmental changes in the lives of young people had occurred in the past ten years or so that were sufficiently strong to have reconfigured the civic ecology, the overall environment in which young people are socialized into civic life. The hope was to reconstruct this ecology on a community wide scale. It was the intention to reconstruct the most significant networks and institutions that shaped the lives of young people as an environment in a single community, Madison, Wisconsin. The hope was further to purposively sample across these multiple networks, in order to demonstrate in some depth the quality of connection and disconnection of young people to these networks, and further, to gauge the meanings that young people themselves ascribed to these attachments. This goal was partially successful. A systematically stratified purposive sampling frame (described in this paper) that allowed identification and interviews of a very diverse group of almost 100 young people in many different contexts of their lives, ranging from the most formal institutions of school, across multiple semi-formal contexts of civic youth organizations, clubs, and volunteer settings, to informal contexts of association was constructed. Put simply, young people?s civic activities and attitudes were greatly shaped by three broad processes: (1) First, family socialization was still a prime determinant of what kinds of activities young people would engage in and why they would do so; (2) Second, the institutional setting of school ined primary context that organized these activities and channeled them in a variety of directions, supplemented in important ways by after-school settings and clubs, service, and volunteer activities; and (3) Finally, the future expectations of young people had a much stronger force in shaping what kinds of activities they engaged in and why than had been expected. Specifically, the role of college loomed larger in the lives of many of the young people and this was true across class and racial backgrounds. Many young people told us that one important reason for their civic engagement was the desire to build a resume for college admission, or in their own words, "resume-padding." And this was so whether they were oriented toward an Ivy League school, state university, or even the local technical college. Almost all of the young people interviewed expected (or at least hoped) to better their lives and linked these expectations to college education, and a majority linked their hopes for college admission to service. (Contains 3 endnotes.) [This paper was produced by Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), University of Maryland.]

This study closely examined interview transcripts collected in six rural schools to describe how educators and community members viewed issues of social class. Data came from an SEA-funded project investigating high-poverty schools honored for serving all students well. This study is one of several drawing on data gathered for this project. Findings demonstrate three distinct approaches to engaging the poor. The major tendency is "saving the poor," a benign middle-class attempt to support impoverished families and intending to help children from such families enter the local middle class. Four of the six schools embrace this approach. The other two schools were different. In one, the poor were repudiated and even demonized. In the other, the poor were not even identified as a group; instead, interviewees described all residents as "common people," and the school exhibited a strong community purpose and a strong concern for the common good. Such close connection permitted educators to convince skeptical rural parents of the value of a prominent reform mathematics curriculum, which this school adopted. The discussion considers several theories potentially useful in explaining the findings: educational leadership, cultural values, community type, economic structure, and historical views of schooling. Examination of issues of economic structure, however, offers unique causal insights. The discussion concludes with an interpretation of the relevance of a deeper understanding of social class issues to the future of rural schooling. (Contains 1 table, 1 figure, and 17 footnotes.) [Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, CA, April 2006.]

The purpose of this project was to gain a better understanding of dimensions of trust and inter-relationships between those dimensions during the adolescent years. Drawing from survey data collected at the beginning and end of a semester in eighty middle- and high-school social studies classes, relationships were assessed between: social trust, trust in elected officials, trust in the responsiveness of government to ordinary people, trust in the American promise, and trustworthiness of the media. The study was designed as a randomized evaluation of a civics curriculum called Student Voices in the Campaign, with data gathered from two waves of surveys with 1,670 students ages 12-19 during the fall of 2004. Students from ethnic minority backgrounds were less likely than their ethnic majority peers to trust elected officials or people in general or to believe that the government was interested in ordinary people. However, ethnic minority students were not less likely to believe in the general tenets of that all people, regardless of background, had an equal opportunity to succeed in America. Controlling for social class, age, and ethnicity, adolescents' trust in the American promise and their civic commitments were found to be significantly predicted by the youths' proximate experiences of social inclusion in their communities and, particularly for ethnic minority students) by their reports that teachers practiced a democratic ethos at school. (Contains 9 tables.)

Reducing socioeconomic differences in college transfer requires a better understanding of how and why parental education, occupational class, and family income are associated with changing colleges. Building on prior studies of traditional community college transfer we explore relationships between those factors and two types of transfer among 4-year college students. Our results indicate that reverse transfer--the move from 4-year to community college--is more common among students from less-educated families partly because of lower levels of academic performance during their freshman year. In contrast, students from advantaged backgrounds in terms of class and income are more likely than others to engage in lateral transfer--4-year to 4-year--which may reflect individual preferences for changing colleges rather than a reaction to poor academic performance. Implications for policy and practice are discussed in light of the fact that only reverse transfer is associated with lower rates of degree completion. Description of variables is appended. (Contains 3 tables, 1 figure and 12 footnotes.)

