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Tim Tebow is an outlier.
Tebow’s college football career is a stellar resume of winning, but Tebow also stands among an elite fraternity who have won the Heisman Trophy.
Nonetheless, Tebow has once again failed in the National Football League, being cut by the New England Patriots.
Despite his pattern of failure in the NFL, Tebow tweeted: “I will remain in relentless pursuit of continuing my lifelong dream of being an NFL quarterback.”
As well, Tebow stands as another type of outlier:
Among the past 16 quarterbacks to win the Heisman, there has been a grand total of one NFL playoff win as a starter. And that winner was Tim Tebow. The magic happened in Jan., of 2012, as the Broncos beat the Steelers in OT, 29-23, on Tebow’s 80-yard bomb to Demaryius Thomas.
This says more about the Heisman winners than it does Tebow, I’m afraid. One has to go back to Vinny Testaverde, who won the Heisman in 1986 at the University of Miami, to find someone who had a modicum of NFL success. And before him there were plenty, but since 1987 there haven’t been many Heisman quarterbacks who have done much, NFL playoff-wise.
And among these contradictory moments of high success and disappointing failure, Tebow has maintained a tremendous base of hardcore fans. Tebow is the Great American, it seems—young, white, athletic, hard working, eternally optimistic, brashly Christian.
All of this leads one to wonder why—despite his enormous talents, his relentless work ethic, his repeated opportunities, and his powerful faith—Tebow cannot achieve his single greatest “lifelong dream.”
The answer lies in the cultural attitudes in the U.S. concerning success and failure, as well as an enduring faith that success and failure lie primarily in the character of individuals.
Successful people in the U.S. have earned their success, and thus deserve it, the myth goes. Successful people are hard workers.
People who fail or struggle, especially economically, are lazy, the myth includes. Any claims that failure is the result of inequity or the consequences of an unfair playing field are simply excuses.
These cultural myths about the rugged individual and the power of hard work now drive education reform. The rise of “no excuses” discourse coming from political leaders and “no excuses” polices found in charter schools but replicated in public schools are the logical extensions of instilling in all children a work ethic that will help them rise above the consequences of their births.
Beneath these compelling narratives, however, remain the much uglier beliefs about race and class: Poor people (disproportionately minorities) are lazy and deserve their poverty.
The Tebow story also highlights another aspect of these mythologies—a misunderstanding of normalizing exceptionality.
If anyone suggests the U.S. remains racist** and classist, outliers such as Clarence Thomas and Barack Obama are held up as proof otherwise.
For Tebow, all his effort and faith cannot and will not replace a stark fact: If you are not good enough to be an NFL quarterback, you will not be an NFL quarterback. Period.
And no person can simply will him/herself to overcome forces larger than him/her.
For people like Tebow, then, it is inexcusable that the unattainable has become the marker by which they judge themselves and others judge them.
I am no Tebow fan, but I see his life as a powerful lesson that we fail to acknowledge time and again in the U.S. Tebow’s life is a powerful lesson about the incredible damage we are doing to the children of our country by committing our faith, public institutions, and tremendous wealth to what essentially is a web of lies, the foundational elements of the “no excuses” education reform movement.
Are poor people lazy and somehow the agents of their own poverty? Amina Khan reports:
There’s a widespread tendency to assume that poor people don’t have money because they are lazy, unmotivated or just not that sharp, said study coauthor Sendhil Mullainathan, a behavioral economist at Harvard University.
“That’s a broad narrative that’s pretty common,” Mullainathan said. “Our intuition was quite different: It’s not that poor people are any different than rich people, but that being poor in itself has an effect.”…
Discussing the same research, Emily Badger explains:
In a series of experiments run by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Warwick, low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests, saddled with a mental load that was the equivalent of losing an entire night’s sleep. Put another way, the condition of poverty imposed a mental burden akin to losing 13 IQ points, or comparable to the cognitive difference that’s been observed between chronic alcoholics and normal adults.
The finding further undercuts the theory that poor people, through inherent weakness, are responsible for their own poverty – or that they ought to be able to lift themselves out of it with enough effort. This research suggests that the reality of poverty actually makes it harder to execute fundamental life skills. Being poor means, as the authors write, “coping with not just a shortfall of money, but also with a concurrent shortfall of cognitive resources.”
This explains, for example, why poor people who aren’t good with money might also struggle to be good parents. The two problems aren’t unconnected….
