Washington Post article
Frugality falling out of fashion?
A returning hunger for retail therapy thaws out the credit card
By Annie Gowen
Monday, October 19, 2009




Aba Kwawu vowed she'd buy only one or two classic pieces for work that would last her for years. So what was she doing recently at the cash register of a Washington boutique, credit card in hand, agonizing over whether to buy a flashy designer purse with faux snake trim?

"I don't need anything. I don't need a bag," Kwawu said, and sighed. She barely looked at the pricey but practical gray sweater coat she was supposed to be buying, already wrapped in an elaborate origami of tissue at her elbow. She only had eyes for the $695 green-and-black handbag next to it that looked so cute when she slung it over her shoulder and twirled in front of the mirror a few minutes earlier.

When the recession slowed business at her public relations firm, the Silver Spring fashionista put herself on a strict spending diet. She avoided online retailers and her favorite Georgetown haunts. She unearthed clothes in her own closet that she had never worn, some with the tags still on.

After about six months, however, her virtue has begun to feel like a heavy cloak she longs to cast off.

"I had not shopped in so long I was going through withdrawal," said Kwawu, 34. "I thought, 'I have to get something now. I've been good long enough.' "

Malls and boutiques are filled with people such as Kwawu these days, shoppers who have cut their spending -- some drastically -- during the downturn and are now suffering from what some call "frugal fatigue."

Most ardent shoppers don't seem to be giving in to their cravings yet: Consumer spending was sluggish last month, and credit card debt is waning. But with the Dow topping 10,000 just last week and the air filled with talk of recovery, it's getting harder for some people to keep suppressing the urge.

"I want to shop!" cried a frustrated Gillian Joseph, 42, of McLean, leaving Marshalls in Pentagon City empty-handed last week.

Joseph, a widow and mother of a young son, quit shopping "cold turkey" a year ago when her investments lost half their value.

For someone who used to blow $100 every time she walked into Target, "it was a sad and scary time," she said. "I'm a shopaholic. I love to shop."

She finally broke her fast, walking into Nordstrom after a long absence and buying a pair of 4 1/2 -inch heels in bright floral colors. The experience was cathartic, she said.

"It was like spring -- rebirth, reawakening."

In recent days, Joseph returned to the stores to buy necessities: a new winter coat and boots. But she said she's determined not to purchase what she's really longing for: new furniture for her home and a silver BMW 5 Series.

Not everyone, however, is strong enough to resist. Some of Lynne Glassman's clients have already started falling off the tightwad wagon when they go into stores with the personal shopper and image consultant.

"They're saying, 'I need to watch it; I can't spend this much.' And then they get there, it's like they've been on a diet for a long time, and they're buying more than they intended," said Glassman, who works in the District.

Christopher Reiter, owner of Muleh, the 14th Street NW boutique where Kwawu was agonizing over the handbag, has noticed the same phenomenon. Lately, some power shoppers come into the store, see something they want and initially decide not to buy it, he said. Then they sneak back in a day or two and get what they tried to leave behind.

"I think people over the last six to eight months have been hiding underneath their kitchen tables," said Paco Underhill, author of the book "Why We Buy: the Science of Shopping" and a marketing consultant. "They've climbed out from underneath their kitchen tables and are recognizing the sky is not going to fall."

Some experts say that Americans, still traumatized by hundreds of thousands of layoffs and plummeting home values, might never return to spendthrift ways.

But others say deep and lasting change might prove challenging in a country where the phrase "shop 'til you drop" gets 1.7 million Google hits.

Before the downturn, Americans visited a shopping mall at least three times a month, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers. Many people shopped for reasons unrelated to need: for comfort, for stress relief, for excitement.

"I don't think we're ever going to go back to shopping as gluttonously as we have in the past, but for competitive sport shoppers, the thrill is waning on abstinence," said Kit Yarrow, a professor of consumer psychology at Golden Gate University in California.

Over the past year, Arash Shirazi, 35, a music agent from Arlington County, saw his income remain steady but his stock portfolio dip. He said "no" to a new MacBook computer, a new Bang & Olufsen stereo and a new Audi S5 -- all of which he would have purchased without a second thought in the pre-recession days.

But now that the stock market is rebounding, he's been itching to buy an Italian diving watch. He has been making trips out to Tysons Galleria to try them on, the heft reassuringly solid on his wrist. It would set him back anywhere from $5,000 to $30,000.

