Can
Education Eliminate Race, Class, and Gender Inequality?
Roslyn Arlin Mickelson and Stephen Samuel Smith
INTRODUCTION
Parents, politicians, and
educational policy makers share the belief that a “good education” is the meal ticket. It will unlock the door
to economic opportunity and thus enable disadvantaged groups or individuals to
improve their lot dramatically. This belief is one of the assumptions that has
long been part of the American Dream. According to the putative dominant
ideology, the United States is basically a meritocracy in which hard work and
individual effort are rewarded, especially in a financial terms. Related to
this central belief are a series of culturally enshrined misconceptions about
poverty and wealth. The central one is that poverty and wealth are the result
of individual inadequacies or strengths rather than the results of the
distributive mechanisms of the capitalist economy. A second misconception is
the belief that everyone is the master of her or his own fate. The dominant
ideology assumes that American society is open and competitive, a place where
an individual’s status depends on talent and motivation, not inherited
position, connections, or privileges linked to ascriptive characteristics like
gender or race. To compete fairly, everyone must have access to education free
of the fetters of family background, gender, and race. Since the middle of this
century, the reform policies of the federal government have been designed, at
least officially, to enhance individuals’ opportunities to acquire education.
The question we will explore in this essay is whether expanding educational
opportunity is enough to reduce the inequalities of race, social class, and
gender which continue to characterize
We begin by discussing some
of the major educational policies and programs of the past forty-give years
that sought to reduce social inequality through expanding equality of
educational opportunity. This discussion highlights the success the failures of
programs such as school desegregation, compensatory education, Title IX, and
job training. We then focus on the barriers these programs face in actually
reducing social inequality. Our point is that inequality is so deeply rooted in
the structure and operation of the
First, it is necessary to
distinguish among equality, equality of opportunity, and equality of
educational opportunity. The term equality
has been the subject of extensive scholarly and political debate, much of
which is beyond the scope of this essay. Most Americans reject equality of life
conditions as a goal, because it would require a fundamental transformation of
our basic economic and political
institutions, a scenario most are unwilling to accept. As Ralph Waldo Emerson
put it, “The genius of our country has worked out our true policy—opportunity.”
The distinction between
equality of opportunity and equality of outcome is important. Through this
country’s history, equality has most typically been understood in the former
way. Rather than a call for the equal distribution of money, property, or many
other social goods, the concern over equality has been with equal opportunity
in pursuit of these goods. In the words of Jennifer Hochschild, “So long as we
live in a democratic capitalist society—that is, so long as we maintain the
formal promise of political and social equality while encouraging the practice
of economic inequality—we need the idea of equal opportunity to bridge that
otherwise unacceptable contradiction.” To use a current metaphor: If life is a
game, the playing field must be level; if life is a race, the starting line
must be in the same place for everyone. For the playing field to be level, many
believe education is crucial because it gives individuals the wherewithal to
compete in the allegedly meritocratic system. In
THE SPOTTY RECORD OF FEDERAL
EDUCATIONAL REFORMS
In the past forty-five
years, a series of educational reforms initiated at the national level has been
introduced into local school systems. All of the reforms aimed to move
education closer to the ideal of equality of educational opportunity. Here we
discuss several of these reforms, and how the concept of equality of educational
opportunity has evolved. Given the importance of race and racism in
School Desegregation
Although American society
has long claimed to be based on equality of opportunity, the history of race
relations suggests the opposite. Perhaps the most influential early discussion
of this disparity was Gunnar Myrdal’s An
American Dilemma, published in 1944. The book vividly exposed the
contradictions between the ethos of freedom, justice, equality of opportunity
and the actual experiences of African Americans in the
The links among
desegregation, expanded educational opportunity, and the larger issue of
equality of opportunity are very clear from the history of the desegregation
movement. This movement, whose first phase culminated in the 1954 Brown decision outlawing de jure segregation in school, was the
first orchestrated attempt in
Has desegregation succeeded?
