Unsportsmanlike Conduct

By Joe Bruns — National Football League commissioner  Roger Goodell right now might be feeling like the captain of a fishing boat seeing on his radar screen the confluence of four storms, each by itself manageable, but combined they threaten to shake the foundation of what has become America’s national sport.

Traumatic Brain Injury

PBS Frontline recently aired the aptly named program League of Denial, investigating the mounting evidence that football playing causes both acute and chronic brain injury even when playing within the rules of the game and with the recommended safety equipment. Furthermore, the program chronicles half-measured – some would say bogus — attempts by the NFL at research into the connection between playing football and traumatic brain injury and the condition known as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). As with the tobacco industry before it, the NFL continues to hide behind the argument that there is no ‘conclusive proof’ of a cause and effect relationship. It is hard to not accept the premise, though, that NFL players are risking permanent and serious brain damage every time they take the field. Several former NFL players have committed suicide and have specifically asked that their brains be examined.

Junior Seau committed suicide in 2012

But the NFL’s problem goes beyond its own professional players who are being paid for taking such risk. The physical style of play and the toughness of the professional players sets an example of the sport played at its highest level.  As such it is the style of play encouraged by coaches and emulated by players at every level, sometimes with tragic consequences.  Just this month a high school football player in Arizona died of a brain trauma suffered on the field. Children as young as eight are playing tackle football, and have coaches telling them to be tough, to ignore pain and to take a physical toll on opposing players.

Big hits (i.e. violent ones) are celebrated by parents and routinely posted on You Tube.  USA Football, the governing body of the sport, sends mixed messages on its website. In one article they talk about the need to teach kids as young as eight to overcome their fear of hitting. They also have an entire section of their website dealing with concussion risk and diagnosis. But their message becomes clear as you dig down, their conclusion is that concussions are “a manageable injury,’ and as for permanent brain damager, “…there is no proof.”

Former NFL great Brett Favre recently said that if he had a son he would be “real leery” about allowing him to play football. Participation in Pop Warner youth football has declined almost ten percent over the past two years. If parents decide that youth football is not worth the risk, the entire feeder system for high schools and colleges will be threatened, and with it a possible erosion in the popularity of the NFL itself.

College football: Everyone Prospers Except the Players.

The second threat to professional football as we now know it is the possible professionalization of its ‘minor league,’ NCAA college football. 

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell

Unlike Major League Baseball, which has a multi-tiered minor league system of professional prospects, professional football depends upon college football to identify talent, teach fundamentals, test players in high-pressure games, and eventually allow the best to rise to the top, ready for admission into the NFL cartel through the college draft system.

All of the costs of this process are borne by the colleges, and funded by television contracts, filled stadiums of fans, and you, the taxpayer. The players themselves, however, are so-called amateurs supposedly playing for the thrill of the competition and the honor of representing the alma mater, or at least that is the story. But players, and even some university administrators are beginning to rebel.  For their part, players see the billions of dollars of revenue generated by their play on the field, and wonder why they live on the equivalent of food stamps (sometime literally). They’re beginning to want a piece of the action. One study by Sports Illustrated concluded that a University of Texas football player was worth $578,000 per year. As it now stands, a player cannot legally accept a used car without jeopardizing his career, while his coach makes something upward from $1 Million. Even a college player’s own image can be used and marketed by video game producers without compensation. He may or may not make it through four years of college football without a career ending injury, and only if he is among the best will he be allowed to negotiate with a single employer for a professional contract. There is change lurkingin the future.

Arrogant Owners

The third threat to the NFL is brought on by the arrogance of team owners. Take the case of the Washington Redskins.  The “Washington Redskins” actually play their home games in Landover, Maryland, having moved out of Washington, DC many moons ago. It turns out the sports stadiums are generally built in the jurisdiction that will give them the greatest taxpayer funded breaks, not necessarily either where the fans reside or in their namesake city. Few of the negotiated concessions are passed on to the fans. The Redskins have among the highest prices for parking, beer and food. They also severely restrict what a fan can bring into the stadium, purportedly for ‘security concerns.’ Even the size of a women’s purse is restricted.

