A Commitment to Inequality

The reality of the American school system—and why it isn't going to change

Another piece from my project “Twilight’s Last Gleaming: Everyday Life in the Late American Empire.” It’s a companion piece to the “Educated Guessing” and “Sustaining Illusions.” —Jim

In my recent posts about the history and state of American education, I have emphasized the sheer unpredictability of outcomes, given the uncertain possibilities and limits of a given human life at its outset. So it may be worth saying a few more words about the systems under which those possibilities and limits unfold, and why I think that despite our ritualistic affirmations of equality—or more recent calls for “equity,” which regard equality as a misleading if not counterproductive metric for social justice—most of our hearts are fundamentally in a different place.

There are a few reasons why. One is that we just don’t know what works—or, more accurately, we don’t know really how to engineer success on a mass basis. Even if we were to say that money was no object, there’s no clear consensus on how we might spend it to achieve consistently good outcomes (which is why, for example, there’s a wide variety of schools—religious, progressive, traditional—among the elite). For well over a century now, there have been a series of unresolved arguments about the frequency and tenor of assessment; the role of teacher quality and preparation; skills or content-based curricula, et. al. It’s safe to say that any one side in such arguments will have a substantial amount of truth to it. But sorting them out and making them consistently effective has been elusive, to put it mildly.

Moreover, such arguments do not take place in a financial vacuum. It’s hard to plow substantial resources evenly into collective investments with little sense of which ones will work out—one reason why, for example, as little as 3% of a corporation’s investment in research and development is considered quite good. People are of course more important the products or machines, but spending on education in the United States usually comes from taxpayers—more specifically, local taxpayers, which is experienced much more directly (and thus more painfully) than other kinds of collective spending outlays, though, again, wealthy communities tend to pour more money into such systems than others, which is why the real dividing lines in American schools is less public vs. private than rich vs. poor.  

This local dimension of education funding is distinctive and decisive. Very few countries in the western world rely upon it, as schooling is usually considered a national responsibility; the balkanized quality of U.S. public (and professional) education reflects the peculiarly libertarian character of American society and history, one even greater than our mother country of Great Britain. Local property taxes foster a more direct relationship between what you pay and what you get, one reason why small wealthy communities, often suburbs, are committed to them. Poorer, larger, and more urban public school districts—which are often immediately adjacent to wealthy ones, creating sometimes glaring disparities—typically have less to work with, relying more on supplemental sources of tax revenue from state and federal sources (which in turn makes wealthy suburban voters less inclined to support this kind of government spending). The United States also utilizes private schooling to a relatively high degree, which fosters economic segregation still further. Private schools will often compensate for their elitist character through diversity initiatives and financial aid, but that doesn’t alter their essential exclusivity, or their tendency to siphon off good students who might otherwise invigorate public schools. That’s because, high-minded mission statements notwithstanding, exclusivity is their essence, the very reason private schools exist.

Moreover, while it’s certainly possible to create any number of checks and balances to ensure basic equity and access in many arenas of contemporary life, including educational ones, there will always be efforts to game the system, some of which will be successful. Complicating matters still further is the fact that while we regard certain kinds of discrimination as deeply problematic, there are others we cheerfully countenance. In modern times, racial or gender discrimination is considered repugnant. But few of us will publicly blanch at the notion of an Ivy League college discriminating against dumb people. Such schools don’t explicitly say they do, and of course one can argue about the meaning of “dumb.” But whatever criteria such institutions end up adopting, they will involve an avowed set of standards by which they feel entitled to reject most aspirants in good conscience. In a world of truly equal opportunity, admission to Princeton or Stanford would be determined by lottery. That’s not likely to happen (unless exclusion morphs and assumes a different shape).

What’s a little astounding—troubling in some ways, inspiring in others—is that amid this jagged impersonal social process of social reproduction, specific individuals strive, and sometimes succeed, in finding their way.  Actually, the scenario I’m describing is hardly limited to the United States. Nor is it anything new. Insofar as there’s anything distinctively American about it, the collective logic of our education system is notable for the way it tries to finesse collective imperatives with the pursuit of personal happiness—which, to put it mildly, is something most people in most societies for most of history would regard as peculiar, if not repugnant. (God? Absolutely. Country? Certainly. Family? Of course. But happiness? What the hell does that mean?) Our conceit has involved a belief that you can square a circle of social utility and individual fulfillment: what’s good for you is good for your family, your country and any notion of God you might have (now more likely to be cast in terms of spirituality rather than religion).

As a society, Americans focus so much of their collective attention on the personal fulfillment side of the equation—the one thing we collectively agree upon is the legitimacy of the individual’s pursuit of happiness—that we sometimes seem unaware of the power and legitimacy of other imperatives, which continue to operate whether we recognize them or not.  We forget, for example, that the legal justification for Affirmative Action, as sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court (for a little while longer anyway), is justified in terms of its benefit for the institutions in question to serve society more effectively, not as a form of social welfare to be distributed among eligible individuals. Such goals are not necessarily mutually exclusive, so we’re not often forced to consider the tensions between them. We can, to put it a little differently, maintain our ignorance about that tension between individual and institutional to the point of denying that there is one—or, that if there is one, regard the very notion of such tension as the sign of a problem.

Still, whatever its structural flaws or basic unfairness, there’s been enough room in our educational system, broadly construed, to accommodate some upward mobility and thus maintain faith in the system. That system is messy and unfair and may well be deteriorating. The underlying dynamics are unlikely to change, even though the people involved in managing them will. Which is not to say there can’t be improvements, variously understood, for any given set of people at any given time. But the American Way, as we used to describe it, has a logic, one that should not be dismissed lightly.

So speaks a specimen of that system. I’ll have more to say about that in my next post.