Hi folks, and happy National Coming Out Day! I thought it might be an appropriate time to share one of my coming out stories, so I'm going back to the beginning.
Picture it: East Texas, 1989. A young TMWA (before being called TMWA) is close to graduating high school. A young, gay, TMWA, who is not yet out to anyone, but who has known he was gay for quite some time. (Seriously, how hard is to figure out who you're attracted to at that age? Although maybe with all the hormones, the trees probably start to look good to some people. But I digress.)
I remember being up on stage in the auditorium of my high school. (No, I didn't come out on stage in front of the whole school. Stay with me.) We were having some sort of rehearsal for an honors assembly, and I think the National Honor Society were all sitting on stage at that point. I was next to my good friend Romola, and we were chatting while everyone was getting sorted out. She was talking about a guy she had a major crush on, and she asked, "Isn't it terrible when you really like someone but you can't tell them?" Since I also had a major crush on a guy I knew, and certain social inhibitions were definitely keeping me from telling him, I said, "I know what you mean."
Well Romola was sharp enough to zero in on that answer, so I got an immediate, "Ohh--so who is it?" I gave that a minute's thought. I hadn't come out to anyone yet, but I was kind of ready to, because it's really hard to constantly pretend not to be yourself. Frankly, I was dying to tell someone at that point, and Romola seemed reasonably safe. Granted, coming out to anyone in that place and time carried some risks, but I thought it might be worth it. So I said I would tell her who my crush was, but that I wanted to do it in private sometime, because I didn't want anyone else to know.
So for about the next week, every time Romola saw me at school, she immediately opened with "So who is it?" Usually in the midst of an enormous group of people, like the lunch room, which led me to defer. "When we get a chance alone. I'm not telling anyone else," I'd tell her. "But these are just your friends--they won't care," she'd respond. Oh, but they might, I thought. Some of them liked to complain about "faggots", although I actually voiced objections when they did. It does tend to put a crimp on how comfortable I really felt around people. Of course, that's part of why I really wanted to tell someone: It would be nice to have at least one person I could be honest with.
Looking for an opportunity to have some time alone with Romola, I arranged to give her a ride after school one day when we were off to a gathering. I figured she would remember and ask me about my mystery person again as soon as we left. (I wasn't quite able to just bring up the topic myself yet. Hey, it was my first time coming out, and still pretty scary.) But that day her mind must have been elsewhere, and she wasn't asking even 'though we were alone and I was (nervously) ready to answer. I cast around in my head for a way to steer the conversation in the right way, and finally said something about her romantic interest. That worked: She almost immediately remembered and asked again who I had the crush on.
Now even then I had a hard time answering. I ended up hinting around a bit, and confirming the right person, all of which ended up with her saying, "Wait, I'm confused." (Actually, she understood perfectly, she just wasn't expecting mystery person to be a guy.) I did by this point recognize one flaw in telling her in the car: I was driving, so I never got to actually see her reaction when she realized who I meant, and that it was not a woman. But I did get to hear her reaction. I got some repeated variations of "John?", "John?!?", "JOHN?!" with varying degrees of questioning or surprise at various points, mixed in with (thankfully) statements that she was OK with this, even 'though it came as kind of a shock.
Actually, the surprise was a little surprising to me. I kind of figured, particularly since I never dated any women, didn't really bother to try to try to "butch up", and was actually a vocal supporter of gay rights, that more than a few people probably had some shrewd guesses, but maybe not. I think several of my friends just thought I was hopelessly naive on the issue of gays, and that maybe I only supported equal rights and fair treatment because I'd never had a chance to meet any gay people to discover how terrible they really were. Irony, thy name is adolescence.
In any case, Romola kept my secret in high school. (She and my parents were the only people I told before I got to college.) We stayed friends and kept in touch. It took only about a semester at Oberlin College (which I recall Newsweek once called a "gay mecca", to our great amusement) before I was fully out to everyone I met, and was fortunate enough to find hosts of other people who didn't care. It was nice to finally have a group of friends--straight, gay, and bi--with whom I could feel close, and not have to feel like I had to lie and hide part of myself. But the first did come in high school, even in east Texas in 1989, and that turned out pretty well.
