Reason 2: Their Silence in Acknowledging the Consequences of Capitalism and Racial Discrimination are not cured by Educational attainment alone
The contemporary education eform movement hinges on variants of one basic principle: that what is holding urban students back from achieving in life is the lack of a “good” or “quality” education. Their argument follows a basic chain of analysis: low-income students of color, if they were to attend schools that demonstrate better outcomes through, primarily quantitative metrics like standardized test scores, will have greater opportunities to go to college, and presumably secure quality employment. Let us temporarily disregard the reality that more and more colleges are jettisoning the practice of including performance on standardized exams as factors for acceptance as they recognize the greatest indicator of student success in college is students’ high school GPA. Let us temporarily suspend the fact that performance on standardized tests aligns reliably with family income where more affluent districts perform reliably better, while poorer districts perform reliably worse; putting to bed the idea that zip codes don’t matter. And let us push aside our understanding that America is not a meritocracy, and that largely social mobility is becoming more a mythical dream than a reality. NEWSFLASH: attending a non-urban public school or will not save the lot of students growing up in low-income America regardless of their race.
The Education Reform Community refuses to tackle such realities with the depth and maturity. My suspicion is their smokescreen advocacy is tied to the financial interest of their billionaire funders: to keep issues of capitalism, wealth inequality and racial discrimination far from the minds of the masses of the most marginalized, and redirect the narrative to identify urban public schools as both the genesis of urban inequality and antidote to systemic inequality. Both are false. “Failing” (their definition) schools are not the cause for the lack of future opportunities for low-income students of color, but capitalism and racial discrimination are. And, education reform through urban school closure and broader proliferation of corporate charter schools, as advocated by the Education Reform Community, does nothing to address either. This brings us to “The Genuine Problems I have with the Education Reform Community, Reason #2”: Their Silence in Acknowledging the Consequences of Capitalism and Discrimination are not Cured by Education.
The Contrived “Failing” School
Long documented shortcomings of minority and low SES students in comparison to white students in test scores, school completion, course selection, and college attainment coalesce to form what is popularly referred to as the “achievement gap. The oft referred “achievement gap”, despite consistently narrowing, has remained a central rallying cry for Educational Reform Community prompting well-funded efforts to increase standardized assessments, the spreading of corporate charter schools, and increased urban school closure. Offering an alternative understanding of the “achievement gap”, the concept of a lingering “Education Debt”, introduced by Gloria Ladson-Billings, describes how of centuries of racial segregation and injustice, in addition to historic economic and occupational discrimination endured by blacks specifically, accumulated overtime to explain the disparity in educational performance between low SES minority and white students.
Education Reform Community’s Conception of “Good” Education Ignores Operating Realities of Capitalism
Despite the finger-wagging and posturing for the need for urban students of color “trapped in failing schools’” need for “quality” education, the Education Reform Community comprised of billionaire funders, flagrantly disregards capitalism’s operational reality that seeks to maximize profits through reducing both production and labor costs. Underreported fact: More students than ever are graduating and attending college than ever, including students from low-income backgrounds. In “The False Promise of Education”, Backer writes, “about 3.5M students will graduate from high school during the 2016-2017 school year” with most attending at least some college after and during that same year “1.01M associate’s degrees, 1.9M bachelor’s, 800,000 master’s, and 181,000 doctoral degrees will be awarded” but continues “having a degree will do nothing to protect against the sometimes violent and unpredictable patterns of market activity in a capitalist economy”. With the increase in domestic automation, corporate offshoring due to growing and extended international trade agreements, the sustained erosion of factory jobs that continued for nearly fifty years has no signs of slowing down.
The capitalist desire to find the cheapest labor extends beyond manufacturing, and taxpayer-reliant public sector jobs, but also is apparent in the technology sector as well. Greater educational attainment for today’s students does nothing to mitigate this reality. Quite common it is for customers experiencing difficulty with their computer or telecommunications device to contact customer service and be connected with a call centers based in India or Bangladesh. Tech workers in Silicon Valley, CA were paid on average $78,000 in 2013, where someone in India is paid to $8,000 to do the same work. Such a disparity in labor costs, not educational attainment, is blamed for the shedding of nearly three million white-collar jobs since 2002.
