I discussed the problems of college education in chapter 4; I now focus on K–12 education and the ongoing crisis in public education. It might be thought that schools that serve the poorest children would get the most resources in a democracy, but the opposite is the case in the United States today. This is because the FTE sector does not want to help the low-wage sector; history matters, and we live in an oligarchy rather than a democracy.
Thirty years ago, Lisbeth Schorr wrote a book on urban education with the hopeful title, Within Our Reach. She argued that we knew how to educate students who were growing up in poor and dysfunctional families and neighborhoods. Her primary argument was that schools in poor areas needed extra resources in the form of medical and psychological help that would enable poor children to learn in school. This book was published before the income distribution had become as unequal as it is now, and there was still the illusion that we were all working together for the good of all. Her project, however, ran afoul of racecraft and fears that the advancing integration and improving fortunes of African Americans would undermine positions of white power. Her book today stands as a memorial to a better time, and a reminder of the programs that we knew were needed then and are still needed now.1
The roots of our current problems in public education are entangled with gender as well as race. American industrialization in the nineteenth century led to increasing gender specialization, and the roles of men and women became more distinct as part of this process. Despite getting the vote in 1920, women were not emancipated from their traditional roles, and they continued to have restricted job choices for two-thirds of the twentieth century. Many jobs women were allowed to hold were still in cotton goods, clothing, and boots and shoes, the traditional nineteenth-century industries. Teaching remained a good job for women—considerably more interesting and more attractive than the alternatives.2
This changed in the 1970s as women greatly increased their college attendance and graduation rates. Oral contraceptives let women choose when to have their children. With the aid of “the pill,” they could plan their education and integrate family and career plans. Women chose to get more education, and they began to spread out into a variety of professional occupations. Teaching was no longer the only interesting job that American women could find. And the wages of women with graduate education began to rise relative to the salaries of female teachers in the late 1980s, climbing from 20 percent more to 40 percent more by 2000.3
Teaching lost its position as one of the most interesting or the best paid jobs for bright young women as careers of doctors and lawyers became available to them. Teacher unions became more strident as women teachers lost ground in earnings. Waves of teacher strikes spread across the country in the 1970s and 1980s as teachers tried to keep up with other educated women. Despite some gains, the unions were unable to bring teachers’ wages up to those of the newly opened career choices for women.4
Public education today is hobbled by the lack of resources to make teaching an attractive career. We can reorganize education in many ways, but we will not have a large effect on student learning if we cannot attract more skilled and creative teachers to public education. But—like the public universities described in chapter 4—public education in America has suffered from inadequate resources. School districts cannot raise teachers’ wages because they do not have the resources to do so. Many urban school districts do not even have enough money to maintain school buildings as a result of government policies at many levels. Wages for both men and women teachers continued to decrease relative to wages for comparable jobs after 2000, and the erosion of relative teacher wages was sharpest for experienced teachers.5
An important decision by the Supreme Court in 1974 condemned urban school systems to growing poverty. Justice Lewis Powell was part of the 5–4 majority, as was Justice William Rehnquist, in Milliken v. Bradley (418 US 717). This case was brought by the NAACP to challenge the implementation of Brown v. Board of Education. That decision set out a straightforward idea of integrated schools that proved very difficult to implement in the aftermath of the Great Migration.
The case came from Detroit, which had absorbed many black families seeking work. They were excluded from white neighborhoods by restricted access to mortgages and the opposition of white neighbors. The Detroit school district was two-thirds black by the 1970s, and the NAACP filed suit against Michigan Governor William Milliken and others, charging direct discrimination against blacks in the drawing of school districts. The Supreme Court held that school districts were not obligated to desegregate unless it could be proven that the lines were drawn with racist intent. Arbitrary lines that produced segregated districts were not illegal.
Intent is a familiar concept in criminal law, where it has been used for many, many purposes. The application to public policy, however, is fraught with problems. Public decisions often are made by many people interacting in complex political processes. The records of their discussions typically are brief and often bland. It is harder to find intent in a committee’s actions than in an individual’s actions. The Supreme Court used a traditional indicator in a way that accepted cities’ policies without inquiring into their causes or effects.