And then there’s the issue of the name “Redskins.”

Many old-time Washington Redskins fans will tell you about the legendary history of the football team, but many don’t know that before Washington, the team was the Boston Redskins (and the Braves before that.) More fans probably do know, but choose to brush aside the fact that, along with a number of championships over the years, the Washington Redskins in 1962 were the last NFL team to integrate, and did so only under the threat of federal legal action that would have denied them use of their DC stadium where they then played.

While opinion polls find people divided, at least some Native Americans find the name Redskins to be offensive – a racial slur. Indeed, many dictionaries describe the term as disparaging or a slur. Defenders contend that the name is meant to honor American Indians, as a tribute to their bravery and warrior spirit. And many public opinion polls support that point of view, along with the sense that the name is part of a tradition, sort of like Semper Fi.

But we are talking here about a football team, not the United States Marine Corps. The ‘tradition’ of a professional football team is hardly something sacred. If even a small number of people are honestly offended by a name that  clearly has racist overtones, why keep it? Owner Dan Snyder is on record as saying he will NEVER change the name of the Redskins. (Capital letters are his). This sounds more like simple arrogance than it does like principle. But arrogance in the guise of denial seems to be an NFL trait. While the Super Bowl is described by activist Cindy McCain as the ‘largest human trafficking venue on the planet,” the NFL refuses to cooperate with those trying to address the issue.

Machismo Culture

Finally there is the inside look at the players culture, as demonstrated by the New Orleans Saints locker room. By now, everyone with even a passing interest in sports knows the story of Jonathan Martin, a classics graduate from Sanford being harassed by fellow Miami Dolphin Richie Incognito to the point that Martin quit the team and Incognito was suspended. While there are many questions to be resolvedabout the whole affair, one thing seems pretty clear:

The culture inside a professional football team is a pretty ugly one, with behavior that would be considered entirely out of bounds, perhaps even illegal, in most work places.

It also spills over outside the locker room. A Miami Dolphin staffer has come forward with accusations of harassment as well. What does it say about us as a culture that behavior and language, including frequent use of the N-word, that would be grounds for dismissal at almost any worksite is the norm among those we idolize as sports heroes? Perhaps it is a culture that leads to bounty-hunting bonuses for injuring opposing players.

Football and the NFL will endure these trials, I have no doubt. But you never know when a tipping point might be reached when a popular sport begins to decline in popularity as happened with boxing

Duk Koo Kim was taken off life support four days after fight

Boxing was once considered a major sport, and television sports programming grew up with Wednesday and Friday night fights, and broadcasts of major championships before the age of HBO and pay television. But professional boxing had long had seedy underworld connections, including boxers willing to take a dive, corrupt managers and scorers, and plaster added to boxing gloves. But the turning point for boxing, when it lost much of its popularity and glamour, might be the death by brain trauma of Duk Koo Kim at the hands of Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini in 1982. Mancini beat Kim to death on national television.

While boxing's popularity has waned, it does still continue, and so does the brain trauma. Even as I write this a boxer,  Magomed Abdusalamov, lies in a New York hospital with life threatening injuries.

Unlike boxing, the effect of brain injury usually occurs later, out of sight and not on camera, but if a high school boy dies of brain trauma playing football it is only a matter of time before we witness such an event on national television. What will be our reaction?

A Well Founded Fear: The Refugee Crisis

A refugee is someone who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted… is outside the country of his/her nationality, and is unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.” — 1951 UN Convention on Refugees.

Joe Bruns

By Joe Bruns — On October 12, Columbus Day in the new world, at least 26 refugees, mostly women and children were lost in the Mediterranean Sea when their boat teeming with several hundred people capsized and sank near Lampedusa, Italy in Maltese waters.

This particular tragedy might have gone unnoticed, except that it occurred during a particularly gruesome two-week period in which more than 390 people perished in similar fashion, leading Malta’s Prime Minister to condemn European inaction on the wave of seafaring refugees as turning the Mediterranean into a “cemetery.”

