Class, and classes
The long knives have come out for education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos. But her critics aren’t attacking her because they think she’ll do a bad job. They’re attacking her because they’re afraid she’ll do a good job. But I think that her success will be important, if you care about addressing inequality in America.
What DeVos’s critics hate most is that she’s an advocate of school choice. DeVos supports charter schools, education vouchers and other ways of letting parents control where their kids go to school. The people who hate this idea are mostly, in one way or another, people who instead want a captive market of taxpayer-funded pupils. But what’s good for politicians, administrators and teachers’ unions isn’t necessarily good for kids.
The other day I noticed a series of tweets from photographer Chris Arnade, who specializes in portraits of the parts of America that aren’t doing well. Arnade stressed that the big source of inequality in America is cultural, rather than economic. The values that are extolled by what he calls the “front row kids” who run things (Joel Kotkin calls them the “gentry liberals”) are those associated with fancy education, and it’s hard to get ahead without knowing them.
Even as we’ve had more talk about economic inequality, the lines of social inequality have hardened:
You are made invalid, and so are your views, if you cannot speak as we speak. Eat as we eat. Dress as we dress. Properly pronounce. The tools to remind you of your place — that you are uneducated — are satire. Mocking. Condescending. Smug. Disdain. Or just dismissal.
You’re not going to acquire that polish in the public schools if you’re poor. Public schools are sold as promoting equality, but in practice they’re more likely to reinforce inequality. People with money move to “good” neighborhoods, and they do it “for the schools.” People without money generally live in “bad” neighborhoods, where the schools aren’t very good and probably won’t teach their kids what they need to know to get ahead.
Of course, as Lucinda Rosenfeld wrote recently in The New York Times, “the most privileged segment of society does not use the public schools at all.” Rich parents send their kids to private school.
Poor parents can’t afford to do that, but school choice, of the sort that DeVos has championed, would give them the chance to do so.
Remember this when you hear people arguing that school choice is a tool for destroying public schools. The truth is that when public schools are good, most parents won’t bother with vouchers or charters. But when public schools are bad — and they often are — school choice will allow people to escape and do better.