For all the value in this finding, it’s easy to imagine how proponents of hackneyed arguments about poverty might twist the fundamental relationship between cause-and-effect here. If living in poverty is the equivalent of losing 13 points in IQ, doesn’t that mean people with lower IQs wind up in poverty?
“We’ve definitely worried about that,” Shafir says. Science, though, is coalescing around the opposite explanation. “All the data shows it isn’t about poor people, it’s about people who happen to be in poverty. All the data suggests it is not the person, it’s the context they’re inhabiting.”
Are claims of racism simply excuses, playing the race card? Yi Wu details the facts of U.S. incarceration*:
[O]ne out of every 12 working-age black men are imprisoned, far exceeding the figure for whites (one out of 87). Inmates cannot work to provide for their families, and their incarceration leads to sizable losses of our national economic output. Instead of producing goods or getting trained, they are locked in cages. In every 12 black families there is one missing breadwinner. It is estimated that imprisoning one person costs $23,286 in lost productivity. Furthermore, more than one out of three young black men without a high school diploma are incarcerated. If you are a black male high-school dropout, you only have 63% chance of being free, let alone finding gainful employment, and for you, King’s dream may remain deferred.
Matt Bruenig adds the racial inequity found between middle-class whites and blacks:
[B]lack families have much less wealth than white families, even when you compare blacks and whites within the same income groups….
[B]lack and hispanic wealth represented as a percentage of the white wealth in a given income group. So for instance, the bar farthest to the left says that black families in the poorest 20 percent of families have a median wealth that is just 19.7 percent of the median wealth of white families in the poorest 20 percent. Black families in the 60th to 79th percentile of income come the closest to their white peers, but even they have median wealth holdings that are just 53.9 percent of whites in that group. If you average all the income groups together, you find that, when you control for family income, black median wealth is less than 1/3rd of white median wealth.
Why is this the case? There are many factors, but one in particular looms large. It turns out that three centuries of enslavement followed by another bonus century of explicit racial apartheid was hell on black wealth accumulation. Wealth accumulation opportunities haven’t exactly been evenly distributed in the last half century either. Because wealth is the sort of thing you transmit across generations and down family lines (e.g. through inheritance, gifts, and so on), racial wealth disparities remain quite massive.
This wealth disparity means that a middle class black family is not in basically the same position as a middle class white family.
And Bruenig has also exposed the relationship between hard work and privilege:
[Y]ou are 2.5x more likely to be a rich adult if you were born rich and never bothered to go to college than if you were born poor and, against all odds, went to college and graduated. The disparity in the outcomes of rich and poor kids persists, not only when you control for college attainment, but even when you compare non-degreed rich kids to degreed poor kids!
Therefore, the answer to the question in the title is that you are better off being born rich regardless of whether you go to college than being born poor and getting a college degree.
Race and class in the U.S. remain powerful forces, more powerful than individual effort or character.
Lazy and morally suspect people born into privilege often remain affluent, and even grow their wealth.
Decent and hardworking people born into poverty tend to remain in poverty.
The smiles and platitudes Tebow clings to feed his popularity with others who wish to believe in myths that are simply distortions at best, and corrosive lies as worst.
Does hard work matter? Of course, hard work as its own reward may be one of the most powerful and enduring lessons we can teach children.
Hard work, however, is no guarantee, and hard work isn’t nearly enough if we persist in pretending that the U.S. is post-racial, that the U.S. is a meritocracy.
There was a time in the not-so-distant past that Tebow would have had another advantage in the NFL, where being white was a marker for being quarterback.
Oddly, the NFL is closer to being a post-racial meritocracy than our wider society (although the NFL itself suffers lingering racial problems as well).
Thus, Tebow’s floundering NFL career, then, sends a hard message that we should stop manipulating his idealism and start acknowledging that hard work isn’t enough.
* For a compelling and disturbing chronicle of the racial inequity represented by the current era of mass incarceration, read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.
** Tell Me How Long James Baldwin’s Been Gone, by Alex Carnevale
Faulkner refused an invitation to the White House that would have put him and Baldwin in the same room. He was of an ilk of white man whose objection to other people’s objections was that they made it all about race. This is not to say something about Faulkner, but ourselves. Even now, when someone argues that an issue has eclipsed race, we can hear Faulkner’s words to American blacks in theirs, and know it for a lie.
