news flash: poor parents value education, too.

I'm taking a summer class about diversity in higher education, and I really like it. The professor is great, the material is interesting, and it's going to help me write my all-important candidacy paper. Trifecta of win... until my classmates speak.

Well, not all of them. There is actually a really diverse mix of people and I'm sure/I hope that as the session goes on (only 4 more weeks!) the conversations will get better. But right now, the only people who feel comfortable speaking a lot are me (duh) and the ones who only know privilege and are therefore ignorant about the populations who benefit from efforts to improve access and retention policies... Which is kind of the point of the class. Instead of coming in with an openness to learn, they say stuff that makes me want to punch them...

So here is what happened in the last session.

We were discussing the flawed pipeline from high school to college that shows how about 20 out of 100 ninth graders will end up graduating with a two or four year degree. (That's national data, folks. Disaggregated by race and gender, it's even more depressing.) Professor posed the question 'Why do you think this is?' and my classmate replied: 'Middle class, well-educated people don't have kids, but poor people do. So it's not a surprise that, since more poor kids are in school, that they don't want to go to college, or won't be successful when they get there. Poor parents don't push college because it's not as important.' (I'm paraphrasing, but sadly, not much.)

Having worked with low-income families in the past, I know that this is patently false. The majority of my students were free lunchers whose parents were either unemployed or minimally employed, and I never met one who didn't value education... especially higher education. I never had a problem 'selling' more education to these families, and often they sought me out for advice. The hardest part was knowing that they were so far behind in the process that their dreams, while attainable, would take a lot more work. The admissions timetable can't start in junior year for kids who don't have a college-going tradition in their families. It is not that these parents don't care, they just don't know how to navigate the system. (I didn't touch the whole 'poor people have more kids than educated ones' comment, because that's just not correct.)

I said this in class, and there was an awkward silence. Nobody disagreed, but the topic died. This definitely wasn't the first time I'd heard this sort of comment, but it still bothered me just as much. I don't know how people (especially education people) can believe such nonsense, and it makes me sad for the people that my classmate is supposed to serve. There are plenty of gaps in American education - achievement, opportunity, gender, disciplinary - but desire to have their children succeed in life is not one of them. Poor parents value education. They care just as much and want their kids to be just as successful as middle and upper class parents wish their children to be. It's such a shame that some educators don't share this mindset, or at the very least, acknowledge it.

How can the system be fixed if the folks responsible for bringing about change think so negatively about the people they are supposed to help?

mo' money, mo' prisons.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about who benefits from educational inequality. Clearly it isn't people who look like me, but there has to be someone. After all, if it was 100% bad that poor kids and kids of color got a far worse education just for being poor and not White, then this inequality wouldn't have persisted for this long... right? It wouldn't be so publicly acceptable for state governments to unequally fund urban school districts with smaller tax bases while holding them to the same standards as the wealthy suburban ones with people who can pay higher taxes for better schools... right? Am I missing something here?

[Not sure how common this knowledge is, public education in most states is funded by property taxes. People of color have lower property values because we are not White (really, that's the reason), pay lower property taxes, and therefore have less money for their schools... even in the suburbs. Urban centers have more poor people so their tax base is smaller, and therefore they rely more on the state government for education funding.]  

Aaand, we're back. 

The idea of costs v. benefits of inequality reminds me of a rally I took my students to last May to protest the governor of Pennsylvania's plan to cut roughly a billion dollars from the state's education budget. He and his party (guess which one it is) claimed that the state was broke, and implied that public educational institutions (including K-12 and higher education) were mismanaging current funding and could probably operate effectively if only they knew how to budget. Meanwhile, the same budget approved the building of three (3!) new prisons, at the cost of a few million dollars. Because that's what you do when you're broke, right?

Call me old-fashioned (or just progressive and idealistic), but I think that an appropriately funded and resourced education system along with meaningful employment upon completion would eliminate the need for more prisons. Plus, given the fact that it costs more to imprison someone than it does to educate them, this push for incarceration makes even less sense. As Linda Darling-Hammond says in The Flat World and Education, "States that would not spend $10,000 a year to ensure adequate education for young children of color spend over $30,000 a year to keep them in jail" (p. 24). I feel ill every time I read that line.

What does this say about our priorities as a society? And, more importantly, what can be done about it?

Perhaps thinking of who benefits from such inequality is a useless task, since it won't fix it. I think it is time to more pragmatic about it, and focus on solutions. I think it is time for us to use our voices and our votes to say that this is not okay. Increases in criminal "justice" spending (like that of national defense) tend to be justified in the name of safety. As the argument goes, in order to maintain order and security, we must have places to put these dangerous individuals. But if more prisons were really all it took to stop crime, it would have been stopped by now.

Clearly something else is at play. I refuse to believe that the link between a predominately Black, brown, and low-income prison population and the systematic denial of quality education to people of these same group is anything less than a causal one. Social policies need to be linked with education policies in order to address the overlapping needs of people from these vulnerable populations. Only through a more holistic approach can reform occur in either area.