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Fall 2011 Issue of PATHWAYS A magazine on poverty, inequality, and social policy Trends in poverty and inequality: Periodic reports on key poverty and inequality indicators Cutting-edge research: Concise summaries of research that is changing how we understand the sources and consequences of poverty and inequality Bold new visions: Must-read discussions of how labor market, poverty, and inequality policy might be rethought and changed Debates: Leading scholars and policymakers weigh in on the crucial poverty and inequality questions of our time

We describe changes over time in inequality in postsecondary education using nearly seventy years of data from the U.S. Census and the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth. We find growing gaps between children from high- and low-income families in college entry, persistence, and graduation. Rates of college completion increased by only four percentage points for low-income cohorts born around 1980 relative to cohorts born in the early 1960s, but by 18 percentage points for corresponding cohorts who grew up in high-income families. Among men, inequality in educational attainment has increased slightly since the early 1980s. But among women, inequality in educational attainment has risen sharply, driven by increases in the education of the daughters of high-income parents. Sex differences in educational attainment, which were small or nonexistent thirty years ago, are now substantial, with women outpacing men in every demographic group. The female advantage in educational attainment is largest in the top quartile of the income distribution. These sex differences present a formidable challenge to standard explanations for rising inequality in educational attainment.

Our current system has to do with money more than it has to do with good educational practices. Most of those in power do not know about education and research and buy-in...yes BUY-in to what large wealthy publishing companies sell. If our school systems are not failing yet, they will be by the time state and federal education departments, and some of the politicians who surround us, are done. Education clearly cannot go back to the way it used to be because there were too many inequities. Too many inequalities. Unfortunately, those inequities and inequalities still exist today and high stakes testing has done very little to change that. Education cannot keep going in the present direction. There must be a balance between the good ole days where teachers and students could be do whatever they wanted and the present situation where educators share a unified curriculum.

I did a post a short while back about the fact that there are persistent inequities in state school finance formulas and that those  persistent inequities have real consequences for students' access to key resources in schools - specifically their access to a rich array of programs, services, courses and other opportunities.  In that post I referred to the post school funding equity era as this perceived time in which we live. Been there, done that. Funding equity? No problem. We all know funding doesn't matter anyway. Funding can't buy a better education. It's all about reform. Not funding. And we all know that the really good reformy strategies can, in fact, achieve greater output with even less funding. Hey, just look at all of those high flying, no excuses charter schools. Wait… aw crap… it seems that many of them actually do spend quite a bit. But, back to my point. Alexander Russo put up a good post today about those pesky school funding gaps, asking whatever happened to them?

As the incomes of affluent and poor families have diverged over the past three decades, so too has the educational performance of their children. But how exactly do the forces of rising inequality affect the educational attainment and life chances of low-income children? In Whither Opportunity? a distinguished team of economists, sociologists, and experts in social and education policy examines the corrosive effects of unequal family resources, disadvantaged neighborhoods, insecure labor markets, and worsening school conditions on K-12 education. This groundbreaking book illuminates the ways rising inequality is undermining one of the most important goals of public education-the ability of schools to provide children with an equal chance at academic and economic success.

We do not need high stakes testing to tell us that we have inequalities in education. All we need to do is drive from a city school to a suburban school to see there are inequalities. Class size, student preparedness, parental involvement, and proper facilities are just a few of those inequalities that many of our students and colleagues have to face every day.

"It is, for example, quite common for charter schools to lead to an increase in inequality based on culture, race or socio-economic status," says Professor of Teacher Education, John O'Neill. "The evidence overall is that while a few highly motivated individuals and families may benefit, charter schools do not provide more choice for most families," he says. "Also, they often promote greater inequality of educational outcomes for disadvantaged students, and fail to eliminate the long tail of underachievement that the Government is rightly concerned about."

