Education: The Great Leveler and the Great Divider

David Brooks had an tense (and some would say awkward) column in the New York Times last week.  It was called, How We Are Ruining America. 

Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making sure the children of other classes have limited chances to join their ranks.

He talks mostly about what means gives to upper-middle class families especially in terms of time and access.  He did have one interesting stat:

Since 1996, education expenditures among the affluent have increased by almost 300 percent, while education spending among every other group is basically flat.

He is does bounce around a bit with his terms- which is confusing - saying things are worse for the middle class but making that sound like almost no one who went to college fits in that category.  Instead he calls out the "upper middle" class.

But his central premise is one that I recognize and have written about before AND it puts forth an even bigger question:

It’s when we turn to the next task — excluding other people’s children from the same opportunities — that things become morally dicey. Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution recently published a book called “Dream Hoarders” detailing some of the structural ways the well educated rig the system.

I was braced by Reeves’s book, but after speaking with him a few times about it, I’ve come to think the structural barriers he emphasizes are less important than the informal social barriers that segregate the lower 80 percent.

But I don't think it's a 80-20 percentage divide.  I think there is more likely a 60-25-15 divide.  Meaning, the 60% of people who have not gone to college, the 25% who did but not to Ivy League schools and the 15% who have the most exclusive college experience and/or advanced degrees.

(The Census says that 33.4% of Americans 25 or older have a college degree.  By race, it's Asians, 55.9%, white Americans, 37%, black Americans, 23% and Hispanic Americans,  16.4%.)

Basically, it's what I call the code of the club of the educated (particularly the very well-educated). If you didn't grow up with money or parents who went to college but you yourself DID go to college, you probably know what I mean.

You know, the secret handshake that says, "I know this, do you?"  And it's not the "book learning" stuff - it's how you behave in a nice restaurant, what the words on the menu - frequently in another language - mean, it's where everyone went on their last vacation and you haven't a clue where that is, it's the sorority girls in their preppy chic, it's all those things that you learn to be in the club.

Brooks uses a terrible example of taking "a friend with only a high school degree to lunch" to a fancy sandwich shop and seeing her horrified face as she couldn't understand the menu. 

In her thorough book “The Sum of Small Things,” Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argues that the educated class establishes class barriers not through material consumption and wealth display but by establishing practices that can be accessed only by those who possess rarefied information.

We in the educated class have created barriers to mobility that are more devastating for being invisible. The rest of America can’t name them, can’t understand them. They just know they’re there.

Because to be in the club means that you can somehow move up in the world, both socially and in the work world.  

So into the fray comes Robert Rondiscio of the Flypaper blog with his own thoughts on the Brooks essay.

Brooks, I think, confuses effects for causes. Mating, motherhood, and Middlebury are not the arenas where battles for opportunity are fought. They are the spoils of war accrued by those who’ve already won.

And here's where he (and I) come to that bigger question (bold mine):

There is, without question, a language of privilege in America that excludes those who do not speak it fluently. And unlike assortative mating, blood-sport parenting, and legacy admissions to the Ivy League, it is within our power as educators and policymakers to influence children’s acquisition of that language. But doing so will require a degree of clarity and candor to which we are unaccustomed when we talk about education. E.D. Hirsch, Jr., has long been making the social justice case for giving disadvantaged children access to the knowledge and language that have long been assumed by the privileged and powerful.

Hirsch’s project (the book Cultural Literacy)has been to inventory, to the degree possible, the mental furniture of the elites that Brooks sees hoarding privilege and opportunity, and to advocate for seeding their knowledge and language in every American classroom. This has long made Hirsch our best and truest voice for social justice in K–12 education.

So, if the language of power in this country cuts out many people - and this may be the impulse that got Trump to the presidency - should it be taught in schools and, if so, how?  

But:

But the idea that American schools should explicitly familiarize children—especially those from other countries, cultures, or traditions—with a uniform body of knowledge in elementary and middle school falls upon contemporary ears as awkward, anachronistic, even inappropriate. We are far more likely to honor or even revere a child’s home language, culture, and dialect. But we must seriously consider the possibility that this well-meaning impulse is quite wrong for all the right reasons.

He goes on:

Lisa Delpit, an African American literacy researcher and 1990 MacArthur grantee, has written persuasively for many years about the “culture of power” in American schools and classrooms.  

