Write a 5 page plus title and reference, APA formatted paper in which you discuss what equal educational opportunity means to you. Explain whether you feel equal educational opportunity means the same thing for all students, regardless of gender, ethnicity, socio-economic class, ability, etc. Be sure to support your position with examples and reasoned arguments.
Use textbook only to support your major points. This is a reflection and critical thinking assignment so you should be analyzing and synthesizing what youve read and then putting those ideas into your own words in your paper. DO NOT USE ANY INTERNET SOURCES ON THIS PAPER!!! Your paper MUST be properly formatted in APA format. If your paper is not properly cited and formatted, it will be returned to you with a grade of zero.
School and Society: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
by Steven Tozer, Guy Senese, Paul Violas
chapter 12
Introduction: Inequity and Inequality From its very origins American society has struggled with questions of equity and equality. Although these terms derive from the same linguistic stem, they carry substantially different meanings. Equality denotes equal; equity, fair. Even as an ideal, democracy does not call for an identical existence for each citizen or promise to equalize outcomes. In theory, democratic ideals of freedom marry well with ideals of economic freedom. Those who have the most skill and talent, work hardest, and have the best luck are expected to prosper in a free market economy. The free market is supposed to structure a system of rewards that bring out the productive best in people. In practice, however, this theory is questionable. It assumes that the starting conditions for everyone allow for fair competition or, at the very least, that social institutions treat everyone fairly. British economic historian R. H. Tawney draws the distinction in this manner: [To] criticize inequality and to desire equality is not, as is sometimes suggested, to cherish the romantic illusion that men are equal in character and intelligence. It is to hold that, while their natural endowments differ profoundly, it is
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the mark of a civilized society to aim at eliminating such inequalities as have their source, not in individual differences, but in its own organization, and that individual differences, which are the source of social energy, are more likely to ripen and find expression if social inequalities are, as far as practicable, diminished. . . . it is by softening or obliterating, not individual differences, but class gradations, that the historical movements directed towards diminishing inequality have attempted to attain their objective.1 Liberal Ideology: Meritocracy Reexamined Social theorists and educators have long been concerned with the origins of inequality. Does inequality stem from deficiencies within certain individuals or groups or from external social and economic conditions? It is important to remember that inequalities which have their source in social organization mean that some, the socially privileged, have advantages which are denied to others in the society. The privileged often find it comforting as well as expedient to interpret these socially derived inequalities as intrinsic personal qualities. Not only do they claim personal ownership of their advantages, they often charge the socially disadvantaged with personal ownership of their deficiencies, justifying the low socioeconomic benefits accruing to the disadvantaged. In addition to frequent misuses of the terms equity and equality, much confusion has resulted from inadequately analyzing the implications of inequality. What sorts of educational and social policies are needed as a result of inequality, whatever its origin? Are some individuals so unequal that they cannot benefit from the kind of education others receive, and if so, should they be denied access to decision-making authority? As we have seen, these equity and equality issues were settled during the first decades of the 20th century as psychologists such as E. L. Thorndike and Lewis Terman along with sociologists such as E. A. Ross and Charles H. Cooley convinced the American public that African Americans and the new immigrants were innately inferior to Anglo-Saxon Americans.2 This conclusion led to the development of different and inferior educational programs for these groups. Thus, differentiated curricula soon became standard in American schools and were seen as a major component in the American system of meritocracy.3 The meritocracy issue reemerged during the 1960s, as we saw in the cold war era of Chapter 5, and remained at the center of educational discussions for the next 20 years. Fueling the new debate, as we shall see, was the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision and the ensuing Coleman study. These in turn led to several cultural deprivation studies, which will be analyzed briefly in the next section. The cumulative effect of these works was to reestablish the idea that some individuals and groups are inherently unequal. The source of inferiority was not considered to be social or economic conditions but flaws residing in some individuals and groups. Moreover, because their inherent deficiencies were considered to be of such magnitude, it was argued that they could not benefit from the kind of education their superiors received. Thus, the 1960s debate appeared to confirm the fairness of Americas meritocratic economic structure. If some children succeeded in school while others failed, it was believed, the fairness of the system ensured that children succeeded due to their own individual merit. Social Conditions behind the New Debate It is instructive to examine the social conditions out of which this new meritocracy debate emerged. Perhaps the first major challenge to the meritocratic conclusions reached at the beginning of this century resulted from the GI Bill, which appeared near the end of World War II as members of the Roosevelt administration began planning for the demobilization of the American armed forces. Their primary concern was to entice GIs to enter college rather than the labor market and thus help prevent massive unemployment. Many of these GIs came from poorly educated families that earlier had been judged inferior, and so they were not expected to succeed in college. In accordance with prevailing meritocratic ideas, many educators were horrified at the prospect of this horde of unprepared and ill-suited students leaving their lower-class backgrounds and crashing the citadels of learning. Educators forecast widespread failure for these new students. Much to their surprise, however, most of the GIs were very successful. As a group, they graduated at a higher rate than did the regular students and achieved higher grades en route to their diplomas. This success presented a new reality, a new set of social facts that most social analysts and educators chose to ignore.
