Diversity and Distrust Revisited

Thanks primarily to the wackier GOP candidates for President (okay, that’s virtually all of them), we’re seeing a recurrence of socially divisive arguments about “political correctness,” abortion, religion and immigration–and an elevation, in unfortunate and not-so-veiled forms, of America’s racist impulses.

I was pondering our current unlovely public discourse, with its rejection of “otherness,” when my eyes fell on my bookshelf, and on Stephen Macedo’s 2000 book, Diversity and Distrust. The book was a meditation on the important civic role played by public schools in multi-ethnic societies like ours. I leafed through it to see where I’d highlighted observations (something that’s harder to do on a Kindle app), and I thought I’d share a few of them:

American public schools have been, in many ways, where the tension between diversity and the felt need to promote shared values has played out most dramatically. This institution has, from its inception, been the principal direct public instrument for creating a shared political culture amid religious, racial, ethnic and class diversity.

..some of the the most basic and widely discussed conflicts around public schools have been the consequence of religious opposition to basic civic ideals.

The [common/public school] was meant to pursue a novel set of civic ends: consolidation under public aegises was essential to the institution’s civic agenda.

The proponents of many orthodoxies, especially perhaps integral and totalistic belief systems, will not be happy with educational institutions that include all of the children within a pluralistic community. We cannot pursue shared civic ends without making it harder for the proponents of some moral and religious doctrines to perpetuate their views.

Macedo’s book was a full-throated–and persuasive– defense of the importance of public education in a diverse democratic country.

In Indiana, we’ve turned our backs on the civic mission of the schools, bowing to the demands of those who value particularist dogma, privatization, interest group politics and profits above the need to create and perpetuate a common American culture based upon our particular (and yes, in that sense “exceptional”) historical and legal commitments.

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Perpetuating Inequality

The Washington Post’s Wonkblog recently reported on an education experiment in Ft. Lauderdale that holds so many lessons—not just about inequality, but about institutional and unintentional racism, the waste of human capital, and the difficulty of seeing things that lie outside our comfortable worldviews.

In 2003, Cynthia Park asked her staff to make a map showing where every gifted student lived in Broward County, Fla.

The result was an atlas of inequality.

“All of them were scattered in the suburbs and in the wealthier communities, where parents were more involved in education,” recalls Park, who oversaw the county’s gifted students program. “The map was virtually void in other areas.”

The map convinced Park that the district needed to work harder to identify gifted children from impoverished areas, and in 2005, it began giving a short test to all students in the second grade. Children who scored well on the test were then evaluated to determine whether they should be enrolled in the system’s gifted program.

The result? The district identified an additional 300 gifted children between 2005 and 2006—and the impact on racial equity was huge: 80 percent more black students and 130 percent more Hispanic students were now entering gifted programs in third grade.

Prior to this change in the method for identifying precocious children, the school district had relied upon referrals by teachers—a system used by many, if not most, school districts around the country. (Not, I am pleased to report, in IPS, which uses a system similar to the one in Ft. Lauderdale.) And therein lies the problem. As the Wonkblog notes

Critics say gifted programs amplify inequality because they disproportionately recruit children from high-income families — another example of how opportunity accrues to those already blessed with opportunity.

This is a perfect example of how systemic bias operates.

People who dismiss the notion of structural racism or advantage do so because they see bias as intentional, and success or failure solely as a measure of individual effort and/or merit. They look around and no one is burning a cross on that black family’s lawn, or otherwise displaying hurtful antisocial behavior, so they draw the (not-unreasonable albeit inaccurate) conclusion that bias is absent.

The Ft. Lauderdale teachers who failed to identify precocious poor children weren’t bigots—they wouldn’t have been in those classrooms, working with poor children, if they were. But like most of us, they’d been socialized to connect intellectual capacity with certain markers of behavior—markers that children from disadvantaged families are less likely to exhibit.

A similar phenomenon occurs when businesses have job openings. Positions tend to be filled via “networking.” The word gets out to people already in those networks, who mention the opportunity to their friends, and to people with whom they feel comfortable. People who look and sound and act like them. It isn’t intentionally nefarious—it’s human. It’s the way the world works.

But in the aggregate, these otherwise innocent social networks operate to keep advantage where it is, and to exclude access to those whose talents and abilities are less recognized, because they are expressed differently. These are the “old boy’s networks” that continue to constrain women’s progress, the continuing friendships of alumni from elite schools disproportionately populated by the offspring of wealthy families, and the many other “communities of interest”—professional or social—where, as the old saying goes, “birds of a feather flock together.”

America cannot afford to lose the contributions of talented citizens simply because that talent comes in unfamiliar forms. We need to break through the barriers that keep us from seeing each other accurately. The Ft. Lauderdale approach is one small step in that direction.