Showing posts with label Social issues. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Social issues. Show all posts
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Monday, May 09, 2011
Flatland and Social Commentary
I've recently finished The Annotated Flatland. Flatland was written in 1884 by Edwin Abbott, and tells the story of "A. Square", an inhabitant of a two-dimensional world called Flatland, who is visited by a three-dimensional sphere. I'd heard of the book before, but hadn't read it. It's fairly famous as a mathematical work which describes ideas about how two-dimensional creatures would perceive three-dimensional objects, and by analogy, how we might perceive the fourth dimension. This semester, one of our better students watched a recent movie made from the book and was fairly excited by it. It led to a conversation with another faculty member who said she'd attempted to read the book, but had found it so sexist she couldn't stomach it. It turns out that the book's treatment of women is a point of contention for a number of people.
The book describes a two-dimensional universe with a strict class structure. All males are polygons of various sorts, ranging from the lowest ranked isosceles triangles with one very small angle, followed by triangles, then squares, then so on up higher and higher order regular polygons. (Irregular polygons are considered immoral, and are shunned, imprisoned, or executed.) At the top of the social order are high degree polygons called "circles", who are the elite priest class of the society. Women are only line segments, and are considered incapable of thought and essentially worthless.
So the story does describe a fundamentally sexist (and horribly class structured) world. (It's worth noting that the strict class distinctions have a strong affect on the male inhabitants, too. The isosceles triangles with very small angles are considered mentally deficient and are caged in schools for the young to practice "feeling" angles on. Isosceles triangles with larger angles are only allowed low-ranked jobs, and equilateral polygons are ranked on the social hierarchy by the number sides they have, with the most honored jobs reserved for those with a large number of sides and large angles.)
So was Abbott a wretched sexist and classist? As it turns out, no; Abbott was in fact fairly progressive for his time, and in fact argued for the education of women at a time when many believed (as the Flatlanders did) that women were incapable of education or of rational thought. What he wrote was in fact a critique of common attitudes toward women, the disabled, and the class structure. At the time, it would have been a thinly veiled satire of Victorian social norms, although apparently there is some evidence that even at the time, some people did not get that he was making fun of, rather than encouraging, those attitudes. (Which means that Flatland may in fact be a 19th century example of Poe's Law.) Of course, by the 20th and 21st century we are far removed from Victorian social mores, and it makes it hard to recognize this as a satire when the social context has been removed. Instead, it ends up looking horrifically retrograde. Once read with the idea of a satire in mind, however, it becomes remarkably clear. In fact, there are occasional clues in the text that the line segments are more intelligent than A. Square (or the rest of Flatland) credits them with being.
Interestingly, the movie altered the story to remove the sexist elements. The protagonist's grandson (a hexagon) is recast as a hexagonal granddaughter, Hex; women are no longer represented as line segments or considered unworthy of education. However, the class structure of the original is preserved. Perhaps we are more able to recognize the critique of class than of gender. The movie is also given a happier ending; through the intervention of the three dimensional visitor, the Flatlanders come to understand the reality of the third dimension (and the fourth is hinted at), and it is implied that the class structure dominated by the circles is being overthrown at the end.
So what about this movie alternative? The social critique has been altered. The critiques of class and orthodoxy remain. The idea of truth--as revealed by reason and observation--taking priority over authority, is a familiar (and needed) social criticism for our culture, but isn't far from Abbott's original text. The removal of the gender dimension (ahem) might be wise, since a careful recasting of the story to satirize our own prejudices might be more difficult, and require more time than the movie allowed. Our contemporary approaches to sexism have become more refined and less crudely stated, and exposing these may require different tools than Abbott used. So perhaps the movie is a good "translation" into modern language of some of what Abbott intended, without being literal.
Plus, the graphics are pretty cool.
The book describes a two-dimensional universe with a strict class structure. All males are polygons of various sorts, ranging from the lowest ranked isosceles triangles with one very small angle, followed by triangles, then squares, then so on up higher and higher order regular polygons. (Irregular polygons are considered immoral, and are shunned, imprisoned, or executed.) At the top of the social order are high degree polygons called "circles", who are the elite priest class of the society. Women are only line segments, and are considered incapable of thought and essentially worthless.
So the story does describe a fundamentally sexist (and horribly class structured) world. (It's worth noting that the strict class distinctions have a strong affect on the male inhabitants, too. The isosceles triangles with very small angles are considered mentally deficient and are caged in schools for the young to practice "feeling" angles on. Isosceles triangles with larger angles are only allowed low-ranked jobs, and equilateral polygons are ranked on the social hierarchy by the number sides they have, with the most honored jobs reserved for those with a large number of sides and large angles.)
