Education and Class

Thanks to Doug over at Borderland for the tip to Lawrence Mishel and Richard Rothstein’s excellent article Schools as Scapegoats.

Mishel and Rothstein outline the history of recent rhetoric linking the state of the economy to educational achievement and argue, as the have so effectively elsewhere, that schools alone cannot be held responsible for declining wages and growing income inequality.  They write:

It is cynical to tell millions of Americans who work (and who will continue to be needed to work) in low-level administrative jobs and in janitorial, food-service, hospitality, transportation, and retail industries that their wages have stagnated because their educations are inadequate for international competition. The quality of our civic, cultural, community, and family lives demands school improvement, but barriers to unionization have more to do with low wages than does the quality of education. After all, since 1973 the share of the workforce with college degrees has more than doubled; over 40 percent of native-born workers now have degrees beyond high school. Additionally, the proportion of native-born workers that has not completed high school or its equivalent has decreased by half to just 7 percent.

They go on to argue:

These are not problems that can be solved by charter schools, teacher accountability, or any other school intervention. A balanced human capital policy would involve schools, but would require tax, regulatory, and labor market reforms as well.

I think that in the end, I think that  I’m agreeing with Doug when I note that Mishel and Rothstein are suggesting that  even kids with stable and loving –but underpaid - parents  are stressed in ways that few expected, because their hard work is supposed to be paying off.  And it’s not.

Early childhood education, parents in stable relationships, and homework turned in neatly every day are not going to solve the problem of declining wages and growing inequality.

Scapegoating in any form is merely a diversion from the bigger policy questions that have to be addressed.

Mike Rose writes movingly about politics, work, the “detail and texture” of the lives of blue-collar people, and intelligence in a recent post on his blog.   Consider:

Judgments about intelligence carry great weight in our society, and we have a tendency to make sweeping assessments of people’s intelligence based on the kind of work they do. Political tributes to labor over the next three or four months, especially around Labor Day, will render the muscled arm, sleeve rolled tight against biceps, but few will also celebrate the thought bright behind the eye, offer no image that links hand and brain.

We might wish that more campaign workers and mainstream media pundits would read this post, or better yet, Rose’s excellent book on these things, The Mind at Work.

It’s not new news that educational advantage starts very early for the children of the wealthy, but the competition for admission to kindergartens charging $30,000 tuition has apparently intensified, in spite of the economic downturns in  much of the rest of the country.

A family member does physical labor for a small business that went through a round of layoffs a few months ago (he survived) and that is now dropping health insurance for the remaining employees (he’s not sure that he can financially survive this, and is justifiably concerned that this is the beginning of the end of his job).

When times get tough for privileged five year olds in New York City,  any number of entrepreneurs step up to fill the void.

When hard working middle-aged men hit hard times,  there’s little profit potential in their circumstances, and they’re pretty much left on their own.

Lane Kentworthy, over at Consider the Evidence, has been doing a series of posts here, here, here, and here on economic mobility and income inequality in the U.S.  The news is not good.  In his latest post in the series, he writes:

The median income of [sample] families  increased by about $12,000 between 1964 and 1994. Between 1974 and 2004, in contrast, it increased by only $4,500. The gain from generation to generation declined. And this is despite the fact that a growing share of these families have two earners rather than just one.

Public rhetoric would suggest that this is, in essence, an educational problem: That we’re not adequately preparing kids for high paying jobs so that employers then reluctantly move those jobs elsewhere.

Yet the data that he cites suggests that declining mobility may be attributable not simply to a slowing economy (as is assumed in much educational policy making), but instead to growing income inequality.

As he notes, the “American ethos” is enveloped in a deep belief in the chance to move up — in large measure, through doing well in school.

It seems unfortunately clear, however, that poor and working class kids cannot simply learn their way into the middle class in these troubled economic times .