This is really three questions: First, to what extent are the nation’s schools
desegregated? Second, have desegregation efforts enhanced students’ academic
outcomes? Third, what are the long-term outcomes of desegregated educational
experiences?
Since 1954, progress toward
the desegregation of the nation’s public schools has been uneven and limited.
Blacks experienced little progress in desegregation until the mid-1960s when,
in response to the civil rights movement, a series of federal laws, executive actions,
and judicial decisions resulted in significant gains, especially in the South.
Progress continued until 1988, when the effects of a series of federal court
decisions and various local and national political developments precipitated
marked trends toward the resegregation of Black students. Nationally, in
1994-1995, 33 percent of Black students attended majority White schools
compared with the approximately 37 percent who attended majority White schools
for much of the 1980s.
Historically, Latinos were
relatively less segregated than African Americans. However, from the mid-1960s
to the mid-1990s there was a steady increase in the percentage of the Latino
students who attended segregated schools. As a result, education for Latinos is
now more segregated than it is for Blacks.
Given the long history of
legalized segregation in the south, it is ironic that the South’s school
systems are now generally the country’s most desegregated, while those in the northeast are the most intensely segregated.
However, even desegregated schools are often resegregated at the classroom
level by tracking or ability grouping. There is a strong relationship between
race and social class, and racial isolation is often an outgrowth of
residential segregation and socioeconomic background.
Has desegregation helped to
equalize educational outcomes? A better question might be which desegregation
programs under what circumstances accomplish which goals? Evidence from recent
desegregation research suggests that, overall, children benefit academically
and socially from well-run programs. Black students enjoy modest academic
gains, while the academic achievement of White children is not hurt, and in
some cases is helped, by desegregation. In school system which have undergone
desegregation efforts, the racial gap in educational outcomes has generally
been reduced, but not eliminated.
More important than
short-term academic gains are the long-term consequence of desegregation for
Black students. Compared to those who attended racially isolated schools, Black
adults who experienced desegregated education as children are likely to attend
multiracial colleges and graduate from them, work in higher-status jobs, live
in integrated neighborhoods, assess their abilities more realistically when
choosing an occupation, and to report interracial friendships.
Despite these modest, but
positive, outcomes, in the last decade of the twentieth century, most American
children attend schools segregated by race, ethnicity, and social class.
Consequently, forty-give years of official federal interventions aimed at
achieving equality of educational opportunity through school desegregation have
only made small steps toward achieving that goal; children from different race
and class backgrounds continue to receive segregated and, in many respects,
unequal educations.
The Coleman Report
Largely because evidence
introduced in the 1954 Brown case
showed that resources in segregated Black and White schools were grossly
unequal, Congress mandated in 1964 a national study of the “lack of
availability of equality of educational opportunity for individuals due to
race, color, religious, or national origin in public schools.” The authors of
the subsequent study, James Coleman and his associates, expected to find
glaring disparities in educational resources available to African-American and
White students and that these differences would explain the substantial
achievement differences between majority and minority students.
Instead, the Coleman Report,
released in 1966, produced some very unexpected findings which became the
underpinning for many subsequent educational policies and programs. The
researchers found that twelve years after Brown,
most American still attended segregated schools but that the characteristics of
Black and White schools (e.g., facilities, books, labs, teacher experience, and
expenditures) were surprisingly similar. Apparently, segregated Southern
districts had upgraded Black educational facilities in the wake of the Brown decision. Coleman and his
colleagues also found that variations in school resources had relatively little
to do with the variations in students’ school performance. Instead, they found
that family background influenced an individual’s school achievement more than
any other factor, including school characteristics. Subsequent research has
provided a better understanding of when, where, and how resources and school
characteristics influence student outcomes.