So was Abbott a wretched sexist and classist? As it turns out, no; Abbott was in fact fairly progressive for his time, and in fact argued for the education of women at a time when many believed (as the Flatlanders did) that women were incapable of education or of rational thought. What he wrote was in fact a critique of common attitudes toward women, the disabled, and the class structure. At the time, it would have been a thinly veiled satire of Victorian social norms, although apparently there is some evidence that even at the time, some people did not get that he was making fun of, rather than encouraging, those attitudes. (Which means that Flatland may in fact be a 19th century example of Poe's Law.) Of course, by the 20th and 21st century we are far removed from Victorian social mores, and it makes it hard to recognize this as a satire when the social context has been removed. Instead, it ends up looking horrifically retrograde. Once read with the idea of a satire in mind, however, it becomes remarkably clear. In fact, there are occasional clues in the text that the line segments are more intelligent than A. Square (or the rest of Flatland) credits them with being.
Interestingly, the movie altered the story to remove the sexist elements. The protagonist's grandson (a hexagon) is recast as a hexagonal granddaughter, Hex; women are no longer represented as line segments or considered unworthy of education. However, the class structure of the original is preserved. Perhaps we are more able to recognize the critique of class than of gender. The movie is also given a happier ending; through the intervention of the three dimensional visitor, the Flatlanders come to understand the reality of the third dimension (and the fourth is hinted at), and it is implied that the class structure dominated by the circles is being overthrown at the end.
So what about this movie alternative? The social critique has been altered. The critiques of class and orthodoxy remain. The idea of truth--as revealed by reason and observation--taking priority over authority, is a familiar (and needed) social criticism for our culture, but isn't far from Abbott's original text. The removal of the gender dimension (ahem) might be wise, since a careful recasting of the story to satirize our own prejudices might be more difficult, and require more time than the movie allowed. Our contemporary approaches to sexism have become more refined and less crudely stated, and exposing these may require different tools than Abbott used. So perhaps the movie is a good "translation" into modern language of some of what Abbott intended, without being literal.
Plus, the graphics are pretty cool.
Monday, November 09, 2009
Risk taking
So I heard passed on a complaint from some employers: That the current workforce is too risk-averse, that they only want to do what is "safe". Or I guess in the usual "business-ese", that their employees don't "think outside the box." This is, I suppose, seen to be a failure of educators. (That would include me.)
I'm inclined to call bullshit.
There's no question that US public education has an unspoken agenda to produce docile, unquestioning workers who will sit in cubicles all day doing mind-numbing tasks and avoid asking difficult questions at all costs. That's actually part of the history of what the public education system was for. But it's worth asking why this was ever a goal, and the answer is because that's what employers wanted.
I'm also inclined to think that people have been encouraged to take fewer risks because risk taking because they have so little overall security. Most people today worry about being laid off at every downturn of the economy. There is no long-term job security any more. And in a particularly screwed up twist, no one gets health care at an affordable cost without a really good job. Plus we have an otherwise generally eroding social safety net. So no one feels safe, and I think a lot of that lack of security can be laid at the feet of corporations that decided short term profits could be had by regularly laying off employees and trying to squeeze more out of the ones left. And now they're complaining that their employees aren't willing to take risks? Why would anyone take risks in such a precarious situation?
Plus I doubt they really want risk-takers. Risk takers might try some crazy scheme that no one ever thought of before, and that scheme may fail. Actually the crazy schemes probably fail more often than not. (How many start-up technology companies did not go on to become Google, Microsoft, or Apple?) I suspect what they mean is that they want employees to take risks doing things that turn out successful. But that's not risk-taking! I don't know. Maybe an employee that does try some wild new idea that fails spectacularly really does get a "Congratulations! You failed!" celebration a la Meet the Robinsons. Maybe innovations (including failures) are actually encouraged by some (or all) employers. But that just doesn't ring true. I think it's the businesses that are risk-avoiders, and the employees are picking up on that and following along.
And employees are easy to blame. What employee would disagree with his or her employer's assessment of the situation? That sounds like awfully risky behavior.
I'm inclined to call bullshit.
There's no question that US public education has an unspoken agenda to produce docile, unquestioning workers who will sit in cubicles all day doing mind-numbing tasks and avoid asking difficult questions at all costs. That's actually part of the history of what the public education system was for. But it's worth asking why this was ever a goal, and the answer is because that's what employers wanted.
