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Chris Hadfield
Retired Canadian Astronaut & Author
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Conspicuous consumption is over. It’s all about intangibles now
These new status behaviours are what one expert calls 'inconspicuous consumption'.
04 July, 2020
Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images for Tiffany
In 1899, the economist Thorstein Veblen observed that silver spoons and corsets were markers of elite social position.
<p> In Veblen's now famous treatise <em>The Theory of the Leisure Class</em>, he coined the phrase 'conspicuous consumption' to denote the way that material objects were paraded as indicators of social position and status. More than 100 years later, conspicuous consumption is still part of the contemporary capitalist landscape, and yet today, luxury goods are significantly more accessible than in Veblen's time. This deluge of accessible luxury is a function of the mass-production economy of the 20th century, the outsourcing of production to China, and the cultivation of emerging markets where labour and materials are cheap. At the same time, we've seen the arrival of a middle-class consumer market that demands more material goods at cheaper price points.</p><p>However, the democratisation of consumer goods has made them far less useful as a means of displaying status. In the face of rising social inequality, both the rich and the middle classes own fancy TVs and nice handbags. They both lease SUVs, take airplanes, and go on cruises. On the surface, the ostensible consumer objects favoured by these two groups no longer reside in two completely different universes.</p><p>Given that everyone can now buy designer handbags and new cars, the rich have taken to using much more tacit signifiers of their social position. Yes, oligarchs and the superrich still show off their wealth with yachts and Bentleys and gated mansions. But the dramatic changes in elite spending are driven by a well-to-do, educated elite, or what I call the 'aspirational class'. This new elite cements its status through prizing knowledge and building cultural capital, not to mention the spending habits that go with it – preferring to spend on services, education and human-capital investments over purely material goods. These new status behaviours are what I call 'inconspicuous consumption'. None of the consumer choices that the term covers are inherently obvious or ostensibly material but they are, without question, exclusionary.</p>
<p>The rise of the aspirational class and its consumer habits is perhaps most salient in the United States. The US Consumer Expenditure Survey data reveals that, since 2007, the country's top 1 per cent (people earning upwards of $300,000 per year) are spending significantly less on material goods, while middle-income groups (earning approximately $70,000 per year) are spending the same, and their trend is upward. Eschewing an overt materialism, the rich are investing significantly more in education, retirement and health – all of which are immaterial, yet cost many times more than any handbag a middle-income consumer might buy. The top 1 per cent now devote the greatest share of their expenditures to inconspicuous consumption, with education forming a significant portion of this spend (accounting for almost 6 per cent of top 1 per cent household expenditures, compared with just over 1 per cent of middle-income spending). In fact, top 1 per cent spending on education has increased 3.5 times since 1996, while middle-income spending on education has remained flat over the same time period.</p><p>The vast chasm between middle-income and top 1 per cent spending on education in the US is particularly concerning because, unlike material goods, education has become more and more expensive in recent decades. Thus, there is a greater need to devote financial resources to education to be able to afford it at all. According to Consumer Expenditure Survey data from 2003-2013, the price of college tuition increased 80 per cent, while the cost of women's apparel increased by just 6 per cent over the same period. Middle-class lack of investment in education doesn't suggest a lack of prioritising as much as it reveals that, for those in the 40th-60th quintiles, education is so cost-prohibitive it's almost not worth trying to save for.</p><p>While much inconspicuous consumption is extremely expensive, it shows itself through less expensive but equally pronounced signalling – from reading <em>The</em> <em>Economist</em> to buying pasture-raised eggs. Inconspicuous consumption in other words, has become a shorthand through which the new elite signal their cultural capital to one another. In lockstep with the invoice for private preschool comes the knowledge that one should pack the lunchbox with quinoa crackers and organic fruit. One might think these culinary practices are a commonplace example of modern-day motherhood, but one only needs to step outside the upper-middle-class bubbles of the coastal cities of the US to observe very different lunch-bag norms, consisting of processed snacks and practically no fruit. Similarly, while time in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City might make one think that every American mother breastfeeds her child for a year, national statistics <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/data/reportcard.htm" target="_blank">report</a> that only 27 per cent of mothers fulfil this American Academy of Pediatrics goal (in Alabama, that figure hovers at 11 per cent).</p>