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Nevertheless, it represented a potential chink in the armor of the meritocratic ideology. In 1954, immediately after the positive experience of the GI Bill, came the Supreme Courts Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which stated, It is doubted that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education . . . [and such opportunity] must be made available to all on equal terms.4 This reopened the debate about equity in American society. Michael Harringtons 1962 best-seller, The Other America,5 added fuel to the debate as he reminded the middle class that one-third of Americans were still ill fed, ill housed, and ill clothed. Apparently, the umbrella of the middle class did not cover as much of the populace as conventional wisdom had assumed. This awareness of widespread inequality and inequity was heightened by the growing civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the urban riots that followed his murder in 1968. Meanwhile, the nation was becoming increasingly entangled in the Vietnam War and the social inequities that the war protest movement uncovered. And if the preceding events were not enough to unsettle the national psyche, President Lyndon Johnson, in an attempt to secure a political coalition of urban ethnics, African Americans, and liberal intellectuals, declared a war on poverty that found domestic foes almost as intractable as those in the rice paddies of southeast Asia. To round things out, events in the area of industrial labor relations were equally contentious, as seen in the conflict at General Motors Vega plant, where workers demanded democratic control of the workplace. It became clear to many that such events were causing a major reassessment of the modern liberal ideology undergirding meritocracy. Many critics questioned the new liberal faith in scientific expertise and scientific rationality as the best ways to organize the workplace and plan domestic and foreign policy. Expert and elite control
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3. Measured student performance on standardized tests showed considerable differences, with White students well ahead of African American students in test results. 4. The measured differences in school resources seemed to have little or no effect on the differences in students performance on standardized tests; that is, educational inputs (facilities, curricula, teachers) seemed to make no meaningful difference in outcomes (academic achievement). 5. The only variable that seemed to affect educational achievement (outcomes) was quality of peers. 6. Minority children, especially African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans, entered school with lower achievement scores, and this gap increased throughout their stay in school. Although it was profoundly influential in the national discussion about schools and inequality, the Coleman study was seriously flawed. According to Samuel Bowles and Henry Levin, for example, the statistical method used to analyze the data grossly underestimated the positive effects of schooling on student achievement.9 In other words, if the study had been conducted differently, it would have shown that schools do matter a great dealthat different levels of school input produce very different outcomes in student learning. In addition to flaws in the statistical method used, the data collected by Colemans team were in themselves misleading: Teacher quality, for example, was measured primarily by years of schooling and years of teaching experience. Despite its flaws, the Coleman Report succeeded in focusing attention away from educational inputs (what schools bring to students) and toward what children bring to school. It seemed to invite the scientific investigation of unequal education achievement by looking for flaws in the children rather than in the schools or in societ y. The Cultural Deprivation Studies During the winter of 19661967, the Carnegie Foundation sponsored a seminar at Harvard University to examine the implications of the Coleman Report. Two books were conceived during the seminar: On Equality of Educational Opportunity, edited by Daniel P. Moynihan and Frederick Mosteller, and Inequality, by Christopher Jencks and his associates. Both books reanalyzed the Coleman database; that is, they used the data collected by the Coleman researchers rather than gathering new
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of social institutions did not seem to be producing the progress that modern liberalism promised. Further, the uncritical nationalism that modern liberalism had fostered in so many Americans was being questioned. And the promise of freedom for all Americans seemed to be an illusion, given the pervasive conditions of poverty that seemed to constrain millions of Americans who simply didnt have an equal chance at the American dream of a self-sufficient life. As if these concerns were not enough, there were simultaneous attacks on the schools that were preparing children for their future roles in the meritocracy. These attacks ranged from Admiral Hyman Rickovers demand for a technological elite to defend America from the onslaught of world communism,6 to Arthur Bestors charge that the schools were an intellectual wasteland7 that threatened the very existence of American democracy, to Nat Hentoffs assertion that the inner-city schools were so underfunded that they could not educate.8 Thus, education, the major institutional support for meritocracy, was also under severe assault. A basic assumption in American schooling has been that students success in school and in economic life is based on their learning abilities in an equitable educational system. How does this assumption relate to the idea of our society as a meritocracy? Thinking Critically about the Issues #1 The Coleman Report To fulfill one of the provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the U.S. Office of Education commissioned James Coleman to conduct a survey concerning the lack of availability of equal educational opportunity for individuals by reason of race, color, religion, or national origin. This study initiated the new debate on equity. Colemans team of researchers gathered data on over 6,000,000 schoolchildren, 60,000 teachers, and 4,000 schools across the United States. His findings were startling. To summarize them briefly: 1. Most African American students and White students attended different schools. 2. According to measurable characteristics (e.g., physical facilities, curricula, material resources,