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Producing Educated Citizens–or Worker Bees?

A recent, lengthy post at Talking Points Memo blames conservatives, liberals and accrediting agencies for a decline in the excellence of American higher education–a decline that is widely remarked upon.

First comes conservatives seeking a corporate transformation or restructuring of higher education. One option comes through the rise of for-profit private colleges, offering a game plan of expensive tuition and pricey administrators, delivered mostly with low cost adjunct professors in often cookie-cutter, interchangeable curriculum delivered online.

This is Fordism coming to higher education… The other option is traditional schools adopting this model; employing business leaders to run schools and developing cost containment policies aimed mostly at standardizing curriculum. It is top-down decision-making premised upon treating faculty no differently than an assembly line worker….The result: a market-driven product devoid of innovation, creativity, and intellectual challenge.

Liberals come second, often joined by religious conservatives, bent on enforcing political correctness on campus and in producing a curriculum that offends no one. Captured in the Atlantic by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their article “The Coddling of the American Mind,” there is a push to insulate students from ideas and words that they do not like. Across the country schools are adopting policies demanding trigger warnings or alerting faculty to forms of microaggression that students find objectionable. The result is not only an erosion of academic freedom but a curriculum that is uninteresting and devoid of learning.

Finally comes the accrediting agencies who have taken the assessment lessons from K-12 and are imposing them on higher education. They demand schools measure and test students and curriculum by developing a complex process of goals, objectives, rubrics.

I would add to these indictments a more foundational issue: until we reach agreement on what we mean by education, we will never be able to focus on the question of how best to provide it.

Far too many “education reformers” at all levels fail to recognize the fundamental difference between genuine education and job training–between intellectual flowering and the inculcation of skills needed by the marketplace. It doesn’t help that state legislatures and Commissions on Higher Education focus on graduation rates and  employment metrics to the exclusion of all else.

Evidently, if you can’t count it, it doesn’t count.

It’s probably heresy for a Professor to say this, but not every high school graduate is a candidate for college. There is nothing wrong with job training–it’s important and entirely legitimate– and such training can meet the needs of a number of students. If we were to reserve the university experience for young people who display intellectual curiosity, a capacity for serious scholarship and/or a demonstrable passion for the life of the mind, both the institutions and their graduates would benefit.

As a bonus, we could trim those bloated administrations, disabuse ourselves of the notion that educational institutions should be “run like businesses,” and stop coddling students who demand protection against ideas they find threatening.

Ideas can be right or wrong, comforting or offensive–but to find any idea “threatening” is a signal that one is unfit to be educated.

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Playing “What If”

The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required) recently published an essay written with my former Graduate Assistant. Hey–if you’re going to dream, might as well dream big….Anyway, here’s our original draft, appropriate for a Sunday Sermon.

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Americans are increasingly concerned about two seemingly unrelated issues: a distressing lack of civic literacy and informed civic engagement among the general public, and the escalating burden of student loan debt.

We could make significant progress on both of these issues with a new G.I. Bill.

In the wake of World War II, Congress passed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the G.I. Bill. It provided a wide range of benefits for returning veterans, including subsidies that allowed G.I.’s to obtain low-cost mortgages, low-interest loans that could be used to start a business, cash payments of tuition and living expenses to attend a university or vocational training program. All soldiers who had been on active duty during the war for at least one hundred twenty days and had not been dishonorably discharged were eligible. By 1956, estimates were that roughly 2.2 million veterans had used the G.I. Bill education benefits in order to attend college, and an additional 5.6 million had used them to obtain job training of some sort.

The G.I. Bill was expensive, but by all accounts it was a major political, humanitarian and economic success. It contributed significantly to the creation of a skilled workforce, moved thousands of people into the middle class, and was a spur to long-term economic growth.

The G.I. Bill was originally an effort to reward those who had manifested a willingness to risk their lives for their country, but it has had a number of other salutary consequences: it raised the skill level of the American workforce and provided an avenue for social mobility.

Defending the United States is an important goal, but military service is only one aspect of that defense. It is equally important that citizens understand just what it is that our military is protecting. Citizenship is more than residence; patriotism requires informed engagement by people who have earned the right to be considered citizens. Survival of America qua America is not the same thing as physical survival.

To put it bluntly, there is more than one way to lose one’s country.

If we are to provide that second kind of defense—defense of the American system of law and government—we require a civically educated populace, and it is increasingly obvious that current patchwork efforts to boost civic literacy are not producing that populace.

Our proposal builds on the laudable efforts of others—including, recently, General Stanley McChrystal– who have called for a renewal of national service. It’s important to challenge the notion that military service is the only way to serve one’s country. While military service has been shown to significantly increase voting rates and other forms of civic engagement, fewer Americans serve in the military than in past generations, and we need to consider what sorts of national programmatic efforts might begin to change the civic culture.