<p>Knowing these seemingly inexpensive social norms is itself a rite of passage into today's aspirational class. And that rite is far from costless: <em>The Economist</em> subscription might set one back only $100, but the awareness to subscribe and be seen with it tucked in one's bag is likely the iterative result of spending time in elite social milieus and expensive educational institutions that prize this publication and discuss its contents.</p><p>Perhaps most importantly, the new investment in inconspicuous consumption reproduces privilege in a way that previous conspicuous consumption could not. Knowing which <em>New Yorker</em> articles to reference or what small talk to engage in at the local farmers' market enables and displays the acquisition of cultural capital, thereby providing entry into social networks that, in turn, help to pave the way to elite jobs, key social and professional contacts, and private schools. In short, inconspicuous consumption confers social mobility.</p><p>More profoundly, investment in education, healthcare and retirement has a notable impact on consumers' quality of life, and also on the future life chances of the next generation. Today's inconspicuous consumption is a far more pernicious form of status spending than the conspicuous consumption of Veblen's time. Inconspicuous consumption – whether breastfeeding or education – is a means to a better quality of life and improved social mobility for one's own children, whereas conspicuous consumption is merely an end in itself – simply ostentation. For today's aspirational class, inconspicuous consumption choices secure and preserve social status, even if they do not necessarily display it.</p><p><a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10933.html" target="_blank"><em>The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class</em></a><em> by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett is out now through Princeton University Press.</em><img src="https://metrics.aeon.co/count/b10ffa20-4c3a-4ef2-8740-921999c3791a.gif" alt="Aeon counter – do not remove"></p><p>Elizabeth Currid-Halkett</p><p>This article was originally published at <a href="https://aeon.co/?utm_campaign=republished-article" target="_blank">Aeon</a> and has been republished under Creative Commons. Read the <a href="https://aeon.co/ideas/conspicuous-consumption-is-over-its-all-about-intangibles-now" target="_blank">original article</a>.</p>
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Most white parents don’t talk about racism with their kids
Seldom are these conversations actually anti-racist.
28 June, 2020
ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images
Though race and racism are at the top of Americans' public discussion, most white parents don't talk about those issues with their kids.
<p>Research on how white parents discuss race with their children is sparse. However, past research has shown that conversations about race, much less racism, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1375132" target="_blank">are rare</a>, even when these issues are highly visible – for example, during the Ferguson protests in 2014.</p><p>One study found that even though <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0192513X16676858" target="_blank">81% of white mothers believed it was important</a> to have such discussions, only 62% of them reported actually doing so. Of those who said they did, however, fewer than one-third of those people could actually recall a specific conversation.</p>
<h2>Teaching generations</h2><p>To understand the issue more deeply, we examined surveys of more than 2,000 adults ages 18 and older, collected from May 21 to June 14, 2020, in four major U.S. cities – Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans and New York. We were seeking to understand how people's views on race were influenced by their parents. It was part of an ongoing study looking at how people's experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic have been shaped by their race.</p><p>Our initial findings indicate that among white respondents, 65% said their parents had "never" or "rarely" had conversations with them about racism when they were children.</p><p>In general, we found that younger white people were more likely to have parents who talked with them about about racism compared to those in older generations. Surprisingly, however, those in the youngest age group – 18- to 25-year-olds – were less likely to have parents who talked with them about racism "very often" (only 7%), compared to 26- to 40-year-olds (16%) and to those 41 to 55 years old (12%).</p><p>We found that those whose parents talked with them about racism were themselves more likely to talk with their own children about it. However, even during this period of unrest, 27% of white parents of children between 6 and 11 years old told us they "never" talked with their kids about the need for racial equality.</p><p>Another 15% said these conversations were "rare," and 34% said they happened "on occasion."</p>