Mathematical practices and knowledge are often in dispute for those race and class identities at the margins of social power. This talk will describe both the ways in which mathematics can be complicit with social domination, and the ways in which it can aid in resistance and reconfiguration. It will end with a presentation of Culturally Situated Design Tools, software based on the ethnomathematics of cultural artifacts from Native American, African American, Latino, and Youth Subculture communities.

Young people from lower class origins continue to face major barriers to university education in Canada. This paper documents both substantial inter-generational class mobility and continuing inequalities in formal educational attainments by class origins. While Canada now has the world's higher educational attainments in its youth cohort and has experienced rapid growth in adult education participation as well, those from professional/managerial families remain more than three times as likely to attain a degree as those from working class origins. There is also mounting evidence that escalating financial costs are again increasing the relative class inequalities in university education. These large and increasing class inequalities are compared with the much more equitable and extensive participation in informal learning found in a recent national survey, as well as the underemployment of working class people in the Canadian job structure. In light of these educational and economic inequalities, needs-based student subsidies and democratic workplace reforms are seen as major means to address persistent discrimination against the learning capacities and aspirations for university education of those from lower class origins. (Contains 4 tables and 37 references.) (Author)

Rural development is often presumed to rest on educational improvement, and high levels of mathematics achievement might seem essential to improving the quality of rural life and the viability of rural communities. Efforts to promote math achievement growth are usually limited to curricular and instructional innovations, while contextual factors related to changing economic activity and social organization are overlooked. In contrast, this study focuses on contextual factors such as the increasing importance of social class, declining payoffs for investments in education, families' need for two incomes, widespread use of dubious-quality child care, and the fragility of nourishing institutions (extended families and neighborhoods). The math achievement growth of 305 elementary students in 6 rural and 6 nonrural schools in West Virginia were examined from kindergarten through the end of grade 3. Using a multilevel repeated-measures model, it was found that math achievement growth in this sample was contextually constrained in ways that are rarely acknowledged. Not surprisingly, maturation (time) and socioeconomic status (SES) were important influences. More surprisingly, neighborhood quality (separate from SES) positively influenced achievement growth, while a school's participation in private daycare (as opposed to Head Start) negatively influenced achievement growth, all else equal. Higher school-level SES and participation in Head Start were associated with greater achievement gains over time. Rural locale did not significantly affect achievement. (Contains 100 references) (Author/SV)

This study is one in a series that examines cohorts of American Rhodes scholars in order to determine how changing dynamics of merit, sponsorship, and democratization affect elite membership, socialization, occupational structures, and perceptions of leadership. This segment of the study examines the ways in which elite baccalaureate credentials interact with pre-college cultural capital to shape distinctive career outcomes. The sample (n=220) included two cohorts of Rhodes scholars from the late 1940s and the late 1960s, and the research sought to determine: (1) whether between World War II and the late 1960s Rhodes scholars had become more diverse in terms of social origins; (2) whether an upper-class background increased the likelihood of achieving professional prominence; (3) whether attendance at a "big 3" graduate school had an independent effect on career prominence; (4) whether social class and educational effects on career attainment differed for Rhodes scholars in the 1940s and 1960s; and (5) what interactions of social background, baccalaureate origins, and graduate school prestige affect career prominence. The study concluded that factors outside of formal education and social background account for the majority of the variation in the career pathways of Rhodes scholars chosen for eminence. (Contains 40 references.) (CH)

Our schools are environments of race and class and these school environments structure opportunity based on race and class. This paper explores how students' lives and their access to postsecondary education are framed and structured by the influences of race and class. The college choice decision process of three female Black students from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds in three distinct high school environments are examined. One of the most important ways that schools foster the investment of various forms of capital in the course of students' educational careers is in the transition from high school to college. The data for this ethnographic study was collected over a nine-month period at three urban California high schools. At the private school, intensive support was provided for college admissions and students applied to selective colleges nationally. At the two public schools much less support was provided and applications were generally limited to within the state or to historically Black colleges. Analysis suggests that Black students from private schools are accruing higher social status and opportunities while the future status of Black public school students is lowered by their more limited college choices, regardless of their academic qualifications. (Contains 32 references.) (JLS)

