Ruby Payne, CEO of aha! Process, Inc., and author of "A Framework for Understanding Poverty" (2005), has become one of the most influential figures in the U.S. public education milieu. Payne's framework, built largely upon understanding the "culture" of poverty, instructs educators on the values and mindsets poor students carry into the classroom…

The study outline differences among classes and genders within higher education. Because of the expansion of places of study, higher education has lost some of its former selectivity. The matriculation of one full birth cohort into Swedish higher education was studied. The results showed that the enrolment of working- and intermediate-class women…

Selected survey data on future aspirations and expectations from 3565 young Indonesians are presented in this study. Muslim-majority Indonesia is an Asian economic success story. The economy has seen solid growth, leading to an expansion of the private sector. The upward credentialling of the labour market and the rapid growth of the middle class…

Author attempts to gain a perspective on the role of culture in contemporary society and education. (Author/RK)

In this study we adapted DeBaryshe and Binder's Parent Reading Belief Inventory (PRBI) with middle-class, well-educated (M = 14-15 years of education) Taiwanese mothers to find what their beliefs were about reading aloud to young children. Parental reports of home literacy practices including children's emergent literacy behaviours were also…

This work studies verbal conflict between parents and preadolescents through analysis of family dinnertime conversations. We move from the assumption that verbal conflict is an educational instrument of interaction and a tool of socialization. The aim of the research is to analyze the participants' strategies in situations of conflict and to…

This article reports on research exploring the extent to which a group of Malaysian students in a British university expect to secure a competitive edge in the positional race for jobs, income and status. It explores the students' understandings of a good job and success, as well as their perceived chances of fulfilling their aspirations.…

The purpose of this research is to explore the dynamics of cortisol regulation in the context of center-based child care by examining the impact of social context (large classroom vs. small group) and relationship quality with caregivers (conflict with mothers and teachers). We extend the research on children's physiologic stress system…

This article draws on extant research from the disciplines of psychology, sociology, and economics to identify linkages between individual, family, community, and structural factors related to social mobility for African Americans during the transition to adulthood. It considers how race and class together affect opportunities for social mobility…

Lower middle-class whites who support their police, who paste flags in their car windows, and who comprise a most volatile political constituency are the subject of this book. In particular, Kensington, a blue-collar neighborhood in Philadelphia, is examined: Irish, Italians, and Poles are found to be as angry and disaffected as their neighboring…

It is contended that the middle class does the work, pays the bills, and gets blamed for everything. It is conversely contended that many student activists feel that middle-class society needlessly blocks personal growth. (CK)

The author does not think of himself as a logical candidate to help first-generation college athletes graduate. He is 59 and middle class, not a former athlete or a first-generation college graduate, and obviously not hip. More to the point, he is white and Texas-born, and he attended segregated schools his whole student life. He was even at the…

Recent efforts to deal with college affordability, including measures now before Congress, raise many questions: Why does college cost so much? How can students ever be expected to pay back their loan debt? Why does the middle class always get squeezed? America's historical commitment to the education of its citizens is perhaps the most important…

In this essay I review an important report on school reform, published in 2007 by the National Center on Education and the Economy, and written by a group of twenty-five panelists in the USA from industry, government, academia, education, and non-profit organizations, led by specialists in labor market economics, named the New Commission on the…

The phenomenon of nonmarital motherhood among upper-middle-class, educated women has increased dramatically over the last few decades in most industrialized countries. The purpose of the current research is to examine how women who elect nonmarital motherhood compare with women who elect other family configurations with respect to their…