I'm also inclined to think that people have been encouraged to take fewer risks because risk taking because they have so little overall security. Most people today worry about being laid off at every downturn of the economy. There is no long-term job security any more. And in a particularly screwed up twist, no one gets health care at an affordable cost without a really good job. Plus we have an otherwise generally eroding social safety net. So no one feels safe, and I think a lot of that lack of security can be laid at the feet of corporations that decided short term profits could be had by regularly laying off employees and trying to squeeze more out of the ones left. And now they're complaining that their employees aren't willing to take risks? Why would anyone take risks in such a precarious situation?
Plus I doubt they really want risk-takers. Risk takers might try some crazy scheme that no one ever thought of before, and that scheme may fail. Actually the crazy schemes probably fail more often than not. (How many start-up technology companies did not go on to become Google, Microsoft, or Apple?) I suspect what they mean is that they want employees to take risks doing things that turn out successful. But that's not risk-taking! I don't know. Maybe an employee that does try some wild new idea that fails spectacularly really does get a "Congratulations! You failed!" celebration a la Meet the Robinsons. Maybe innovations (including failures) are actually encouraged by some (or all) employers. But that just doesn't ring true. I think it's the businesses that are risk-avoiders, and the employees are picking up on that and following along.
And employees are easy to blame. What employee would disagree with his or her employer's assessment of the situation? That sounds like awfully risky behavior.
Saturday, November 08, 2008
Between Hope and Despair
Tuesday morning broke as a stunning day. A rain had swept the earth clean and I walked out into a bright warm day (reminding more of spring than fall) with a fresh scent in the air, as though the world were newly wrought. The scent carried me through some unknown passage to my childhood, to my grandmother's house and neighborhood, and my eyes were seeing the houses along my block through those lenses again for some reason. The air was clean and warm, and I felt uplifted.
I walked to the polling place at the municipal building, which is only a few blocks away. I had no real wait (I think because the district is too small to really have one), and soon punched a button to elect a moderately liberal black democrat with a unusual name as the 44th president of the United States, and I knew the odds were excellent he would actually win. As I walked back, I thought to myself, "So this is what the 21st century feels like." And it felt wonderful.
I watched returns that night, and worried a little until the concession speech around 11:30, when I started to hear screams of joy from the campus a block away. I felt like joining in. It felt good. I had hope for a return from the brink. (Or perhaps more aptly, a chance to at least crawl back up to where the brink was.)
The elation lasted through late Wednesday morning. Then I read that Proposition 8 in California had passed. A majority of California citizens had decided it was appropriate to take away rights already granted to a minority, to chase down those who had been married and viciously tear apart their marriage licenses, symbolically tearing apart their families, their hopes, their very lives. I'm almost numb to most of this asinine nonsense now, and most of the other ugly and awful amendments (like in Florida and Arkansas) I'm almost used to. But in California, they took away peoples civil rights. They took away their rights and their marriages. Because of the children (except of course for the gay and lesbian ones, or the children of same), or because people want to pretend other people don't exist. Because gay people having lives is apparently just icky. And the appropriate response is to take away their civil rights and explicitly condemn them as not just second class citizens, but unreal, non-existent, and in fact, unthinkable. That hurts.
By Wednesday night I was morose. I'm still flitting between moods. I feel a thrill, a joy, every time I see or think about our new president, and the possibility of what he might accomplish, even if that's only a potentiality now. A relief that so much ugliness might end. And sometimes I think of the lives being destroyed and I feel as if I'm about to vomit, or I cry and rage. I'm not sure what to feel anymore.
I walked to the polling place at the municipal building, which is only a few blocks away. I had no real wait (I think because the district is too small to really have one), and soon punched a button to elect a moderately liberal black democrat with a unusual name as the 44th president of the United States, and I knew the odds were excellent he would actually win. As I walked back, I thought to myself, "So this is what the 21st century feels like." And it felt wonderful.
I watched returns that night, and worried a little until the concession speech around 11:30, when I started to hear screams of joy from the campus a block away. I felt like joining in. It felt good. I had hope for a return from the brink. (Or perhaps more aptly, a chance to at least crawl back up to where the brink was.)