However, at the time, the
Coleman Report had dramatic and long-lasting effects. The report tended to
deflect attention away from how schools operated and instead of focused public
policy upon poor and minority children and their families as the ultimate
sources of unequal school outcomes. Numerous observers concluded incorrectly
that schools had little to do with Black-White educational differences because
they paid insufficient attention to another of the report’s findings that
implicated schools in inequality of educational outcomes. That finding showed
that African-American and White achievement gap between Black and White first
graders was much smaller than the gap between twelfth graders. This finding
suggested that, at best, schools reinforce the disadvantages of race and class
and, at worst, are themselves a major source of educational inequality.
Although published over
thirty years ago, the Coleman Report remains one of the most important and
controversial pieces of social research ever completed in the
Compensatory Education
A second outcome of the
Coleman Report was widespread support of the compensatory education. Policy
makers interpreted the finding that family background was the strongest
predicator of students’ achievement as evidence of “cultural deprivation” among
poor and minority families. This interpretation gave impetus to an education
movement designed to compensate for the alleged cultural deficiencies of
families that were neither middle class nor White, so that when so-called
disadvantaged children came to school, they could compete without the passage
of the handicaps of their background.
Beginning with the passage
of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, a series of educational
programs offered low-income and under-achieving children developmental
preschool followed by a host of individualized programs in math, reading, and
language arts once they arrived in elementary school. Examples of compensatory
education programs include:
Compensatory education
programs have had a controversial history. Critics from the left charge that
the underlying premise of compensatory education—that poor and minority
families are deficient relative to middle-class White families—is racist and
elitist. Critics on the right argue that compensatory education is a waste of
time and money because the lower achievement scores of minority and poor
children are due to their inferior intelligence. Policy critics charge that it
is impossible to judge the effectiveness of compensatory education programs
unless they are fully funded and implemented so that all eligible children
receive services. Since the inception of compensatory education programs, less
than half of eligible students have received services.
Despite criticism from such
diverse quarters, the compensatory education movement survived the past thirty
years. The Head Start program, for example, is currently embraced by a wide
range of Americans who consider it a cost-effective strategy to help poor
children do better in school. A growing body of research demonstrates the
existence of both cognitive and social benefits from early childhood education
for low-income and minority children. However, the achievement gaps between
minority and White, and between working- and middle-class, children remain.
Furthermore, evaluations of Title I and Follow Through have been unable to
demonstrate unambiguous benefits. One must conclude that compensatory
education, like desegregated education, has neither leveled the playing field
nor eliminated racial or social class inequality in educational outcomes.
Human Capital Theory and
Workforce Education Programs
The widely held belief that
a good education is the meal ticket
to reducing inequality receives its most sophisticated exposition in human
capital theory, which holds that greater levels of education are investments in
human beings’ productive capacities. People who are poor, according to this
theory, have had inadequate investments in their education. Over many decades,
numerous education and training programs have been implemented, but the
school-to-work transition remains problematic for many noncollege-bound youth.
During the last third of this century, specific programs linked to anti-poverty
efforts were implemented and eventually scrapped for failing to provide
low-income youth with what they needed. While the Comprehensive Education and
Training Act (CETA) and its successor, the Job Training and Partnership Act
(JTPA), two of the best known programs, gave skill training to low-income
youth, the jobs needed to employ them were simply not there. Moreover, JTPA
graduates were no more likely to obtain a job than those without such training.
A variety of workforce
education programs exist today in
A second reason to question
the utility of these programs is that the human capital approach views the
problem of inequality as a lack of worker skill, not a paucity of well-paying
jobs. The poor often have a great deal of skills and education. What they lack
are well-paying jobs in which to invest their skills. In fact, many studies
indicate there is an adequate match between skill requirements of current jobs
and those possessed by the workforce. Rather, the complaints of most employers
are that entry-level new hires lack a strong work ethic, a problem human
capital theory does not address.