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data. Thus both books suffered most of the same flaws as the original Coleman study. The MoynihanMosteller work10 concluded that since educational inputs are roughly the same for all children, America had achieved equal educational opportunity. The authors argued that educational expenditures were already high, and since further expenditures were not likely to raise educational achievement for minorities, such increases would be economically unwise. America, according to these writers, had already reached the point of diminishing returns regarding educational expenditures. In retrospect, it is interesting to note that the argument for a halt in rising educational expenditures did not originate with the conservative Nixon or Reagan administrations but with liberal Harvard social scientists who were supported by the Carnegie Foundation. This oc curred because the MoynihanMosteller work reinforced the Coleman Reports suggestion that the achievement problems faced by minority students rested not with the schools but with the students and their cultural backgrounds. More money for the schools, in that interpretation, would provide little benefit. By implication, the book also bolstered the notion that poverty stems from personal problems within the poor rather than from problems within the social system.11 Christopher Jencks and colleagues Inequality12 was even more explicit, although perhaps unintentionally so, in its attempt to rescue the economic system from charges of inequity. The authors began by arguing that the Coleman data showed substantial equality of inputs in public schools. They also asserted that cognitive inequality was not affected by schooling but was largely dependent on the characteristics of the child upon entering school. Like Moynihan and Mosteller, they noted that unequal achievement was caused by deficiencies in the child, not in the school. The conclusions of Jencks et al. regarding economic inequality were not as predictable as their assertions about educational inequality. They argued that nothing in the Coleman data could be shown to affect future economic success. According to Jencks et al., family background, schooling, IQ, and cognitive skills had little or no predictive value on future economic success. They did hazard a guess, which they acknowledged lacked data support, that economic success was probably related to luck and special competencies, such as the ability to hit a baseball. Nevertheless, they recommended that society spend more money on schoolingeven though schools do not make any difference in a persons futurebecause most people spend 20 to 25 percent of their lives in school and thus schools
should be pleasant.13 During the following decade many educators worried, talked, and planned about making schools more pleasant places. The real cost of this kind of activity was to deflect attention away from questions about how to make schools more effective learning centers for children. Henry M. Levins review14 of Jencks and colleagues work points out many of its major flaws. Levin notes that the authors conclusion that family background has little effect on future income, especially for the rich and the poor, defies the results of many studies of intergenerational mobility which show that the effect of family is quite significant. Regarding their conclusion that schooling has only a small effect on income, Levin suggests that their interpretation of what constitutes small may be open to interpretation. The data showed that the difference in annual income between high school graduates and elementary school graduates who were otherwise identical was 16 percent in favor of the high school graduates; between college graduates and elementary school graduates, the difference was 48 percent in favor of the college graduates. Levin notes, Jencks apparently believes that such differences are small, but two men separated by such income disparities might not agree.15 In light of the massive flaws in these studies and the fact that they nevertheless exerted, and continue to exert, considerable influence on educational and social policy, the question arises, How did this happen? The most reasonable explanation seems to be that these ideas were congenial to the powerful in our society because they served to justify and explain their own positions of privilege. In other words, these ideas were powerful because they accorded well with the dominant ideology: modern liberalism. They reinforced and appeared to justify a meritocratic arrangement of society and schooling. They deflected arguments that questioned the validity and fairness of such arrangements. Regardless of the reasons these studies became so influential, they continue to affect the way Americans think about equity and schools. Let us now examine some of the data concerning income, race, social class, gender, and schooling. Subsequently, we shall examine theories that attempt to explain the relationships found in these data.
