I refuse to be an onion.

 @RachelPLeven | leven.p.rachel [at] gmail.com

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Politico examines DC mayoral candidates' stances on DCPS enrollment policies.

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Education Secretary Arne Duncan Looks to Place High-Quality Teachers in High-Poverty Schools

The Washington Post and Education Week have more on the plan.

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Florida's Considering a "Money Course" for High School Seniors

The financial management course would focus on "budgeting, saving, understanding investments, wise use of credit, and other topics," according to Dave Hodges on Tallahassee.com. 

Why It Matters: Helping students with these skills could help them avoid the pitfalls of other consumers hurt during the recession, the article said.

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If You Read One Long Read This Weekend, Make It This One

"Girl in the Shadows: Dasani's Homeless Life" by Andrea Elliott details the plight of the more than 22,000 homeless children in New York. The story also makes the economic case for taking care of these children now.

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One in Five Americans Will Be Part of "New Rich" At Some Point

The "new rich," or anyone who has a household income of $250,000 or more, includes "21 percent of working-age adults for at least one year by the time they turn 60," according to an AP article by Hope Yen.

Why It Matters: "As the fastest-growing group based on take-home pay, the new rich tend to enjoy better schools, employment and gated communities, making it easier to pass on their privilege to their children. Because their rising status comes at a time when upward mobility in the U.S. ranks lowest among wealthy industrialized counties, the spending attitudes of the new rich have implications for politics and policy. It's now become even harder for people at the bottom to move up."

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The Perry Preschool Project established that early education—in addition to raising educational performance and lowering dropout rates—influences the future social skills and learning capacities of students, which play a large role in employability. It seems the best job-training program for a 25-year-old is a quality preschool program at age 4.

Austan Goolsbee in The Wall Street Journal

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For Your Lunch Break, Why 'The Hunger Games' is Real

Univeristy of Michigan's Miles Kimball wrote in Quartz that the Hunger Games are real -- but who did Kimball identify as the Capitol and the Districts? (H/T Digg)

For those of you non-Hunger Games fans, the point of the article is summed in one quote: "The tight restrictions we impose on immigration come at great cost to our economy, to future government budgets and the future geopolitical power of the United States."

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There is little reason to believe that college graduates from 1993 had significantly better “soft skills” than 2013 graduates – but they did enter a much better labor market and employers were more willing to let them develop skills on the job.

Mary Alice McCarthy wrote for EdCentral (H/T Fritzwire)

Why This Matters: McCarthy says most employers look for their newly-graduated hires to have work experience, many times in the fields they are applying to work in. This often means unpaid internships that, as we've already discussed, result in exclusion of those not born to priviledge.

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For Those in Poverty, Where You Live Matters

If you're looking to move from low to middle class, San Francisco is a better bet than New York, New York University's Patrick Sharkey said.

That is because San Francisco's neighborhoods are less clustered by income-level than New York City's, allowing lower income students access to higher quality schools and other economic opportunities.

Cities' wide-ranging economic segregation levels indicate state and local authorities need to fix economic mobility barriers, Sharkey said. America's land of opportunity cannot be fixed by a national solution alone.

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A RAND study found every $1 spent on prison education decreases incarceration costs by $4 to $5 "during the first three years after release," Courier-Post's Phil Dunn wrote. Video also via Dunn.

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David Brooks of The New York Times and E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post give you talking points on this week's biggest news.

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Unemployment Rate Drops to 7 Percent in November

From Reuters: “The unemployment rate dropped three tenths of a percentage point to its lowest level since November 2008 as some federal employees who were counted as jobless in October returned to work after a 16-day partial shutdown of the government.

The decline came even as the participation rate - the share of working-age Americans who either have a job or are looking for one - bounced back from October’s 35-1/2-year low.”

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More Spending + Higher Taxes = Less Inequality?

Dylan Matthews takes a look at which countries have the best spending and tax policies in place to keep low levels of inequality.

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A Book for Your Holiday Wish List

Jason Fagone wrote the book Ingenious about "about the X Prize Foundation’s $10 million competition to build a car that can travel 100 miles on a single gallon of gas," according to a Long Reads excerpt.

Why It Made My List: The competition was a way to level the playing field, Fagone said on the Long Form podcast. It didn't matter where you started, just what you produced to solve the problem.

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Economic Growth Isn't Driven By Low Fertility Rates

Education is driving economic growth in developing countries, a new study in Demography found.

"The new findings demonstrate the decisive role of investments in universal education in bringing countries out of poverty. These insights matter greatly for the ongoing international discussions around extensions of the Millenium Development Goals adopted by the United Nations," one of the study's authors told Phys.org.

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“There remains a serious academic debate about causation—does inequality cause low trust, or does low trust (or rather, low social solidarity) cause inequality, or are both the effects of some as yet undiscovered third variable?”

Robert Putnam said in Amy Davidson's The New Yorker article (H/T Wonkbook)

Putnam says this lack of trust matters because "A generation was not being put 'in a position to be contributing democratic citizens.' And that was, or could become, dangerous."

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The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American Dream, our way of life, and what we stand for around the globe. And it is not simply a moral claim that I’m making here. There are practical consequences to rising inequality and reduced mobility.

President Barack Obama said in a speech Dec. 3

Find out how rising inequality and reduced mobility hurt the economy, families and social cohesion, and democracy by reading the full text, available here.