The 1974 decision in Milliken v. Bradley made it clear that white flight would successfully separate white suburbanites from their new dark-skinned neighbors. The decisions also ensured that black urban communities would lack an adequate fiscal base. The Supreme Court would not combine or otherwise alter existing school districts, and whites fleeing cities for suburbs would be able to separate their children from those of urban blacks. The decision also mandated poverty conditions for the urban school districts, which became poorer and more completely black over time. The tax base for urban schools decreased as urban factory jobs also decreased and fleeing whites avoided paying for urban schools. The result was segregated schools with inadequate resources for urban schools attended by the children of the Great Migration. Separated and unequal, one might say.
Powell, only two years after becoming a Supreme Court justice, had made Nixon’s Southern Strategy into a national policy. The Supreme Court limited school busing across city boundaries by a rule that stalled integration efforts and encouraged rising racial segregation between inner cities and suburbs.6
The process of income separation has continued as the FTE sector moves to its own communities and progressively disengages with the low-wage sector. The authors of studies that revealed this extension of white flight summarize the effects as follows: “Segregation of affluence not only concentrates income and wealth in a small number of communities, but also concentrates social capital and political power. As a result, any self-interested investment the rich make in their own communities has little chance of ‘spilling over’ to benefit middle and low-income families. In addition, it is increasingly unlikely that high-income families interact with middle- and low-income families, eroding some of the social empathy that might lead to support of broader public investments in social programs to help the poor and middle class.”7
American schools and particularly American urban schools have proven inadequate in recent years to fulfill the task set for them, but it will be very hard to improve school quality without attracting more highly talented teachers. There are many creative teachers like John-David Bowman, and we would attract more of them if teacher salaries were competitive with the earnings of other stimulating jobs. None of the current reforms even comes close to making that attempt. They are doomed to failure as a result. The worst schools are predominantly black, but the crisis extends to most public schools. Testing is popular as a way to evaluate schools, changing their role from informing teachers how well their students are learning to informing administrators how well their teachers are teaching. This further discourages good potential teachers from considering the field, and drives excellent but frustrated teachers into other professions, and it has not notably improved the quality of schools.8
And tests often preserve racial disparities. This can be seen in the activities of schools in Broward County, Florida. Like many other places, they had inflows of black and Latino students, but these students of color were far less likely than white students do be included in programs for gifted students. The county introduced a universal screening test based on a short nonverbal test for second graders in 2005. The results were startling. The proportion of black and Latino students identified as gifted tripled!
This startling result came from two sources. The nonverbal test did not favor students in families where English was not spoken, written, or pronounced as it was by mainstream Americans. In addition, teachers were not involved in the ratings. Teachers have expectations about students, and they do not see gifted students in unexpected places. This effect is pervasive, and it can be seen in symphony orchestras as well as schools. When the orchestras changed their auditions to have candidates play behind a sheet so their gender could not be seen, many more women were accepted into orchestras.
Despite these positive results, Broward County suspended its universal screening program in 2010, as the financial crisis of 2008 reduced tax revenues. Racial and ethnic disparities reemerged like those seen before 2005. A new test was adopted in 2012, but it was verbal and involved teacher judgments. It did not replicate the effects seen before 2010.9
The FTE sector is far from failing schools, and members of the FTE sector have options available for educating their children. They move to suburbs with good schools, paying high taxes to support them. If that is not good enough for them, they send their children to private schools. (Only a few dedicated reformers send their children to urban public schools.) At the lower end of the FTE sector, many parents are frustrated with the quality of their schools, but the FTE sector talks about improving individual schools without disturbing the current structure of American education.
