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http://www.toomuchonline.org/articlenew2006/Oct2a.html
Perpetuating Inequality
Is opportunity the best antidote to inequality? Or can only equality create opportunity? Within education, a crucial debate may finally have begun.
October 2, 2006
Americans, apologists for inequality often argue, don’t really mind the awesome concentrations of private wealth that sit atop America’s economic ladder. They don't mind, the argument goes, because America offers opportunity.
Opportunity, Americans believe, starts with schools. Get an education and you can go anywhere. Study hard and you can do anything. So promises the American Dream.
Isabel Sawhill would like to believe that promise. The co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the prestigious Brookings Institution — and one of America’s most respected public policy analysts — Sawhill takes opportunity seriously. In an increasingly unequal United States, she believes, only opportunity can prevent American society from becoming “a poverty trap at the bottom and an enclave of wealth at the top.”
Sawhill and a team of distinguished social scientists have just released a massive new survey that explores the state of opportunity — and education — in the United States today. They reach a sobering conclusion. Education — the institution Americans expect to level our unequal playing field — may actually be doing more “to perpetuate” existing inequalities than compensate for them.
One huge reason: The United States is not investing as much in education and kids as other nations.
“Growing disparities in income and wealth in the United States would be less troubling if everyone had a decent chance to win the most valuable and coveted prizes,” Sawhill sums up. “The most important step the nation can take to make the competition fairer is to strengthen and reform the education system so that it compensates for differences in family background.”
What’s wrong with this picture? The September Phi Delta Kappan, the most influential journal within American education, offers an answer — from Robert Everhart, a veteran educator at Oregon’s Portland State University.
Everhart’s provocative essay — Why Are Schools Always Begging for Money? — sets out to explain America’s failure to invest adequately in education. He finds that explanation in America’s distinctly unequal distribution of income and wealth.
The more wealthy and powerful America’s wealthy have become, Everhart argues, the less they pay in taxes — and the more the tax burden shifts onto the shoulders of working families already stretched economically to the limit.
“The level of public support for school funding,” Everhart contends, “cannot be divorced from the patterns of income distribution in our nation.”
Everhart may have put his finger on the grand strategic choice that now faces advocates for quality public education. Should these advocates concentrate their efforts on increasing opportunity — or move to explicitly confront inequality straight-on?
Sawhill’s perspective, as outlined in a just published Brookings Institution policy brief, couldn’t be clearer. To address “the large income gaps that have recently opened up in American society,” she acknowledges, we could choose to directly confront inequality, via progressive taxes on society’s most comfortable and the generous social welfare programs that progressive taxes make possible.
Europeans have generally chosen just this course. But, writes Sawhill, that’s not “the American way.”
“What does fit with both U.S. culture and history,” she notes, “is using the educational system to enhance opportunity.”
No political leader in the United States today, of course, opposes using the educational system to enhance opportunity. Yet opportunity is not increasing. Recent international comparisons of intergenerational income mobility, as Sawhill notes, place the United States “near the bottom of the pack.” Education, simply out, is not delivering mobility.
Why? In Opportunity in America, Sawhill and her colleagues patiently trace how the absence of adequate financial resources, at every level from preschool through higher education, dooms kids from poor families to second-class status and privileges kids from the economic ladder’s upper rungs.
Researchers have shown, for instance, that quality preschool programs can help students score significant long-term academic gains. But quality programs, the research also indicates, don’t come cheap. They demand “highly qualified, well-paid teachers, a high ratio of teachers to children,” and participation by children “from an early age.”
A society committed to ensuring all kids real opportunity would make quality preschool programs available, first and foremost, to kids from disadvantaged backgrounds. But public bodies in the United States have not made the investments that would make quality preschool programs widely accessible to poor families.
Preschool attendance today, Sawhill points out, actually runs “higher among children from more advantaged families.” Their families can afford the expense.