The elation lasted through late Wednesday morning. Then I read that Proposition 8 in California had passed. A majority of California citizens had decided it was appropriate to take away rights already granted to a minority, to chase down those who had been married and viciously tear apart their marriage licenses, symbolically tearing apart their families, their hopes, their very lives. I'm almost numb to most of this asinine nonsense now, and most of the other ugly and awful amendments (like in Florida and Arkansas) I'm almost used to. But in California, they took away peoples civil rights. They took away their rights and their marriages. Because of the children (except of course for the gay and lesbian ones, or the children of same), or because people want to pretend other people don't exist. Because gay people having lives is apparently just icky. And the appropriate response is to take away their civil rights and explicitly condemn them as not just second class citizens, but unreal, non-existent, and in fact, unthinkable. That hurts.
By Wednesday night I was morose. I'm still flitting between moods. I feel a thrill, a joy, every time I see or think about our new president, and the possibility of what he might accomplish, even if that's only a potentiality now. A relief that so much ugliness might end. And sometimes I think of the lives being destroyed and I feel as if I'm about to vomit, or I cry and rage. I'm not sure what to feel anymore.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Jesus and Cooties
A few weekends ago, I spent a few days watching documentaries relating to The Da Vinci Code. Many were marvellously entertaining. For instance, did you know the Templars essentially established a form of international branch banking before the thirteen-hundreds? The movie (and the book) seem to have worked up quite a froth among conservatives because of the claims Brown makes about Jesus and the early church. Now to be fair to those doing the frothing, in addition to the fiction which is the book, Brown seems to be pushing a fair bit of background information for the book as factual which actually ranges anywhere from possible to highly improbable in the eyes of most historians, and some of which falls into the category of wild-eyed conspiracy theories. (Very little seems to be either widely believed or authoritatively disproven.) I suspect he does this deliberately because he thinks (probably correctly) that it will sell more books if he stirs the pot a little.
Should I warn about spoilers? I've not read the book myself (or seen the movie), but since I haven't been in a coma for the past year or so, I'm still aware of most of the points which are causing all the ruckus. One of the big ones seems to be the suggestion that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and that they had children, and that the bloodline still exists today. The producers of one documentary spent some time looking into the question of whether Jesus could have been married, and interviewed several scholars on this point, including a priest. The priest looked absolutely furious; he seemed almost too mad to speak, and managed to spit out that suggesting Jesus was married was "libelous."
Now this I have to wonder about. Whether someone was married or not may be true or untrue, and the question may be open or settled, but I've never heard it suggested that claiming someone was married is libel. (I actually looked up the definition of "libel" just to make sure the universe hadn't changed around me.) What in the world?
Two possibilities occur to me here as to why someone would feel such a claim would be so scurrillous. There is of course the obvious point that we have to remember who is doing the speaking here; if it turns out Jesus was married, someone may have been giving up the horizontal mambo his whole life for what turns out to be no good reason. (Remember the joke about the monk who spent his life making copies of copies of manuscripts who discovered upon reading the originals in heaven that the word was celebrate?) Personally, I suspect there's at least some truth to this basis for the anger, but I think there's another reason for much of the church to dislike the suggestion: They think women have cooties, and no one truly holy could possibly have touched one, or even wanted to. (This also explains how churches supposedly following the teachings of someone who spent almost all his time talking about love, caring, compassion, and forgiveness end up spending almost all their time talking about sex and the importance of not having it, or at least making sure no one has any fun at it.)
Which is particularly interesting in light of what some of the other scholars had to say about Mary Magdalene herself and other women connected with Jesus and with the early church. While the evidence seems to be pretty strong that if Jesus was married it wasn't to Mary, it does seem that she was a disciple who traveled with him--and that she wasn't the only one. In what would have been somewhat scandalous at the time, Jesus seems to have interacted with men and women in essentially the same way. In the earliest church, there were apparently a number of women who became teachers and leaders. Which makes sense if you think about the admonishments from some early (male) church leaders for women to be silent; why tell someone to shut up who hasn't been speaking out?
So perhaps some of the anger is the residual "women have cooties" feeling, which (ironically) may have been part of what Jesus himself preached against. Actually, the whole thing leaves me with the odd feeling that Jesus may have been way more progressive on gender issues than most of the contemporary world.
Should I warn about spoilers? I've not read the book myself (or seen the movie), but since I haven't been in a coma for the past year or so, I'm still aware of most of the points which are causing all the ruckus. One of the big ones seems to be the suggestion that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and that they had children, and that the bloodline still exists today. The producers of one documentary spent some time looking into the question of whether Jesus could have been married, and interviewed several scholars on this point, including a priest. The priest looked absolutely furious; he seemed almost too mad to speak, and managed to spit out that suggesting Jesus was married was "libelous."