<h2>Missing the point</h2><p>Research shows that the relatively small number of white parents who do discuss race with their children often use what are sometimes called "<a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1080/01419870.2013.848289" target="_blank">colorblind</a>" approaches that downplay racism's significance in American society. These conversations usually involve emphasizing the sameness between all people, and minimize or deny the idea of differences between races. Typical themes include "not seeing race" or "treating everyone the same," which ignore or even reject the existence of white privilege and racism.</p><p>These discussions can promote a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2018.1523354" target="_blank">myth of meritocracy</a> that claims anyone can succeed in the U.S. regardless of their race – a belief shared by 57% of the white respondents in our survey. The problem with this colorblindness is that it ignores how <a href="https://www.mobilitypartnership.org/publications/racial-residential-segregation-and-neighborhood-disparities" target="_blank">racism is embedded in society</a> – for example, in where people live and what kinds of jobs and educational opportunities people have.</p><p>Sometimes conversations can also be explicitly or implicitly racist, relying on racial stereotypes premised on the idea of inherent differences between race groups.</p><p>Seldom are conversations anti-racist. An anti-racism dialog with children involves acknowledging racial inequalities and the historical and current reasons why they exist. They also include talking about ways a child could help actively undo racism and how not to be a bystander when they see racism being perpetrated.</p>
<h2>Changing perspectives</h2><p>Our data showed that white people who were taught by their parents about opposing racism and what our survey called the "importance of fighting for racial equality" were supportive of doing more to help racial minority groups hit harder by COVID-19.</p><p>By contrast, people whose parents had never or rarely talked to them about anti-racism were more likely to feel that racial minorities are themselves at fault for their <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/20/black-americans-death-rate-covid-19-coronavirus" target="_blank">higher death rates from COVID-19</a>.</p><p>We also found that parents' discussions with their kids helped them grow up to have more nuanced views on other aspects of racism in the U.S.</p><p>Three-quarters of adults who had, as children, talked with their parents "very often" about racism said that racial minorities do not have the same opportunities as whites. A similar share, 69%, of them said race plays a major role in the types of social services that people receive, such as health care or daycare. And 69% also agreed that race plays an important role in who gets sent to prison.</p><p>But of the adults whose parents "never" or "rarely" talked with them about racism, fewer than half – 47% – said racial minorities have different opportunities than whites. Similarly, fewer than half of these people felt that race plays a role in the types of social services people receive or in incarceration – 49% and 48%, respectively.</p><p>Resisting racism, challenging racist societal structures and advocating for equity have been an uphill battle <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0012-1649.42.5.747" target="_blank">shouldered predominantly by individuals, families and communities of color</a>. Our research indicates that the more white parents talk with their children about the realities of American racism, the more aware those kids are, as adults, of inequalities in American life.</p><p><a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/david-chae-1126417" target="_blank">David Chae</a>, Human Sciences Associate Professor & Director, Society, Health, and Racial Equity Lab, <em><a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/auburn-university-1419" target="_blank">Auburn University</a></em>; <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/leoandra-onnie-rogers-1126413" target="_blank">Leoandra Onnie Rogers</a>, Assistant Professor of Psychology, <em><a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/northwestern-university-1259" target="_blank">Northwestern University</a></em>, and <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/tiffany-yip-1123036" target="_blank">Tiffany Yip</a>, Professor of Psychology, <em><a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/fordham-university-1299" target="_blank">Fordham University</a></em></p><p>This article is republished from <a href="https://theconversation.com/" target="_blank">The Conversation</a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/most-white-parents-dont-talk-about-racism-with-their-kids-140894" target="_blank">original article</a>.</p>
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Can the U.S. fix unemployment with 'Universal Basic Jobs'?
What would happen if the U.S. guaranteed every citizen a job with a living wage and benefits?
26 June, 2020
Stephanie Keith / Getty
- A new book from Pavlina Tcherneva, chair of the economics department at New York's Bard College, makes the case for a "Job Guarantee" federal program.
- The program would grant jobs to every citizen who's willing and able to work.
- A 2019 poll found that a majority of Americans would support a federally funded jobs program.
