The Meritocracy Trap

by Daniel Markovits

  The differences grow as the children get older: among eight- to twelve-year-olds, rich children spend roughly twelve and a half fewer hours per week using screen media than poor children and roughly seven fewer hours per week than middle-class children, and for thirteen- to eighteen-year-olds, the rich/poor and rich/middle-class differences rise to seventeen and eleven hours respectively. Among eight- to twelve-year-olds, those with a parental income of less than $35,000 spend five hours and thirty-two minutes per day using screen media, those with a parental income between $35,000 and $99,999 spend four hours and thirty-two minutes per day using screen media, and those with a parental income greater than $100,000 spend three hours and forty-six minutes per day using screen media. For students ages thirteen to eighteen, those numbers rise to eight hours and seven minutes, six hours and thirty-one minutes, and five hours and forty-two minutes respectively. “Fact Sheet: Digital Equity Gaps—The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens,” Common Sense Media (2015), Table 2, www.commonsensemedia.org/research/the-common-sense-census-media-use-by-tweens-and-teens.

  This comes as no surprise, as rich adults watch nearly four fewer hours each week than poor adults. For adults, daily television viewing for those in middle socioeconomic positions ranged from 170 to 200 minutes per day, while for those in the highest socioeconomic position, it ranged from 140 to 160 minutes per day. E. Stamatakis et al., “Television Viewing and Other Screen-Based Entertainment in Relation to Multiple Socioeconomic Status Indicators and Area Deprivation: The Scottish Health Survey 2003,” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 60 (2009): 737, Figure 2. Murray reports that the average American watches 35 hours of TV per week, while elites barely watch at all. Murray, Coming Apart, 27. Murray cites Nielsen data for average TV viewing, “State of the Media TV Usage Trends, Q2 2010,” Nielsen, November 18, 2010, www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2010/state-of-the-media-tv-usage-trends-q2-2010.html, and Trish Gorely, Simon Marshall, and Stuart Biddle, “Couch Kids: Correlates of Television Viewing Among Youth,” International Journal of Behavioral Medicine 11, no. 3 (2004): 152–56, for elite viewing.

  professional chefs to tutor him: See Katy McLaughlin, “Haute Home Schools Designed to Give Kids a Bespoke Education,” Wall Street Journal, February 18, 2016, accessed November 18, 2018, www.wsj.com/articles/haute-home-schools-designed-to-give-kids-a-bespoke-education-1455807796. Hereafter cited as McLaughlin, “Haute Home Schools Designed to Give Kids a Bespoke Education.”

  his own catering business: McLaughlin, “Haute Home Schools Designed to Give Kids a Bespoke Education.”

  341,300 students in 1965: Allan C. Ornstein, “The Growing Popularity of Private Schools,” The Clearing House 63, no. 5 (January 1990): 210.

  1.4 million today: “Private School Enrollment,” National Center for Education Statistics (May 2016), https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cgc.asp. The upward trend, moreover, continues. Enrollment increased by more than 15 percent between just the 1995–96 and 2011–12 school years. Enrollment statistics for 2011–12 are available at “Private School Universe Survey 2011–2012,” National Center for Education Statistics (2012), https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pss/tables/table_2011_02.asp; the 1995–96 statistics are available at “Private School Universe Survey 1995–1996,” National Center for Education Statistics (1998), https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=98229.

  The general population, by contrast, grew by a factor of just 1.66. The U.S. population has grown from 194.3 million in 1965 to 323 million in 2016. “Annual Estimates of the Resident Population: April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2016,” American Fact Finder: United States Census Bureau (2016), https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml; “Population in the U.S.,” Google: Public Data, www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=kf7tgg1uo9ude_&met_y=population&idim=country:US.