Schools in the North have become as segregated as they were in the South before Brown v. Board of Education. The media are full of observations, analyses, and hand-wringing about schools with predominantly black students. A recent paper found that “school desegregation significantly increased educational attainment among blacks exposed to desegregation during their school-age years, with impacts found on ... attending college, graduating with a four-year college degree, and college quality.” But the residential pattern of black cities and white suburbs makes this kind of gain hard to expand.10
American education has split into two separate educational systems, echoing the division of the population into two sectors. Children in the FTE sector go to reasonably good schools, whether public schools in wealthy suburbs or in private schools. Children in the low-wage sector go to poor urban public schools. Since one third of black men are gone due to mass incarceration, most black children live in poor urban neighborhoods where the low-wage schools are starved for resources. One of the difficulties of school reform today is to distinguish between these two educational systems because their needs are quite different. Another problem is of course the reluctance of the FTE sector to spend money helping education in the low-wage sector. We had a dual school system based on race before Brown v. Board of Education; now we have a new dual school system based on class.11
The FTE educational sector has problems obtaining adequate teachers and other resources, but it functions well along traditional lines. There are concerns that even these favored schools are not doing all they can. Average performance on math and reading tests by high school students has fallen in recent years, while the federal government argues that excessive testing is getting in the way of a good education. And various people have called for more emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects so that students can find good jobs.12
Schools for the low-wage sector are failing students in more severe ways. Buildings are old, students are not engaged with the instruction they are offered, and many students do not finish high school. Studies in various states confirm poor results and poor conditions of black public schools. For example, many ninth graders in neighborhood high schools in Philadelphia have been there two or more years, and many of the first-timers are over age or below grade level in reading and math.13
The push for privatization noted for prisons has extended to schools in the form of charter schools that use public funds, but are not subject to the control of local school boards or unions. Charter schools, although hailed widely as a key to unlock public education, are not universally effective. There is a lot of variation, and not all students or all charter schools work well, but on balance, charter schools help poor, underachieving urban students. Successful charter schools are allowed to expand in some states, but not all states control the expansions to ensure that only good schools do so. And while public schools have to accept and help all students, charter schools have not always kept to that high standard, forcing out the most difficult students and those with special needs.14
Charter schools as a whole have no impact on test scores and a negative impact on earnings. In other words, the average student of a charter school has test scores no better than students at public schools and earnings below them. The best charter schools increase test scores and four-year college enrollment, but they do not have a statistically significant impact on earnings. Other charter schools decrease test scores, four-year college enrollment, and earnings. The private public oxymoron is not helping public education.15
The dual education system in the United States does damage to the country as a whole in addition to restricting the opportunities of students from the low-wage sector. By restricting the access of most of the population to the benefits of education and professional training, we reduce full participation in the economic and social benefits of America and the possibility that truly extraordinary young people will be able to fulfil their promise to the benefit of all. The benefits of full integration are shown in the outstanding Olympic victory in women’s gymnastics in 2016 with a team of gymnasts made up of two African Americans, two European Americans and a Latina. The captain was Jewish, and the big star was black.16
The experience of Detroit schools shows what happens when the private public oxymoron is taken to the limit. Michigan allowed unlimited charters to open in 1993. The cap on charters in the original law was abolished in 2011 at the same time that oversight by the State Department of Education was eliminated. But funding remains low for Detroit schools at about two-thirds of the spending per pupil in Denver and Milwaukee. Many charter schools were started in Michigan, and 80 percent of the new charters were in Detroit, where only 10 percent of high school seniors are college ready. The best Detroit charters are the most selective in the students they admit, and the average charter school is no better than the average public school. Detroit is awash in choice but hardly in quality.17
Economic analyses of both charter and public schools in New York, Houston, and Boston have found a set of best practices that help poor urban students make progress in school. These practices include close attention to traditional skills, frequent support for teachers using test feedback, and intensive tutoring for students identified by poor test results. By traditional skills, these studies mean reading, writing, and arithmetic—still the building blocks of human capital in the twenty-first century and the keys to further exploration of skills and knowledge. Best practices findings also state that teachers need to get feedback on how each student is going to direct his or her attention where it will be most useful; tests should be treated as diagnostic rather than as conclusive. Finally, students who need lots of help should get it. Teachers need to deal with whole classes; tutors are needed to pinpoint assistance to the neediest students.
