Mixing Classes

Washington Monthly, Dec, 2000 by Richard D. Kahlenberg

Why economic desegregation holds the key to school reform

IN A SOCIETY MARKED BY SOME OF THE highest rates of income and wealth inequality in the industrialized world, we in the United States put enormous stock in the idea that strong public schools will serve, in the words of Horace Mann, as the "great equalizer." But Mann, the noted 19th century educator, believed that in order to give all students a chance to achieve and do well in life, public schools had to be "common schools," schools which educate both disadvantaged and advantaged children under one roof. Separate schools for poor and working-class kids on the one hand, and middle-class and wealthy children on the other, are inherently unequal, he believed.

For Mann, it was axiomatic that in order for public schools to serve their function of preparing productive workers, enlightened citizens, and loyal Americans, those schools had to be common schools in which "the children of all classes, rich and poor, should partake as equally as possible in the privileges" of the enterprise. In terms of academic achievement, the presence of high-achieving students raises the standard, he argued, and "the mass will rise again and reach it. Hence the removal of the most forward scholars from a school is not a small misfortune." In addition, Mann worried, if the advantaged families withdrew from the common schools, they would be less active in ensuring the quality of the schools and less willing to support annual public appropriations.

To inculcate a belief in democracy, Mann argued, what better way to teach privileged children that they share a common humanity than to teach them in the same school with the poor. Mann firmly believed that education in the common school was necessary to bind a people from diverse backgrounds and religions--an issue more pressing in America than in homogeneous European nations. Mann had observed religious riots in Boston in 1837 and felt strongly that Americans of diverse religious persuasions should be taught to peacefully coexist. The nation's economic and ethnic diversity, Mann believed, could split it asunder unless a common school instilled shared values.

In Mann's vision, then, there was something for everyone. For liberals, there was the promise of upward mobility by exposing poor kids to higher aspirations and new possibilities. For conservatives, there was the promise of economic assimilation and stability and inculcation of American values. For both, there was the promise of a better functioning democracy.

One hundred and fifty years later, as the nation struggled to purge itself of the most egregious violation of the common-school ideal--segregation by race--a well-known sociologist from the University of Chicago, James Coleman, sought to revive the idea of school integration based not only on race, but on social class as well.

But in the years since, no one has taken up Coleman's concern about social-class integration. In the last half century, progressives have properly tackled a number of important educational issues having to do with race (desegregation), religion (ending compulsory school prayer), ethnicity (bilingual education), gender (Title IX), and disability (mainstreaming). When progressives do talk about class in education, it has to do with equal and compensatory funding through programs like Title I and Head Start.

But when parents say they want to live in areas with good public schools, they don't normally mean institutions with the very highest per-pupil expenditures as much as places with solidly middle-class environments. Given a choice between a high-poverty school that spends more per pupil and a middle-class school that spends somewhat less, most parents would not have a hard time deciding on the middle-class school.

Parents know what Coleman knew and what 50 years of sociological data make clear: Being born into a poor family places students at risk, but then to be assigned to a school with high concentrations of poverty poses a second, independent disadvantage that poor children attending middle-class schools do not face. Taken together, being poor and attending schools with classmates who are poor, constitute a clear "double handicap."

And yet, in the United States, social analyst David Rusk notes, "We surround children from the weakest families with the weakest neighborhoods and the weakest schools." America's problem, Rusk notes, is not Third World-style poverty in the sense of large-scale malnutrition. America's problem is concentrations of poverty.

Separate and Unequal

Economically separate schools are the fountainhead of countless discrete inequalities, and the best way to guarantee that a school will have what various individual reforms seek to achieve--high standards, qualified teachers, less crowded classes, etc.--is through the existence of a critical mass of middle-class families who will ensure that these things happen. The lack of middle-class presence in a school is so significant that one study found that poor kids attending middle-class schools perform on average better than middle-class kids attending high poverty schools.