We propose a National Service program for high school graduates who would be paid minimum wage during a one year “tour of duty.” At the end of that year, assuming satisfaction of the requirements, participants would receive stipends sufficient to pay tuition, room and board for two years at a public college or trade school. The public service requirement would be satisfied through employment with a government agency or not-for-profit organization focused upon civic improvement.

In addition, students would be required to attend and pass a civics course to be developed by the U.S. Department of Education in cooperation with the Campaign for the Civic Mission of the Schools.

What sorts of outcomes might we expect from such a program? Since the program is likely to be most attractive to those struggling to afford higher education, we could expect broader civic participation from populations whose voices are largely missing from today’s civic conversation. A better-educated population should engage in better, more nuanced policy debates, leading (hopefully) to more thoughtful policy choices. We might even see more meaningful and issue-oriented political campaigns, with fewer of the “dog whistles” and less of the intemperate rhetoric that characterizes messages crafted to appeal to uninformed voters.

A program of this sort would also have an enormous and positive impact on the level of student debt.

According to a 2014 report by the New York Times, total student loans outstanding have risen to $1.1 trillion, compared with $300 billion just a decade before. The average total debt for student borrowers was around $30,000 in 2013.

Student debt has thus become a significant impediment to America’s economic growth.

Studies show that the burden of student debt constrains individual decision-making in a number of ways, and affects the entire economy. People with student loans, for example, are less likely to start businesses. Considering that 60 percent of jobs are created by small business, diminishing the ability to create new businesses does considerable harm to the economy.

Debt loads also affect overall consumer consumption. According to research by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, fewer 30-year-olds in general have bought homes since the recession, but the decline has been steeper for people with a history of student loan debt and has continued even as the housing market has recovered.

In an economy that depends upon the ability and willingness of consumers to purchase homes, furniture, automobiles and other goods, a debt load that effectively precludes such purchases poses a real problem. According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, three-quarters of the overall shortfall in household formation can be attributed to younger adults ages 18 to 34. In 2011, 2 million more Americans in this age group lived with their parents than in 2007.

According to a recent report from Zillow, the relatively few millennials who are thriving economically are the ones whose parents are able to subsidize college tuition or a down payment on a home. Help with education and buying a home were the two primary ways in which the original G.I. Bill created upward social mobility. Estimates are that each new household formed leads to $145,000 of economic impact. If student debt is keeping just a third of those 2 million young Americans from living on their own, that adds up to a $100 billion loss or delay in economic activity.

The G.I. Bill was a social contract that said if you invest in your country’s future, your country will invest in yours.

A national public service program of the sort contemplated here would significantly reduce student loan debt, increase civic competence, and provide local communities with additional human capital— resources they can deploy to improve the quality of local life. (Kalamazoo, Michigan, where a local program has been providing subsidies for college tuition to high school graduates since 2005, the city has seen a 4.7 dollar return for every dollar invested, according to a recent Upjohn Institute Study.)

In addition to the economic benefits, a national program encouraging increased civic knowledge and engagement would also move the culture, since an informed citizenry with experience in civic life can be expected to vote, volunteer and engage at substantially higher levels.

The real question is: do we Americans still have the ability to think big?

 

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Faux History For God

I’ve often repeated Pat Moynahan’s famous adage: we are all entitled to our own opinions, but not to our own facts.

I stand corrected.

In Texas (where else?), “educators” unsatisfied with actual American history have responded by creating their own. Because God.

Did you have any idea that our first President believed that government required God and the Bible in order to function? And are you familiar with the following quote from President Ronald Reagan? “Within the covers of the Bible are the answers for all the problems men face.”  Chances are you haven’t heard of either of these – because they’re both fiction. George Washington is better categorized as a Deist (rather than a traditional Christian), and Reagan never made such a statement about the Bible.

It’s part of a strange indoctrination strategy at a small school district in eastern Texas. On the walls of the school hallways and classrooms are many such alleged “passages” from the Bible and “statements” attributed to prominent figures in American history that all are inaccurate, misquoted, taken out of context, and even made up out of whole cloth.

The school’s practice of inventing “suitably” pious quotations with which to indoctrinate children came to light after a letter from the Freedom From Religion Foundation challenged the quotations.  According to the organization’s attorney Samuel Grover:

“The district cannot even fall back on the argument that these quotes have educational merit, given the many examples of misquotes, misattributions, and entirely fraudulent quotes displayed on its walls…The district sets a poor example for its students if it cannot be bothered to fact check the messages it chooses to endorse.”

With all due respect, I don’t think the problem was “failure to fact check.” I think the problem was the readiness of dishonest people to invent a history that would be more consistent with their religious preferences than that pesky thing called reality….

I guess they missed that place in the Ten Commandments about “bearing false witness.”

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