The Third Pillar
Page 29
Both James Coleman and James Heckman emphasize the importance of family education and environment for a child’s subsequent learning. Smart, well-educated parents will likely give their children the necessary head start and continuing support that researchers believe is important for learning. Furthermore, Coleman’s work suggests that the better the caliber of other students in school, the better an entering student’s learning experience. So keeping other things constant, the more that other children in the school come from homes with smart, well-educated parents, the better the child’s educational experience will be.
Montgomery County in Maryland, where my children went to school, has affordable public housing to which poor families are assigned by lottery. Over the period from 2001 to 2007, Heather Schwartz examined the performance of students from disadvantaged backgrounds who attended the district’s most advantaged district elementary schools (in the sense of having the fewest children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds) and found they far outperformed in math and reading those children in public housing who attended the district’s least-advantaged district elementary schools.18 She also found that lower poverty in the neighborhood where students lived enhanced their performance, but only about half as much as the school effect.
So if we had a highly educated couple with substantial incomes looking for the best public schooling for their only child, what would they do? Obviously, they would visit every school within fifty miles of their workplace, trying to gauge which one worked best (they are young competitive parents, after all!). Almost surely, they would end up choosing a school in a neighborhood with other upper-middle-class parents like themselves. The high incomes in the neighborhood would ensure almost every family would give its children the head start that Heckman finds so important to life chances; a class full of such students would learn more academically, with students challenging one another to do better; and there would be few laggards to hold everyone back and occupy the teacher’s attention. For such reasons, choosy parents would typically move to the highest-income school district they could afford to live in.
The data are consistent with such choices. Residential segregation by incomes has increased over the last four decades in the United States, even as the ICT revolution has increased the wage premium associated with capabilities. The proportion of families living in neighborhoods with median incomes well above (1.5 times) or well below (0.67 times) the median income of their metropolitan area has grown rapidly since 1970.19 In 1970, only 15 percent of all families lived in such neighborhoods, while 65 percent lived in middle‐income neighborhoods. By 2012, 34 percent of all families lived in either rich or poor neighborhoods, more than double the percentage in 1970. Over the same time period, the proportion living in middle‐income neighborhoods declined from 65 percent to 40 percent. Moreover, sociologist Ann Owens finds that such income segregation (that is, neighborhoods sorting by income) increases only for families with children, with it changing little for families without children.20 This suggests that a big factor in residential sorting is parental desire for good schools for their children.
Neither family background nor community are dispositive. There are plenty of spoiled rich children who make little use of their good fortune, and plenty of children from families with modest resources who succeed despite the odds—two of the United States’s recent presidents came from households of moderate means headed by single women (their successors, however, came from millionaire families). Furthermore, academic learning is not the only purpose of school; school, as John Dewey wrote, is also about preparing the child for the kind of society we want. All this is true, but beside the point. In a meritocracy, capabilities matter. As a general tendency, those with higher incomes will also be better educated and be able to give their children a better head start. So if the couple wants the best for their child in the job market of tomorrow, they should follow the money today. And they typically do. The responsibility to family proves stronger than the ties of community!
As more leave, the mixed community becomes even less attractive for the remaining upper-middle-class parents, even those who harbor a strong sense of community. With the middle class and lower middle class left behind, it is not surprising that the middle class would also start leaving the original community. Soon, the classes sort into different communities, as the data suggest.
Commentators like David Brooks, Christopher Lasch, Edward Luce, Charles Murray, and Robert Putnam have all noted such residential sorting in the United States, which greatly weakens less-well-off communities.21 Less central to their narratives are the economic forces that drive the sorting. Sorting does not seem to have occurred because of some breakdown in egalitarianism and growing elite distaste for the company of the rest but more likely because of parental concern for children and their success, an economic consequence of our more meritocratic and capability-demanding economies. As we have seen repeatedly through history, the demands of the market weaken the community. We are all becoming amorally familial (as in Banfield’s dysfunctional Montegrano).
Importantly, none of this sorting would happen if the less-well-off could follow the better-off into their enclaves. There would be no escaping the mixed, integrated community. In the United States, the price of housing, maintained at a high level by zoning laws that effectively limit the construction of low-income housing, keeps the unwanted lower classes out of a higher-class neighborhood or out of a desirable city. Conversely, in declining communities hit by trade, we have seen that the better-educated management workers move out, accelerating the decline in the remaining community. The net effect of all this is that in an economy that increasingly requires workers with stronger capabilities, access to acquiring capabilities has become highly unequal, with the children of those who already have strong capabilities more likely to secure them, and the children of those with modest capabilities unlikely to have much hope for their children. The market has subverted the community’s role in providing equal access by creating unequal communities. We have moved toward a hereditary meritocracy.