<p>Since COVID-19 began spreading across the U.S. earlier this year, more than 45 million Americans have filed for unemployment. The Federal government has passed a $2.3 trillion economic stimulus package. And unemployment hit Depression-era levels, with the Federal Reserve projecting that rates will hover around 9.3 percent by the end of 2020.</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"This is the biggest economic shock, in the U.S. and the world, really, in living memory," Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/business/economy/federal-reserve-rates-unemployment.html" target="_blank">said</a> at a news conference in June. "We went from the lowest level of unemployment in 50 years to the highest level in close to 90 years, and we did it in two months."</p><p>To economist Pavlina Tcherneva, the pandemic didn't just present the American economy with a unique set of problems, but rather revealed its built-in flaws that have long prevented millions of Americans from securing decent jobs. </p><p>In her new book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1509542108?tag=bigthink00-20&linkCode=ogi&th=1&psc=1" target="_blank">"The Case for a Job Guarantee"</a>, Tcherneva offers an ambitious policy proposal that calls for the federal government to provide living-wage jobs and benefits to anyone willing and able to work.</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"At bottom," Tcherneva writes in the book, "the Job Guarantee is a policy of care, one that fundamentally rejects the notion that people in economic distress, communities in disrepair, and an environment in peril are the unfortunate but unavoidable collateral damage of a market economy."</p><p>The idea of using federal funding to create jobs isn't new. It's found in the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, Franklin D. Roosevelt's proposed Economic Bill of Rights, and was again debated during the Civil Rights Movement. It's also a key component of the Green New Deal, a suite of policy proposals that seeks to aggressively tackle climate change and economic inequality.<br></p><p>In Tcherneva's vision, the Job Guarantee would act as a sort of buffer. Here's a bit on how a Job Guarantee might work in the U.S.:</p>
$15 minimum wage and benefits
<p>Jobs granted through the program would offer at least $15 per hour, and this base wage would remain flexible to match inflation over time. The Job Guarantee would also provide workers with health insurance, paid leave, childcare, and possibly fewer hours than the current 40-hour standard work week.<br></p><p>Establishing standards like these, Tcherneva argues, would pressure private firms to treat and pay workers better, considering that now they'd have more employment options and wouldn't have to settle for <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/case-for-job-guarantee-review-pavlina-tcherneva" target="_blank">poor working conditions</a>.</p>Jobs would be funded federally, administered locally
<p>Across the U.S., unemployment offices would be converted into employment offices. The unemployed would be able to enter these offices and "leave with a list of employment options, public-service opportunities you'll be able to access locally," Tcherneva told Vox.<br></p><p>What would those jobs look like? Tcherneva offered some examples: performing weatherization on a local <a href="https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2020/5/4/21243725/coronavirus-unemployment-cares-act-federal-job-guarantee-green-new-deal-pavlina-tcherneva" target="_blank">hardware store</a>, replacing lead pipes on a construction site, helping out at a homeless shelter, or working on local <a href="https://therealnews.com/stories/why-the-green-new-deal-includes-a-jobs-guarantee" target="_blank">alternative-energy projects</a>.</p><p>The federal government would remain mostly hands off, allowing state and local governments to decide which public projects to pursue, and how to allocate resources.</p>The program would be 'counter-cyclical'
<p><span style="background-color: initial;">In the current economic system, unemployment spreads like a virus: people lose their jobs, stop spending money, businesses are forced to shut down, and so on.</span><br></p><p>A Job Guarantee could act as a buffer that absorbs unemployed people before they fall to the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. And this could help to stabilize the economy during recessions, assuming these workers continued to spend money. As the economy improves, workers could move back to their previous jobs, or to other employment options.</p>How the U.S. might pay for a Job Guarantee