Economists who have identified these effective measures have argued for their wider use. These best practices are present in some urban charters, and those are the charters that pull up the ratings of urban charter schools. The characteristics also work in public schools when they are tried. But although charter schools are privately run, they typically cannot expand freely even if they employ best practice methods. Minow’s critique of privatization in chapter 6 applies here to education. Regulations and inertia have prevented these insights from making a large difference in low-wage sector schools.18
This discussion of teacher salaries, racial segregation, best practices, and privatization exposes how complex the problems of education are. Several members of the very rich, notably Bill Gates, the Walton family, Michael Dell, and Eli Broad, supported public education through philanthropy. They had grown rich by finding new ways to provide other services, and they thought that the key to improving public education could be found similarly. Cory Booker, then Mayor of Newark, agreed with this approach and convinced another billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg, in 2010 to provide $100 million dollars a year for five years to Newark schools to emulate the spectacular successes of Microsoft, Walmart, and Facebook.19
Booker used the outside funds to hire a private firm of educational consultants who eventually earned close to $300 million advising Newark. These highly paid members of the FTE sector were supposed to bring their wisdom to fix the low-wage sector’s education problems in Newark. But their knowledge was of the FTE education system, not the low-wage education system, and they were woefully uninformed about the latter. The most obvious gap was in their conception of the community whose children were being educated. This was not the suburban community that supported schools to get their children into college, but low-wage people who wanted their children to be educated by the institutions they knew. Traditional schools were an important part of the community, through both employment and local politics. The community saw existing schools as their friends; the consultants saw the existing school principals and teachers as their enemies. The consultants also were white, while the community was black.
The consultants’ plan was to drastically shrink the authority of the Newark school district and replace most public schools with charter schools and specialized schools for gifted and problematic kids. The children would be tracked in a central database, and the school principals would run their schools like managers in private business. Taking this analogy further, they planned to move managers (principals) and workers (teachers) around to maximize productivity (test scores). They would overcome Minow’s objections to privatization by making the whole school system into a big firm with a set of competing plants. Booker argued this had to be done quickly. He and the state governor might soon be out of office. The donors needed to see speedy results. And, Booker said, “Entrenched forces are very invested in resisting choices we’re making around a one-billion-dollar budget. There are jobs at stake.”20
One casualty of the speed was the organization of the school reform itself. No one was in charge, and the integrated reform effort dissolved into a variety of different initiatives. The new charter schools were supposed to grow rapidly, providing what the reformers thought of as a good education. But this growth would denude traditional public schools of funds while leaving them with the neediest students. The traditional schools would go into a death spiral, losing support from social workers and guidance counselors while getting higher and higher proportions of problem students. Newark parents were not enthusiastic.
The consultants had no plans for this transition. They argued that once the transition was over, all children would be fine in the new charter and special schools. But what was to happen to the most vulnerable students in the meantime? Perhaps consultants hoped that Newark could stabilize like Detroit, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia with 55, 44, and 28 percent charter schools among all district schools, respectively. But the anticipated beneficial results for students did not appear immediately, and the plan collapsed. Cory Booker went from mayor to senator in 2013. Consultants left for greener pastures, and the children of Newark were abandoned.
Russakoff concluded her vivid narrative of the Newark fiasco with a statement of the problem: “It is obvious that urban public schools are being asked to overcome nothing less than the effects of poverty. ... Much more support is needed.” Schorr had identified this problem thirty years earlier and described how added support could help. Nothing had been learned in the meantime, however; only the problems have grown.21
Poor urban public schools do not appear to have the ability to adopt best practices on their own. But there are exceptions to this rule. The schools in Union City, not very far from Newark in northern New Jersey, seemed about to collapse around 1990 when enrollments rose sharply due to a large inflow of Latino immigrants. The schools were saved by a combination of interrelated actions. The Union City school department leaders decided to work with gifted teachers already in the school system and launched a plan to redesign the curriculum. Emphasis was concentrated on early education. The school system instituted pre-kindergarten programs to introduce poor families and children into the educational system. These were full-day preschools with curricula built around stories in both English and Spanish that would appeal to the students. This beginning helped families support the changes underway and prepared students who came from poor houses with no books to focus on reading.
