Editors' Note: This piece has been corrected.

In the 1990s, federal homeownership policy shifted from making homeownership available to the middle class to subsidizing homeownership for almost everyone. In the process, renters were implicitly denigrated and federal spending allocated to support them fell. The push for homeownership began under President Bill Clinton and reached a crescendo under President George W. Bush and his ownership society. Bush's Department of Housing and Urban Development ostensibly continued Clinton-era goals for homeownership, with an added emphasis on closing the racial gap.

A University of Chicago study has found that girls may be learning math anxiety from female teachers who have qualms about their own math skills. Sian L. Beilock, an associate professor in psychology, and her colleagues studied students of both sexes in the classes of 17 different teachers, most of whom were women, and found that the female students of the female teachers who thought they were not good at math were more likely to agree by the end of the year that boys were better at it. Those girls also scored worse on math tests.