Education and Class

Continuing on the theme of the significance of rising standards for admission to elite schools, I found much to admire in this essay from a journalist from an “unworldly blue collar” home who was admitted to Harvard 35 years ago. He marvels at the multiple accomplishments of the kids he now interviews as part of the admissions processes to Harvard, even while he understands that many of these students won’t be admitted, in spite of all that they’ve accomplished.

Yet I’m conflicted when I read about how he’s eventually come to terms with shifts in the admissions landscape:

I came to understand that my own focus on Harvard was a matter of not sophistication but narrowness. I grew up in an unworldly blue-collar environment. Getting perfect grades and attending an elite college was one of the few ways up I could see.

My four have been raised in an upper-middle-class world. They look around and see lots of avenues to success. My wife’s two brothers struggled as students at mainstream colleges and both have made wonderful full lives, one as a salesman, the other as a builder. Each found his own best path. Each knows excellence.

Here, it seems, is the essential question of class.

I completely accept that there are many paths to personal happiness and many routes to individual excellence.

Yet there are, of course, fundamental differences between finding happiness within the options that are available to you and having many choices about where one might seek happiness.

As long as institutions like Harvard are growing less accessible to kids who can’t afford the frenetic resume building now required for admissions, and as long as Harvard remains a vital route to political and economic power, the questions of admissions go beyond whether one’s own child might find personal happiness there, or whether attaining excellence as a builder will, in the end, provide personal fulfillment.

Unless, of course, the children of the elite are asking the same questions.

It seems, however, that most are not.

As long as the kids who do eventually graduate from Harvard are going to wield power over other people’s kids, and as long as the grand narrative of the culture is that those Harvard kids deserve that power because they are essentially better people than kids who went to college elsewhere (and certainly, better than those who didn’t go to college at all), admissions is a social problem, not just a problem of misguided individual choices.

Another piece of the puzzle of why Americans invest so much less in social services — including education — relative to other Western countries is analyzed in this NYT article. The author reviews a number of studies that correlated support for social programs with ethnic diversity and finds — rather consistently — that support for “redistribution” programs falls as communities become more ethnically and racially diverse.

In the U.S., it seems, white voters assume that such programs are for those “other people”. In more homogeneous countries like Sweden, voters support social programs because they assume that such programs will benefit families like their own.

In the end, though,

Ethnic diversity doesn’t inevitably reduce spending on public goods. Rather, spending tends to fall when elected officials choose to run and govern on platforms that heighten racial and ethnic divisions.

Missing from the article are the perspectives of poor and working-class whites and their complicated positions in such deliberations about social programs, social “welfare” and race.

Most poor children in this country are white. Are poor and working class white voters identifying with more privileged whites to deny services to those “others”? Or are the “white” voters discussed in this article less homogeneous than the author implies?

More importantly, how do we move deliberations about such things beyond campaign sound bites to more substantive analysis of how class matters in the U.S.? Assuming that many poor and working class people aren’t regular readers of the New York Times, where are other public forums in which these questions can even be raised?

How do we begin to imagine a school curriculum in which class interests are identified, debated, supported, and then articulated in the broader public arena?

I read two very different perspectives on access to higher education yesterday.

The Carnegie Foundation posted this essay proposing that we define higher education as a birthright for all, rather than a privilege. The author, Ray Bachetti, contrasts his family’s history — in which government investments, a healthy measure of luck, and the privileges of race enabled his generation to become educated and to then pass the “cultural capital” of the educated on to their children and grandchildren –with today’s policy climate in which access is limited by rising costs, declining government support, and persistent gaps in achievement and attainment.

(There are multiple thoughtful comments posted with the essay - note Sherry Linkon’s post on the cultural issues that can depress achievement and attainment even when poor and working class kids do jump the hurdles to access).

Speaking particularly of access to those schools that conferred the most privilege to graduates from Bachetti’s generation, Kevin Carey argues that the much-publicized intensified competition for admission to Ivy League colleges is largely a statistical myth because 1) more applicants are applying to more schools, creating larger numbers of rejections, even while young people are still being admitted somewhere, and b) elite colleges have increased admissions slots by 8% in recent years, in proportion to the growth in numbers of “baby boom echo” high school students now seeking admission to college.