In the first nine months of 2013, more than 30,000 refugees arrived in just Malta and Italy. Most of these come from Senegal, Somalia, and now, particularly from Syria.

Those who make it to Europe are the relatively lucky ones. More often, refugees andinternally displaced persons (IDP) find themselves in camps with minimal services and scant security. Life for women and children is especially hard. A participatory assessment of the lives of refugee and IDP children in sub-Saharan Africa conducted by the United Nations in 2007 found the following:

• Displaced children are frequently subject to violence both within and outside refugee camps
• Refugee children often experience discrimination by local residents
• Gender-based violence directed at girls, including harassment and rape is widespread
• Forced marriages, often resulting from rape and pregnancy, are common in several camps

Simple chores assigned to women and children, such as gathering firewood or drawing water, can be life threatening.

The United Nations High Commission on Refugees

The international body with primary responsibility for refugees and displaced persons is the UNHCR. Established in 1950, the UNHCR was given a three-year mandate to deal with the problem of displaced Europeans in the wake of World War II. It has, by necessity, extended far beyond its sunset date.

Today there are 40 million refugees, displaced and stateless people world wide, almost half of them children. InSub-Sahara Africa alone there are some 10.4 million IDPs, mostly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they live a particularly hellish life in North Kivu around the embattled cities ofGoma and Kamango, as government forces battle the latest rebel group knows as M23.

Worldwide, more than half the refugee/IDPs have come from Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Columbia, Somalia and Uganda. But the conflict creating the greatest volume of new refugees is Syria.

More people have been displaced from Syria than from genocide in Rwanda or ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.”  William J. Burns, State Department 

Syria – A Human Tragedy

While politicians and international bureaucrats debate the merits of military intervention in Syria the human costs of the civil war mount. Some two million people have fled Syria for Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan, The exodus has been compared to previous crises related to Rwanda and the breakup of Yugoslavia. As superbly reported by New York Times reporter Anne Barnard, an additional five  million Syrians are internally displaced, forced to seek shelter with relatives, in mosques and vacant buildings, often experiencing food and fuel shortages and still subject to the war itself. As the war continues, the social and economic infrastructure is collapsing in major regions of the country, creating the conditions for yet another failed state.

The combined seven million refugees and IDPs represent fully one-third of the Syrian population.

Much of the American political debate regarding Syria has focused on providing military assistance to the rebels trying to overthrow the Assad regime. The US has been providing humanitarian assistance to Syria and the affected countries– some $1.3 billion over the past two years according to USAID. The need though is enormous and will continue to grow. Also growing is pressure for the Obama administration to leverage its humanitarian aid by channeling it through opposition forces. This would likely be both ineffective and would simply add to the general cynicism in which US aid often held.

Also affected are neighboring countries receiving refugees. Lebanon, a country of only 4.1 million, has 750,000 registered refugees from Syria, and several hundred thousand more who have drifted across the border without registration. In Lebanon, such a large influx has the potential to further upset the delicate ethnic and religious balance, potentially leading to another conflict among Shiite Hezbollah, Sunni and Christians.

The situation in Turkey is also becoming tense. As reported in Al Monitor in July, Turkey was host to about half a million Syrian refugees, about equally split between camps and among the general population, and this number has been growing rapidly.

Not only are the numbers of refugees difficult to deal with, the Syrian refugees are mostly Sunni now living in a region of Turkey that has substantial numbers of Alevis, traditionally allied with the Alawites and supportive of Bashir Assad.  Jordan and Iraqare also heavily impacted by the human wave of refugees from Syria.

Syria may be the greatest immediate challenge, but refugees to Indonesia, and fromSomalia and Nigeria all face gruesome challenges. Refugees and IDPs from theDemocratic Republic of Congo are particularly falling victim to rape by both sides of the war.

And even those lucky enough to make their way to Europe often find themselves classified as ineligible for asylum, leaving them to live a life of evasion from the authorities, sleeping in empty cargo containers, and resorting to odd jobs, begging or petty crimes for survival.