In her seminal essay, “The Silenced Dialogue,”she explains the implications of the culture of power:

This means that success in institutions—schools, workplaces, and so on—is predicated upon acquisition of the culture of those who are in power. Children from middle-class homes tend to do better in school than those from non-middle-class homes because the culture of the school is based on the culture of the upper and middle classes—of those in power. The upper and middle classes send their children to school with all the accouterments of the culture of power; children from other kinds of families operate within perfectly wonderful and viable cultures but not cultures that carry the codes or rules of power.

To say this is an uncomfortable topic among educators is to vastly understate things, especially among those who are earnestly committed to both progressive ideals and progressive pedagogy. “The Silenced Dialogue” and the book it spawned, Other People’s Children, are staples on the syllabus of teacher-education programs and spark heated debate and wounded egos.

This is big, big stuff.  While I applaud the idea of ethnic studies, this issue of what you need to know to operate well and with access to all areas of society should be part of that.

How to plan such a curriculum that operates both academically and with a social justice focus is a tremendously hard undertaking that must have buy-in from parents.  But how to do all of that?

From Ms. Delphit:

Many liberal educators hold that the primary goal for education is for children to become autonomous, to develop fully who they are in the classroom setting without having arbitrary, outside standards forced upon them. This is a very reasonable goal for people whose children are already participants in the culture of power and who have already internalized its codes.

   “But parents who don’t function within that culture often want something else. It’s not that they disagree with the former aim, it’s just that they want something more. They want to ensure that the school provides their children with discourse patterns, interactional styles, and spoken and written language codes that will allow them success in the larger society.

I would call that intersectionality - how we blend and honor all the cultures of our country into the power structure.

However, we run up against this:

American education remains deeply reluctant to do this, since it requires overthrowing any number of traditions and practices—from child-centered pedagogies, assumptions about student engagement, and other progressive education ideals, to local control of curriculum, the privileging of skills over content, and the movement toward mass customization of education.

It cuts against the received wisdom of pedagogical and political fashion, but regardless of where one attends school, if we are serious about breaking down the social barriers to upward mobility, there should be far more similarities than differences in education in the United States, at least at the K–8 level. The promise of preparing children for academic achievement and upward mobility depends upon a base level of language proficiency. Foundational knowledge across the curriculum not only sets the stage for further independent exploration, it provides the basis for language proficiency—for communication, collaboration, and cooperation between and among disparate people.

Great points all because I perceive that if you don't have this come from the top and spread out to states, then, well, it's pretty much local cultural goals. In Seattle, we are a progressive city and I believe most parents would embrace the change if they are included in the process.  Would they in Spokane?  In Sarasota?  In Syracuse?  I don't know.

He also mentions a book that I highly recommend about the smartest senior, an African-American boy, at the worst high school in D.C. and his struggle to education. 

In 1994, Ron Suskind published A Hope in the Unseen, the story of a bright, ambitious young man from one of the worst high schools in Washington, D.C., who defies the odds to win acceptance at Brown University. The book became one of the touchstones of the education-reform movement because it appeared to demonstrate that demographics need not be destiny. You can grow up as dirt poor as its protagonist, Cedric Jennings, and still achieve at the highest levels academically—all the way to the Ivy League.

 He ends his essay:

There is a language of upward mobility in America. It has an expansive and nuanced vocabulary that it employs to nimbly navigate the world of organizations, institutions, and opportunities.

There is a language of power. It is the language of privileged parents, affluent communities, and elite universities. It’s the language of David Brooks. But he’d do well to recognize that you don’t learn that language in those places. They don’t let you in until or unless you demonstrate command of it.

From my own personal experience of going from a small and isolated border town to a private university in a huge city, I found that sometimes it was humiliating ("What's a Porsche?"), humbling, frustrating and exasperating (what did it matter what the brand of my clothing was if I was cute?).  I soon learned.

Going to Stanford to see my best friend, I learned her roommate was an heiress to the Philip Morris company.  There's another lesson -there's rich and there's wealthy.  As Chris Rock said, "Shaq is rich, the guy who signs his paycheck is wealthy."  Also, the first rule of wealth is...we don't talk about money. 

I was fortunate enough to be married to a guy who became incredibly well-educated and he, too, learned to move in much, much wealthier circles than how he was raised as an immigrant.  He took it on, as part of his role as a professor, to help his students understand how to navigate the world of power.  He never forgot where he came from and would never allow anyone to make him feel like less because he wasn't born to the manor.  It's just one of the many reasons I was so proud of him and why I miss him so much.

Thoughts about these essays and the way forward for the newly-minted resolution for ethnic studies?