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The lead sentence is Middle-class kids are taught from an early age that they should work hard and finish school. Yet 3 out of 10 students dropped out Anyone

by tjic 17y ago

The lead sentence is Middle-class kids are taught from an early age that they should work hard and finish school. Yet 3 out of 10 students dropped out Anyone catch the logical and rhetorical flaw ? First, we talk about how MIDDLE class kids are taught not to drop out. Then we seemlessly move to all kids. And...surprise! Some of them drop out. Because, duh!, not all kids are middle class kids. After reading that much stupid in the first half of the first sentence I stopped reading the article.

Tycho 17y ago
Perhaps the author considers non-middle-class people to constitute (significantly) less than 30% of the population.
- philwelch 17y ago
  Not surprising. Most Americans consider themselves middle-class: poor people think they are lower middle class and rich people think they are upper middle class. This is why "the middle class is disappearing" is such an effective political message: most people identify with the middle class. It probably doesn't help that the American class system is vague. There's no official threshold between the classes. In some countries, the "upper class" is, by definition, descended from nobility, so even a British billionaire would still be middle class.
jlhamilton 17y ago
I wish the author had been more clear here and cited his statistic, but he's mostly right. The report "High School Dropout and Completion Rates in the United States: 2007" (http://nces.ed.gov/pubSearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2009064 http://nces.ed.gov/pubSearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2009064) has a graph showing that the middle income dropout rate is about the same as the overall rate. The upper income students make up for the lower income ones. And according to the report at http://www.americaspromise.org/Our-Work/Dropout-Prevention/Cities-in-Crisis.aspx http://www.americaspromise.org/Our-Work/Dropout-Prevention/C... "Nationwide, nearly one in three U.S. high school students fails to graduate with a diploma."

by tjic 17y ago

Tycho 17y ago

Perhaps the author considers non-middle-class people to constitute (significantly) less than 30% of the population.

philwelch 17y ago
Not surprising. Most Americans consider themselves middle-class: poor people think they are lower middle class and rich people think they are upper middle class. This is why "the middle class is disappearing" is such an effective political message: most people identify with the middle class. It probably doesn't help that the American class system is vague. There's no official threshold between the classes. In some countries, the "upper class" is, by definition, descended from nobility, so even a British billionaire would still be middle class.

jlhamilton 17y ago

I wish the author had been more clear here and cited his statistic, but he's mostly right. The report "High School Dropout and Completion Rates in the United States: 2007" (http://nces.ed.gov/pubSearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2009064 http://nces.ed.gov/pubSearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2009064) has a graph showing that the middle income dropout rate is about the same as the overall rate. The upper income students make up for the lower income ones. And according to the report at http://www.americaspromise.org/Our-Work/Dropout-Prevention/Cities-in-Crisis.aspx http://www.americaspromise.org/Our-Work/Dropout-Prevention/C... "Nationwide, nearly one in three U.S. high school students fails to graduate with a diploma."