As we approach 60 years since U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and stand in the wake of a 50-year anniversary of the March on Washington, Richard Rothstein details:
Today, many black children still attend schools in racially and economically isolated neighborhoods, while their families still reside in lonely islands of poverty: 39 percent of black children are from families with incomes below the poverty line, compared with 12 percent of white children (U.S. Census Bureau(a)); 28 percent of black children live in high-poverty neighborhoods, compared with 4 percent of white children (Casey 2013).
Reports from 2012 also highlighted the growing resegregation of schools in the South and across the U.S. Concurrent with the re-segregation of public schools—along with the ignored reality that children’s ZIP codes tend to determine their access to high- or low-quality schools, which reflect the affluence/poverty of the community—a growing commitment to charter schools ignores that charter schools fail to achieve academic success distinguishable from traditional public schools (both formats of schooling produce a range of outcomes) but tend to segregate children by race and class.
Rothstein recognizes a historical link between burying the Coleman report from the mid-1960s and the rise of “no excuses” reform today:
The fear of education reformers today, that discussion of social and economic impediments to learning will only lead to “making excuses” for poor teaching (Rothstein 2008), mirrors fears in 1966 that similar discussion would undermine support for federal aid to education.
A few important lessons lie beneath these historical and current patterns.
First, continuing to refuse to confront, discuss, and address directly race, class, segregation, and inequity guarantees that none of these contexts will ever be overcome.
Next, continuing to focus on bureaucratic and political answers to complex social and educational issue is the central failure we associate with “government.” When government is primarily political and bureaucratic, it is impotent or even corrosive.
For democracy and government to work, then, we must re-envision government as a mechanism for democratic goals. That will require lessening our faith in the free market and the Invisible Hand while increasing our faith in the Commons.
Segregation itself is ugly but so is its recent history in the U.S.
Since the mid-1950s, the U.S. has nearly eradicated blatant and legal segregation. But that structural shift forced segregation to go underground.
A second wave of segregation developed and has existed in public schools for decades—schools within schools. The persistent use of tracking and the gate-keeping mechanisms that create Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate “schools” within the “other” schools where mostly black and brown children living in poverty sit in overcrowded classes with inexperienced and un-/under-certified teachers have institutionalized a masked segregation that we still mostly ignore.
Upon that second wave of insidious and tacit segregation we are now confronted with a third frontier of segregation that almost no one seems to find offensive—represented by Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools and their copy-cat “no excuses” charters (see the story of New Orleans for a vivid picture).
Public education is a mirror of U.S. society. Our schools do not change society; they mimic and perpetuate our society.
The school-choice-option of the day, charter schools, is yet more of the great bureaucratic failure of government—investing precious public funds to build a system of schools that are indistinguishable from the schools we claim are failing, replete with the worst public education has to offer.
If segregation is a scar on a free people (and it is), then segregation cannot be tolerated in any form in our public institutions.
Commitments to new standards, next-generation high-stakes tests, charter schools, and Teach for America are not only failed education reform mechanisms, but also tragic re-investments in segregation that remains separate and unequal.
The rich get richer, and fewer, while everyone else frantically competes for the little that is left over.
Rothstein ends his report by confronting public policy:
It is inconceivable to think that education as a civil rights issue can be addressed without addressing residential segregation—a housing goal of the March on Washington. Housing policy is school policy; equality of education relies upon eliminating the exclusionary zoning ordinances of white suburbs and subsidizing dispersed housing in those suburbs for low-income African Americans now trapped in central cities.
By stressing integration as the most important goal of education improvement, the March on Washington had it right. It is appropriate not only to commemorate this resolve, but to renew it.
Saying education is the civil rights issue of our time, as President Obama and Secretary Duncan do, is a hollow political act. To continue that refrain while embracing policies that increase inequity and segregation tarnishes daily the brave and bold words and actions that held such promise at mid-twentieth century.
Imagine a world where time is capital.
This is the dystopian future of 2161 brought to film by Andrew Niccol’s In Time (2011)—triggering some powerful parallels to Logan’s Run (both the original novel from 1967 and the film adaptation in 1976).
Both Logan’s Run and In Time expose the human condition in terms of age and mortality—in the first, life ends at 30, and in the latter, people stop aging at 25, but at a price, which involves time.
Science fiction (SF) as a genre presents us with allegory in the form of other worlds, as Margaret Atwood argues, and speculations, but the most engaging aspect of SF for me as a fan and teacher is when SF unmasks universal and contemporary realities by presenting those other worlds.