In elementary and secondary education, meanwhile, quality demands qualified teachers and reasonable class sizes. Some local school districts can afford to fund this quality. Many others cannot. And in the United States, a nation where education remains a local and state funding responsibility, no one is seriously correcting the resulting imbalance.
The federal government, Sawhill notes, currently provides only 7 percent of the total dollars that fund public schools. Without significant federal support, where kids live determines the quality of the education they receive.
New York, Sawhill observes, “spent $10,957 per pupil during 1999–2000 while Mississippi spent $5,356,” a disparity hardly “consistent with the principle of equal educational opportunity.”
The disparities become, if anything, even more striking at the higher ed level. Students from less affluent families simply cannot afford to “navigate a very complex system.”
“In the nation’s top-ranking 25 percent of colleges,” observes Sawhill, “74 percent of students are from the highest socioeconomic quartile, while only 3 percent are from the lowest quartile.”
All these disparities, taken together, systematically undermine economic mobility. The United States “fares poorly” in international mobility comparisons, Sawhill notes, in no small part because “other advanced countries provide greater public financing of education at all levels.”
But why the low U.S. rate of investment in education? Do Americans value education less than peoples in other advanced nations?
Robert Everhart makes this question the core of his analysis. He seeks to unravel the paradox that defines contemporary American education: Americans, by wide margins, insist to pollsters they want high-quality schools. Yet Americans, today more than yesterday, resist paying the freight that high-quality education requires.
Inequality, Everhart contends, can help us solve this paradox. America’s shifting distribution of income and wealth — from working families to rich ones — has created a thorough-going “economic uncertainty” that leaves middle- and low-income Americans indisposed to voting schools the dollars they need.
Since the late 1960s, Everhart notes, 80 percent of Americans have seen no increase whatsover in their real incomes. At the same time, those who have seen significant increases in income have also been paying taxes at strikingly lower rates. One example: A third of recent federal tax cuts have gone to the richest 1 percent of taxpayers.
The corporations whose executives make up large chunks of this top 1 percent have seen their tax burden fall even more steeply. In Everhart’s Oregon, for instance, corporations supplied 45 percent of state property tax revenue in 1970, only 16 percent in 2000.
Figures like these, says Everhart, can “shed light on why so many middle- and lower-class citizens feel beleaguered.” The “economic uncertainty so many experience,” he adds, “makes it unlikely that they will vote for increased taxes for schools, even though they say they support high-quality schools.”
For many of these hard-pressed families, America’s traditional opportunity narrative — work hard, study hard, and succeed — comes across as increasingly hollow. More and more Americans, Everhart notes, have come to trust more in Powerball than education. In Oregon, he marvels, the annual total spent on gambling now averages “an almost unbelievable figure of $450 for each adult in the state.”
A system of public education that “relies for support on the large percentage of the population that is more and more a marginal beneficiary of a highly stratified economic system,” Everhart posits, will never sit securely.
Only equality, Everhart’s work suggests, can make inequality “less troubling.” Only equality, in the end, can create opportunity.
MORE:
The New Inequality Engine
http://www.toomuchonline.org/articlenew2006/Nov27a.html
Can Learning Make Us Less Unequal?
http://www.toomuchonline.org/articlenew2007/Feb12a.html |
_________________
http://www.toomuchonline.org/index.html
http://www.hr676.org
http://www.pnhp.org/publications/the_national_health_insurance_bill_hr_676.php |
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Tue Jul 15, 2008 1:20 pm |
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Demeralda
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I'm no model lady. A model's just an imitation of the real thing. - Mae West |
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Tue Jul 15, 2008 1:39 pm |
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Dave Starr
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| I'm glad to see you said all they need, and not all they want. |
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I used to care, but I take a pill for that now.
Pushing buttons sure can be fun.
When a lion wants to go somewhere, he doesn’t worry about how many hyenas are in the way.
Paddle faster, I hear banjos. |
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Tue Jul 15, 2008 1:42 pm |
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