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The PoliticalEconomic Context The Demographics of Modern American Society The United States has been known from its beginning as a land of opportunity, and today it ranks near the top of all industrialized nations in per capita purchasing power.16 The United States is also one of the most schooled countries, in terms of years of schooling per capita. Per capita education spending in the United States compares well with other countries: Over 85 percent of U.S. students graduate from high schools, and U.S. college and university systems enroll nearly 20 million students, attracting applicants from all over the world.17 These statistics give an encouraging picture of American society. Unfortunately, this picture is misleading. For example, almost half of those who go on to college will drop out. And of those who drop out, a disproportionate number are from minority backgrounds. For example, six different states have school districts where the high school dropout rate is over 25 percent, and nationwide the dropout rate for African American and Hispanic students far exceeds the dropout rate for other populations. Although the nation is prosperous overall, income inequality is among the highest in the industrialized world. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, recent median income for White and Asian American families ranged from $55,000 to $60,000, while for Black and Hispanic families it ranged from $33,000 to $34,000.18 These are huge differences not only in paying for college, but even for buying adequate clothing and housing a family in neighborhoods where good public schools prevail. To gain a more detailed picture of how wealth and power are distributed in society, social scientists examine data on income, educational level, childhood mortality, teenage pregnancy, substance abuse, home ownership, capital stock, and other social indices. These variables are then matched against different demographic groups organized by age, race, ethnicity, social class, gender, and so forth. (See Exhibits 12.1 and 12.2 for years of school completed related to age, through 2000, with 2010 census verifying continuation of those trends.) The next few sections step back from this larger picture of general prosperity to examine outcomes for several different demographic groups. The intent is to reinforce with statistics what is already common knowledge: Social, economic, and political outcomes generally favor men over women, White people over people of color, and upper- and middle-class people over the urban poor and the working class. Race, Ethnicity, and the Limits of Language In this section we examine data for specific minority groups. Bear in mind that both race and ethnicity are socially constructed terms that are difficult to define. There
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is, for example, no definition of race that will stand up to scientific analysis, and so it must be understood that race is not a purely biological term. For example, the distinction between White and African American is largely determined by legal ruling, as is the case in Louisiana. There the courts have held that a person is African American if the equivalent of one great-greatgreat-great-grandparent was African American (i.e., if a person is one sixty-fourth African American). Hispanics are usually classified by virtue of a Spanish surname clearly a cultural rather than a biological distinction. The important point is that these terms refer less to innate biological differences than to socially constructed differences in how people are perceived to be members of various groups (see the American Anthropological Association Statement on Race in Table 12.1). There are several difficulties with trying to talk or write about issues of race and ethnicity. One, as the Dictionary of Race and Ethnic Relations points out, is that every time we use the word race, we appear to be perpetuating a concept that has no basis in science.19 The Human Genome Diversity Project, for example, has demonstrated that the darkest-hued African and the lightest-skinned Scandinavian are 99.99 percent identical in their genetic composition.20 Yet the concept of race has historically operated as if the differences among large groups of people (traditionally Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid) are so significant as to identify us as subspecies of the larger human species, a division that has no scientific basis. To continue to use the term race seems to perpetuate that mistaken notion. It might be better, it seems, to eliminate the term altogether from the way we refer to ourselves as humansunless to affirm that we are all one race. However, the term race has been historically used to differentiate us from one another, not to unite us. (For the African and the Scandinavian to say they are of the same race seems like nonsense to most people, as if the language were being used in a way it was not meant to be used.) Therefore, focusing on race draws our attention to the differences among us rather than to the similarities. The same might be said for ethnicity, a term which does have a strong basis in social science. Focus on this term, too, can make people uncomfortable, because in the middle of the effort to affirm what we have in common with one anotherour essential humannesssocial scientists and educators use a term that emphasizes our differences. This may be perceived as divisive. It separates us by different languages and different cultural histories. In short, focus on ethnicity, like focus on race, seems to divide us rather than unite us, but for different reasons. There is still another difficulty with the language of race and ethnicity: Our terms of ethnic identification are disputed and often inaccurate. There is not full agreement among Native Americans (or American Indians, or Indians, or indigenous peoples) about which identifying term to use. Some of these terms (Indians, Americans) are the historical legacy of conquering Europeans, and most cultures resist having their names