SOME RELATED ISSUES IN LEARNING
None of the forces I have described are specific to the United States. They are a natural consequence of the technology-created need for capabilities, and the greater ability of richer families to move to acquire them. Only countries where housing is broadly affordable across the country, public transport is available and inexpensive, and public schools are well funded, can avoid the residential sorting by incomes that is the source of resentment. Some countries in Europe have such conditions, many do not.
There are ways some of this sorting can be mitigated. For the smart kid from a poor family, charter schools or scholarships offer the possibility of getting the same opportunities that richer kids get. It seems cruel to deny that child the opportunity, yet some well-meaning advocates would do that because when that bright child leaves, it further depletes the environment in the public school they were attending. Similarly, some public schooling systems create special classes or schools for the bright. In England, bright students are tracked into grammar schools at age eleven. A study finds that the performance of those who get into the grammar schools improves significantly by age sixteen, but the average performance of those left behind deteriorates so that such streaming has little overall effect.22 Once again, such tracking helps the educational experience of the tracked at the expense of the rest. Even as I write, there is a raging debate in New York public schools because some schools have tried to assure higher preparedness and thus learning in their classrooms by instituting admission tests. Ultimately, the question is not whether a few poor smart kids should bear the brunt of society’s failure to create adequate access for all, but how society as a whole will remedy this failure.
THE EFFECTS OF RACE AND IMMIGRATION ON SORTING
Any discussion of residential sorting, and city to suburb and back to city movements, in the United States has to also account for race. The changing situat
ion of the historically disadvantaged African Americans has exacerbated the movements associated with everyone’s desire for stronger capabilities for their children.
In the early 1950s, African Americans were still restricted to separate but unequal schools, where funding was significantly lower than in schools elsewhere. In the southern United States, where African Americans and whites lived side-by-side, schools were explicitly segregated. In the North and the West, where African Americans lived in segregated neighborhoods, segregation occurred de facto.
The law became the lever with which to change society. As challenges mounted against segregated and poorly resourced schools, in 1954 in Brown versus Board of Education the Supreme Court ruled that formal segregation in public schools violated the right to equal protection. The fight to integrate schools now had legal sanction. The passage of the National Defense Education Act in 1958 and President Lyndon Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965 as part of his War on Poverty boosted federal funding for education tremendously. As this opened a pathway for the federal government into local school districts, courts began using the lever of federal education subsidies to implement district-wide desegregation programs.
Even as the government increased its intervention, the student body in many schools became less diverse. The reason was simple: As more disadvantaged minorities were admitted into public schools, the white parents who could, moved their children out. The share of minority students in schools that have over 90 percent minority children decreased after the Civil Rights movement through much of the United States, but has climbed back up since.23 In the Northeast, it never decreased, and by this measure, the liberal Northeast is the most segregated region in the United States today. It is easy to ascribe such actions to racism, and some of it indeed was. However, we should not dismiss economic fears of the kind outlined earlier—that the children coming from disadvantaged backgrounds would hold back upper-middle-class children. The problem was not necessarily the race of the students, it was that the move from separate and unequal schools to integrated schools was bound to be disruptive for all if the minority students were not given a chance and the means to catch up first.
The urban African American community itself experienced a loss of economic diversity when the Civil Rights movement made it easier for middle-class African Americans to move elsewhere. Sociologist William Junius Wilson argues in his seminal book The Truly Disadvantaged that the deteriorating social conditions of the poor urban black community in the 1970s and 1980s—with rising teenage pregnancies, an increase in single-parent (typically headed by women) families, exploding substance abuse, youth crime, and incarceration—is hard to understand, since this followed the successes of the Civil Rights movement. Wilson argues that even with the debilitating legacy of slavery and racism, black families and communities in the 1950s were not any less stable or supportive than similarly positioned white ones. Indeed, even though segregation was devastating in its overall economic effect, it kept the community together, much as we have already seen with the Quakers during the Industrial Revolution.