  $50,000 per child: As recently as 2000, so few rich students were homeschooled that the Department of Education did not even collect data on them. By 2012, 1.6 percent of homeschooled students came from households with annual incomes above $100,000. McLaughlin, “Haute Home Schools Designed to Give Kids a Bespoke Education.”

  make less than $50,000: The precise rates are 26 percent and 6 percent respectively. Jed Kolko, “Where Private School Enrollment Is Highest and Lowest Across the U.S.,” City Lab, August 13, 2014, www.citylab.com/housing/2014/08/where-private-school-enrollment-is-highest-and-lowest-across-the-us/375993/. Another study reports that 18 percent of children from the richest fifth of households attend private schools, compared to 9 percent of children from the next two-fifths and just 4 percent of children from the bottom two-fifths. Reeves, Dream Hoarders, 47. For the purposes of this study, private schools included parochial schools, and data came from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 Senior Class of 2004 First Follow-Up survey, National Center for Education Statistics.

  only 7 percent from the bottom half: For a compilation of these data, see Michael T. Owyang and E. Katarina Vermann, “Measuring the Effect of School Choice on Economic Outcomes,” Regional Economist, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (October 2012). The study bases its calculations on data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

  from the top 4 percent of the income distribution: Ruben A. Gaztambide-Fernandez, The Best of the Best: Becoming Elite at an American Boarding School (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 35. The author cites a now-defunct blog article at Patrick F. Bassett, “Bassett Blog: Affordability and the Family Ford,” NAIS eBulletin, April 2006, www.nais.org/about/article.cfm?ItemNumber=148304&sn.ItemNumber=4181&tn.ItemNumber=147271 [inactive]. Hereafter cited as Bassett, “Affordability and the Family Ford.”

  Only 30 percent of the students at the schools conventionally thought of as “elite boarding schools”—a group of twenty-eight schools that collectively enroll over fifteen thousand students—get any financial aid. Ruben Gaztambide-Fernandez, “What Is an Elite Boarding School?,” Review of Educational Research 79, no. 3 (September 2009): 1098–99, Table 1. And even financial aid recipients are overwhelmingly rich: the National Association of Independent Schools’ Trendbook reports that “there are nearly five times more families in the top 20 percent of family incomes who received need-based aid in 2015–16 than there were families in the bottom 20 percent.” Mark Mitchell, “Are Low-Income Families Being Squeezed Out of Independent Schools?,” The Independent School Magazine Blog, September 28, 2015, accessed November 18, 2018, www.nais.org/learn/independent-ideas/september-2015/are-low-income-families-being-squeezed-out-of-inde/. The association estimates that a family needs an annual household income greater than $200,000 to afford its schools without support. Bassett, “Affordability and the Family Ford.” Indeed, financial aid sometimes goes to students from households with incomes as high as $300,000. Paul Sullivan, “For Boarding Schools, an Evolving Financial Aid Philosophy,” New York Times, March 14, 2014, accessed November 18, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2014/03/15/your-money/for-boarding-schools-an-evolving-financial-aid-philosophy.html. See “Who Gets Financial Aid,” Groton School, www.groton.org/page/admission/who-gets-financial-aid, for an example of an independent school in which families with incomes above $300,000 are eligible to receive financial aid based on a combination of income, assets, debt, and other expenses.

  Small student/teacher ratios—7:1: Even as enrollments at nonsectarian private schools grew, for example, student/teacher ratios at these schools declined between 1995 and 2012, from 9:1 to 7:1. See “Private School Universe Survey 1995–96,” and “Private School Universe Survey 2011–2012.”

  16:1 in public schools: The average student/teacher ratio at public schools nationwide, by contrast, is 16:1, and average class sizes are 21 in elementary schools and 27 in secondary schools. The reported ratios are for 2013 and the reported class sizes are for the 2011–12 academic year. “Fast Facts,” National Center for Education Statistics, https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28.

  A student tour g
uide: Conversation with author.

  for 90,000 more: “About,” Phillips Exeter Academy, www.exeter.edu/academics/library/about; “An Open Book,” The Exeter Bulletin, Winter 2006, www.exeter.edu/documents/Exeter_Bulletin/An_Open_Book.pdf [inactive].

  private day schools: For rankings, see “America’s Best Prep Schools,” Forbes, April 29, 2010, accessed November 18, 2018, http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/29/best-prep-schools-2010-opinions-private-education.html. For rankings that contain tuition data, see “2019 Best Schools in America,” Niche, accessed November 18, 2018, http://k12.niche.com. Even less elite private schooling is expensive, with average annual tuition across all private day schools in the Northeast and New England reaching nearly $35,000. Tuition varies by geographic region, and schools in other parts of the country cost less, although they remain expensive. The comparatively cheapest private schools are in the Southeast, where average annual tuition at private day schools is slightly less than $20,000. Alia Wong, “When Private School Tuition Costs More Than College,” Atlantic, November 21, 2014, accessed November 18, www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/11/when-private-school-tuition-costs-more-than-college/383003/.