University of California Santa Barbara students were surveyed in 1996 to learn about student life and culture in the 1990s. Fifty-five percent of 815 randomly selected undergraduates responded to a mail survey. Responses were grouped according to students' race, gender, and social class. Reasons identified for attending college included: to receive preprofessional or precareer training, to make more money, and to develop self-knowledge. Findings support the widespread belief that young people are relatively anxious about their future life chances. Differences in social practices and activities of students were found for different racial, ethnic, and gender categories. Students reported on their use of alcohol and drugs and the frequency of attending large parties at private homes. Information was also obtained on the frequency of students' interactions with faculty about academic matters, and the frequency of attending cultural events. The data, which include 4 tables and 10 figures, suggest that students from working class and lower income families, minorities, and those who are the first in the family to attend college are less uncertain than their upper middle class peers about the value of a college education. Additional findings and policy implications are considered. (Contains 20 references and 18 endnotes.) (SW)

This paper identifies and discusses the connections between the way individuals frame their world based on the language they use and the impact of language and stereotyping on the perception that computer technology is primarily for certain individuals. The study explores how some of the dimensions of the language of computers and technology, computer culture, and computer-based activities are inextricably linked to the language and culture of mathematics which has framed a particular way of thinking about computer technology. The document discusses an array of anecdotal evidence and research findings supporting the contention that technology education carries with it the biases and beliefs of the society in which it operates. The use of computers often exacerbates inequities for students of color and poor students rather than act as an educational panacea. However, a broad understanding of this cultural context can be used to begin to change the culture of the classroom and school to respond better to the educational needs of the broad range of students who traditionally do not succeed. Questions are raised regarding, how to make technology engaging for both males and females and how can a new approach to technology support a democracy? The document concludes with a number of approaches to creating classroom changes. These include increasing the opportunities for girls to engage in technology-related activities, working with more collaborative activities, giving students' more control over the activities that they work on, and changing patterns of discourse. (MJP)

The movement of middle-class residents, especially blacks, out of inner-city neighborhoods has been hypothesized to contribute to the decay of the inner city and the growth of an underclass by increasing social isolation and depriving youth of role models. This study examines changes in patterns of racial and class segregation in the residential structure of Milwaukee (Wisconsin) between 1970 and 1980 and their effect on poor, black children living in the inner city. Statistical data from the 1970 and the 1980 censuses were analyzed using segregation indexes and measures, after adjusting for data suppressed by the Census Bureau for reasons of confidentiality. The following summary conclusions are discussed: (1) racial residential segregation clearly decreased, especially for high status blacks; (2) blacks displayed higher levels of intragroup class segregation than whites in 1970; (3) black intragroup class segregation increased more than white intragroup class segregation; (4) changes in the class isolation of poor black children were due to changes in the aggregate population rather than to changes in class segregation patterns; and (5) racial residential segregation is the predominant influence on patterns of class isolation. A discussion of the suppression of data in the census tape files, a list of 34 references, and 9 tables of statistical data are appended. (FMW)

The relative lack of students studying post-compulsory STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects is a key policy concern. A particular issue is the disparities in uptake by students' family background, gender and ethnicity. It remains unclear whether the effects of family background can be explained by academic disparities, and prior research has only considered student characteristics as having additive effects, and has not yet considered whether these characteristics interact in determining choices. Using data from more than 4,000 students in England from the "Next Steps", I use logistic regression methods to consider these questions. Disparities by students' ethnicity are shown to increase when considering prior attainment. Parents' education and social class are differentially related to uptake for male and female students. Disparities in degree choice by parents' education persist when conditioning on prior attainment suggesting a leak in the pipeline', particularly for young women from less educated families. Disparities in uptake by gender are only observed for low and middle Socio-Economic Position (SEP) families. Implications for policy and future research are discussed.

This discussion paper of the Youth Transition Funders Group synthesizes "the insights, inspirations and future directions" created over a five-year period "to frame policies and programs directed at our most vulnerable youth." (Contains 7 footnotes and 2 figures.)

Most social scientists assert that Whites and African Americans exist in different economic, political, and social environments and that these contextual differences contribute substantially to group differences in violence and other antisocial outcomes. This paper uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and structural equation modeling to compare a model of violent delinquency among black adolescents to one among white adolescents. Participants were 12,105 students in grades 7-12, who completed an in-school questionnaire. Results indicated that many of the factors leading to violence among black and white teens were the same. However, context led to racial differences in violent delinquency. White adolescent behavior was more sensitive to community characteristics than black adolescent behavior. The results associated with black adolescents could be attributed to exposure to community deprivation. Neighborhood poverty and unemployment levels as well as parents' education and nontraditional family structures had substantial effects on the behavior of both black and white adolescents. Social class offered some protection against adverse outcomes associated with risky behavior, although the strength of this protection was conditioned by race. (Contains 68 references.) (SM)

