In this pamphlet, reprinted from the Proceedings of the Second Annual Playground Congress of the Playground Association of America, Joseph Lee discusses the ideal home playground.

JOSPEH LEE is considered the “Father of the Playground Movement.” He is the author of “Play and Playgrounds,” available on the Russell Sage Foundation site.

This report, a collaboration between Project Talent at the University of Pittsburgh and the Russell Sage Foundation, presents the results of a survey of the attitudes of secondary school students, teachers, and counselors toward ability tests and provides an appraisal of the extent of these tests’ use.  

“Enobong Hannah Branch and Caroline Hanley have written an insightful book that documents just how fragile the American Dream is and always has been for Black workers. Anyone who wants to understand the complex, nuanced relationship between race, gender, and economic insecurity needs to pick up Work in Black and White immediately.”
—ADIA WINGFIELD, vice dean of faculty development and diversity, professor of sociology, Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of Arts and Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis

“Work in Black and White deftly weaves Black and White workers’ sense making of their labor market insecurities with clear historical and demographic analyses. ‘Stories have the power to make inequality legitimate,’ the authors write and go on to document the commonalities and divergence in stories told by educated men and women. While Black and White workers share aspirations for security, they part ways on how to understand the barriers to achieving it. Black workers recognize continuities in racism and White nepotism but also tend to believe they have some control over their own futures. Whites misperceive their precarity as a loss of racial privilege, while being blind to their advantaged reliance on White networks to get and keep jobs. Both groups embrace myths around hard work, education, and meritocracy and so are unable to imagine, much less generate, a political agenda to deal with the profound structural weaknesses of the U.S. economy. Read this book.”
— DONALD TOMASKOVIC-DEVEY, professor of sociology and director, Center for Employment Equity, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

“Work in Black and White reminds us that leaving school is just the beginning of the struggle for economic security. Many workers experience recessions as new threats and recoveries as challenges to their past accomplishments. And, of course, nothing works the same for women and men or Blacks and Whites. Enobong Hannah Branch and Caroline Hanley build a case for employment policy that goes beyond credentials and self-reliance; America needs to reset the imbalance between workers and employers.”
—MICHAEL HOUT, professor of sociology and director, Center for Advanced Social Science Research, New York University

The ability to achieve economic security through hard work is a central tenet of the American Dream, but significant shifts in today’s economy have fractured this connection. While economic insecurity has always been a reality for some Americans, Black Americans have historically long experienced worse economic outcomes than Whites. In Work in Black and White, sociologists Enobong Hannah Branch and Caroline Hanley draw on interviews with 79 middle-aged Black and White Americans to explore how their attitudes and perceptions of success are influenced by the stories American culture has told about the American Dream – and about who should have access to it and who should not.

Branch and Hanley find that Black and White workers draw on racially distinct histories to make sense of today’s rising economic insecurity. White Americans have grown increasingly pessimistic and feel that the American Dream is now out of reach, mourning the loss of a sense of economic security which they took for granted. But Black Americans tend to negotiate their present insecurity with more optimism, since they cannot mourn something they never had. All educated workers bemoaned the fact that their credentials no longer guarantee job security, but Black workers lamented the reality that even with an education, racial inequality continues to block access to good jobs for many.

The authors interject a provocative observation into the ongoing debate over opportunity, security, and the American Dream: Among policymakers and the public alike, Americans talk too much about education. The ways people navigate insecurity, inequality, and uncertainty rests on more than educational attainment. The authors call for a public policy that ensures dignity in working conditions and pay while accounting for the legacies of historical inequality.

Americans want the game of life to be fair. While the survey respondents expressed common ground on the ideal of meritocracy, opinions about to achieve economic security for all diverge along racial lines, with the recognition – or not – of differences in current and past access to opportunity in America.

Work in Black and White is a call to action for meaningful policies to make the premise of the American Dream a reality.

ENOBONG HANNAH BRANCH is Senior Vice President for Equity and Professor of Sociology, Rutgers University

CAROLINE HANLEY is Associate Professor of Sociology, William & Mary

“Sociologists Natasha Quadlin and Brian Powell take us on a well-reasoned, accessible, and engaging journey of how public opinion has changed over time regarding college access and paying for it. Their findings suggest a cultural shift in the American mindset about higher education inequality, and Who Should Pay? merits a strong read to learn what it is and why.”
—Prudence L. Carter, Sarah and Joseph Jr. Dowling Professor of Sociology, Brown University

“One of the most pressing issues of today is whether a public college education should be free for every eligible high school graduate, and if so, how will it be funded? This provocative book based on over a thousand adults contacted before and during the pandemic discusses how public views of access and funding of higher education have changed. Addressing problems of individual versus collective interests, this excellent volume raises questions regarding our commitment to future generations of youth, democratic values, and American productivity.”
—Barbara Schneider, John A. Hannah University Distinguished Professor, Michigan State University

Americans now obtain college degrees at a higher rate than at any time in recent decades in the hopes of improving their career prospects. At the same time, the rising costs of an undergraduate education have increased dramatically, forcing students and families to take out often unmanageable levels of student debt. The cumulative amount of student debt reached nearly $1.5 trillion in 2017, and calls for student loan forgiveness have gained momentum. Yet public policy to address college affordability has been mixed. While some policymakers support more public funding to broaden educational access, others oppose this expansion. Noting that public opinion often shapes public policy, sociologists Natasha Quadlin and Brian Powell examine public opinion on who should shoulder the increasing costs of higher education and why.

Who Should Pay? draws on a decade’s worth of public opinion surveys analyzing public attitudes about whether parents, students, or the government should be primarily responsible for funding higher education. Quadlin and Powell find that between 2010 and 2019, public opinion has shifted dramatically in favor of more government funding. In 2010, Americans overwhelming believed that parents and students were responsible for the costs of higher education. Less than a decade later, the percentage of Americans who believed that federal or state/local government should be the primary financial contributor has more than doubled. The authors also find increased public endorsement of shared responsibility between individuals and the government in paying for higher education. They additionally examine attitudes on the accessibility of college for all, whether higher education at public universities should be free, and whether college is worth the costs.

Quadlin and Powell also explore why Americans hold these beliefs. They identify individualistic and collectivist world views that shape public perspectives on the questions of funding, accessibility, and worthiness of college. Those with more individualistic orientations believed parents and students should pay for college, and that if students want to attend college, then they should work hard and find ways to achieve their goals. Those with collectivist orientations believed in a model of shared responsibility—one in which the government takes a greater level of responsibility for funding education while acknowledging the social and economic barriers to obtaining a college degree for many students. The authors find that these belief systems differ among sociodemographic groups and that bias—sometimes unconscious and sometimes deliberate—regarding race and class affects responses from both individualistic and collectivist-oriented participants.

Public opinion is typically very slow to change. Yet Who Should Pay? provides an illuminating account of just how quickly public opinion has shifted regarding the responsibility of paying for a college education and its implications for future generations of students.

NATASHA QUADLIN is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

BRIAN POWELL is James H. Rudy Professor of Sociology at Indiana University.