The recession "made everyone sort of take a pause and think about how they spend their money, needs versus wants," Shirazi said. "However, I work all the time. . . . And if you work hard, you like to reward yourself in some capacity."

Exactly, agreed local TV personality Paul Wharton, who cut his maid service and made other economies during the recession.

Wharton recently plunked down more than $1,000 for a pair of python shoes. For him, the shoes are a talisman of better times to come.

"It's almost like I've come out of the recession before the market," he said proudly. "I made a choice! I just refused to be in the recession any longer!"

Kwawu also misses her retail therapy.

"I would have a crazy-tough day with a client, and I'd go to Neiman's. Or on a Saturday afternoon get cupcakes and stroll in here" to Muleh, she said.

In days gone by, Kwawu would think nothing of racking up a four-figure bill in one afternoon at the boutique. But things are different now. When she does shop, she said, she's much more price conscious and less impulsive.

"I want trendy but not ridiculous," she explained. "Now my thought process is: How many times am I really going to wear this? Can I wear it out in the evening?"

Then she saw the olive and black satchel with the gold embossed trim by her favorite designer, Phillip Lim, and her brisk resolve faltered.

"Oh, my gosh, I'm sorry, I have to have this! It's great!" she said, stroking its soft leather. "It's like butter."

She sat on a stool near the counter for several minutes, debating what to do.

"This is where the id and the super ego go, 'Do it. Don't do it,' " she said, mimicking a good angel and a bad angel on each shoulder.

After several minutes of anguish, she handed over her credit card.

The saleswoman wrapped up the purse for Kwawu, who went happily out into the sunlight. The useful gray sweater coat was left behind, forgotten. At least for now.
 
 
Washington Post

Making the Grade Isn't About Race. It's About Parents.
By Patrick Welsh
Sunday, October 18, 2009




"Why don't you guys study like the kids from Africa?"

In a moment of exasperation last spring, I asked that question to a virtually all-black class of 12th-graders who had done horribly on a test I had just given. A kid who seldom came to class -- and was constantly distracting other students when he did -- shot back: "It's because they have fathers who kick their butts and make them study."

Another student angrily challenged me: "You ask the class, just ask how many of us have our fathers living with us." When I did, not one hand went up.

I was stunned. These were good kids; I had grown attached to them over the school year. It hit me that these students, at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, understood what I knew too well: The lack of a father in their lives had undermined their education. The young man who spoke up knew that with a father in his house he probably wouldn't be ending 12 years of school in the bottom 10 percent of his class with a D average. His classmate, normally a sweet young woman with a great sense of humor, must have long harbored resentment at her father's absence to speak out as she did. Both had hit upon an essential difference between the kids who make it in school and those who don't: parents.

My students knew intuitively that the reason they were lagging academically had nothing to do with race, which is the too-handy explanation for the achievement gap in Alexandria. And it wasn't because the school system had failed them. They knew that excuses about a lack of resources and access just didn't wash at the new, state-of-the-art, $100 million T.C. Williams, where every student is given a laptop and where there is open enrollment in Advanced Placement and honors courses. Rather, it was because their parents just weren't there for them -- at least not in the same way that parents of kids who were doing well tended to be.

In an example of how bad the fixation on race here has become, last year Morton Sherman, the new superintendent, ordered principals throughout the city to post huge charts in their hallways so everyone -- including 10-year-old kids -- could see differences in test scores between white, black and Hispanic students. One mother told me that a black fifth-grader at Cora Kelly Magnet School said that "whoever sees that sign will think I am stupid." A fourth-grade African American girl there looked at the sign and said to a friend: "That's not me." When black and white parents protested that impressionable young children don't need such information, administrators accused them of not facing up to the problem. Only when the local NAACP complained did Sherman have the charts removed.

Achievement gaps don't break down neatly along racial lines. Take Yasir Hussein, a student of mine last year whose parents emigrated from Sudan in the early 1990s, and who entered the engineering program at Virginia Tech this fall. "My parents were big on our family living the American dream," he said. "One quarter when I got a 3.5 grade-point average, the guys I hung around with were congratulating me, but my parents had the opposite reaction. They took my PlayStation and TV out of my bedroom and told me I could do better."

Yasir said it wasn't just fear that made him study: "Knowing how hard my parents worked simply to give me the opportunity to get an education in America, it was hard for me not to care about getting good grades."