This early education can be seen as the starting point for a serious approach to the education of poor children. A first step would be prenatal help to the mother so the baby will be born with a normal birth weight. Then talking to and playing with young infants has large impacts on children’s future development. Every mother would like to do this, but not every mother has the time and energy to read and interact with her child. Children of the low-wage sector typically have disadvantages dating from their preschool years that are not overcome once school has started.22
James Heckman, a Nobel laureate in economics who has studied the effects of early education, states this point forcefully: “The accident of birth is a principal source of inequality in America today. American society is dividing into skilled and unskilled, and the roots of this division lie in early childhood experiences. ... While we celebrate equality of opportunity, we live in a society in which birth is becoming fate.” Heckman goes on to say that success in life depends on more than cognitive skills, that is, human capital. It depends also on noncognitive characteristics, that is, social capital, including “perseverance, attentiveness, motivation, self-confidence, and other socio-emotional qualities.” These aspects of social capital are best acquired in children’s early years. When families cannot teach, public policy is needed to make up for the problems of low-wage families.23
The second action, following the Union City school leaders, is to increase the education budget. Taxes in Union City were raised to aid the schools, and the Supreme Court of New Jersey decided a case in its Abbott series of school-funding decisions by asserting that hugely unequal funding of schools in different school districts was unconstitutional. The court monitored compliance to its rulings over the next decade and made sure that the schools in Union City received more funds. Starting in 1990, at the same time as Schorr’s book, Within Our Reach, the experience of Union City shows that public schools, with the aid of dedicated teachers and adequate funds, can deal with the problems that poverty creates for education.24
The preschool program supported by the New Jersey Supreme Court’s Abbott decisions has been shown to have such substantial effects on children in fifth grade that the evaluators have promoted it as a national model. The effects from two years of preschool are more than twice those from one year and close from 20 to 40 percent of the achievement gap between minority and white students. The continuous improvement was promoted by teacher self-assessments, collection of data on individual children’s progress, and coaching by master teachers.25
Instead of expanding the emerging progress of the second-generation majority minority, Chris Christie, Governor of New Jersey, demonstrated the force of the Lewis model by trying to destroy the Abbott school funding system and replace it with a flat allocation of funds to school districts similar to the flat tax plans of conservative political candidates. A flat allocation would transfer state money from under-served minority urban schools to prosperous white suburban ones. As the New York Times Editorial Board said: “This toxic plan does nothing less than pit rich against poor, black against white and city dwellers against suburbanites, and it could well poison state politics for years to come, even if Democrats succeed in fending it off.”26
The third step in school reform is to commit to slow and steady progress, as the leaders of the Union City school department did. These leaders were drawn from the community, and they were determined to help their families and friends and neighbors. They were not investors from Silicon Valley or politicians on their way to Congress; they were educators who were dedicated to their profession. They thought in terms of decades rather than years, and—like the proverbial tortoise—they won the race.
The sequence of white flight and poor urban schools is most apparent in Northern cities and suburbs, but not all African Americans left the South in the Great Migration. Many African Americans still live in Southern states, where they often are living in abandoned rural communities, as opposed to the inner cities of Northern cities. Rural schools in the South face the twin problems of inadequate funding and poor job prospects for graduates in the local area. It is as hard to keep these Southern rural black students as it is to keep Northern urban black students engaged in learning. Educators have proposed varied solutions for dealing with these combined problems. One that complements the idea of best practices in urban schools is to reverse the order of instruction. Instead of starting with skills in reading and math and then applying the tools to problems that could interest students, educators have proposed starting with local stories and problems that the students can identify with and then teach reading and math through the stories the students are investigating. This is the same kind of approach used in Union City. There have not been systematic comparisons of schools run along these lines with traditional approaches because poor Southern students are scattered throughout the countryside, but Union City’s track record is promising.27
There are no quick fixes or miracle cures for urban education. The success of schools in Union City shows how sustained effort can upgrade low-wage sector schools over time. These schools used many of the best practices identified by economists, supplemented by preschool for all children age three and older, attention to the absorption of immigrants, and the active involvement of parents. Instead of the rapid coming and going of venture capitalists, the slow and steady growth of trust between the community and schools, and between teachers and students, has been a necessary part of school success. Social capital is needed for successful investments in human capital.28
The pressures on families in the low-wage sector make the need for investments in social capital very important. Suburban schools can think about social and emotional intelligence within their schools, but they do not have to build social capital in their communities. Progress in towns and cities like Union City requires active investment in the community as well as in the schools. The severity of this need can be seen in a few New York City schools where half the students are from homeless households.29
The contrast between the two school systems now operating in the United States can be seen in the contrast between Head Start and NCAA basketball. Head Start was started by President Lyndon B. Johnson as part of his War on Poverty to provide the kind of preschool preparation that the Union City reformers supported. Head Start began giving grants to school districts in 1965; it was received well and still operates today. But while enrollment doubled in the fifteen years after 1970, the funding (adjusted for inflation) only rose by one fifth.30
Many scholars have found that Head Start improved the education and lives of students who went through the program. The results have been controversial because the teaching in Head Start was multifaceted, supporting social as well as intellectual skills, and some observers accused the program of wasting money. In the terms used here, the critics looked only at human capital, while the supporters of Head Start look also at social capital. As argued here, acquiring social capital is a big hurdle for education in the low-wage sector, particularly in communities ravaged by mass incarceration.