America's public schools and prisons are stark images of the fact of racial, gender, and socioeconomic inequity in our society-inequity that is both perpetuated by and necessary for the ruling elite to maintain their artificial status as that elite. The research, coming from the U.S. Department of Education, and the media coverage are not evidence we are confronting that reality or that we will address it any time soon. The research and the media coverage are proof we'll spend energy on the research and the coverage in order to mask the racism lingering corrosively in our free state while continuing to blame the students who fail for their failure and the prisoners for their transgressions.

While on Wall Street many protesters decry economic inequality, and in Washington, D.C. debates continue over federal education policy, teachers across the country are occupying their classrooms. In the eyes of the president of the second-largest teachers' union, the two issues of inequality and education are closely related. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has been a frequent visitor to New York's OWS protests. The AFT recently revised its "working document" -- a sort of mission statement -- to include language referring to the richest 1 percent.

"This paper arises out of frustration with the results of school reforms carried out over the past few decades. These efforts have failed. They need to be abandoned. In their place must come recognition that income inequality causes many social problems, including problems associated with education. Sadly, compared to all other wealthy nations, the USA has the largest income gap between its wealthy and its poor citizens. Correlates associated with the size of the income gap in various nations are well described in Wilkinson & Pickett (2010), whose work is cited throughout this article. They make it clear that the bigger the income gap in a nation or a state, the greater the social problems a nation or a state will encounter. Thus it is argued that the design of better economic and social policies can do more to improve our schools than continued work on educational policy independent of such concerns."

Education policies focusing on equity in education may be a particularly useful way for countries to increase earnings mobility between generations and reduce income inequality over time. Countries can work towards this goal by giving equal opportunities to both disadvantaged and advantaged students to achieve strong academic outcomes - laying a pathway for them to continue on to higher levels of education and eventually secure good jobs.

Many of our country's enduring dilemmas are the products of inequalities in power and wealth created by social class, race, culture, and sexism. Challenges exist inside and outside the education system. Although the society has made visible historic progress on many fronts, our nation's most pressing educational problem remains the opportunity gap between the children of the haves and those of the have-nots; this gap has grown with the mounting social inequality of the last 40 years. We believe the schools can and should do much more to make progress in many areas. Yet we recognize that improving schools for the families of the have-nots on any large scale will in the end depend on broader steps toward democracy and equality. In any case, we are unlikely to renew our democracy without a fresh commitment to quality public education.

The charter school movement has been a major political success, but it has been a civil rights failure. As the country continues moving steadily toward greater segregation and inequality of education for students of color in schools with lower achievement and graduation rates, the rapid growth of charter schools has been expanding a sector that is even more segregated than the public schools. The Civil Rights Project has been issuing annual reports on the spread of segregation in public schools and its impact on educational opportunity for 14 years. We know that choice programs can either offer quality educational options with racially and economically diverse schooling to children who otherwise have few opportunities, or choice programs can actually increase stratification and inequality depending on how they are designed. The charter effort, which has largely ignored the segregation issue, has been justified by claims about superior educational performance, which simply are not sustained by the research. Though there are some remarkable and diverse charter schools, most are neither. The lessons of what is needed to make choice work have usually been ignored in charter school policy. Magnet schools are the striking example of and offer a great deal of experience in how to create educationally successful and integrated choice options.

The charter school movement has been a major political success, but it has been a civil rights failure. As the country continues moving steadily toward greater segregation and inequality of education for students of color in schools with lower achievement and graduation rates, the rapid growth of charter schools has been expanding a sector that is even more segregated than the public schools. The Civil Rights Project has been issuing annual reports on the spread of segregation in public schools and its impact on educational opportunity for 14 years. We know that choice programs can either offer quality educational options with racially and economically diverse schooling to children who otherwise have few opportunities, or choice programs can actually increase stratification and inequality depending on how they are designed. The charter effort, which has largely ignored the segregation issue, has been justified by claims about superior educational performance, which simply are not sustained by the research. Though there are some remarkable and diverse charter schools, most are neither. The lessons of what is needed to make choice work have usually been ignored in charter school policy. Magnet schools are the striking example of and offer a great deal of experience in how to create educationally successful and integrated choice options.

