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Education Isn't Helping Americans Overcome Deepening Inequality


In Remaking Eden (Harper Perennial, 1998), geneticist Lee Silver envisioned a future in which humanity has split into two species: "Naturals," the poor slobs who muddle along with the genes that nature gave them, and the "GenRich," who can afford to boost their physical and mental talents via genetic engineering. Silver warns that over time, "the genetic distance between the Naturals and the GenRich has become greater and greater, and now there is little movement up from the Natural to GenRich class."

We don't have to wait until science catches up to science fiction for this unjust dystopia to be realized. It's happening now, in the United States, as a result of policies that favor the rich at the expense of un-rich. Scholars are confirming with empirical studies what Occupy Wall Street protesters have been saying: our system is unfairly rigged in favor of the haves, who keep pulling away from have-nots.

Education can help the poor climb their way to a higher socioeconomic status. But according to Sabrina Tavernise of The New York Times, several studies have shown that "the achievement gap between rich and poor children is widening, a development that threatens to dilute education's leveling effects."

Race plays less of a role than it once did in this widening chasm. A study published last year by sociologist Sean Reardon found that the difference between standardized test scores of blacks and whites has narrowed since 1960, while the difference between low-income and wealthy students has surged 40 percent. "We have moved from a society in the 1950s and 1960s," Reardon told The Times, "in which race was more consequential than family income, to one today in which family income appears to be more determinative of educational success than race."

The simplest explanation for the divide is that the rich can afford to send their children to better schools, hire private tutors for them and give them other advantages. In 1972, affluent parents spent five times as much on their children, on average, as low-income parents; by 2007, that difference had almost doubled, to nine to one. "The pattern of privileged families today is intensive cultivation," sociologist Frank Furstenberg told The Times.


Political scientist Andrew Hacker documents the depths of our inequality in "We're More Unequal Than You Think," in The New York Review of Books this month. He estimates that since 1985 "the lower 60 percent of households have lost $4 trillion, most of which has ascended to the top 5 percent." U.S. economic policies, Hacker says, now serve as a "giant vacuum cleaner" sucking money from low-income people and showering it upon the rich.


Hacker notes that "in a not-so-distant past, families of modest means made enough to put something aside for their children's college fees. That cushion is gone, which is why millions of undergraduates are now forced to take much larger loans. Adding interest and penalties, many will face decades paying off six-figure debts." (I'm facing this financial challenge myself; my son is entering college next fall and my daughter a year later.)



Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons,


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