The third reason to question
in utility of workforce development education for reducing inequality has to do
with the changing nature of the post-industrial economy. There is little
certain knowledge of what the restructuring and globalization of the economy
will mean for future workers. It is entirely possible that workforce education
will prepare people for jobs which have been relocated to
Title IX
Title IX of the 1972 Higher
Education Act is the primary federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in
education. It states, “No person in the
The effect of Title IX upon
college athletics has been especially controversial. While women constitute 53
percent of undergraduates, they are only 37 percent of college athletes. This
is undoubtedly due to the complex interaction between institutional practices
and gender-role socialization over the life course. Certainly, the fact that
vast majority of colleges spend much more money on recruiting and scholarships
for male athletes contributes to the disparities.
In spring 1997, the United
States Supreme Court refused to review a lower court’s ruling in Brown v. Cohen that states in essence
that Title IX requires universities to provide equal athletic opportunities for
male and female students regardless of cost. Courts have generally upheld the
following three-pronged test for compliance: (1) the percentage of athletes who
are female; (2) there must be a continuous record of expanding athletic
opportunities for females athletics; and (3) schools must accommodate the
athletic interests and abilities of female students. As of the ruling, very few
universities were in compliance with the law.
Gender discrimination exists
in other areas of education where it takes a variety of forms. For example, in
K-12 education official curricular materials frequently feature a preponderance
of male characters. Male and female characters typically exhibit traditional
gender roles. Vocational education at the high school and college level remains
gender-segregated to some degree. School administrators at all levels are
overwhelmingly male although most teachers in elementary and secondary schools
are female. In higher education, the situation is more complex. Faculty women
in academia are found disproportionately in the lower ranks, are less likely to
be promoted, and continue to earn less than their male colleagues.
Like the laws and policies
aimed at eliminating race differences in school progresses and outcomes, those
designed to eliminate gender differences in educational opportunities have, at
best, only narrowed them. Access to educational opportunity in the
EQUALITY OF EDUCATIONAL
Despite the failures of
these many programs to eliminate the inequality of educational opportunity over
the past 45 years, there is one indicator of substantial progress: measured in
median years, the gap in educational attainment between Blacks and Whites, and
between males and females, has all but disappeared. In 1997, the median
educational attainment of most groups was slightly more than twelve years. In
the 1940s, by contrast, White males and females had a median educational
attainment of just under nine years, African American males about five years,
and African American women about six.
However, the main goal of
educational reform is not merely to give all groups the opportunity to receive
the same quality and quantity of education. According to the dominant ideology,
the ultimate goal of these reforms is to provide equal educational opportunity
in order to facilitate equal access to jobs, housing, and various other aspects
of the American dream. It thus becomes crucial to examine whether the virtual
elimination of the gap in educational attainment has been accompanied by a
comparable decrease in other measures of inequality.
Of the various ways
inequality can be measured, income is one of the most useful. Much of a
person’s social standing and access to the good things in life depends on his
or her income. Unfortunately, the dramatic progress in narrowing the gap in
educational attainment has not been matched by a comparable narrowing of the
gap in income inequality. Median individual earnings by race and gender indicate
that White men still earn significantly more than any other group. Black men
trail White men, and all women earn significantly less than all men. Even when
occupation, experience, and level of education are controlled, women earn less
than men, and Black mean earn less than White men. It is only Black and White
women with comparable educational credentials in similar jobs who earn about
the same.
The discrepancy between the
near elimination of the gap in median educational attainment and the ongoing
gaps in median income is further evidence that addressing the inequality of
educational opportunity is woefully insufficient for addressing broader sources
of inequality throughout society.
This discrepancy can be
explained by the nature of the
Many argue that numerous
service jobs remains or that new manufacturing positions have been created in
the wake of this capital flight. But these pay less than the departed
manufacturing jobs, are often part-time or temporary, and frequently do not
provide benefits. Even middle-class youth are beginning to fear the nature of
the jobs which await them once they complete their formal education. Without changes
in the structure and operation of the capitalist economy, educational reforms
alone cannot markedly improve the social and economic position of disadvantaged
groups. This is the primary reason that educational reforms do little to affect
the gross social inequalities that inspired them in the first place.
