By
Jonathan Wynn

Inequality in education seems
to be one of the more counter-intuitive things I can imagine: how can our
education system exacerbate existing inequalities?

And yet, we should not be
surprised. Last summer I visited Arkansas,
stopping by Little Rock Central High School, the location of one of the most
powerful moments in American history.

In 1957 and in accordance with a 1954
Supreme Court ruling to integrate schools (Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483), nine
African-American teenagers marched through an angry mob to school, eventually
having to be escorted by the 101^st Airborne Division as per
President Eisenhower’s order. 

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The museum erected to commemorate this
event stands across the street, and it powerfully evokes the events themselves,
including audio and video clips of testimonials and news clips, adding an interactional
scale to the micro-level events that occurred in the lunchroom (e.g., the ”Chili
Incident”). The stuff brought me to tears. It’s also the stuff you bring back
with you to class. To many students, this is ancient history.

When talking with students about
education in the U.S., I start with John Dewey and his belief in the ideal of meritocracy.
I ask my students: “Did your parents or friend’s parents move to a particular
neighborhood because of the school district?” I then prod them further: “Why
should that matter? Why are there good schools and bad schools?”

These are seemingly simple questions,
but they unlock a set of assumptions about how we organize our public education
system, and how it can undermine our shared belief in meritocracy. It is hard for
students to reflect on being the beneficiaries of an unequal education system.
(Here’s a news story on my high school. You can find your high school’s rank here.) 

For students fresh out of high school, who
maybe heard of Little Rock Central in High School, we move to thinking about how
property taxes link to educational resources.

Here is a nice chart on the sources of
one state’s education funds from a study on this topic by a non-partisan think tank, Minnesota 2020:

 Source: Minnesota 2020 

Over the last few years, state funds are
a lesser proportion of school funds, and local taxes are taking a greater
proportion of the burden. Schools in poorer communities receive fewer
resources. Funding for programs that attempt to directly address these
inequalities are perpetually under funded: Title 1, IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities
Education Act), Pell Grants, and Head Start. The New York Times reports that laws seeking to
balance inequalities, like “No Child Left Behind,” have not closed achievement
gaps.

The results? It is always a surprise
when my students see a graph that shows SAT scores having a positive
correlation with parental income. (Here’s a visualization of
the data, along with a discussion at The Society Pages.) So much for merit. (A
fantastic new book about how the other half learns, see Shamus Kahn’s Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent
Elite at St. Paul’s School.)

Sociologists like to use Robert Merton’s manifest (i.e., obvious and intended) and latent (i.e., hidden and unintended) functions of particular social phenomena, and
you should think about them as they apply to this scenario. If the obvious and
intended purposes of education are to provide equal access to information,
training for skills, and equal chances to succeed, the latent functions of
tying education funds to property taxes might be the reproduction of
inequality. 

Seemingly race-neutral, the policy of
tethering education funds to property should be connected with decades of other
social problems, including redlining (a term coined by a sociologist to
describe how banks would systematically avoid investing in predominantly
African American communities), steering (the practice of real estate agents
directing African Americans to particular neighborhoods and hiding housing
opportunities in from them), and other forms of discrimination.

Can you hypothesize why this system is
constitutional? In a 1973 5-to-4 ruling (San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, 411
U.S. 1) the U.S. Supreme Court found that
funding for education based upon property taxes was not in violation of the 14^th Amendment and the same
Equal Protection Clause (affirming the commitment that “all men are created
equal”) that allowed the Little Rock Nine to walk into their high school.
Thurgood Marshall, in his dissent, wrote that “The Court concludes that public
education is not constitutionally guaranteed [despite the fact that] no other
state function is so uniformly recognized as an essential element of our
society's well being.”

If you are interested in seeing how
your high school ranks as related to those nearby, Propublica compiled data
from the U.S. Department of Education Office of
Civil Rights, and created an
online tool called "The Opportunity Gap."

And last, there are the revelations
from recent reports on college admissions officers seeking out full paying students, seeking
higher-income students (which is to say, students with parents who have higher
incomes).

Meanwhile, student loans are an increasingly risky endeavor. Higher
education loans became a one trillion dollar business, and a New
York Times article provided detailed
and personal accounts of the weight on "generation debt," and a devastating report Congressional report found private colleges can damage students’ long term
financial stability, and another wherein 2013 graduates will, on average, be
shackled with over $35,000 of debt, creating yet another layer
of inequality.