But Yasir's experience isn't what community activists and school administrators at T.C. Williams or around the country focus on. They cast the difference between kids who are succeeding in school and those who are not in terms of race and seem obsessed with what they call "the gap" between the test scores of white and black students.

This year, community groups in St. Louis and Portland, Ore., issued reports decrying the gap. After a recent state report on test scores in California schools, Jack O'Connell, the state's superintendent of instruction, said the gap is "the biggest civil rights issue of this generation" -- a very popular phrase in education circles.

But focusing on a "racial achievement gap" is too simple; it's a gap in familial support and involvement, too. Administrators focused solely on race are stigmatizing black students. At the same time, they are encouraging the easy excuse that the kids who are not excelling are victims, as well as the idea that once schools stop being racist and raise expectations, these low achievers will suddenly blossom.

Last year, two of the finest and most dedicated teachers at my school -- one in science and one in math -- tried to move students who were failing their classes into more appropriate prerequisite courses, because the kids had none of the background knowledge essential to mastering more advanced material. Both teachers were told by a T.C. Williams administrator that the problem was not with the students but with their own low expectations.

"The real problem," says Glenn Hopkins, president of Alexandria's Hopkins House, which provides preschool and other services to low-income families, "is that school superintendents don't realize -- or won't admit -- that the education gap is symptomatic of a social gap."

Hopkins notes that student achievement is deeply affected by issues of family, income and class, things superintendents have little control over. "Even with best teachers in the world, they don't have the power to solve the problem," he says. "They naively assume that if they throw in a little tutoring and mentoring and come up with some program they can claim as their own, the gap will close."

Perhaps nothing shows how out of touch administrators are with the depth of poor students' problems more than the way they chose to start this school year. The Alexandria School Board had added two more paid work days to the calendar, a move that cost more than $1 million in teachers' salaries. So the administration decided to put on a three-day conference they dubbed "Equity and Excellence." We were promised "world-class speakers." If only that had been true. As part of the festivities, Sherman formed a choir of teachers and administrators that gave us renditions of "Imagine" and "This Land Is Your Land." Sherman closed the conference by telling us that if we didn't believe that "each and every" child in Alexandria could learn, he would give us a ticket to Fairfax County.

Now, six weeks into the academic year, some 30 fights -- two gang-related -- have taken place at T.C. Williams. I wish those three days had been spent bringing students to school to lay out clear rules and consequences, and for sessions on conflict resolution and anger management.

Last week, Sherman announced that a second installment of "Equity and Excellence" featuring a "courageous conversation" with Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard, will take place at T.C. Williams tomorrow. I am eager to find ways to help my students succeed, but I am afraid that Ferguson -- whose book includes a chapter titled "Teachers' Perceptions and Expectations and the Black-White Test Score Gap" -- may underestimate what it will take to meet the challenges that we face.

There is one moment of those frivolous first days of the year that I do keep returning to: One of the speakers, Yvette Jackson, the chief executive of the National Urban Alliance, made it clear that the lip service and labels Alexandria is putting forward are not going to help children who are what she calls "school-dependent learners." These are students from low-income backgrounds who need school to give them the basic knowledge that other kids get from their families -- knowledge that schools expect students to have when they start classes. To her, the gap everyone is talking about is not a question of black and white but of the "difference between children's potential and their performance."

"No matter how poor they are, when little kids start school, they are excited; they believe they are going to learn," Jackson said. "But unless schools give them the background knowledge . . . so they can connect with what they study and feel confident, they begin to feel that school is a foreign place, and they give up."

For Junior Bailey, a senior in my Advanced Placement English class, school has never been a foreign place, a fact he attributes to his dad. "He has always been on me; it's been hard to get away with much," Junior said. He also told me that hardly any of his friends have their fathers living with them. "Their mothers are soft on them, and they don't get any push from home."

On parents' night a few weeks ago, I was thrilled to see Junior's dad, Willie Bailey, a star on T.C. Williams's 1983 basketball team, walk into my classroom. Willie told me that after seeing how the guys he grew up with were affected by not having their dads around, he promised himself that he would be a real presence in his son's life.

With more parents like Willie Bailey, someday schools might realistically talk about closing the gap between students' potential and their performance.

patrwelsh@gmail.com

Patrick Welsh teaches English at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria.