The Great Debate UK

The racial wealth gap: not just an American problem

-Omar Khan is director of policy research at UK race equality think tank The Runnymede Trust. The opinions expressed are his own.-

Scholars, policy experts, advocates and members of Congress will be gathering in Washington in early April to assess the racial wealth gap in the United States, where families of colour on average own 16 cents of wealth to the white family’s dollar.

But this is not only an American problem.

Ethnic minorities in the United Kingdom also lag behind white people in accumulating wealth, and this is probably true across Europe. This disparity is bad for everyone.

In the UK, the government has collected data on ethnicity since the 1991 Census, and public authorities are required to monitor ethnicity. In contrast, in most European countries collecting data on ethnicity is illegal. We cannot precisely quantify wealth holdings elsewhere in European countries, but, by extrapolating from UK data and for reasons set forth below, we know that European ethnic minorities have fewer assets than white people on the continent.

The UK’s Department of Work and Pensions has found that 60 percent of black and Asian households have no savings at all, compared to 33 percent of white households. The UK’s first Wealth and Assets Survey in 2009 reported that while the average white household had £221,000 (roughly $350,000) in assets, Black Caribbean households had £76,000, Bangladeshi households £21,000 and Black African households £15,000.

There are a few explanations for these low levels of asset-holding. First is that ethnic minorities and migrants in the UK – and indeed in Europe – are more likely to earn low incomes. As any visitor to London, Brussels, Paris or Rome will know, African, Asian and East European migrants do many of the low-paid, low-security jobs that don’t provide access to many European benefits, and that makes it difficult to save.

Permanent revolution trains kids for unemployment

By Laurence Copeland. The opinions expressed are his own.

I am unsure about Britain’s education system. Most of the time, I think it is a matter of one step forward, two steps back – but then there are times when I wonder about the forward step.

This morning I heard the glad tidings about the latest ideas for grabbing a much-prized relegation slot in the world’s education league table (predictably enough, the Americans can be relied on to provide stiff competition).

The latest brainwave currently being surfed by a bunch of MP’s is to introduce “financial education” in schools, including for example courses in How to Understand Your Phone Contract. This is not a premature April Fool story. It is completely consistent with the long-established drive to push education in directions which the powers that be, in their infinite lack of wisdom, regard as more relevant, more practical, more immediately useful.

It is hard to imagine a philosophy less likely to equip youngsters for the modern world. My own view, which would once have been accepted on all sides, is that school is where kids are introduced to the ideas they will carry with them for the rest of their lives, enriching them psychologically, culturally and, yes, ultimately in pecuniary terms too. Not nowadays, however. Today’s establishment attitudes to education are so dominated by short term considerations they would shame the lads in front of the trading screens down in the City.

Consider for a moment the implications of the latest proposal.

It is claimed that phone contracts are very complicated. This is absolutely true (though I suspect that most teenagers can find the best deals an awful lot quicker than adults, including the poor teacher) – but since when has the fact that something or other is complicated been sufficient grounds for inclusion in the school syllabus?

A new generation of feminist scholars

Jess deCourcy Hinds, a library director and writer, has written for Newsweek, the New York Times, Ms., and School Library Journal. The opinions expressed are her own. Thomson Reuters is hosting an International Women’s Day live blog on March 8, 2011.

I am the librarian at Bard High School Early College in Queens, New York, where my students speak 34 languages, from Albanian to Urdu to Tibetan. And I’m proud to say that these bright, culturally diverse students are learning about feminist history—some as early as 9th grade.  I had to wait until graduate school to become a feminist scholar with the kind of research opportunities my youngest students have now.

My students read primary source documents about slaves and suffragettes on the Library of Congress website. They stream videos of labor activists through the Women’s History Archives of Smith College. They find Eleanor Roosevelt’s letters, and listen to Virginia Woolf’s voice in a BBC recording—on YouTube!  Multimedia archiving and the digitization of documents present exciting new opportunities for learning about women—famous and ordinary.

Sometimes, when I’m talking with students about the limitlessness of women’s history resources, the opportunities for under-represented women to have their stories finally told, I’ll find myself overcome with emotion. “Calm down, Miss,” a student once said with a smile. “Don’t hyperventilate.”

But how can you not hyperventilate? My students, many of them first-generation Americans and the first in their families to attend college, are doing real research. They are doing the research that was previously restricted to scholars who possessed letters of introduction, invitations, and appointments. My students and I have none of these things. We are in a public school during a recession. And yet, we are true researchers.