For more on the fallout in Europe see the three-part article Hamburg Unrest, from Der Spiegel

Photo credits: AFP/Getty and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR)

The scale of third-party human suffering from armed conflicts is almost too great to comprehend. And too often the media run to the site of the conflict, or focus on the number of killed or on a particular genus of weapon used, leaving the plight of non-combatant victims barely visible.

– Joe Bruns (cajunjoe) is a Trail Mix Contributor

IRAQ IN A HARD PLACE

by CAJUNJOE

Iraq might be off the front pages, but our legacy is still unsettled

Joe Bruns

By Joe Bruns — The United Nations mission in Iraq reports that 979 Iraqis were killed and another 2133 wounded in acts of terrorism and violence just in the month of September, bringing the death total to 5740 so far this year.

In Baghdad, on September 30 alone, there were 15 car bombs detonated as the violence continued to wreck devastation on what is left of the country. Car bombings have become a way of life, averaging more than two per day, with multiple coordinated car bombings frequent.

Nor is the violence confined to Baghdad. Just this week, suicide bombers, probably Sunni, killed 19 people of the small Shabak sect in attacks near the city of Mosul. And on September 29, ten people were killed and 62 injured in bombings in the generally peaceful Kurdish autonomous region.

Violence in Iraq is pervasive and comes from multiple quarters. The traditional animosity between Sunni and Shia has existed for centuries. Regional differences have diced the country into ethnic enclaves often under the control of local militias. The Kurdish autonomous area is becoming virtual Kurdistan. Even within sectarian groups, sub-factions battle for control. In Sadr City, Moktada al-Sadr finds himself in a power struggle with Asaib al-Haq, who has ties to Iran and has sent support to Syria to aid President Bashar al-Assad. Added to this are the professional insurgents, Baathists (dead-enders as they were once known), Iranian backed Hezbollah, resurgent al-Qaeda related groups, and clans seeking to settle old grievances. While the violence has not yet reached the stage of the bloody years of 2006-2007 when there was a virtual civil war it is increasing.

Iraq Ethnic and Religious Distribution — WorldPress

Meanwhile, the Nouri al-Maliki government celebrates oil production goals and buys Russian war materials. But al-Maliki’s regime is rife with corruption, is unable to regularly provide basic services and, importantly, lacks an independent judiciary. In an act the United Nations human rights chief Navi Pillay called “obscene and inhuman,” the al-Maliki regime this month carried out mass executions of 42 prisoners. Ms. Pillay went on to characterize Iraq’s justice system as too corrupt to warrant use of the death penalty at all, let alone on such a large scale.

An American Legacy

Ten years ago, the United States invaded Iraq for the purpose of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, securing his [non-existent] weapons of mass destruction, and establishing a democratic beachhead in the middle east.

It is not a neocon pipedream … that Israel, Palestine, Turkey, Afghanistan and Iraq can create [democratic] momentum that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and … even Syria or Iran would find hard to resist,” said Victor Hanson (Hoover Institution) in 2005.

This grand crusade began with a spectacular display of American military might: shock and awe.

March 19- 20, 2003 Shock and Awe in Baghdad (Photo BBC)

General Tommy Franks commanded the invasion, and executed it with precision, demonstrating the particular strength of the American led coalition forces in striking hard and fast. The southern oil fields were quickly secured, and resistance to the invading forces, while at times fierce, was quickly overcome. By April, Baghdad fell.

By May 1, the invasion of Iraq had gone so well that President Bush declared on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, “Major combat operations have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

USS Abraham Lincoln (5/1/2013)

But we quickly learned that defeating an opposing army and bringing peace, stability and democracy to a complex country were two quite different things. The problems started almost immediately.