One of the recurring messages of SF is the crippling inequity that continues to plague human societies, such as the haunting and sparse Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” that forces reader to admit privilege exists on the backs of the innocent and oppressed.
The world of In Time presents an apparent meritocracy in which all people are given life until 25, when they stop aging but an embedded clock starts ticking forcing everyone to earn time in order to live. This deal with the devil positions all labor as literally necessary to live and puts banks at the center of who survives.
The Frantic Distraction of Surviving
Americans’ faith in a meritocracy is often expressed in claims of the U.S. being a post-racial society as well as a classless society. Like the Hunger Games trilogy, In Time highlights class distinctions as people are segregated in Time Zones. Eventually, the narrative brings together the two main characters, Will Salas from the ghetto and Sylvia Weis from the affluent zone, New Greenwich.
Due to both personal tragedy and a huge gift of time from a stranger, Will confronts the norms of this dystopia while being hunted by a Timekeeper, Raymond Leon. One scene, I think, deserves closer consideration.
When Will travels from the ghetto through several Time Zones (incrementally costing him more and more time) to New Greenwich, he steps out of the cab and immediately begins jogging, a habit common in the ghettos since almost everyone is living, literally, from paycheck to paycheck (or under the weight of time loans, loan sharks, or pawn shops) until he notices that in New Greenwich people are eerily casual. This distinction comes up again when he is eating breakfast and the waitress notices that he isn’t from New Greenwich because he does everything fast.
People in the ghettos, what can reasonably be called the working class and the working poor, lead lives that are so frantic that no one has the time to confront the inequity of the society, and because of the segregated society, these frantic workers have little insight into the lives of privilege, casual lives, that Will witnesses for himself and the viewer.
Also worth closer consideration is the role of the Timekeeper, Leon, who presents a truly complex character who functions under a code of ethics that is perfectly ethical within the norms of the culture, but ultimately self-defeating and dehumanizing. Timekeepers enforce the laws, primarily couched in time as capital, but because of their close proximity to crime, they carry with them only small quantities of time, thus leading frantic lives very similar to the working class/poor they help keep both in line and frantic.
Ultimately, Will exposes truths that challenge the norms of this society, truths that are in fact just as relevant to the world we now inhabit:
• Will discovers that time is not a limited commodity; there is plenty of capital, but the privileged create scarcity to keep the masses frantic, and distracted.
• Timekeepers as a police force are unmasked as not seekers of justice (Leon admits this directly), but as agents of the privileged.
• The moving target of the free market is exposed as not so much “free” but an arbitrary mechanism that puts most people in a life like caged gerbils on running wheels. Interest rates and prices incrementally increase daily as the workers accumulate time. The system is designed to keep workers trapped in their roles as workers.
• And privilege, as Le Guin’s story shows, is always at the expense of others, captured by this exchange from In Time:
Sylvia Weis: Will, if you get a lot of time, are you really gonna give it away?Will Salas: I’ve only ever had a day. How much do you need? How can you live with yourself watching people die right next to you?
Sylvia Weis: You don’t watch. You close your eyes. I can help you get all the time you want.
In effect, while the details may be exaggerated, the lessons learned by Will are disturbingly relevant to contemporary Americans, as much as how it informs us as workers as it highlights that education reform is more concerned with producing workers than proving all children with equity, liberation, and autonomy.
Frantic Students, Frantic Workers: The Rise of the Frantic Class
The frantic state of being among the working class and working poor of In Time is a perceptive dramatization of the American worker, increasingly stripped of rights as unions are dismantled and the essentials of human dignity (income, health care, retirement) are further tied to being employed.
But the allegorical messages of In Time also speak to how and why current education reform claims and policies are designed to appease corporate needs for frantic workers.
One characterization of U.S. public education today is well represented in this dystopian world—frantic.
Current corporate education reform is built on implementing national standards designed to continue the historical call to incrementally increase both expectations and outcomes (the target for success in education has always been a moving target) so that students, teachers, and schools are always under duress, always falling short, always so frantic that no one can pause to question, challenge, or do anything other than comply.
Imagine a world where time is capital, where all of any person’s time is spent compiling time, a fruitless cycle of acquisition, of seeking to comply with the mandates none of the masses have chosen for herself/himself.
But you don’t have to imagine this.
This frantic world of In Time is the frantic existence of the American worker, and this frantic world is being fed by the corporate takeover of public schools where accountability, standards, and testing have reduced teachers and students to gerbils on running wheels.
