My Turn
Economic Boom for Whom?

Frustrated by the gap between prosperity hype and everyday reality, this high school teacher and her students dare to ask tough questions.

By Tamara Sober Giecek

Silence may be golden, says this social studies teacher from Virginia, but not when it comes to issues of inequality, money, and class.

We live in prosperous times. At least that's the message we seem to hear almost every day on the news. But I can't seem to square the reports of record prosperity with my day-to-day experiences in the classroom.

In my government and economics classes, any time I mention a contemporary reality that doesn't fit the prosperity picture--corporate downsizing, for instance--a few students will almost immediately begin to open up and share stories about relatives who've been devastated by a job loss.

Then later, after class, other students will confide in me, one-on-one, about the economic devastation they're experiencing, in their own families. I remember the girl who couldn't stay awake because she had to work the late shift to help pay her family's bills, the boy who couldn't stay focused because he was hungry.

I encounter the same hard realities when I contact parents to talk about their children's progress--or lack of it. The parents so often unload. They're living in temporary housing, they're between jobs, they're not able to provide for their family's basic needs.

If I see these sorts of situations in the affluent suburb where I teach, I shutter to think of the realities inner city teachers must face, realities so powerfully described in books like Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities.

What I see in my school, I believe, reflects on a small scale what's happening in society at large. Some of my students drive to school in new BMWs. Others come to school hungry. I am a daily witness to America's growing inequality of income and wealth.

This inequality matters. It matters because the standards movement, as it labels one school a success and another a failure, fails to address inequality. It matters because there's no way I can teach that the system works for everyone, that the rising tide will lift all boats, when my students know differently.

I accept the idea that, in a free market system, people may make choices that lead to varying levels of economic success or despair. But I also know, as a history teacher, that there were times in our past when Americans worried deeply about the dangers of concentrated wealth, when Americans fought for--and won--economic policies that helped people at all income levels.

Today, wealth in the United States is more concentrated than at any time since the 1920s, right before the Great Depression. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans now own a greater share of the nation's wealth than the bottom 95 percent. Meanwhile, adjusted for inflation, wages for average working people still haven't come back to what they were in the early 1970s.

My students at the bottom of the economic ladder are bombarded, every day, with messages that leave them believing they've missed the prosperity train. They begin to doubt their own personal abilities.

At the other end are the students who've completely bought in to the idea that they, too, will one day become multimillionaires. These students pour over the stock charts, relishing every opportunity to learn how the stock market works.

This hunger for "learning'' makes me uncomfortable. Learning about stocks is indeed important, but students also need to learn to think about economic issues--like inequality--that go beyond Dow Jones average ups and downs.

Issues about money and class are, of course, sensitive issues, and, at first, I was apprehensive about raising these issues with my students. I did anyway. I felt silence would reinforce the myth that we are a classless society where you need only work hard to move up.

The student response? Extremely positive. Once we began to discuss inequality, students on both ends of the economic scale began to make important discoveries.

I've subsequently worked to develop a curriculum guide for teachers like me, educators looking for materials to help students understand and think about the many issues that inequality raises.

The curriculum's 20 lessons all require students' active participation. In a sense, I suppose, I'm trying to teach economics as if people mattered. They do.

Tamara Sober Giecek teaches social studies at James River High in Chesterfield, Virginia. For info about her new curriculum, Teaching Economics As If People Mattered, contact United for a Fair Economy, at 37 Temple Place, second floor, Boston, MA 02111. Fax: 617/423-0191. E-mail: info@ufenet.org. For more on inequality today: www.ufenet.org.

Editor's Note

I often get asked what the NEA Today staff does once the final issue of the school year goes to press.The short answer: We start all over again on next year's issues, but let me be more specific.

In late April, we begin with more than two weeks of planning. During this time, we take stock of what we've been doing through roundtable discussions with our Local Editor Advisory Board of eight team members from around the nation who provide us regular feedback throughout the year.

In the spring, we bring the local editors together to pick their brains about future topics.

Then we go over the results of our annual reader surveys, taken every year since NEA Today was launched in 1982. Survey results give us a good benchmark of our strengths and weaknesses: how much members read the magazine, favorite sections, and other key data.

From there we move to discuss topics for our main stories, starting with the most-read 1,500 words in labor journalism, our cover stories.

We generally plan about a dozen cover stories, then winnow the list to a final elite eight.

Since we tie each issue's debate to the cover story, the next step is coming up with good debate questions. Then it's on to deciding on eight student health topics, the eight key interview subjects for the year, and on and on.

By the time we end our two weeks of planning, we'll have mapped out at least half of all the material that'll go in NEA Today for the next eight issues.

Then it's time to start our September and October issues. Most of the work on both fall issues is complete by late June.

Want to become part of this process? You can help us plan NEA Today content for next year by sending us your story tips and ideas. Just E-mail your thoughts to us at neatoday@nea.org.

—Bill Fischer