Standard benefit-incidence analysis assumes that the subsidy and the quality of educational services are the same for all income deciles. This paper takes a new approach, a "marginal willingness to pay" analysis that measures the impact of the government's provision of public schools on the educational spending behavior of an average Mexican household. Mexican National Household Income and Expenditures Survey data (1996) were analyzed to examine: (1) how much an average household with given characteristics would spend on a child if subsidized public schools were not available; (2) how much the household "saves" by sending the child to public rather than private schools; (3) size of the "savings" for various income groups; (4) determinants for enrollment in upper secondary school by income groups and rural versus urban location; and (5) how individuals' educational expenditures affect enrollment patterns. Among the findings are that the nonpoor and those in urban areas got a large share of the subsidy or "savings" from government provision of educational services. Household enrollment and transition to secondary school depended heavily on the cost of schooling, head of household's educational level, per capita household income, and housing characteristics. Probability of secondary school attendance was much higher in the top 40 percent of urban income groups than in the bottom 40 percent in rural areas. The variable government effort had a significant marginal impact on upper secondary enrollment that, in elasticity terms, was 12 times more effective for the poor than the wealthy and 15 times more effective in rural than urban areas. (Contains 24 references and 26 data tables.) (Author/SV)

The nations of the capitalistic world devote a high percentage of their exports to trade with other nations in that group, while the underdeveloped nations send most of their exports to the capitalistic nations. The low wages in underdeveloped countries are critical for the maintenance of their position as dominated, for these low wages allow the dominant industrial countries to receive goods at relatively low cost and also to reduce the internal mass market of the underdeveloped countries to a minimum. In a colonial period, education is used by the capitalist countries to produce elites in the dominated countries. Today universal education policies in the underdeveloped countries keep these countries in a state of underdevelopment, for the costs of education and the growing unemployment rates of the educated in urban areas perpetuate a state of dependency. For the individual rural family, belief in advancement via education hinders the individual production and accumulation process and also creates a number of family liabilities in the form of children who cannot function within the existing rural society because they have never learned the required skills. By teaching things which have no obvious usefulness, institutionalized education plays a major role in creating the required mentality of a working class which can be and is controlled by the dominant classes in both the capitalistic and underdeveloped countries. (JC)

The Swedish address system is in a state of rapid change. Consequently, Swedes are now more than ever sensitive to the seeming lack of generally accepted rules of usage. This paper attempts to codify the rules for usage of the personal pronouns "du" and "ni." In so doing, it finds that "du" may be used to express either solidarity or intimacy-familiarity, while "ni" exists in old peasant form as well as in current polite and impolite forms. Generally speaking, one can describe the Swedish address system adequately only if one recognizes that Swedish social classes have different rules due to different semantics (i.e., the covariation between the pronoun used and the objective relationship existing between speaker and addressee) of the pronouns "du" and "ni." (Author/DB)

The special language of particular occupations, the role playing of those who practice them, and the terms in which the communications media and the general public refer to them evoke problematic cognitions about occupational functions and practitioner traits that determine an occupation's high or low social standing. Perceptions of occupations rest heavily on stereotypes that are often class based and occur in sets, each stereotypic feature connoting others in the set as well. Race, ethnicity, sex, class subculture, level of attractiveness and kind of personality are common components of such sets. Linguistic evocations encourage a focus upon the special procedures of high prestige occupations rather than on the achievement of demonstrable results, which are expected from low prestige occupations. The various levels of the occupational hierarchy systematically reinforce each other's high or low standing and also systematically legitimize inequalities in the allocation of values in society as a whole. (Author/TA)

African Wolof society is divided into a number of ranked status groups or castes, the largest of which is the high-ranking noble caste. Wolof conceive of two styles of speaking, the restrained or noble-like and the elaborated or "griot"-like, and the two styles are connected by the presence or absence of "kerse," honor and self-control. The linguistic phenomena relevant to social rank are found in all aspects of speech performance: paralinguistic phenomena (such as intonation), phonology, syntax, and lexicon. Intonational features provide the most striking differences in style. Phonological differences seem to be related to differences in speech tempo. The griot style uses syntactic devices that lengthen the total utterance but add little or nothing to its meaning, while the noble style uses shorter, blander forms and intentional errors as a sign of high rank. The variants can also signal high and low rank within a caste. The use of intentional error can create confusion between a high-ranking individual and a linguistically incompetent foreigner. The linguistic system as a whole may have shifted in the direction of the high-status variant, and the reduction in surface elaboration is consistent with high-rank restraint and nonfluency, possibly arising from the general population's desire to appear more high-ranking. Thus the cultural valuation of speech can influence both the form and the direction of language change. (MSE)