  $700,000 per student: The average endowment across the whole list exceeds $250 million, or over $350,000 per student. The average endowment of the day schools is nearly $100 million, or over $100,000 per student. These figures reflect data gathered at the schools’ websites or, where websites did not report data, from the Form 990s that the schools, as tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organizations, were required to file with the Internal Revenue Service in 2015, for the 2014 tax year. For a summary of this data, see “Largest Endowments,” Boarding School Review, www.boardingschoolreview.com/top-twenty-schools-listing/largest-endowments.

  Endowments among a slightly broader elite of private schools remain enormous: the average endowment of the twenty-eight boarding schools mentioned earlier is about $225 million. Gaztambide-Fernandez, “What Is an Elite Boarding School?,” Table 1.

  between $15,000 and $25,000 per student: For example, on their website, the Roxbury Latin School states, “In fact, for this 2018–2019 school year, tuition accounts for about 41 percent of the School’s budget, with the remainder provided through income from contributions to the Annual Fund (22 percent) and from the endowment (37 percent). This year, the total budgeted cost per student . . . is almost $25,000 more than RL’s tuition . . . ; so essentially every boy at RL receives a scholarship.” “Annual Fund,” Roxbury Latin School, www.roxburylatin.org/page/supporting-rl/annual-fund.

  every year of her education: The sum reflects tuition charges between $35,000 and $55,000 per year and subsidies between $15,000 and $25,000 per year. Again, some schools report expenditures per student, and the reports confirm this calculation. Roxbury Latin says that it spends $55,264 annually on each student. “Annual Fund.” The Collegiate School says that it spends roughly $56,000. “Why Give?,” The Collegiate School, https://www.collegiateschool.org/page/support/why-give. The Lawrenceville School reports expenditures per student of nearly $90,000. “The Lawrenceville Fund,” Lawrenceville School, www.lawrenceville.org/page/giving/the-lawrenceville-fund. And Deerfield Academy reports that the cost of its education runs to roughly $84,000 per student per year. “Support,” Deerfield Academy, https://deerfield.edu/dpn/parent-support/. These numbers were calculated by using the percentage of expenditure covered by tuition, which is reported on each school’s relevant “giving” page, to calculate total expenditure per student.

  just over $12,000: According to the National Center for Education Statistics (housed in the United States Department of Education), the national average per-pupil expenditure at public schools, for the 2012–13 school year, was $12,296. “Public School Expenditures,” National Center for Education Statistics, May 2016, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/Indicator_CMB/coe_cmb_2016_05.pdf.

  public school funding in the United States: Stephen Q. Cornman, Revenues and Expenditures for Public Elementary and Secondary School Districts: School Year 2011–2012 (Fiscal Year 2012), U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (2015), https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014303.pdf. State governments contribute 45.1 percent of funding and local governments contribute 44.8 percent. The federal government contributes 10.1 percent.

  spends barely $8,000: U.S. Census Bureau, “Per Pupil Amounts for Current Spending of Public Elementary-Secondary School Systems by State: Fiscal Year 2014,” Annual Survey of School System Finances, June 10, 2016, https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=SSF_2014_00A08&prodType=table. Connecticut has in the recent past spent still more—$18,512—and Mississippi still less—$7,928. Reid Wilson, “Best State in America: Connecticut, for Its Teachers,” Washington Post, September 5, 2015, accessed November 18, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/best-state-in-america-connecticut-for-its-teachers/2014/09/05/8e11ac88-3457-11e4-8f02-03c644b2d7d0_story.html?utm_term=.5cd4ba377ed5; Lyndsey Layton, “Study: Poor Children Are Now the Majority in American Public Schools in South, West,” Washington Post, October 16, 2013, accessed November 18, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/2013/10/16/34eb4984-35bb-11e3-8a0e-4e2cf80831fc_story.html?utm_term=.a7ff5647e08a.