<p>Tcherneva doesn't deny that a Job Guarantee would require <a href="https://therealnews.com/stories/why-the-green-new-deal-includes-a-jobs-guarantee" target="_blank">massive public investment</a>, but she notes that what's lacking isn't the money, but political will. What's more, she notes the high social costs of having a large swath of the American workforce remain, more or less, permanently unemployed.<br></p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"I came to the Jobs Guarantee from a macroeconomic perspective — the realization that we were using unemployed people as a kind of "buffer stock" to control inflation," she told the <a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2020-06-24/forget-ubi-says-an-economist-its-time-for-universal-basic-jobs" target="_blank">Los Angeles Times</a>. "Having unemployed people means that when the economy grows, those people would be there to take those jobs."</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"But what if we could use <em>employment</em> as a buffer stock? That's obviously the superior option. I realized that you couldn't just argue about this as a macroeconomic policy, you have to bring in the human rights framework, the moral framework. You have to think about the kind of neglect, the health effects, the pain that unemployment inflicts on people who want to work."</p><p>According to <a href="http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/the-job-guarantee-design-jobs-and-implementation" target="_blank">projections</a> from the Levy Institute, with which Tcherneva is affiliated, the program would cost about 1.5 percent of the U.S. GDP, boost real GDP by half a trillion dollars, and create 3 to 4 million jobs.</p><div id="87eac" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="f24bcfebb0cc57c35a65b9980fa515d0"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1275934855671549953" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">California is requiring all new homes to be built with #solar panels, all public buses to be zero emissions, and is… https://t.co/1wvxLQxfN9</div> — Mike Hudema (@Mike Hudema)<a href="https://twitter.com/MikeHudema/statuses/1275934855671549953">1593041549.0</a></blockquote></div><p>The Job Guarantee proposal has <a href="https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/05/10/a-jobs-guarantee-is-a-flawed-idea" target="_blank">no shortage</a> of <a href="https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/05/10/a-jobs-guarantee-is-a-flawed-idea" target="_blank">critics</a>. What's more, these points are just a brief overview of what the program seeks to establish. But, surprisingly, more Americans seem to support the idea than you may realize.</p><p>According to a 2019 poll from The Hill-HarrisX, more than 70 percent of Americans said they would "somewhat" or "strongly" support a federal program that created jobs for the unemployed.</p>
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8 powerful speakers that might make you think differently about racism
8 powerful voices share what it's like to be black in America, and why white people must break the racist status quo.
19 June, 2020
- Black communities have been telling the nation, for more than a century, that they have been targeted, beaten, falsely accused and killed by the police and other institutions meant to protect them.
- They have not been believed until recently, when the rise in camera phones and social media finally enabled them show and disseminate proof.
- Even after the video of George Floyd's death on May 25, 2020, there remains defensiveness and denial among white Americans and institutions—a defensiveness that prevents change to the root of the problem: systemic racism. In this video, eight powerful voices share perspectives on being black in America, and why white inaction and white politeness must end.
To learn more about what you can do to end the racist status quo, educate yourself and take action. Here is Robin DiAngelo's list of resources.
What if education were engaging for every student?
OpenStax reimagined textbooks and saved students $1 billion. Now is a moment to reimagine even more. How can education help students learn more, better, and faster?
18 June, 2020
Photo: Klaus Vedfelt / Getty Images
- In 2012, I founded OpenStax as a then-radical solution to the Great Recession: Why not make college textbooks free for students? And why not make them open-licensed?
- Now we are faced with COVID-19, another crisis of enormous scale—and one that is once again underscoring the harsh inequities in our communities and accelerating the existing gap between the haves and the have-nots.
- Student engagement and open education are the next frontiers that innovators must address if we want education to live up to its promise as the great equalizer.