Carey doesn’t talk at all about the equally well-publicized rising bar for admissions, about how those with any hope of being admitted will now be expected to have have spent summers volunteering on ecological restoration projects in Costa Rica (rather than working to pay for school), that they’ll have lived in a neighborhood in which schools offer multiple AP courses, that they’ll be heavily involved in sports and drama (not jobs) after school, that their SAT scores will reflect the extensive private coaching that their parents have provided.

Carey does, however, offer this explanation for the increase in applications at Ivy League Schools, over and above the increase in the number of kids graduating now from high school:

There has likely been an increase in the number of unqualified students treating the Harvard application like a Powerball ticket. An Ivy League education can be worth millions of dollars over a lifetime. To take a shot at one, all you need is $65.00 and a dream.

Given that Harvard and Yale are turning away thousands of students with 4.0 high school GPAs and many with perfect SAT scores (according to NYT Select articles on April 1 and 4, from which I unfortunately cannot generate blog-friendly URLs), it’s not clear what Carey considers “unqualified”. It’s not clear, either, how he distinguishes between those who have no more understanding of college admissions than the Powerball players at the corner Quickstop, and those who have carefully played by all of the rules of the game, only to find that the game now is being played on an entirely different field.

In short, Carey evades the entire point that the odds of admission to places like Harvard and Yale have indeed declined for those not already ensconced in the upper-middle class.

The parents and grandparents of those kids packing their bags for summer adventures in Costa Rica were supported by public policy that acknowledged that “the education of any enriches all”.

Yet now, many from those generations justify policies that extend the privileges that they’ve enjoyed only to people like them, in part by defining everyone else as “unqualified” — or worse, as simply deluded.

I want to read more about this researcher’s work, but this newspaper article on relatively high levels of distress among affluent youth caught my eye.

The researcher, Suniya Luthar, says that

upper-middle-class adolescents reported far more incidents of substance abuse, anxiety and depression than those in inner cities and the general American teen population.

She tells the reporter that it has been hard to find funding for her research, because few people think that the problems of rich kids are worth studying.

Ellen Brantlinger made similar points in her poignant case studies of “the winners” in high school who fared less well as young adults in Dividing Classes.

There are at least two things at work here that intrigue me:

First is the tendency of the press and academic community to local psycho-social problems primarily within “at risk” kids in poor and working class homes, in spite of how often studies like this show otherwise.

But second, is that the “problems of rich kids” are part of the story of how class works in America. We talk too little about the ways in which intensified competition for too few opportunities affect kids trying just to get in the game, but we’ve hardly talked at all about the costs for kids trying to hold their places there.

We can’t understand class without understanding both.

I wrote in a an article a few years ago about how seldom educational researchers “study up” to the upper-middle classes or the wealthy.

In part, I suspect, the children of powerful families are more protected from the scrutiny of researchers than are kids in poor and working class schools.

But I wonder, also, whether we’ve even been interested in what we might find there beyond the high test scores? Even as we insist that test scores can’t capture the full educational experiences of kids on the margins, do we have a lot more to learn about what lurks beneath the accomplishments of the poster children of achievement in upper-middle class schools?

Over on the Education Policy Blog, Aaron Schutz has written an interesting critique of the assumption that a more educated workforce creates a stronger economy, as more educated people create more and better jobs. He finds little evidence for these assumptions.

His post reminded me of this NYT article coming at similar questions from a different direction, in which the author argues that there is little evidence for trickle-down theories of economics in either labor market patterns or wages.

In education, we have become used to hearing that our work must be “research based”.

Yet we are required to continue to flog the children of unemployed or underemployed parents into scoring higher on their many tests, promising as we do that this is all in their best interest, that all that stands between them and economic stability that they have never known as children is their willingness to work hard in school.

And we are expected to continue to teach these kids in woefully underfunded schools, because to raise taxes for books, computers, teacher salaries, or school repairs would inevitably harm the economy.

Yet there is precious little evidence that any of this will ultimately narrow the growing chasms between the “haves” and the “have nots”.

Educational accountability cannot substitute for other social safety nets.

That’s research-based.