  The richest five states today (Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New Hampshire) spend an average of $15,815 per public school student per year, while the middle six (Nebraska, Kansas, Oregon, Maine, Texas, and Ohio) spend $10,716, and the poorest five (New Mexico, West Virginia, Idaho, Arkansas, and Mississippi) spend on average only $9,099. U.S. Census Bureau, “Per Capita Income in the Past 12 Months (in 2015 Inflation-Adjusted Dollars),” 2011–2015 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=ACS_15_5YR_B19301&prodType=table. For purposes of identifying the poorest states, I do not include Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia.

  The gaps between average school expenditures in rich, middling, and poor states have grown over time—in parallel, incidentally, with gaps between incomes in rich, middling, and poor states.

  more per student than others do: In Pennsylvania, for example, per-student public expenditures in low-poverty districts are nearly 33 percent higher than in high-poverty districts ($12,529 versus $9,387). U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Education Finance Statistics Center, “School District Current Expenditures Per Pupil with and Without Adjustments for Federal Revenues by Poverty and Race/Ethnicity Characteristics,” 2015, Table A-1.

  In Connecticut, in spite of an aggressive litigation campaign aimed at school finance equalization, the difference remains nearly 10 percent. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Education Finance Statistics Center, “School District Current Expenditures Per Pupil with and Without Adjustments for Federal Revenues by Poverty and Race/Ethnicity Characteristics,” 2015, Table A-1. A Connecticut court recently held that the inequities in school funding among districts violated the right to public education guaranteed by the state’s constitution. The court ordered the state to develop a funding system that would “be influenced only by school needs and good practices.” Connecticut Coal. for Justice in Educ., Inc. v. Rell, No. X07HHDCV145037565S, 2016 WL 4922730, at *33 (Conn. Super. Ct. Sept. 7, 2016), aff’d in part, rev’d in part and remanded sub nom. Connecticut Coal. for Justice in Educ. Funding, Inc. v. Rell, 327 Conn. 650, 176 A.3d 28 (2018).

  spent only about $8,000: The data for Scarsdale and Barbourville follow Michael B. Sauter et al., “The 10 Richest—and Poorest—School Districts in America,” Alternet, June 11 2012, accessed November 18, 2018, www.alternet.org/story/155824/the_10_richest_—_and_poorest_—_school_districts_in_america [inactive], and Douglas A. McIntyre, “America’s Richest School Districts,” 24/7 Wall Street, June 6, 2012, accessed November 18, 2018, http://247wallst.com/special-report/2012/06/06/americas-richest-school-districts/. Sauter and his coauthors chose Scarsdale
and Barbourville and derived their numbers from data in the U.S. Census and the American Community Survey, 2006–10. They studied only the 9,627 districts that served 250 or more students in the relevant school year, whereas the census reports data for over 13,000 districts.

  Note also that the full ranges of household incomes in the districts reinforce the economic segregation of their schools. Sixty-four percent of households in Scarsdale earned more than $200,000 annually, and 0 percent earned less than $10,000. By contrast, 0 percent of households in Barbourville earned over $200,000 annually, and 7 percent earned less than $10,000.

  The precise numbers have, unsurprisingly, changed since Sauter and his coauthors complied their data. In 2012–13, Scarsdale spent $28,204 and Barbourville spent $8,993. Scarsdale’s median household income had increased to $238,478. (The 2012–13 data report one district that is richer still—the Hillsborough City Elementary School District in Northern California, with median household income above $250,000—but this is a K–8 district only and thus not a good candidate for the comparisons made here.) Barbourville’s median income had grown to $19,760. Census data from 2014 show many—presumably small—school districts with median household incomes in the range of $14,000 to $16,000.

  a few dollars per pupil: The Junipero Serra PTA, in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, for example, raised just $25 per student in a recent year. Jeremy Adam Smith, “How Budget Cuts and PTA Fundraising Undermined Equity in San Francisco Public Schools,” San Francisco Public Press, February 3, 2014, accessed November 18, 2018, https://sfpublicpress.org/news/2014-02/how-budget-cuts-and-PTA-fundraising-undermined-equity-in-san-francisco-public-schools. Hereafter cited as Smith, “How Budget Cuts and PTA Fundraising Undermined Equity in San Francisco Public Schools.”