In this chapter, deBoer focuses on a central tension of educational discourse. I’ll let him lay out his thesis below:
That education is a great economic leveler stands as one of the ubiquitous nostrums of contemporary politics… [but] education is not a weapon against inequality; it is an engine of inequality. Far from making society more equal, our education system deepens inequality, sorting winners from losers and ensuring even greater financial rewards for the former.
I will be honest, I found this chapter more muddled than the previous one. In particular, deBoer tries to make a point about our incoherent views of education by citing two quotations from the same New York Times article. I found that the contrast wasn’t quite as stark as he probably felt, and as a result his argument about school choice felt off-kilter.
Anyway, rather than recap his full argument, complete with winding side-alleys, I’ll just try to recreate its heart and then respond to it.
First, the idea of education as “the best anti-poverty program,” to quote Obama, is a myth. The wage premium for college definitely exists, but it is a function of the demand for college-educated workers as compared to the supply. If we were able to dramatically increase the supply of college-educated workers, their wages would fall, and people would simply seek even higher levels of education than they currently have in order to fight for the best-paying jobs. In fact, these trends are already hard at work.
As an example, deBoer discusses the glut of pharmacy schools that popped up in the past two decades, leading to a massive increase in trained pharmacists vying for a stable number of jobs. As a result, many people who are trained in a field are unable to find work, but they retain the debt that comes from pharmacy school. And, with such a large supply of willing pharmacists for each job, why would CVS raise wages?
This gets back to a form of argument that deBoer deploys repeatedly throughout the book - the wage premium is a measure of relative wages. The only way for one group to have a wage premium is if another group has a lower wage, of course! So a great education is, indeed, beneficial to those individuals who receive it, but only because other people don’t receive it.
The second part of deBoer’s argument is even more interesting to me. Let’s stipulate that it is possible to make our educational system truly fair. If a child is born anywhere in America, they are able to walk into a great school and receive the same education as anyone else in the country.
This means that all “achievement gaps” would be erased. Students from every possible cohort (poor, rich, white, black, latino, and so on) would perform at identical rates on standard measures of educational attainment. This is precisely the idealized goal of all education reformers.
But there would still be significant variation in academic success within every single school, and the people who succeed in earlier years of schooling would get access to the best future opportunities and the highest-paying jobs. Those at the bottom quartile of each school, however, would face grim economic prospects. As deBoer states:
The meritocratic logic of contemporary capitalism, in its purest form, would accept this suffering as the system functioning properly. That’s how it’s supposed to work: the best performers get the best results, while the poorest get the worse. Supposedly, this works to entice students to try their best, incentivizing good academic performance with money and social capital.
This is the rot at the core of most educational arguments. Pundits and reformers claim that they want to give every student the opportunity to excel. But we still have an economic system that makes the stakes of failure extremely high. It’s increasingly difficult to live a dignified life without a college education, and yet most reformers admit that not every student is suited for college. What does the future hold for those students who do not (or cannot) succeed in school?
My Quibble
Here’s a quotation that I disagree with: “not everyone can be a good student if the term ‘good’ has any meaning. Not every school can provide an excellent education if we understand excellence in anything like conventional terms.”
I think deBoer is sliding into the same trap that he so ably identified in the previous chapter! As an 8th grade math teacher, my goal was for all my students to learn the 8th grade math standards by the end of the year. And there were standards where they basically all master the material I wanted them to learn!
Of course, there were students whom I could push to answer more complex and interesting variations of Pythagorean Theorem problems. But basically all my students could find the missing side by the end of the year. They were all good students at finding the missing side of a right triangle!
I don’t want this to get lost in the mix of his argument: While there will always be a distribution of abilities in any classroom, we can absolutely raise each student’s absolute level of learning, and this should be our primary focus as educators. And when every student learns something that I expect them to learn, they are good students.
This is the underlying value that spurs teachers to differentiate their instruction, to find problems that can be engaged with at many levels of sophistication, to push their best students beyond what is expected of their peers.
No matter my views on the education system writ large, I will always believe that the group of 25 or 30 kids sitting in front of me can each grow into a much more sophisticated math thinker. I am not sure if deBoer would even disagree with me, given the way I have reframed his point. But I don’t want this point to get lost in the mix, so I’ll probably bring it up again.