Now this I have to wonder about. Whether someone was married or not may be true or untrue, and the question may be open or settled, but I've never heard it suggested that claiming someone was married is libel. (I actually looked up the definition of "libel" just to make sure the universe hadn't changed around me.) What in the world?
Two possibilities occur to me here as to why someone would feel such a claim would be so scurrillous. There is of course the obvious point that we have to remember who is doing the speaking here; if it turns out Jesus was married, someone may have been giving up the horizontal mambo his whole life for what turns out to be no good reason. (Remember the joke about the monk who spent his life making copies of copies of manuscripts who discovered upon reading the originals in heaven that the word was celebrate?) Personally, I suspect there's at least some truth to this basis for the anger, but I think there's another reason for much of the church to dislike the suggestion: They think women have cooties, and no one truly holy could possibly have touched one, or even wanted to. (This also explains how churches supposedly following the teachings of someone who spent almost all his time talking about love, caring, compassion, and forgiveness end up spending almost all their time talking about sex and the importance of not having it, or at least making sure no one has any fun at it.)
Which is particularly interesting in light of what some of the other scholars had to say about Mary Magdalene herself and other women connected with Jesus and with the early church. While the evidence seems to be pretty strong that if Jesus was married it wasn't to Mary, it does seem that she was a disciple who traveled with him--and that she wasn't the only one. In what would have been somewhat scandalous at the time, Jesus seems to have interacted with men and women in essentially the same way. In the earliest church, there were apparently a number of women who became teachers and leaders. Which makes sense if you think about the admonishments from some early (male) church leaders for women to be silent; why tell someone to shut up who hasn't been speaking out?
So perhaps some of the anger is the residual "women have cooties" feeling, which (ironically) may have been part of what Jesus himself preached against. Actually, the whole thing leaves me with the odd feeling that Jesus may have been way more progressive on gender issues than most of the contemporary world.
Thursday, May 04, 2006
I missed something
I missed something significant in the article I mentioned below about some financial aid being set aside for students who take a sufficiently "rigorous" program in high school, which I came across in conversation with someone else today. The article points out of course that some schools do not offer all of the options that are required for students to qualify for this aid. Students at these schools will of course just be out of luck.
Now, just as a thought experiment, which schools have the fewest options for students? Would these be wealthy schools or poor schools? Which schools can afford to make sure they offer all courses for an "advanced" diploma, including silly computer programming courses? Which schools can recruit teachers to make sure every student who wishes to can take two years of foreign language? Which schools can afford to support AP and IB programs for its students? All of these things are required for a student to qualify for this new financial aid.
And why exactly are wealthy schools wealthy and poor schools poor? (Remember that US schools are financed locally, and usually through property taxes.) So this new program is in essence transferring 4.5 billion dollars of federal aid into funds that can only be used by at least moderately well off students. (The same bill which authorized this new aid also cut $13 billion in college spending.)
So if you're foolish enough to be born to poor parents and consequently attend a poor school, you will of course have limited opportunities up through high school. But should you manage to do well and learn anything anyway, there won't be money for you to go to a college which might help make up for what you missed out on in high school; the money has been reserved for students wise enough to be born to middle-class or higher parents.
Now, just as a thought experiment, which schools have the fewest options for students? Would these be wealthy schools or poor schools? Which schools can afford to make sure they offer all courses for an "advanced" diploma, including silly computer programming courses? Which schools can recruit teachers to make sure every student who wishes to can take two years of foreign language? Which schools can afford to support AP and IB programs for its students? All of these things are required for a student to qualify for this new financial aid.
And why exactly are wealthy schools wealthy and poor schools poor? (Remember that US schools are financed locally, and usually through property taxes.) So this new program is in essence transferring 4.5 billion dollars of federal aid into funds that can only be used by at least moderately well off students. (The same bill which authorized this new aid also cut $13 billion in college spending.)
So if you're foolish enough to be born to poor parents and consequently attend a poor school, you will of course have limited opportunities up through high school. But should you manage to do well and learn anything anyway, there won't be money for you to go to a college which might help make up for what you missed out on in high school; the money has been reserved for students wise enough to be born to middle-class or higher parents.
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