As incomes across sectors have stagnated; housing, food, and health care costs continue to rise, available jobs paying a living wage become increasingly hard to find, the false focus on “good” (corporate charter) schools for urban low-income students color as an answer put forth by the Education Reform Community is diversionary.
Education Reform Community’s Disregard of Racial Discrimination Despite Educational Attainment
In addition to the Education Reform Community’s disregard that capitalism directly conflicts with their assumption that “good” schools is the cure-all for urban students of color, they remain unwilling to contend with the reality of workplace discrimination impacting even the most educated persons of color. Indeed, Quillian, et. al, found even when accounting for education, gender, and study methodologies white people still get 36% more callbacks than black applicants, and 25% more callbacks than Latino job seekers indicating very little progress has been made in leveling the playing field in occupational attainment. Where the common explanation for the persistent disparity in employment rates between Blacks and whites is a comparative lack of formal education or higher likelihood of possessing a criminal record, a 2005 Princeton study showed that black men in New York City with a high school diploma, and no criminal record, were less likely to receive a second phone call from a prospective employer than a white man who had just left prison (Pager & Western, 2006). Alexander (2014) conducted a longitudinal study on low income and working-class families of all races in West Baltimore. He found that “at 28, 54 percent of white men with a criminal record were employed full time making an average of $20 an hour; among black men with similar records, just 33 percent were employed by 28, making just over $10 an hour, or half that of their white peers”.
To be clear, educational attainment for students of color is no antidote for persons of color against employment discrimination. In 2018, in 50 Years After the Kerner Commission, the Economic Policy Institute found that the legacy in employment discrimination persists at roughly the same levels as 1968 when the Civil Rights Act was signed into law by Lyndon Johnson – despite the fact that “more than 90 percent of younger African Americans (ages 25 to 29) have graduated from high school, compared with just over half in 1968”, and Black college graduation rates are at an all-time high. The National Center for Educational Statistics (2016) reported that Black college attendance has increased overall 15% from 1976 to 2012, while white college enrollment fell 24%, from 84 to 60 percent during that same period. Additionally, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2016, experiences of workplace discrimination based on race worsens and becomes more frequent the more formally educated Black people become. And while Black women, the most educated subgroup in America, over thirty years have increased rates of both college enrollment and graduation comparatively, Black women make up only “8% of private sector jobs and 1.5% of private sector leadership positions”.
Finally, for Black students who graduate with a bachelor’s degree, according to Brookings, such educational attainment does not cure wealth gaps nor provides the same economic stability when compared to white counterparts. A report conducted by the Insight Center for Community and Economic Development, Umbrellas Don’t Make it Rain: Why Studying and Working Hard Isn’t Enough for Black Americans, conveys households where the primary breadwinner is white and not college educated, still have more wealth than households where the primary earner is Black with a Bachelor’s degree.
Such focus on students of color getting a “good” education through an expansion of corporate charter schools, and urban public school closure ignores the realities of the labor market that corporations seek to reduce the cost of labor in efforts to maximize profit – that regardless of the education of the domestic labor force, jobs will always go to places where labor and production is cheapest. Further, for urban students of color today, the contemporary approach to education reform, also does not account for job and wage discrimination upon students’ entrance into the work world; even as they attempt to do everything prescribed to them as their avenue to success.
Conclusion
In full transparency: there are several matters I find loathsome about the Education Reform Community’s advocacy for, singularly, urban students of color. In Part 1, I mentioned their disregard for the connection urban public schools have with the availability of affordable housing. Here, I discussed their advocacy extolling the need for “good” schools embodied through, exclusively, corporate charter schools that ignore the realities of capitalism and racism in the workplace. I assert that this no accident nor an oversight as the research on both are readily available. The Education Reform Community, comprised of a handful of billionaires, and their expansive web of funded foundations, philanthropies, “think” tanks, and messengers deliberately concentrates the focus on schools alone as doing so sustains the false narrative of American meritocracy, and distracts attention away from the same billionaires’ forty-year role in perpetuating such staggering economic inequality harming the same children they claim to advocate for.
