Education and Class

I skimmed this this op-ed piece on the insidious side of PTA fundraisers over a rushed breakfast this morning, and then read it more carefully tonight.

I always have very mixed feelings when I hear that one of our strongest teacher ed grads has been hired as a science/art/reading/technology specialist in a school in which such positions are funded by PTA auctions, as if students in these schools are entitled to the particularly focused and skilled instruction of “specialists”.

One the one hand, I know that these teachers will give these kids a good sense of the world beyond their subdivisions.

On the other hand, I know that children attending other schools in the same district will bounce in their seats with joy to have science instruction once or twice a month, after the Spring testing season.

A few years ago, I did research in a school in which young children had decided that it was cool to ride the bus. Their stay-at-home moms supported their choice and dutifully put them on the bus each morning. At the end of the day, though, the SUVs would line up in the school driveway. The moms were there not to pick up their now-independent children, but instead to pick up their children’s backpacks so that the young ones would not be burdened by carrying them on and off the bus.

Fiercely competitive fundraisers. Chauffeurs for backpacks. And auditing the PTA’s budgetary bottom line before enrolling one’s children in an obviously otherwise excellent school.

When do we say enough?

UPDATE:

Jeanne notices that the link is no longer active. I’ve provided Cliff Notes below in a comment.

A few days ago, I lamented the absence of more diverse voices among the gigabites of text generated by the Privilege Meme.

I stand humbly corrected by the The Paper Chase and My Private Casbah bloggers, who enrich the discourse with complex dimensions of gender, race, rurality, and geography.

And, indeed, deprivation.

There’s been a refreshingly multi-faceted and thoughtful conversation about the privilege meme, schooling, and class going on over at this Live Journal blog (and I say this not only because they’ve been sending steady traffic here!).

Speaking of that “privilege meme” that’s still buzzing around out there after oh so many days (even a blogger from Atlantic Monthly chimed in today, critiquing the exercise from her perspective as the graduate of a private school attended by “ultra-privileged” classmates for not reflecting her particular experiences)…

The protocol of the meme has been to “bold” the items that apply to you and to then say a bit about your background.

When something like this is done in person –as it was designed to be –a moderator can facilitate discussion among those whose lives have followed different paths and ensure that all voice are heard. A central point of an exercise like this is typically to generate conversation among the people in the room that would not take place otherwise.

But the people in this virtual room who keep batting this thing around seem to be people from very similar backgrounds.

While I’ve seen all sorts of assumptions made about how others live and what they value (and about how easy it would be for parents anywhere to find free museums to take their kids too “if they cared enough”. Have these people ever been outside a city?), I’ve not yet seen, in all of these hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of posts and comments, anyone who has thought to say:

So, most of the things I’m reading on this are written people who “score” relatively highly on this meme.

But I wonder: what does this all look like to people whose backgrounds included very few of these things?

Might it not be bold to even wonder whether one might have it wrong?

In today’s on-line/January 11’s print issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mitchell Stevens writes in an op-ed piece on the “admissions race that’s already won”, calling the annual admissions frenzy at selective colleges “essentially ceremonial — an elaborate national ritual of just desserts.” He writes:

The fact that the fates of particular applicants at particular colleges remain uncertain until the end enables us to believe that the winners earn their victories in a fair game. That is how the anxiety that attends the application season is deceptive: It encourages those who experience it to believe that the outcomes of the process are considerably more uncertain than they actually are.

More perniciously perhaps, the feverishness of each year’s application season allows us to take comfort in modest reforms that mostly only tinker with that process. Some recent fixes at selective institutions — eliminating early decision, making the SAT an optional component of applications, or, a bit more radically, proposals to replace individualized selection with a lottery system for all those applicants who meet some general criteria — will do nothing to change the distribution of opportunity that delivers talented applicants to admissions officers in a markedly class-stratified way.

It would be far better if we turned our reformist energies toward improving educational opportunity earlier in life.

I think about this in the context of Harvard’s recent decision to tap its considerable endowment to provide more financial aid for “middle income”families earning less than $180,000 a year. But to the extent that such announcements do increase the number of applicants at Harvard, admissions will become even more competitive, and students from more “modest” backgrounds will be welcomed at Harvard only to the extent that they look like the children of the wealthy donors who make their presence possible.

Stevens argues that genuine equity in college admissions will be attained when we have high quality preschool for all children, generous funding for college prep resources in low-income school districts, and a public that thinks of the needs of children other than their own. Similary, Peter Sacks cautions that colleges like Harvard are motivated mainly by their rankings in the admissions race for a relatively small pool of hyper-qualified applicants and in the end, have little incentive to substantively increase needs-based financial aid.

As long as so many students attend schools that are so ill-equipped to prepare them for college, Harvard and its peers can have it both ways in the “elaborate national ritual” of admissions: getting credit for seeming to do its part in equalizing opportunity while still serving very few students of modest means.

And to the extent that the parents who usher their children through the frenzied process of admissions do think of other people’s children, they can convince themselves that these other children must certainly have had it easier.

And the pernicious ritual continues.

Thanks to the Eduwonkette for her tip to the Chronicle piece.