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Education: Inequality Of Opportunities

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By JOHN REINIERS

More Than Words

Published: March 13, 2009

Our school system needs to make serious inroads into the education of the bottom 50 percent of our students. Times are getting tough. We need to connect these kids to reality. No skills — no opportunity.
Those on the bottom are students who are usually marginally motivated, drop out of high school, become candidates for social programs and, as adults, become the political base for Democratic economic populists who thrive on class warfare by attacking achievers.
Radical activists tap into their discontent and promise to give them whatever assets belong to the other 50 percent. Adolph Hitler, Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Fidel Castro come to mind and have resorted to this political strategy. It always works, and sometimes it even has justification.
Central and South America are no exception. Take Bolivia. Morales is a coca-funded leftist who was born a desperately poor Aymara Indian. The interests of the uneducated indigenous Indians were usually ignored by the successful Bolivian elitists. Enter union organizer Morales who got this message across to these people, who then propelled him into the presidency of Bolivia in 2005.
Unlike Bolivia, the U.S. became such a melting pot of ethnic cultures, it would have been difficult for any one group to frustrate the educational aspirations of all the rest. The beginning of our free public school system was around the 1840s. Until then, education was available only to the wealthy. Its founders argued that public schools should prevent poverty and would create good citizens.
The U.S. public school system has done reasonably well, at the elementary school level. It was a serious effort to level opportunities for children. Nevertheless the "lottery of birth" gives children a very different start in life and very different prospects. This will always be with us, and it is what our society and educational system seek to address. It isn't easy.
The measurement of educational outcomes internationally is getting to be quite popular given ever increasing global competition. But there seems to be more interest in measuring the successful, or first world countries. For example, in 2003 Finland was ranked on the top in the OECD's PISA education score survey, followed by Hong Kong and Canada. U.S. white students came in above the OECD average, while blacks and Hispanics came in below.
A group of economists at the World Bank have come up with something new: The Human Opportunity Index, focusing initially on Latin America and the Caribbean. Between 25 percent and 50 percent of income inequality observed in this region is due to personal childhood circumstances outside of their control, such as ethnicity, gender, birthplace, parents' occupations and education levels. Being economists, these guys then measure different inequalities. Some of this is pretty basic stuff that we take it for granted — such as safe drinking water, sanitation, electricity and basic education.
This made me recall my high school years right after World War II when I was working a summer job as a waiter in a resort in upstate New York and living in a barracks with a diverse group of guys ranging from uneducated dishwashers to grad school students. It may sound crazy, but we all became friends.
The management agreed to intern two African students who were on student visas studying animal husbandry at Cornell University. I don't remember their nationality, other than their country had recently been a colony and that both were of two tribes. When they graduated they were to be given high government positions in their native country. Their English was good, but they had an accent — perhaps because of their European colonizers, so they didn't exactly fit in.
Nevertheless, we got to be close friends. Looking back at it, I don't know why, other than I was so young and one of the students was a "John" too. (I couldn't say his name in his native tongue.) What was fascinating was that these two didn't get along with the African Americans I worked with, all of whom had modest jobs. They never socialized with each other and argued a lot at first. These two Africans couldn't understand why our African Americans weren't college students, too. (There were a lot of white college students working there, and, of course, these two were at Cornell.) They marveled at the fact that our African Americans grew up — unlike their people — with safe drinking water — and out of a tap at that — had electricity, flush toilets, public schools and didn't live in huts.
Practically all of us were from New York City. (They saw these "assets" as marvels and indicia of educational and economic achievement.) Some of their debates were ugly. Looking back at it now, it seems strange, because African Americans today celebrate their African heritage.
Given that my African friends were from a third world country and just starting on the road to equal opportunity, they thought the U.S. had all the answers. After all we had electricity, running water and basic education. Yet in the years since I've been a teenager, given our culture, which also includes a legacy of discrimination — toilets notwithstanding, we're still struggling.
In spite of this, the Human Opportunity Index has the U.S. as educationally equal, and as open a society as Sweden, considered to be one of the most open and equal. Yet the OECD reports the Swedish high school dropout rate to be a 9.3 percent. Go figure. The closest we come to this number is Detroit's graduation rate which is a dismal 24.9 percent.
There is a noticeable absence of Americans on the World Bank team of economists behind this study. Some of their observations disclose puzzlement with the U.S.'s results, regarding "the United States as an exceptional case." When considering inequality of income, they conclude that "even if Americans live in a fairly open society ...inequality disappears if the analysis excludes blacks or those with earnings in the top and bottom 5 percent." The bottom now surely includes millions of immigrants from Latin America of whom 47 percent have no high school diploma. We can't even get our own kids through high school and we let in high school dropouts whose children then have the highest dropout rate in our schools!
What if these two African guys were back in the U.S., some 60 odd years later? One fair question might be to ask how far their country has progressed since the 1940s. We've made some great progress in equalizing opportunity; but it sure begs the question.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery observed in "The Wisdom of the Sands" that "Man's 'progress' is but a gradual discovery that his questions have no meaning." I used to think many an unanswered question answered itself with the passage of time. I never thought about "unasking a question." I like that idea. It could do wonders for your sanity.

John Reiniers, a regular columnist for Hernando Today, lives in Spring Hill.

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