In 2012, workers, students, and teachers are the frantic class; like Will, we don’t have time:
Will Salas: I don’t have time. I don’t have time to worry about how it happened. It is what it is. We’re genetically engineered to stop aging at 25. The trouble is, we live only one more year, unless we can get more time. Time is now the currency. We earn it and spend it. The rich can live forever. And the rest of us? I just want to wake up with more time on my hand than hours in the day.
The rising frantic class is necessary for the privileged few, the 1% controlling both manufactured austerity and the perpetually moving targets of success.While universal public education was created to feed the promise of the American Dream, the current corporate takeover of public schools is driving the American Nightmare of the frantic class.
We don’t need a movie to see that.
Related Poem
Related Blogs about SF
Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”: Allegory of Privilege
Whence Come “The Leftovers”?: Speculative Fiction and the Human Condition
Calculating the Corporate States of America: Revisiting Vonnegut’s Player Piano
Public education in the U.S. suffers under a powerful intersection of politics, the media, and the public. As I have too often documented, misinformation tends to be reinforced among all three of these forces.
The role of media, as Alfie Kohn has examined, is central to perpetuating not only misleading beliefs about school quality and education reform but also bad policy.
For example, in South Carolina, The Greenville News has posted an editorial position on reading legislation that misreads what is the best path forward for addressing literacy in this high-poverty and deeply segregated state, notably:
The core part of the legislation makes common sense and is widely supported. It would make it mandatory to retain any third-grader who is not proficient in reading by the end of the school year. It is an idea that has been implemented in Florida to promising results, and it simply makes sense. Promoting a child to fourth-grade if he or she lacks the needed reading skills dooms that child to failure. Although holding back a student can have negative effects on him or her, that student certainly will do better if educators ensure he or she first knows how to read before advancing past third grade.
While we may need some proof that retention of third graders based on high-stakes test scores is in fact “common sense,” it seems true that retention is “widely supported.” The problem with those justifications is that four decades of research strongly rejects retention and close analysis of Florida’s Just Read, Florida, policies discredits claims of its “promising results” (see a full analysis with extensive evidence of the research base on both here).
A point of flawed logic also drives this editorial position: Retention and promotion are not the only options available, and are thus a false dichotomy that likely sits beneath the reality that retention is “widely supported” by the public and then political leaders (see how narrow choices create a false narrative that an issue is supported in the fourth paragraph from the end here).
Further, embedded in this misunderstanding of the research base on retention are careless claims about Florida’s education reform success as well as the current understanding of reading/ literacy instruction and development.
Florida, in fact, is a lesson in what not to do in terms of education policy (see HERE, HERE, and HERE).
Reading/ literacy instruction has been eroded by the accountability era based on standards and high-stakes testing. Literacy is misrepresented by multiple-choice testing, and teaching to those tests greatly warps good literacy instruction.
Test-reading is almost nothing like reading in the real world.
Instead of misguided reading policies reinforced by uninformed media endorsements, a few important and grounding commitments should be guiding reading policy:
Literacy growth is a natural part of being human. Children in middle-class and affluent homes (and thus likely to be enrolled in schools and classes that reinforce rich and authentic literacy) enjoy the sort of experiences with literacy all children deserve.
Retaining third graders based on high-stakes testing will further perpetuate inequity and erode opportunities for children living in poverty to experience rich and authentic learning environments with texts that would result in the type of literacy growth associated with privileged children.
A final problem with the media’s endorsement of “common sense” and “widely supported” education policy is the recurring call for compromise (see Cindy Scoppe at The State), also expressed in The Greenville News editorial:
The important work this fall and heading into the next legislative session is for education leaders and lawmakers to get on the same page about how such an effort would be implemented. There is plenty of room for common ground on this issue….
When policy is evidence-based (as it should be), a compromise between positions that are not evidence based and positions that are evidence based results in flawed policy. In other words, compromise between wrong and right can only result in wrong.
Yes, I recognize that politics is the realm of compromise, but I also believe therein lies the great failure of politics for setting education policy.
In the end, then, much could be solved if we kept our focus on first, do no harm instead of seeking always compromise as the basis for decisions on education policy.
About the historical approaches to addressing poverty, Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in 1967:
In addition to the absence of coordination and sufficiency, the programs of the past all have another common failing — they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else.
I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.
