It's Not All About the Benjamins?

In this week’s New York Times Sabrina Tavernise analyzes a study that concludes that “while the achievement gap between white and black students has narrowed significantly over the past few decades, the gap between rich and poor students has grown substantially during the same period.” 

            On the one hand these findings reflect the progress that our country has made regarding the problem of race.  I can imagine that for people who lived through Jim Crow and who struggled for liberty and justice during the Civil Rights Movement, this progress is to be applauded.  No, our country is not yet the example of racial harmony that that Dr. King envisioned it would be, but we have come a long way since people were not allowed to eat at restaurants simply because of their race. 

The study that Tavernise examines seems to indicate that income does more to determine educational success than does race.  She cites another study that asserts that parents with more income are more able to expose their children to places like museums than are parents with less income.  To fix education according to this line of thinking, now that we’ve slayed the Race Dragon, we need to kill the Income Monster too.

Nonetheless, that mechanical thinking is exactly what James J. Heckman, an economist at the University of Chicago, cautions against.  As he explains in Tavernise’s article, “ ‘The danger is we will revert back to the mindset of the war on poverty, when poverty was just a matter of income, and giving families more would improve the prospects of their children.  If people conclude that, it’s a mistake.’ ”  Heckman’s claim is an important but uncomfortable one: namely, that there is more to poverty than simply not having money.  Later Tavernise quotes Charles Murray, who works at the American Enterprise Institute, when he argues that “ ‘When the economy recovers, you’ll still see all these problems persisting for reasons that have nothing to do with money and everything to do with culture.’ ”  While I wish that Tavernise had allowed Murray to elaborate upon his understanding of “culture” and its contributions to the achievement gap, this thought, as stated, provides fodder for contentious debate.  If income is not the root cause of the achievement gap and if culture is deeply personal, does that mean that there is something fundamentally wrong or flawed about many Americans and that the only way to close the gap is to correct their ways of life?  What does that mean for the purposes of our jobs as teachers in Baltimore City?  Is the teacher a mechanic who has to give the broken car a new engine? 

Although I agree that narrowly defining income inequality as the source of the achievement gap risks oversimplification, adopting Heckman’s and Murray’s stance is a much messier, more complicated, and perhaps more judgmental approach and one that we – especially in Teach For America – likely do not like to or want to hear.  Are Heckman’s and Murray’s views the ugly truth, or are they just ugly?

To read more, check out http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/education/education-gap-grows-between-rich-and-poor-studies-show.html?_r=1&ref=education