The Continental Divide

How you will react to this blog will depend on how you answer this single question: Do believe that public education is and should be America’s engine for upward mobility and a level playing field for those willing to work within that system? If your answer is “no,” then this piece is really not for you. But if you think that “hope” among America’s non-privileged classes is predicated on education, read on.

As most of my readers know, I like to look at trends and the numbers that support them. And it’s no secret that heavy governmental debt has resulted in massive cutbacks to public education at almost every level within state, federal and local budgets. It’s no secret that our nation’s educational standards as whole are dropping like a stone off a high cliff in comparison to the standardized testing applied around the world… from first to 25^th in science and math, for example. It’s also no secret that children of the wealthy – with opportunity and education that does not depend on public funding or largesse – generally do better than those children who live in less privileged environments. This is nothing new.

What is new, however, is that over the past several decades the gap between the richer children and their performance levels when compared with those in the lower socio-economic rungs (the ones most dependent on the public educational sector) is widening at an unprecedented pace. Sean Reardon (a professor of education and sociology at Stanford), writing for the April 30^th New York Times notes: “One way to see this is to look at the scores of rich and poor students on standardized math and reading tests over the last 50 years. When I did this using information from a dozen large national studies conducted between 1960 and 2010, I found that the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago.

“To make this trend concrete, consider two children, one from a family with income of $165,000 and one from a family with income of $15,000. These incomes are at the 90th and 10th percentiles of the income distribution nationally, meaning that 10 percent of children today grow up in families with incomes below $15,000 and 10 percent grow up in families with incomes above $165,000.

“In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race…

“In a study similar to mine, Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski, economists at the University of Michigan, found that the proportion of students from upper-income families who earn a bachelor’s degree has increased by 18 percentage points over a 20-year period, while the completion rate of poor students has grown by only 4 points… In a more recent study, my graduate students and I found that 15 percent of high-income students from the high school class of 2004 enrolled in a highly selective college or university, while fewer than 5 percent of middle-income and 2 percent of low-income students did…

“The economists Richard J. Murnane and Greg J. Duncan report that from 1972 to 2006 high-income families increased the amount they spent on enrichment activities for their children by 150 percent, while the spending of low-income families grew by 57 percent over the same time period. Likewise, the amount of time parents spend with their children has grown twice as fast since 1975 among college-educated parents as it has among less-educated parents.” Reardon.

So we shift our problems out of the school systems into the general population as children raised with fewer opportunities and vastly less hope migrate with less-than-required educational achievements into an employment impaired economy. What are their options? Social welfare? A walk into more lucrative criminal activities, from dealing drugs to using guns to enhance their economic condition? They won’t work in the fields picking strawberries. They’re not willing to dig the ditches or bus tables in place now dominated by undocumented aliens. They just plain give up on the system, creating issues that require massive amounts of money in other areas, from the criminal justice system to Medicaid. When a society inflicts a growing loss of hope for a better tomorrow among vast new segments of its population, exactly how long can such a nation last?

I’m Peter Dekom, and we are doing all of this to ourselves.