Earlier in this century this proposal would have been greeted with ridicule and denunciation as destructive of initiative and responsibility. At that time economic status was considered the measure of the individual’s abilities and talents. In the simplistic thinking of that day the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber.
We have come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. The poor are less often dismissed from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands it does not eliminate all poverty.
We have come to the point where we must make the nonproducer a consumer or we will find ourselves drowning in a sea of consumer goods. We have so energetically mastered production that we now must give attention to distribution. Though there have been increases in purchasing power, they have lagged behind increases in production. Those at the lowest economic level, the poor white and Negro, the aged and chronically ill, are traditionally unorganized and therefore have little ability to force the necessary growth in their income. They stagnate or become even poorer in relation to the larger society.
The problem indicates that our emphasis must be two-fold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position, we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available.
In 2013, when poverty is discussed by President Barack Obama, speaking as the leader of the free world and a bi-racial man, the emphasis remains on indirect, and ineffective, strategies:
The stubborn persistence of racial inequality has left policymakers at odds over what to do, and President Obama has resisted targeted efforts to erase racial economic disparities. Instead, he has pushed policies, such as increasing college access and broadening health-care coverage, aimed at lifting the fortunes of all middle- and working-class Americans. He has said that approach will have a disproportionate and positive effect on black Americans….
Obama has said that closing gaps in educational achievement will go a long way toward closing racial inequalities.
Others are not so sure.
“I’d love to run the president’s experiment,” said Darity, the Duke professor. “We really have to face up to the fact that there is a persistence of discrimination that explains a lot about income and employment gaps.”
However, racial inequity persists:
[R]acial economic disparities are mostly unchanged and in some cases are growing. In 1963, blacks families earned 55 cents for every dollar earned by whites. In 2011, blacks earned 66 cents for every dollar earned by whites. The black unemployment rate averaged 11.6 percent between 1963 and 2012, more than double the white jobless rate over that time.
The black poverty rate of 55.1 percent was just over three times the white rate in 1959. It dropped to 32.2 percent in 1972. But since then, progress has been slow. In 2011, 27.6 percent of black households were in poverty — nearly triple the 9.8 percent white rate, according to the Census Bureau….
Darity called the evidence of discrimination irrefutable. He noted that the 12.1 percent jobless rate for blacks with some college education was higher in 2012 than the 11.4 percent rate for white workers who have not finished high school. He also pointed to work by Princeton University researcher Devah Pager, who found that a black job applicant with no criminal history got a callback or job offer about as often as a white applicant with a felony conviction.
With race and class deeply intertwined, the racial inequity in the U.S. both feeds and is intensified by economic inequity, as Matt Bruenig explains about his titular question “What’s more important: a college degree or being born rich?”:
So, you are 2.5x more likely to be a rich adult if you were born rich and never bothered to go to college than if you were born poor and, against all odds, went to college and graduated. The disparity in the outcomes of rich and poor kids persists, not only when you control for college attainment, but even when you compare non-degreed rich kids to degreed poor kids!
Therefore, the answer to the question in the title is that you are better off being born rich regardless of whether you go to college than being born poor and getting a college degree.
The path that leads to the end of racial and economic inequity must be one built on direct strategies to eradicate poverty, as King implored:
We are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished. The poor transformed into purchasers will do a great deal on their own to alter housing decay. Negroes, who have a double disability, will have a greater effect on discrimination when they have the additional weapon of cash to use in their struggle.
Writing in 1976 about the bicentennial, novelist John Gardner* challenges the 20th century angst “that the American Dream is dead” (p. 96):
The American Dream, it seems to me, is not even slightly ill. It’s escaped, soared away into the sky like an eagle, so not even a great puffy Bicentennial can squash it. The American Dream’s become a worldwide dream, which makes me so happy and flushed with partly chauvinistic pride (it was our idea) that I sneak down into my basement and wave my flag….
That idea—humankind’s inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—coupled with a system for protecting human rights—was and is the quintessential American Dream. The rest is greed and pompous foolishness—at worst, a cruel and sentimental myth, at best, cheap streamers in the rain. (p. 96)
Gardner continues, addressing “majority rule” as “right even when it’s wrong (as often happens),”
because it encourages free men to struggle as adversaries, using established legal means, to keep government working at the business of justice for all.
The theory was and is that is the majority causes too much pain to the minority, the minority will scream (with the help of the free press and the right of assembly) until the majority is badgered or shamed into changing its mind….
