Public Schools and Educational Inequality: Some Further Thoughts (Part 2)

With A Nation at Risk report issued in 1983 and subsequent shifts in policy such as higher curriculum standards, more testing, and accountability for results at school and district levels, the problem of U.S. students’ poor performance on domestic and international tests was clearly laid at the doorstep of schools. Responsibility for mediocre test scores was solely laid upon schools. As the report stated:

We conclude that declines in educational performance are in large part the result of disturbing inadequacies in the way the educational process itself is often conducted.

Schools, therefore, must reform to produce both excellence and equity. No mention was made of societal inequalities that spill over the schools. Schools, then, must improve in order to defend the nation economically and become prosperous once again. Unless school reform occurred, then inequalities will worsen.

That was then. There are now critics who claim that schools still worsen educational, economic and societal inequalities even after 35 years of standards, tests, and accountability, yet these current critics seldom ask (or answer) the fundamental question driving tax-supported public schools: Are children and youth, especially those who are disadvantaged by poverty better off going to school or staying at home? *

 

There have been unfortunate instances where the question has been answered. Consider that Prince Edward County (VA) officials closed its schools in 1959 to resist the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision. White children and youth went to a series of newly established private schools while most black students did not attend public schools save for a few privately funded ones. Prince Edward County schools reopened in 1964 to both black and white students.

The results for black students of five years being locked out of their schools? Terrible.

While private efforts sparked by President John F. Kennedy created “Free Schools” for the African American students barred from attending their segregated public schools, most children and youth could not afford to pack up and leave the county for schools elsewhere in Virginia; they simply stayed home and worked or did nothing. Subsequent low academic achievement, diminished chances for jobs, and dampened aspirations for higher education in the two years the schools were closed were obvious with little relief from the erratic, under-funded, and partial schooling they received in 1962-1964 when the County re-opened its schools (see here and here).

The absence of schooling for black children and youth in Prince Edward County for five years resulted in a far deeper and worse educational inequality than what had already existed in the Jim Crow school district prior to 1959. Schooling matters.

Another example of children not attending school being worse off than those who do, particularly for low-income minority families occurs with three and four year-olds who could attend preschool and those who do not.  Social scientists Steven Barnett (2006), James Heckman (2007), Greg Duncan (2013), and Stephen Raudenbush (2015) have collected and analyzed research findings that document the favorable outcomes to individual children, families, and society of providing universal preschool for three and four year-olds, especially for those children coming from low-income families (see here, here, here, and here).

Add all of the above to those researchers who have documented “summer loss” in academic achievement–see previous post–and what accumulates is a large body of evidence that schools can indeed moderate educational inequalities that exist between middle- and low-income children and youth in public schools. Using a different framework and research findings, then, shows that schools can reduce (but not eliminate) educational inequalities. And that is where I stand.

The answer to the “so what?” question is that persuasive evidence that public schools overall worsen educational inequities is lacking. Surely, there are instances of schools serving largely poor rural and urban families that fail miserably and their students emerge barely educated or drop out (see here, here, and here). But such schools are not the norm.

Nor is the norm those “no excuses” schools and a host of charter and regular public schools enrolling mostly poor and minority children and youth that have shown great promise using the familiar metrics of gains in test scores and sending nearly all of their graduates to higher education (see here, here, here, here).

Yes, tax-supported public schools in coping with the basic facts (noted in previous post) vary in their efforts to moderate existing educational inequalities. No great surprise. While schools matter in easing educational inequalities, the larger picture is that schools reflect those inequalities already existing in the larger society. The cliche is so true: when the U.S. has a cold, schools sneeze.

Thus, political attention must also be paid to the larger structures that shape the economy and society and inevitably influence schooling in the U.S. Growth of inequalities in wealth, the tax code strewn with loopholes that advantage the wealthy, unequal employment opportunities, segregated housing, and limited availability of a social safety net are forces that create the educational inequalities that mark U.S.schools. In the periodic spasms of reform that shake public schools, these structural factors seldom get noticed by political and policy elites.

 

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*I exclude the rise of home schooling in the U.S since the 1970s. About three percent of U.S. students are homeschooled. Evidence of its impact as compared to students in public schools is unclear since many families schooling their children at home often use public schools for course work, sports, and other activities (see here and here).