BEYOND ATTAINMENT: THE
PERSISTENCE OF EDUCATIONAL INEQUALITY
Educational reforms have not
led to greater overall equality for several additional reasons. While race and gender
gaps in educational attainment have narrowed considerably, educational achievement
remains highly differentiated by social class, gender, and race. Many aspects
of school processes and curricular content are deeply connected to race, social
class, and gender inequality. But gross measures of educational outputs, such
as median years of schooling completed, mask these indicators of inequality.
Not all educational
experiences are alike. Four years of public high school in
For example, according to
Jacobs, women trail men slightly in representation in high status institutions of
higher education because women are less likely to attend engineering programs
and are more likely to be part-time students (who are themselves more likely to
attend lower status institutions such as community colleges). Gender segregation
in fields of study remains marked, with women less likely than men to study in
scientific and mathematical fields. Furthermore, these is substantial race and
ethnic segregation between institutions of higher education. Asian-Americans and
Latinos are more segregated from Whites than are African-Americans. Whites and Asian-Americans
are more likely to attend higher status universities than are African-Americans
and Latinos.
These patterns of race and
gender segregation in higher education have direct implications for gender and
race gaps in occupational and income attainment. Math and science degree
recipients are more likely to obtain more lucrative jobs. A degree from a state
college is not as competitive as one from an elite private university. Part of
the advantage of attending more prestigious schools comes from the social
networks to which a person has access and can join.
Another example of
persistent inequality of educational opportunity is credential inflation. Even though
women, minorities, and members of the working class now obtain higher levels of
education than they did before, members of more privileged social groups gain even
higher levels of education. At the same time, the educational requirements for
the best jobs (those with the highest salaries, benefits, agreeable working conditions,
autonomy, responsibility) are growing. Those with the most education from the
best schools tend to be the top candidates for the best jobs. Because people
from more privileged backgrounds are almost always in a better position to gain
these desirable educational credentials, members of the working class, women,
and minorities are still at a competitive disadvantage. Due to the dynamics of
credential inflation, educational requirements previously necessary for the
better jobs and now within the reach of many dispossessed groups are inadequate
and insufficient in today’s labor market. The credential inflation process
keeps the already privileged one step (educational credential) ahead of the
rest of the job seekers.
One additional aspect of the
persistent inequalities in educational opportunities concerns what sociologists
of education call the hidden curriculum. This concept refers to two separate
but related processes. The first is that the content and process of education
differ for children according to their race, gender, and class. The second is
that these differences reflect and thus help reproduce the inequalities based
on race, gender, and class that characterize United States society as a whole.
One aspect of the hidden
curriculum is the formal curriculum’s ideological content. Anyon’s work on
CONCLUSION
In this [essay] we have
argued that educational reforms alone cannot reduce inequality. Nevertheless,
education remains important to any struggle to reduce inequality. Moreover,
education is more than a meal ticket; it is intrinsically worthwhile and
crucially important for the survival of democratic society. Many of the
programs discussed in this essay contribute to the enhancement of individuals’
cognitive growth and thus promote important nonsexist, nonracist attitudes and practices.
Many of these programs also make schools somewhat more humane places for adults
and children. Furthermore, education, even reformist liberal education,
contains the seeds of individual and social transformation. Those of us
committed to the struggle against inequality cannot be paralyzed by the
structural barriers that make it impossible for education to eliminate
inequality. We must look upon the schools as arenas of struggle against race,
gender, and social class inequality.
Questions:
1. What are the beliefs,
assumptions, and misconceptions associated with the idea that a good education
will lead to economic opportunity?
2. Distinguish between
equality, equality of opportunity, and equality of educational opportunity.
3. According to Mickelson
and Smith, has educational reform been successful in reducing social
inequalities? Why or why not?
4. What factors perpetuate
educational inequality?