The very nature of the invasion strategy left the coalition ill prepared to stabilize the country in the aftermath of military victory. We deliberately went in ‘light.’ Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K Shinseki in Congressional testimony estimated that an occupying force of several hundred thousand troops would be necessary to secure Iraq post-invasion. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz ridiculed Gen. Shinseki’s estimate, sticking by an earlier estimate of about 100,000 troops. We will never know if even Gen. Shinseki’s number would have stabilized Iraq. What we do know is that the troop level was insufficient to create civil order. Perhaps more important than sheer numbers, troops specialized in civil administration were insufficiently mobilized, and Arabic language speakers were in short supply. This, when combined with purge of Baathist bureaucrats and skilled workers and the administrative ineptitude of the Coalition Provisional Authority under Pro Consul Paul Bremer soon led to rioting, looting, and outright insurgency. By 2004, a full-scale civil war was breaking out.

You break it, you own it” — Colin Powell on the danger of regime change in Iraq.

Second Battle of Fallujah, November 2004 (photo BBC)

By the time the United States withdrew in 2011, as many as 461,000 Iraqis had died, although this figure is disputed. What is not disputed is that American and allied forces suffered 4804 deaths. More than 32,000 American troops were injured. According to Associated Press, an astounding 45% of the 1.6 million veterans of Iraq an Afghanistan have filed disability claims with the Veteran’s Administration.

Wars also leave impressions on the national psyche. In any war there are examples of jaw-dropping heroism as well as disgusting examples of atrocity. Unfortunately, it is the atrocities that we easily remember. Lynndie England and Abu Ghraib come easily to mind, but many other worse atrocities have been documented. Far less well known are the individual acts of heroism, including the four Americans – a Marine, two Soldiers and a Navy Seal – who were awarded the Medal of Honor, all posthumously. Wars also lead to new tactics and technology. World War I gave us air combat and poison gas, WWII gave us Kamikaze flights, the blitzkrieg and the atomic bomb, Viet Nam offered large-scale irregular warfare, napalm bombings and Agent Orange. Iraq introduced improvised explosive devices, the surge and the widespread use of drones, which have now found new use for killing terrorists wherever they hide, along with too many innocent civilians. Like poison gas, the atomic bomb and napalm before it, the use of drones has become an issue of moral debate.

Wars have unforeseen consequences. World War I led inevitably to World War II, as well as the unfortunate configuration of the Middle East. WWII led to the division of Europe and the Cold War. Defeating Iraq’s army and overthrowing Saddam Hussein was the easy part. It was a mission for which our military was designed. Nation building is the hard part, and is one that our army is ill-suited for, even when supplemented by vast support of contractors and multiple civilian agencies. The overthrow of Saddam and subsequent instability in Iraq has clearly changed the balance of power in the Middle East, and particularly with regard to Iran. It may also have contributed to the “Arab Spring,” with outcomes still unsettled—just like our own legacy in the region.

We have spent trillions of dollars equipping and manning the most powerful armed force the world has ever known. Our machines can defeat their machines, our men and women can outfight any foe. What we continue to demonstrate, though, is our inability to win hearts and minds — to win the peace.

– Joe Bruns (Cajun Joe) is a Trail Mix Contributor

OCTOBER 14, 2013

WAR ON WOMEN: A SECOND FRONT?

by CAJUNJOE

Worsening Health Outcomes for Poor Women (especially in states refusing to expand Medicaid under Obamacare)

Joe Bruns

By Joe Bruns — In the September issue of 
The American Prospect,  Monica Potts memorably tells the story of Crystal Wilson, of Cave City, Arkansas, who died this past May two months shy of her thirty-ninth birthday. Ms. Potts paints an intimate portrait of Crystal to personalize a demographic mystery posed in the title of her piece: What’s Killing Poor White Women?

Demographers have long been intrigued by the differences in mortality rates of segments of the population. Women live longer than men and whites live longer than blacks, even as those gaps are narrowing. But ever since such statistics have been recorded, with very few exceptions such as the 1918 flu epidemic, the trend among all major segments of the population has been upward.