For all the contention brought about by the O.W.S. protests, most observers and commenters agree that the movement's one success has been to shift the national conversation-inasmuch as there is one-to words like "poverty" and "inequality." Still, since the early occupations, calls for the protesters to give specifics to underline their shouting have resounded. And in the months of occupation, the financial and political structures that created and support such drastic inequality have been widely reported on and scrutinized. One, though-the privatization of public education, in the name of reform-has received less attention.

"The phrase closing the achievement gap is the cornerstone of TFA's general philosophy, public-relations messaging, and training sessions. As a member of the 2011 corps, I was told immediately and often that 1) the achievement gap is a pervasive example of inequality in America, and 2) it is our personal responsibility to close the achievement gap within our classrooms, which are microcosms of America's educational inequality. These are laudable goals."

"There continues to be much bluster out there in ed reformy land that money really isn't all that important - especially for traditional public school districts. That local public schools and districts already have way too much money but use it so inefficiently that any additional dollar would necessarily be wasted. An extension of this line of reasoning is that therefore differences in spending across districts are also inconsequential. It really doesn't matter - the reformy line of thinking goes - if the suburbs around Philly, Chicago or New York dramatically outspend them, as long as some a-contextual, poorly documented and often flat out wrong, blustery statement can be made about a seemingly large aggregate or per pupil spending figure that the average person on the street should simply find offensive. Much of this bluster about the irrelevance of funding is strangely juxtaposed with arguments that inequity of teacher quality and the adequacy of the quality of the teacher workforce are the major threats to our education system. But of course, these threats have little or nothing to do with money? Right? As I've explained previously - equitable distribution of quality teaching requires equitable (not necessarily equal) distribution of resources. Districts serving more needy student populations require smaller classes and more intensive supports if their students are expected to close the gap with their more advantaged peers - or strive for common outcome goals. Even recruiting similarly qualified teachers in higher need settings requires higher, not the same or lower compensation. Districts serving high need populations require a) more staff - more specialized, more diverse and even more of the same (core classroom teacher) staff, of b) at least equal qualifications. That means they need more money (than their more advantaged neighbors) to get the job done. If they so happen to have substantially less money, it's not a matter of simply tradin

"The growing role of class in academic success has taken experts by surprise since it follows decades of equal opportunity efforts and counters racial trends, where differences have narrowed. It adds to fears over recent evidence suggesting that low-income Americans have lower chances of upward mobility than counterparts in Canada and Western Europe. Thirty years ago, there was a 31 percentage point difference between the share of prosperous and poor Americans who earned bachelor's degrees, according to Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski of the University of Michigan. Now the gap is 45 points. While both groups improved their odds of finishing college, the affluent improved much more, widening their sizable lead."

In this week's show (Part One of a two part series), Education Radio continues to disrupt the dominant narrative of corporate education reform by investigating the organization Teach for America (TFA). TFA is one of many insidious examples of how the language of social justice and equity is hijacked and appropriated, and instead employed to further the goals of the neoliberal education reform agenda. This agenda includes a firm belief that education should primarily serve the interests of private profit and as with all neoliberal education reformers, TFA is actively intensifying racial and class inequality, and the destruction of education as an essential public good along with the continued decimation of unions - two institutions that are primary determinants of a democratic society.

Our guest author today is Dr. Clifford B. Janey, former superintendent for the Newark Public Schools, District of Columbia Public Schools, and Rochester City School District. He is currently a Senior Weismann Fellow at the Bankstreet College of Education in New York City, and a Shanker Institute board member. For too many students, families, and communities, the high school diploma represents either a dream deferred or a broken contract between citizens and the stewards of America's modern democracy. With the reform movement's unrelenting focus on testing and its win/lose consequences for students and staff, the high school diploma, which should signify college and work readiness, has lost its value. Not including the over seven thousand students who drop out of high school daily, the gap between the percentage of those who graduate and their readiness for college success will continue to worsen the social and income inequalities in life.