In the morning, students knock on the library door, begging to be let in. “We open in five minutes!” I call. I savor the first five minutes of the day alone with my coffee cup and my own research. Currently, I am researching Berenice Abbott, the WPA photographer known for her “Changing New York” photographs of the city. Her work is among 700,000 archived materials in New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery.

Tuition row: The beginning of the end for the coalition?

- Mark Kobayashi-Hillary is the author of several books, including ‘Who Moved my Job?’ and ‘Global Services: Moving to a Level Playing Field’. The opinions expressed are his own. –

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is on a mission to shore up support within his own party for the tripling of university tuition fees. The Liberal Democrats campaigned with a manifesto pledge claiming they would axe fees if they ever got into power. They got the power, but only via a coalition with the Conservative party, and though they claim that some Lib Dem pledges survived the coalition talks, the policy on tuition fees actually went the other way.

MPs will vote on the tuition fees policy tomorrow. Clegg has stated that all his ministers will support the government line, but though the ministers have been whipped into line, it looks like a large number of Lib Dem backbenchers are unhappy with their new reputation as the ‘Fib Dems’. Potentially a large number of them will vote against their own policy or abstain from voting altogether.

This rebellion over a key piece of legislation could be the beginning of the end for the coalition. A coalition government requires compromise, some favoured policies will be axed so that others survive and the result is a curious blend of the pledges made by two parties – often neither party will be entirely happy with their joint proposals.

But if the Lib Dems rebel on tuition fees now then one might expect the Conservatives to rebel over the tidbits thrown to their coalition partner, such as voting reform. If there is no agreement and the constituent parties rebel against the ideas their partner brought to the table then we don’t really have a coalition – just two warring parties. And if this forces an early election then Nick Clegg will see his party reduced to a tiny rump of MPs aimlessly wandering the backbenches, because even their own supporters have lost faith.

Clegg knows this, so he clings on to the lifeline of making the coalition work even though it positions him and his party as the opposite of what they campaigned for. Meanwhile he has to suffer the indignity of watching as the general population circulate YouTube videos of him promising to scrap tuition fees.

The added value of the MBA in promoting sustainability

-Lindsey Nefesh-Clarke is the founder of Women’s Worldwide Web – an online charitable organisation designed to help empower women with access to micro-finance loans, education, mentoring and networking. The opinions expressed are her own.-

“To reach a tipping point towards a new era of sustainability”: this is the urgent goal of the business, government and civil society leaders who convened in New York City for the recent U.N. Global Compact Leaders Summit.

In its effort to mobilize the global corporate community around the values and best practices of corporate responsibility, this gathering could not have been more timely.

The world is still suffering the fallout of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.  In addition to wreaking far-reaching damage in high-income countries, the financial crisis has had an egregious effect on child and maternal health, gender equality, access to clean water, disease control, and hunger levels worldwide.

The World Bank estimates that there will be 53 million more people in extreme poverty in 2015 than there would have been had the financial crisis not occurred.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is battling the worst environmental disaster in its history.  In the wake of BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon managed to strike an upbeat chord in his summit address, observing that “the business community is coming to understand that principles and profits are two sides of the same coin”.

The cost of youth unemployment

-Tony McAleavy is the Director of Education at CfBT Education Trust. The opinions expressed are his own.-

In response to fears that 16 and 17 year olds were the forgotten victims of the recession, the government announced an extra 72,000 school, college and apprenticeship places from this month. If all the places are taken up, non-participation might dip from 14 percent to around 10 percent. And yet, as many as 100,000 16 and 17 year olds currently in employment (with or without training) would still be at risk from the recession.

This isn’t the first time youth unemployment has seen a worrying bulge. Since the early 1970s, policymakers have tried 34 different schemes – from the Training Opportunities Programme launched in 1972, to the Youth Training Scheme of the 1980s.

So what worked, what didn’t and have we learned anything from the millions spent about what actually gets young people off benefits and into work or full-time education? Our study of past schemes highlights ways forward for dealing with a very current problem.

The context, of course, has changed. In the 1980s, the majority of 16- to 17 year-olds were in work of some kind, with just 39 percent in full-time education in 1987. This figure had risen to 73 percent by 2007. Currently, participation in full-time education falls by around 11 percent between the ages of 16 and 17. Faced with limited job opportunities, the choice for many 17 year olds is between remaining in education or unemployment. Many will, hopefully, stay on in full or part-time education. But some might reject both unless labour market interventions can increase the number of jobs with training, and especially jobs with Apprenticeships.