That is until health statisticians began noticing a new trend in American longevity: there was a wide disparity between male and female longevity growth rates when looked at county-by-county. In fact, according to a study in Health Affairs, (Kindig and Cheng 2013) female mortality rose in 42.8% of US counties between 1992 and 2006. By way of comparison, male mortality rates increased in only 3.4% of US counties.

Change In Female Mortality Rates from 1992-96 to 2002-06

Furthermore many of those counties where female longevity fell lay in an arc, from West Virginia, through the states of the old Confederacy to Texas, along with the rural mid-west and counties with Native American reservations. While more recent data show that the downward county-by-county trend has leveled off, there is no dispute that female longevity is significantly disadvantaged in the poor/rural South.

In fact, a woman living in Montgomery County, Maryland has a life expectancy twelve years longer than one living in McDowell, West Virginia.”

The twenty US counties with the worst female longevity are all in the states of the old Confederacy with the exception of two in West Virginia. Among the possible contributing causes are obesity, smoking, and poor nutrition leading to diabetes and heart conditions, as well as limited access to quality health care. What is even more striking, though, is that the loss of longevity is particularly seen among white women.

See: Life Expectancy for White American Females

It also turns out that there is a significant correlation between high school education and longevity among all groups. In a paper written in August, 2012, lead researcher S. Jay Olshansky found “that in 2008, US adult men and women with fewer than twelve years of education had life expectancies not much better than those of all adults in the 1950s and 1960s.” These effects appear to have a compounding effect on white women. Olshansky found a five-year drop in life expectancy among white women high-school dropouts compared to a three-year drop for white men.

Crystal Wilson fit into a pattern. At the time of her death, Crystal weighed over 200 pounds, and had been diagnosed with diabetes, but was ‘waiting to get medicine’ for it. Her primary source of income was her husband’s disability check. She met her husband, Possum, while she was in high school. He was 28; Crystal was 16. They married and Crystal dropped out of school.

See Interactive US Health Map

Forbes Magazine, among others, regularly comes out with articles claiming that poverty in the United States is not so bad, that it is more a matter of bad choices or even bad luck, and at any rate, they are not as poor as those in other countries.

But it is also a fact that while the United States spends more per capita on health care than any other industrialized nation, we are slipping badly in outcomes. According to a major study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the United States ranks 26th out of 34 OECD countries in ‘healthy life expectancy.’ And we are losing ground to other industrialized countries.

Despite a level of health expenditures that would have seemed unthinkable a generation ago, the health of the U.S. population has improved only gradually and has fallen behind the pace of progress in many other wealthy nations,” writes Harvey V. Fineberg, M.D., Ph.D., of the Institute of Medicine, Washington, D.C

So, how is this interesting from a public policy perspective? It’s worth looking at two additional graphics.The first depicts health insurance coverage by state.

The second map shows where states are with regard to Medicaid expansion.

To me, while obviously not identical, the patterns on these two maps are striking in their similarity to the first map showing where women had shortening life expectancies. America may have “the best healthcare system in the world,” as Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) said, but if so, like wealth, it is unequally distributed.

If I were a politician from a county or state with worsening health outcomes for poor women I don’t know how I would explain to my constituents, or even myself, a failure to support the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, or the rejection of the goal of universal health insurance.

Perhaps this is the real war on women.

SAT TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH

by CAJUNJOE

One of the Best Predictors of SAT Scores is Your Family’s Income

By Joe Bruns — The results for the 2013 SAT scores are out, and the annual ritual handwringing, finger-pointing, calls for reform and some occasional bragging are in full throat.

Joe Bruns

While the Orlando Sentinel reported that Florida scores were below the national average (again), and the Los Angeles Times lamented a 2% drop in California student scores, the Washington Post headlined score increases for Virginia and the District of Columbia, while also noting declines in Maryland. National Public Radio reported with the glass-three-fifths empty lead-in that “roughly 6 in 10 college-bound high school students who took the test were so lacking in their…skills, they were unprepared for college-level work.”

Getting the basics out of the way, 43% of those students who took the SAT attained scores indicative of being prepared for college work, according to The College Board, which administers the test. This has been steady for five years.