Evidence shows that graduates of Head Start are more likely to graduate from high school and attend college; they are less likely to be charged with committing a crime. Detailed studies of the allocation of resources used in Head Start show that higher spending on child-specific activities reduced behavior problems and grade repetition while increasing reading and vocabulary. Head Start also diminishes child mortality, which allows these effects to be seen.31
Some critics have asserted that the effects of Head Start rapidly dissipate when students enter grade school. This effect is stronger for black than for white children, and this fading out comes from the inferior, low-wage sector schools that most black students attend. In other words, Head Start is not an education in itself; it is only a good start to a longer process of education. To get the full effect of Head Start and other preschool support, children need to continue to get a good education in the schools they attend—as was achieved in Union City.32
Nevertheless, when George W. Bush renewed funding of Head Start in 2007, he said, “I am pleased that this bill addresses several longstanding Administration priorities, such as increased competition among Head Start providers, improved coordination of early childhood delivery systems, and stronger educational performance standards.” “Competition” is code for the private public oxymoron, looking for charter Head Start programs. “Coordination” is code for reducing the multidimensional focus in very young children, and “performance standards” means tests for short-run impact on human capital rather than the important impact on social capital. President Bush was trying to reform the low-wage educational system along the lines tried in Newark, appropriate perhaps to the FTE schools, not to low-wage schools. President Obama reversed this direction in subsequent years, looking to evaluate Head Start teachers on their relationships with the students rather than focusing on multiple-choice tests for the students.33
It is a long way from Head Start to college basketball, but the value of social capital is illustrated well in a story of success in the NCAA basketball tournament in 2016. Ryan Arcidiacono was a star scorer on the Villanova Wildcats that made it into the Final Four; he was looking forward to scoring at the end of the game to the cheering of the crowd. But when he got the ball with less than five seconds to play in a tied championship game, he passed the ball to an open teammate. The resulting shot was successful, and the fans erupted. The news reporter said, “The game was ... classic and wondrous, because the Wildcats didn’t win it with superstars. ... Those players were selfless, and trusted that their teamwork would give them the edge.” This is social capital: the trust that people who have mutually agreed what to do actually follow through. Teamwork is a form of social capital—which is the key to preschool education for low-wage communities.34
Good education, improving both human and social capital, is a tall order for the low-wage sector, and it goes against the grain of politics in a dual economy. The threat of mass incarceration hangs over black and Latino communities, and the presence of hostile militarized police makes investments in social capital even harder. Far more resources need to be allocated to urban education to make progress, but none will be forthcoming soon. Instead, poor education will keep black and brown communities down, providing more opportunities for mass incarceration. And mass incarceration will contain the people operating without social capital in prison. The money that should go to schools will go to prisons instead.
The abandonment of urban public schools has produced a growing education gap between rich and poor. Comparison of reading and math skills between the richest and poorest 10 percent of the population reveals a gap that has grown dramatically in the last few decades to be equivalent to several years of education. For children born in the postwar boom, educational results were more equal than the incomes that blacks could earn. For children born later, the education gap between rich and poor has grown due to the low funding extended to urban, predominantly black schools. The education gap now exceeds the racial gap in income.35
Some political scientists claimed that integration has decreased trust among students, implying that separate schooling is preferable to integrated schooling. But causation goes the other way. Social capital—that is, trust between people—is lower in low-wage sector communities. When white students from the FTE sector are integrated with black students from the low-wage sector, the level of trust goes down. But it is not because everyone mistrusts everyone else, but rather that the new average is the average of the high social capital of the white students and the low social capital of the black students. Inequality, not diversity, causes distrust.36
And diversity is healthy, and not just in schools. Sociologists have found through market simulations that diverse market participants reduce the frequency and damage of booms and busts. When everyone thinks alike, it is easy for people to convince themselves that a bubble is not taking place. Michael Lewis in The Big Short found that only oddballs saw the financial crisis of 2008 coming.37