The research shows that financial incentives for employers haven’t worked – they will employ young people if they need them, no financial reward or otherwise. In a minority of cases, employers used financial incentives to replace existing full-time staff with cheaper alternatives. The main problem has been that wages in youth schemes have been too low compared with market rates. Employers saw themselves being perceived as “mean”, and young people were turned off the whole idea.

Also, the training provided by employers has sometimes been poor (for example, in one study, 90 percent of employers said they’d provided training, only 70 percent of those recruits thought they had actually received any). At the same time, employer thinking is important, and those schemes based on consultation with employers in the design stage were found to be more successful.

from UK News:

Is the cost of university too high?

With annual student debt soaring to 5,000 pounds a year, young people face tough prospects, according to a new study by Push, an online resource for students.

New university students should expect to owe 23,500 pounds at graduation, the 2009 Push Student Debt Survey shows.

By contrast, students who started university in 2008 can expect to owe nearly 21,200 pounds at graduation.

Teenagers receiving A-level results on Thursday will be particularly concerned as some sources of income have been drying up while debt rises, Push suggests.

About 80 percent of students rely on part-time or holiday jobs to supplement their income by an average of 2,000 pounds a year, the study says.

With data from the Department for Children, Schools and Families published in the Guardian showing that one in six young people in England aged 18 to 24 are now classified as "neets" -- not in education employment or training -- the increase in costs for students raises new worries.

A total of 835,000 young people, 100,000 more than this time last year, are classified as neets.

Are A-levels what they used to be?

- John Dunford is general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders and was formerly head of Durham Johnston Comprehensive School, one of the top-performing non-selective state schools at A-level. The opinions expressed are his own. -

Every August there is a debate in England about whether standards of A-level examinations have declined and whether A-levels are fit for purpose. Years ago, Dr Rhodes Boyson used to be the harbinger of annual doom; in recent years Professor Alan Smithers has invariably produced a report in A-level results week using statistics to “prove” that A-levels are getting easier.

This year Smithers contrasted the International Baccalaureate (IB), which fails 20 to 30 percent of candidates each year, with A-levels, which have a 97 per cent pass rate. The implication was explicit – the IB has maintained its standard by failing people, while A-levels have become easier.

This is, of course, a false comparison. The reason that A-levels now have such a high pass rate is that students take AS examinations at the end of the first year of the two-year course. As a half-way house to gaining a full A-level, the AS acts as a signpost to young people as to the courses they will pass with the highest grades and which they might fail if they continue.

Since 18 year olds who fail their A-levels are worse off than their counterparts who left full-time education at 16 and did a training programme, the AS and the high A-level pass rate are sensible and positive parts of the education system. If there is a strong criticism arising from the Smithers figures, it is that so many young people are allowed to embark on an IB course that they subsequently fail. That helps nobody, least of all the young people themselves.

Two English diseases are particularly prevalent at this time of year – and I am not talking about swine flu.

The first is our habit of talking down success. We should be proud of the improving achievements of our young people and we should celebrate the year-on-year success of schools and colleges in improving A-level scores. Any company with a 27-year record of success to match this would be shouting it from the rooftops – and we would all be buying their shares.

from Africa News blog:

Does Africa respect its writers enough?

The reception would have done justice to royalty or a movie star when Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe paid a rare visit to his homeland recently, some 50 years after penning his book “Things Fall Apart”.

That book has a firm place on school syllabuses in much of Africa and is studied around the world. Achebe, now 79, has been acclaimed as the father of modern African literature and as the continent’s greatest living writer – his books being very accessible as well as giving a penetrating insight into the struggles of his people.

Achebe’s Igbo community in southeastern Nigeria wanted to mark his homecoming in style and Reuters Television’s Africa Journal programme was there to follow it.

Achebe delighted people with readings from his classic novel, which has sold more than 10 million copies and tells the story of Okonkwo, who finds himself and his traditions pitted against newly arrived British colonialists in the 19th century.

“Knowing that Chinua Achebe with his talent unsurpassed, in the literary world as far as I am concerned, certainly in Nigeria, unsurpassed certainly in Africa, knowing that he comes from my neck of the woods is actually an inspiration to me,” said musician Onyeka Owenu.

The region has a reputation for producing internationally acclaimed writers, including Ben Okri and more recently Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of the prize winning novel Half of a Yellow Sun.