It’s true that the system pretty frequently doesn’t work. For decades, pollsters tell us, the American people favored gun control by three to one—law-enforcement officials have favored it by as much as nine to one—but powerful lobbies and cowardly politicians have easily thwarted the people’s will. (p. 97)
About three decades later, I joined the majority of voters in the U.S., electing the first bi-racial (often called simply African American) president in the country’s history. At the time, however, I voted for Barack Obama primarily because I believed his election was an important symbolic moment for the U.S.; I did not buy his message of hope and change (although I was hopeful), and I was skeptical that the Democratic establishment would allow a true champion of liberal and progressive ideas assume the mantle of U.S. President.
As public educators, academics, and scholars have discovered, Obama is no progressive—much less the socialist that libertarians and Tea Party advocates claim. In fact, Obama’s education policy is yet more doubling down on the No Child Left Behind accountability agenda begun under George W. Bush. The Obama education agenda is committed to neoliberalism, not democracy, not justice for all, not protecting human rights:
Barack Obama personifies the power of personality in politics and the value of articulating a compelling vision that resonates with many voters in the US and other global citizens. For Obama’s presidential campaign, the refrain that worked was driven by two words and concepts, “hope” and “change.” From healthcare, to war, to education reform, however, the Obama administration is proving that political discourse is more likely to mask intent—just as Orwell warned through his essays and most influential novel 1984, the source of the term “doublespeak” that characterizes well Obama’s and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s public comments on education reform. They mask the programs promoted and implemented by the Department of Education. (Thomas, 2011)
And despite Gardner’s soaring optimism, the media is culpable in this failure to commit to hope and change by Obama and his administration.
A powerful and disturbing example of how the Obama administration through the U.S. Department of Education and Secretary Arne Duncan masks a neoliberal agenda (see Hursh, 2011, and Carr & Porfilio, 2011) behind civil rights rhetoric and crisis discourse is the exchange between civil rights leaders calling for the removal of Duncan and Obama’s reply. Civil rights leaders include in their call the following:
National Journey for Justice Alliance demands include:
- Moratorium on school closings, turnarounds, phase-outs, and charter expansions.
- It’s proposal for sustainable school transformation to replace failed, market-driven interventions as support for struggling schools.
- Resignation of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
With Obama’s signature prominent at the end of his letter to Ed Johnson, the President replied, his language no longer masking his agenda. Obama is resolute in his commitment to “provid[ing] our children with the world-class education they need to succeed and our Nation needs to compete in the global economy.”
Not once in this two-page response does Obama mention democracy, or any of the ideals embraced by Gardner above. Obama, instead, offers “cheap streamers in the rain”:
Our classrooms should be places of high expectations and success, where all students receive an education that prepares them for higher learning and high-demand careers in our fast-changing economy….
In states that make it a priority to educate our youngest children, students grow up more likely to read and do math at their grade level, graduate high school, hold a job, and form stable families of their own….
The message is clear that education is a mechanism for building a competitive workforce; nothing else seems to matter. Obama’s focus on education as training for workers is disturbing, but his relentless commitment to competition and punitive accountability policies in education is inexcusable against democratic goals and the pursuit of equity.
Throughout the response, Obama mentions Race to the Top twice, invokes “competition” three times, and endorses twice “reward” structures for raising teacher and school quality. But let’s not forget the crisis: “America’s students cannot afford to wait any longer.” Even this crisis is driven by economic diction, “afford.”
More than 30 years ago, Gardner argues:
The lie on the American left is this: that the American theory promised such-and-such and has sometimes not delivered, whereas We Deliver. The truth—a metaphysical truth, in fact—is that nobody delivers. (p. 99)
With Obama’s failed education agenda before us as part of three decades of failed accountability policies, Gardner seems prophetic.
And despite Gardner’s rejecting cynicism (“But the myth of the mindless patriot is not worse than the myth of the cynic who speaks of America with an automatic sneer” [p. 98]), I must side with George Carlin:
But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever, ever be fixed.
It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got.
Because the owners, the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now, the big owners! The Wealthy… the real owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.
Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice! You have owners! They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear….
They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want:
They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests.
I fear this isn’t simply biting social satire. I fear that this isn’t easily discounted as cynicism. I fear that Obama’s education policies and his neoliberal agenda are solid proof that Carlin, not Gardner, is right: “It’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
* “Amber (Get) Waves (Your) of (Plastic) Grain (Uncle Sam)” in On Writers and Writing, John Gardner (1994)
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 