<p>I still cannot get over how much the world has changed in the past few months. We have seen an upheaval in education across our nation and around the globe with tremendous impacts on students, teachers, and our workforce. School and college closures have sent millions of students home to study remotely in hastily prepared online courses. And unemployment is reaching Great Depression levels, with millions of workers looking to upskill and re-enter the now rapidly changing job market. Education is supposed to be the "great equalizer." Yet, COVID-19 has underscored the harsh inequities in our communities and accelerated the existing gap between the haves and the have-nots. I expect that things will never quite be the same.</p>
<blockquote>I founded OpenStax in 2012 as a then-radical solution: Why not make college textbooks free for students? And why not make them open-licensed so that faculty could easily customize them to create the perfect course?</blockquote>
<p>The economic impacts of the current crisis remind me of the Great Recession that followed the financial collapse of 2008. Then, as now, students were looking to our nation's colleges to rebuild their lives. But their situation was aggravated by skyrocketing college textbook prices, which by 2012 had risen <a href="https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/the-college-textbook-bubble-and-how-the-open-educational-resources-movement-is-going-up-against-the-textbook-cartel/" target="_blank">more than 800%</a> over the previous three decades to hundreds of dollars. It is not an exaggeration that college students were having to decide between buying a textbook or groceries.</p><p>In response to this crisis, I founded <a href="https://openstax.org/" target="_blank">OpenStax</a> in 2012 as a then-radical solution: Why not make college textbooks free for students? And why not make them open-licensed so that faculty could easily customize them to create the perfect course? Leveraging the Connexions digital textbook publishing platform I had been developing at Rice University since 1999 and building an editorial team comprising leading college educators funded by forward-thinking philanthropists, we published our first five textbooks.</p><p>Today, OpenStax's library of 40 textbooks covers most of the introductory college courses and has saved students nearly $1 billion. This past school year, 3.4 million students used these texts across 60 per cent of all US degree-granting institutions and many high school classrooms. We have seen true market disruption, as prices dropped for the first time in history starting in 2017, which has largely been attributed to OpenStax and the open education movement. Free and open texts have gone mainstream, they're no longer radical; they simply make sense for students.</p>
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzQwMzQ4NS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxMjAzNDA2OX0.iitAn2YZ2-4cKHiLPdZ7EHdsQS5PmuDCIys7Wm8uSwk/img.jpg?width=1245&coordinates=380%2C838%2C0%2C4&height=700" id="82426" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="40a73f379e0ea8fa7199f25bddd5fae9" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Digital versions of OpenStax textbooks.
Photo: Jemel Agulto, OpenStax
<p>In the face of COVID-19, OpenStax is experiencing an unprecedented demand for free resources and a first-of-its-kind experiment in online education. OpenStax's students and instructors have doubled during the pandemic as compared to the same period last year. Instructors have rapidly transitioned online, restructuring courses and learning new technologies and practices. In response, we are focused on meeting faculty and students where they are at this moment, creating an express lane to quickly and easily integrate our resources into their online learning platforms. Additionally, we are partnering with the <a href="https://bigthink.com/Charles-Koch-Foundation/teacher-education" target="_self">Association of College and University Educators</a> to infuse our materials with research-based best practices around engagement to support teaching and learning for the benefit of all students, rather than just a few. The real test will come down to impacting student engagement at a time when there are rising gaps in equitable opportunities.</p>
<p>Students don't learn if they're not engaged. In a traditional course, we may lose a student's attention in 15 minutes; online this narrows to mere seconds. We need to develop interactions that better reflect a new reality in which learning takes place in shorter cycles and in which bursts of activity break the monotony. Brief activities, videos, peer review, dynamic discussions, and rapid review need to be used in a consistent and predictable manner for students. The implementation of these engaging experiences will vary from class to class. So we need highly modularized solutions that work globally to scale but act locally to meet the unique needs of instructors and deepen engagement for their students.</p><p>As the nation now faces increased tensions, changes, and anxieties, it is hard to see bright spots ahead. Yet, perhaps now more than ever, this is a moment to reimagine education. What if students could better understand themselves as learners—could that spark curiosity and motivation? What if teachers were supported in using data to personalize experiences and interventions for all their students, rather than just a few? These would be huge advances. If we want education to be the great equalizer, then it's time to double-down on open education models that drive toward student engagement.</p>
<a href="https://openstax.org/" ><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzQwMzQ5MS9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzNjE3MzIwNn0.fCKYGxoUqOhrzRNMSuY2cZyGI9fMqpUnmMDS24Yppcs/img.png?width=980" id="30b70" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="29fdb2eea1680127fa72a5048be07e31" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" /></a>
Image: Courtesy of OpenStax
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