Almost all self-identified liberals support the idea of equal opportunity. By this, I don’t mean that they oppose discrimination by gender, race, or any other arbitrary characteristic, though this is also true. I merely mean that they believe each individual should have an equal shot at reaching his or her desired station in life.
This trite ideal, of course, is just an ideal. Those that are born wealthy will always have an advantage over those that are born poor. But the United States used to foster equal opportunity better than any other nation in the developed world. Now, the opposite is true: those that are born into modest means in western Europe are much more likely to better themselves financially; here, those that are born without money almost always die without it as well.
When pondering how to soften our newly rigidifying class structure, many politicos look, quite reasonably, toward the inequalities inherent in our educational system. And in an attempt to remedy these inequalities, these politicos have proposed and implemented a myriad of programs to close the funding and achievement gap between inner city schools and their well-funded, suburban counterparts.
Sometimes these attempts take the form of direct monetary transfers: the federal Department of Education announced a plan to infuse a few struggling inner-city schools in eastern Kansas with cash just a few days ago, Arne Duncan continuously handed out block grants to the poorest districts in the South Side during his tenure as CEO of Chicago Public Schools, and in Louisiana, hardly a bastion of leftism, the state government just parceled out monies to a few struggling wards in New Orleans.
Sometimes, these attempts take the form of desegregatory busing, the most notable being Boston’s METCO program, which is essentially a hollowed out vestige of the tumultuous busing fiasco of the ’70s and ’80s.
But in all cases, these attempts merely place a Band-Aid over a uniquely American problem. You see, nowhere else in the developed world do these cash infusions and busing programs takes place, because these funding gaps between rich and poor districts occur only in the United States. As noted psychologist and educational expert Richard Slavin pointed out in a 1999 edition of the Journal of Education Finance:
[T]he U.S. is the only nation to fund elementary and secondary education based on local wealth. Other developed countries either equalize funding or provide extra funding for individuals or groups felt to need it.
In other words, the United States is the only country in the developed world where one receives a crappy education simply because he or she was born into a crappy neighborhood. Whereas local and state taxes pay for about 83 percent of educational costs here, the federal government picks up almost all of these expenses elsewhere.
In fact, those that are born into poor neighborhoods in Europe are often offered a better education than their wealthier peers. In the Netherlands, for example, for every Euro allocated to a middle-class child, 1.25 are allocated to a lower-class student, and, as Slavin implies, the Dutch are not alone in their progressive scheme.
To be sure, the funding gaps between poor communities and rich communities are massive here; if one were to take the 95th percentile and the 5th percentile of school districts in terms of their total expenditures in every state, he would see that this gap is often upwards of $5,000 per student. In several states, this means that well-funded schools spend well more than twice as much per student as poorly funded schools.
Despite the flagrant injustices of our educational macrostructure, however, these issues rarely penetrate mainstream political dialogue. This isn’t terribly surprising given the extreme municipalism of our culture. But, despite our widespread ambivalence, most Americans would rail against the idea that the government should punish children simply for being born poor.
It’s funny how such an un-American idea has become so uniquely American.
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