Left Center Left

Last night Greater Boston had a segment on the Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling that the Commonwealth’s funding scheme for school districts is meeting its constitutional duty to lower-income school districts. Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear that I think the SJC got it right; it reserved the provision of adequate education as a constitutional mandate the state can be held up to, yet declined to use the courts to weigh in on issues properly policy-based in nature.

But, man, do I find it frustrating to witness debates on education reform, for the simple reason that they step around and can’t even consider the fundamental truth that we’re facing: education in this state and in the country can improve, but we’re not going to have a fair, quality educational system regardless of which policy options we choose. Harsh assessment? Consider the following factors:

Educational credentials are largely zero-sum in nature. I’ve written on this before, but one’s chances in life have something to do with the actual things one learns at school but they have a lot more with how those things (and your school) compare to others’ education. Thus leveling the educational system across geography will simply start a credential bidding war. If we achieve the very difficult and we improve schools in Lowell and Brockton so that the students coming out are as well educated as students in Lexington or Brookline, parents in wealthier districts will pour more resources to ensure that their kids have better education than others. They live in Lexington and Brookline in fact so that their kids will have a better education. So districts and families richer in economic and cultural capital will still likely fare better given comparable levels of state provision; in fact, poorer and mid-level districts will need disproportionately higher funding and service to begin to produce similarly educated students. That higher funding, need I say, is politically unfeasible.

Credentials are only worth what they can be cashed as. Sometimes the labor market is rational and uses educational credentials to find the skills employers need. Equally, though, credentials serve as shorthand for the social background of prospective employees, who are then chosen for being the right sort or caliber of person. On top of this, of course, is outright nepotism, whereby employers give undue advantage to those who went to their schools.

Education is not merely provided but requires the active participation and ability of the learner. Equal funding and provision will not mean equally well educated students. For all sorts of reasons, but one is that students from backgrounds poorer in cultural capital will be less likely to learn as well as a better off student. For that matter, students from poorer backgrounds, internalizing what they see as objectively dismal life chances, will be more likely not want to want participate meaningfully in secondary education period. This is not an aspersion or class racism, it’s just the logical extension of the observation that traits, including propensity to learn, are sociologically variable. And though we like to think of children as endlessly curious, their dedication over twelve or more years time does require their sense that learning is worth the effort. Even if you change the social background of the winners and losers in the education game, you have to address how you’re going to maintain the participation of the losers. If you want an optimum educational system, that is.

The matching of education to the labor market’s needs involves an insurmountable coordination effort. As labor markets become more flexible, the less adequately the educational system matches the knowledge and skills required by the economy and those engendered in students. Given that we look at this as one of the educational system’s key functions, it’s a massive failure. Right now, students take on the risk and bear the burden of matching educational careers and paths on an uncertain labor market. We’d like to think that education provides a general aptitude that can be applied no matter the job. That’s true for some, but how widely applicable is that model? I don’t think we begin to know the answer to that question.

Aligning education to meet the needs of citizenship preparation or higher edification increases the risk of social unrest. Education is about more than the labor market of course, but the more we focus on the other things - a good solid liberal arts background - the less likely we’ll match the labor market’s needs and the more students will find the status claims of the credentials devalued. Pierre Bourdieu’s argument that credential inflation was behind the Mai 68 riots may be mechanistic, but it’s a cautionary thesis for those middle-class folk who want to universalize their own education.

These are just five problems I pulled off the top of my head without any expertise. Note that they don’t begin to cover the policy issues in the field of education - charter schools, merit pay for teachers, class sizes, etc. I happen to think certain policy choices can be chosen out of a sense of fairness (no vouchers, redistributive funding formulas, adequate teacher compensation), experimentalism (charter/pilot schools) or just plain honesty (standardized testing). But we’re fooling ourselves if we think they’ll even lead us close to the goal that policy advocates left, right and center imagine.

Compare this to other large policy problems where tradeoffs exist but solution is feasible (health care, the budget, employment policy). In these other fields, too, there are central truths that aren’t discussed come election season. But policy circles and the intellectual field do worry about those. In contrast, I don’t see many who broach what are largely sociological questions when discussing education. Part of the problem certainly lies with the relative devaluation of sociology among educated Americans, a point I’d like to return to in another post. But part of the problem is the difficulty in attaining a universally fair, quality education that in our ideals we see as central to an equal opportunity society but that in practice none of us really want deep down.