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Table 12.1 AAA Statement on Race In the US both scholars and the general public have been conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the human species based on visible physical differences. With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century, however, it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that there is greater variation within racial groups than between them. This means that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic racial groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. In neighboring populations there is much overlapping of genes and their phenotypic (physical) expressions. Throughout history whenever different groups have come into contact, they have interbred. The continued sharing of genetic materials has maintained all of humankind as a single species. Physical variations in any given trait tend to occur gradually rather than abruptly over geographic areas. And because physical traits are inherited independently of one another, knowing the range of one trait does not predict the presence of others. For example, skin color varies largely from light in the temperate areas in the north to dark in the tropical areas in the south; its intensity is not related to nose shape or hair texture. Dark skin may be associated with frizzy or kinky hair or curly or wavy or straight hair, all of which are found among different indigenous peoples in tropical regions. These facts render any attempt to establish lines of division among biological populations both arbitrary and subjective. Historical research has shown that the idea of race has always carried more meanings than mere physical differences; indeed, physical variations in the human species have no meaning except the social ones that humans put on them. Today scholars in many fields argue that race as it is understood in the USA was a social mechanism invented during the 18th century to refer to those populations brought together in colonial America: the English and other European settlers, the conquered Indian peoples, and those peoples of Africa brought in to provide slave labor. From its inception, this modern concept of race was modeled after an ancient theorem of the Great Chain of Being which posited natural categories on a hierarchy established by God or nature. Thus race was a mode of classification linked specifically to peoples in the colonial situation. It subsumed a growing ideology of inequality devised to rationalize European attitudes and treatment of the conquered and enslaved peoples. Proponents of slavery in particular during the 19th century used race to justify the retention of slavery. The ideology magnified the differences among Europeans, Africans and Indians, established a rigid hierarchy of socially exclusive categories, underscored and (continued)
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imposed by other cultures. Ones identity is in part shaped by ones name, and we resist having our own names for ourselves replaced by someone elses names for ourselves. Similarly, most Asian Americans now resist being called Orientals, and most African Americans resist being called Negroes. While some African Americans and Hispanics and Asian Americans use the term people of color to refer to non-White, non-Hispanic people in the United States, this obscures the fact that some Hispanics in the United States identify strongly with their European origins, are in all outward respects White, and do not want themselves described as people of color. In their view, they are as white as any other U.S. language or ethnic group (Polish, German, Irish) of European descent. Alternativel y, some Hispanics would choose to self -identify as Latino or Chicano (about which more later), terms that are chosen in part to make specific political statements about identity and self-representation. The term white is itself a cultural construction with ideological baggage. Even when we respect the names different peoples prefer for themselves, our efforts to talk about ethnicity are stymied by the fact that broadly inclusive terms are misleading. For example, to generalize about Hispanics or Asian Americans overlooks profound cultural differences, even historical hostilities, within each of those subgroups. While Japanese and Chinese and Cambodians are very different culturally and economically in the United States, the term Asian American seems to allow us to generalize about them as if they were basically similar. Similarly, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans have different histories and important differences in their status in the U.S. economic and educational system, but they are all Hispanics in our use of the language. If our language is such a clumsy tool for talking about these matters, why talk about them? Why cant we all be
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one and stop emphasizing differences among us? (In fact, some would prefer that U.S. Census Bureau and other official documents would stop requiring us to identify ourselves as African American, Asian and Pacific Islander, American Indian, and so on.) One very important reason, as indicated in Cornel Wests Race Matters,21 is that people in the United States are deeply affected privileged, damaged, even killedaccording to their perceived membership in one racial or ethnic group or another. To stop talking about race and ethnicity is to lose an important tool for understanding why some people are treated differently from others in our society. Without race and ethnicity as categories, we cant find answers to important questions about whether schools are serving all children equally wellor whether skin color or cultural background might be factors in why some children perform better than others. We would not be able to learn that Minnesota, a state with a highly regarded school system, ranks dead last of all the states among African American fourth-graders, to cite a 1996 study of academic achievement. If we take away race and ethnicity as tools for analysis, we cant notice that
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Table 12.1 (concluded) bolstered unequal rank and status differences, and provided the rationalization that the inequality was natural or God-given. The different physical traits of African-Americans and Indians became markers or symbols of their status differences. As they were constructing US society, leaders among European-Americans fabricated the cultural/behavioral characteristics associated with each race, linking superior traits with Europeans and negative and inferior ones to blacks and Indians. Numerous arbitrary and fictitious beliefs about the different peoples were institutionalized and deeply embedded in American thought. Early in the 19th century the growing fields of science began to reflect the public consciousness about human differences. Differences among the racial categories were projected to their greatest extreme when the argument was posed that Africans, Indians and Europeans were separate species, with Africans the least human and closer taxonomically to apes. Ultimately race as an ideology about human differences was subsequently spread to other areas of the world. It became a strategy for dividing, ranking and controlling colonized people used by colonial powers everywhere. But it was not limited to the colonial situation. In the latter part of the 19th century it was employed by Europeans to rank one another and to justify social, economic and political inequalities among their peoples. During World War II, the Nazis under Adolf Hitler enjoined the expanded ideology of race and racial differences and took them to a logical end: the extermination of 11 million people of inferio