The College Board, in their press release, goes on to state some findings that seem pretty obvious. Students who take core college preparation curricula are more likely to do well, as are students who take Advanced Placement courses, and, seemingly the most obvious, students with high GPAs.

More African-American and Hispanic students took the SAT in 2013, and they did slightly better than last year. But, overall, performance lags compared to other groups.

College admissions officers are quick to point out that SAT scores are only one of many factors they take into consideration. Some colleges are dropping the requirement for the test entirely, or offering other, sometimes imaginative ways to show academic promise, as Leon Botstein, President of Bard College has done, while declaring ‘war on the whole rigmarole of college admissions.’

Still, the SAT is used as a tool by admissions officers, and while some disagree, it purports to be an indicator of future academic success. Otherwise, what value is it? 

Looking at the College Board data one item that really caught my attention was the distribution of SAT scores by family income level. Perhaps not surprisingly, but with astonishing consistency, one of the best predictors of SAT scores is your family’s income.

Graphic by Joe Bruns; Data from The College Board

It’s often difficult to conclude cause and effect. But it seems obvious that families with more money can afford better schools in the form of private schools, or living in more affluent communities with better public schools. They can also afford tutors, summer enrichment programs and SAT preparation classes, and enjoy better health care and even better nutrition for their children. So, it is not at all surprising that the more wealth your family has, the better you should do on the SAT.

But, if wealth is being concentrated more and more at the top, graphically displayed in the clip below, and SAT scores follow wealth, what does that mean for economic mobility?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMhvYeQPOcE

American higher education has long been considered a path of opportunity. No matter what your background, what your family did, immigrant or native, you can rise on the economic ladder by hard work leading to a college degree. The City College of New York, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and our publicLand Grant Universities, all accepted as part of their mission expanding social mobility.

But, a ProPublica study, reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, shows that since 1996, a smaller proportion of grants are going to students in the lowest family income brackets though the recession hit those in lower income brackets the hardest.

To state again, I am not suggesting that college admissions is inherently unfair. The wealthy kids are better prepared, and they get the best seats. The real problem though, is that the pool of college qualified high school students is tilted toward wealth. As this continues over time, generation by generation, the effect further concentrates elite education opportunity among the already high-wealth demographic.

It should come as no surprise, then, that our higher-education system is becoming increasingly stratified by race and income.” — Awilda Rodriguez in The Chronicle for Higher Education

Affirmative action programs based on income rather than race might help in the short run, but if it means drawing from a pool that is not well prepared for college, it can also lead to drop-outs, failure and frustration, to say nothing of student debt. And, adding to the problem, elite colleges are actually reducing need-based financial aid.

We Need a National Commitment to Fix our Schools, Particularly in Economically Disadvantaged Neighborhoods

The problem is systemic, and is not permanently addressed by affirmative action or other similar programs. We need to start fixing the problem at an early stage if we are to affect outcomes in high school. Poor schooling in the basics leads to poor performance in high school. The root cause of high school dropout and poor SAT scores is the same. Too often, poor children go to ‘poor’ schools. These schools lack the resources, leadership and teaching of schools that are being attended by rich kids. Compare a school in a poor urban district to that in an affluent suburban neighborhood. Most often, the difference is striking. And that is just comparing public schools. The wealthy also have access to private schools to turbocharge their built-in advantage. Testing and slogans won’t change this dynamic. Money to attract and retain the best and brightest teachers and administrators, money to modernize and renovate facilities, money for nutrition, after-school and summer learning programs is needed. While dollars alone can never get to the real differences between the schools it would certainly help. In return for higher salaries and better working conditions, teacher’s unions would need to jettison rules that impede the removal of bad teachers. And, of course, we need greater parental involvement.

Unless and until we begin to get serious about providing all of our children in all of our schools the advantages provided to the more fortunate in society, we will keep them at a disadvantage at every step, including depriving them of access to the American dream of working hard, getting a good education, and moving up the economic ladder.

– Joe Bruns (Cajun Joe) is a Trail Mix Contributor