Hospitality patterns of the Bororo Indians are illustrated in two examples: the etiquette due to a visiting chief from another Bororo village, and the etiquette due any common visitor from another Bororo village. Formal hospitality differs greatly from the usual etiquette. At a visiting chief's arrival, he enters as the last of his group and waits in a central location until the village chief arrives to have an oral duel with him, which establishes their wisdom and rights; the last to speak is the winner. In this duel the importance of names, titles, ornaments, and other social codes of ownership symbolic of survival is expressed. A common visitor goes to the central plaza and shouts out all his personal names and waits to be invited into the meetingplace of the men's council for a long and detailed interview, focusing on his family's names, in order to be placed properly for eating and sleeping in a home of his name-category ("mother,""father,""godmother,""godfather"). Name categories also determine seating. Every person a Bororo may call by a kinship term is inserted into a system of food, shelter, and gift reciprocity. The origin of the kinship ties is in the tradition that a Bororo is not just a descendant of an ancestor but a representative of a mythological hero associated with the name-category. In naming a child the Bororo attempt not to "lose names." A hierarchy of social prestige is expressed in kin terms. However, naming practices do not reflect any formal kinship system--kinship is a secondary effect of naming practices. (MSE)

This paper describes two culturally-sensitive longitudinal studies of normal development of Puerto Rican adolescents and children growing up in the United States. A number of areas pertinent to Puerto Ricans and other minorities that have previously been neglected are studied. Both projects are grounded in a cultural-ecological approach in which the child was examined in a family and neighborhood context. Neither study has been completed, but their methodology is described to provide examples of culturally sensitive research. The adolescent study will follow 150 Puerto Rican boys and 150 Puerto Rican girls and their primary caretakers for 3 years, focusing on 100 children from welfare recipient families, 100 from working class families, and 100 from middle class families. The study will center on self-identity formation and the transformation of parental ties. Interviews with subjects and their families and ethnographic study of the school and community will provide study data. The study of school aged children will be a 5-year project focusing on 150 boys and 150 girls of Puerto Rican origin in grades 1,2, and 3 from 3 social classes. Both studies will be conducted by multidisciplinary teams composed primarily of Hispanics. Both will focus on positive and negative coping skills, and both will explore issues pertinent to minorities, such as acculturation, color, and effects of migration. (Contains 25 references.) (SLD)

This document critically reviews the empirical evidence and theories that have emerged to document and explain ethnic, racial, and class differences in the rate of adolescent involvement in interpersonal violence. In the first section, recent data are presented on the incidence of violence among adolescents in the United States as documented in official reports. Of interest is the comparative rate of violence among youths as opposed to other population age groups. Data are also assembled to describe the ethnic and racial characteristics of adolescent victims and offenders. The second section explores some problems of conceptualization and measurement that must be considered when interpreting findings of ethnic, racial, or social class differences in rates of crime or violence. With the current trend toward viewing violence as a public health problem, the prevention of youth aggression has become a major objective of state and local public officials and federal agencies. Consequently, the third section assesses the relevance of documented group differences for devising policies and programs to reduce the incidence of violence. In recent years there has been a widespread public perception that children and adolescents are more likely to be involved in violence than were their counterparts in the past. Data suggest that the growth in rates of youth violence has not been as explosive as the media have suggested, but that adolescence is indeed a period of heightened risk for involvement both as victims and perpetrators in homicide, assault, robbery, and other forms of nonlethal violence. Data also suggest that higher rates of victimization and offending are found for homicide for African and Hispanic adolescents, but data about nonlethal violence is less clear. For the least serious forms of nonlethal violence, ethnic and racial disparities may not exist at all. (Contains 7 tables and 193 references.) (SLD)

Given the skyrocketing costs of higher education, some borrowers -- particularly those with low incomes and those who were scammed by for-profit colleges -- genuinely need assistance. But portraying student loan forgiveness as a working-class issue is highly misleading. In fact, data on student borrowing shows that debt relief benefits few working-class families, most of whom never attended college in the first place. This paper dives deeply into the evidence on the economic impact of student loan forgiveness. As the paper shows, proposals from political progressives to forgive all student loan debt (or large amounts such as $50,000 of debt) overwhelmingly benefit affluent Americans. President Biden departed from these more elitist proposals, yet his decision to forgive even a more limited amount is still puzzling. At a time when the economic returns to education are rising and the Democratic Party is losing noncollege voters, it makes little sense to target government aid to people who attended college. The paper goes on to examine the question of why the Democratic Party -- traditionally the party of working-class people -- has become so focused on canceling student loans.