Talented and capable black teachers, for example, with few attractive outside opportunities, were a boon to underfunded African American schools, making them in effect somewhat less unequal. Wilson argues that a better explanation than the deleterious consequences of expanded welfare programs or racism for the social breakdown of black urban communities are two important factors. First is the loss of well-paying urban factory jobs in the big northern cities in the 1970s and 1980s, which disproportionately constituted the good stable jobs for the black community. Second is the departure of the black middle class from urban ghettos.
The first reduced job opportunities for black urban youth, who found it harder to switch to service jobs. It also put economic pressure on black families as breadwinners lost their jobs. As men lose access to steady decent-paying manufacturing jobs and become less-reliable earners, they become less-attractive marriage partners. Women might be more inclined to have children without marrying if marriage means tying themselves to a husband who may not be dependable. A reduction in job opportunities for men tends, therefore, to increase the percentage of unmarried mothers, as well as of children living in single-parent households. Interestingly, while Wilson offered this explanation for the social breakdown of poor black urban communities starting in the 1970s, recent studies document a similar social breakdown in the largely white semirural communities that we discussed in the last chapter.24 Once again, albeit with a gap of a quarter of a century or so, the reason seems to be economic, as manufacturing jobs have disappeared because of trade and automation.25 Without stable families, communities are greatly weakened. Too many men, without the anchor of family and responsibility, have turned to substance abuse and crime, resulting in an early hopeless death, both in the black community that Wilson analyzed, and in white semirural communities today. Community breakdown is hard to reverse—which makes it much harder for people to pick up again when economic activity returns.
With their stable jobs, the black middle class could have supported local stores with their custom, local institutions like schools with their volunteering and engagement, and served as exemplars for the young. They could have provided the networks that connected poorer youth to jobs. As outright racism and segregation diminished, though, they found they could move into jobs and communities that better matched their talents and socioeconomic aspirations, and move they did. While understandable, this left the urban black community poorer still.
None of this is to diminish the possible consequences of racism. The African American community still has too few of the opportunities other communities in the United States have. However, some of its disabilities may be economic rather than social, and may be more amenable to remedies, especially when the ailments it experiences are recognized to be more widespread.
Immigrants, especially unskilled ones, typically find they can afford to live only in poorer, working-class communities. It is striking how the earlier debate about the entry of minorities into neighborhoods in the United States and the anxiety it caused is now being replayed in the ongoing debate in Europe (and the United States) about the entry of immigrants and the tensions that arise. We will return to this shortly.
THE LOSS OF LOCAL CONTROL AND THE DECLINE IN SCHOOL QUALITY
In the United States, sorting by economic class into communities has had its effects on local control of schools, parental engagement, and ultimately once again, the quality of schooling. In the rich suburbs, the upper-middle-class parents still engaged with their public school, supporting it with their time and money. Local boards were significantly more empowered in such areas and schools reflected local needs. Parents truly did care about community, except it was a community of their own kind.
In communities where parents were poorer, less educated, and less able to engage, and where the state and federal government provided more funding, the federal and state educational establishment gained more power. With the loss of local control, the community outside the school also became less supportive. An increase in government funding was sometimes partly offset by a diminution of local funding. Some districts became unwilling to increase local property taxes to keep pace with the increasing requirements and costs of education. When asked by Ohio Public Radio why rural voters did not approve increased tax levies from the 1970s through the 2010s, some voters replied the teachers were already overpaid, and the schools were run by “elitist bureaucrats” while another acknowledged that “the trust is broken,” and “it goes back to when several local districts were consolidated.”26
One consequence of broken trust was the increasingly ugly political battle over what was taught in schools. Parents and the educational establishment fought over the teaching of evolution, sex education, feminism, and novels such as Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. With parents and teachers angry or disengaged, the overall
educational experience of their children suffered.
In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration tasked the National Commission on Excellence in Education to assess the quality of schools. In its widely read report entitled A Nation at Risk, the commission asserted, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.” It deplored “the rising tide of mediocrity” in schools, as “more and more young people [graduated] from high school ready neither for college nor for work.”27 Much of this is still true today.
The United States used to have the best publicly funded school system in the world, strengthened by community engagement and involvement. The pressure of the market, both in terms of the availability of local jobs and of residential sorting, has broken the economically integrated community. The quality of US schools is now much more varied, denying many students the equal opportunity that is central to the stability of American capitalism. All youth, by and large, got a chance at the same education. Now, they do not. No wonder their parents are angry.