Designed to Fail

On a lark, I recently took to investigating the local industries here in the Coachella Valley, so as to possibly prepare for a career change (at the mention of which my wife went quietly ballistic - "You're a damn teacher!").  I didn't find much of interest in terms of employment.  But I did encounter a fascinating perspective on the regional economy.

In an article responding to a recent regional economic initiative, I found this profound little description of the valley's socio-economic dynamic:

....did you know there are 500,000 people living in the Valley during peak season?
In fact, some of the cities are very high-end resort communities. Cities like Palm desert, Rancho Mirage, Indian Wells, and La Quinta. The Coachella Valley also has farmland, and also some lower income areas, and cities, which helps provide all labor for the major hospitality industry during the winter months when everyone comes to stay and play. Indeed, there are 200 golf courses in the Valley.

I suppose this is in many ways a mundane, obvious observation.  But it gets at something far more profound about the way our society functions, and the pressures that citizens face in striving to live their lives with dignity and equality of opportunity.  

 

A major talking point in the current Republican primary race is the idea that conservatism emphasizes "equality of opportunity", while liberalism "emphasizes equality of outcomes".  This framing is flawed in that its rhetorical design is to elicit agreement that conservatism's ideological framework, and subsequent policy prescriptions, is superior - a notion that is of course debatable.  However, on its face the framing isn't exactly incorrect, and might even be useful in understanding the deeper nature of our ideological differences.

Liberalism argues that equality of outcomes - a basic fact of our society - are determined by factors including, but not limited to, personal initiative.  In fact, personal initiative itself would be argued as the result of larger factors that shape individual citizens' sense of self-efficacy.  So while there may be in theory an equality of opportunity, an individual may not be able to access it because of socio-economic forces that have conspired to inhibit his personal agency, his ability to take advantage of those opportunities.  

 

In emphasizing the current inequality of outcomes, liberalism argues both that this is the result of socio-economic dynamics that are alterable, and then what policy options are available to broaden access to equality of outcomes.  This policy would ideally find the greatest point of leverage in a given negative dynamic and then design a program that effectively removes it as a negative factor in the individual's ability to affect positive outcomes.  

 

In educational pedagogy, new forms of learning always require what is termed "scaffolding".  A student is not expected to succeed with complete independence at the beginning of the lesson.  First, the teacher provides a model of what is expected.  Then the student is slowly given an opportunity to perform the task himself, but with the teacher right beside him giving him support; some of the scaffolding has been removed.  Finally, the teacher allows him to work completely independently, as he is now competent to succeed independently; the scaffolding has been completely removed.

This analogy is not necessarily meant to equate the learning process with a citizen's intellectual or behavioral capacity, although sometimes behavior is indeed a factor in the dynamics of access to opportunity.  Rather, it is meant as an analogy to the realities of socio-economics.  

 

So, for instance, lets take the example of a young single mother with a high school education, who makes minimum wage.  Laying aside for a moment the social dynamics that first led to her position (that is water under the bridge now anyway), let's examine the socio-economic dynamics of her situation that make it difficult for her to access the opportunities that might exist, yet which for her are circumstantially impractical.

Because of her low pay, she is unable to afford a car, babysitter, health insurance (for both herself and her child), or schooling for her child.  She can only afford to live in the poorest of neighborhoods, and struggles to pay for groceries.  Without government programs designed to help her and her family (her child), her life prospects would not be good, and she would be unable to access the majority of opportunities for betterment, should they even exist.  

 

With government, however, she has a decent chance of leveraging herself and her family to a better, more equal life outcome.  Public transit allows her to get to work without a car.  Subsidized health insurance allows her child (at least) to get the medical care he needs to stay healthy and prevents a medical issue from devastating her fragile situation.  Subsidized child care allows her the time to take classes at the local community college.  Public parks, libraries and community centers in her neighborhood allow a measure of quality of life and opportunities for her and her child.  Food stamps supplement her paltry income, allowing her to at least better feed her family, and possibly even save a little money in the bank.  Public education allows her child to get an education that she would not have been able to pay for privately, nor afford the time to spend homeschooling him - were she even to be competent enough to do so.

Conservative scolds will likely point out that her situation is her own fault.  She shouldn't have gotten pregnant, at least not without marrying first.  That might help.  However, two parents earning minimum wage are still hardly enough to support a family.  They might also point out that the provision of government services likely contributed to a sort of irresponsibility in family planning on her part, in that she must have known that, in the end, she would be taken care of.  

 

However, all we need to do is to is look back to a time before the modern liberal state, before these programs were in place, to see that illegitimacy and poverty were just as much problems then as they are today.  In fact, the research on what actually drives human behavior and life choices, there are much more profound socio-economic factors than the existence of government support.  Things like family background and education level are far more predictive of behavior than the prospect of government dole.  While we ought not discount this critique entirely - I'm sure it does play some role, the reality is that an analysis of the cycle of generational poverty shows that profound deficits in both human and social capital are by far the biggest drivers of impulsive, dysfunctional and short-sided behavior.

One of the most coherent and broadly negative of these dynamics is the geography of poverty itself.  Essentially, what we have in every region of the country is the isolation and stratification of citizens with low levels of human and social capital into communities along socio-economic lines.  These communities become highly reinforcing of negative behaviors, including out-of-wedlock birth, violence, substance abuse, mental illness, low education, inadequate parental involvement and guidance, etc.  (at the opposite end, you have more affluent communities concentrating individuals with high levels of human and social capital - education, savings, networking, mental health, physical fitness, impulse control, etc.).  To be raised in one of these neighborhoods, to fraternize with one's peers, attend school together, etc. is to be raised in a deficient, depleted, and more often dysfunctional environment.  Government programs or no, the sense of self-efficacy and agency, not to mention one's actual physical, emotional, behavioral, moral, academic, etc. development is still going to be massively malnourished.  Whether or not government programs can ever sufficiently remedy this socio-economic deficit - that translates into practical, thus literal opportunity and outcome depletion - is reasonably debatable.  But the larger issue is the structure of our economy itself.

Let us return now to the Coachella Valley.   

....lower income areas, and cities, [help] provide all labor for the major hospitality industry.

This is nothing less that a large-scale, macro-socio-economic recipe for continued poverty and inequality.  As long as there exists a market for low-wage services, there will be low-wage workers who live together in low-wage neighborhoods.  Thus all those who, for whatever reason (lack of education, lack of mental health, behavioral development, etc.) can do no better than work in low-skill, low-wage jobs will continue to make up an underclass of citizens for whom opportunity is inaccessible, and outcomes will be unequal.  We will continue to wrestle with the problems they inflict both on themselves and us in the form of crime, lost productivity and dysfunction.  Yet until we begin to wrestle with the ways in which we - as a society with a distinct social and economic structure - have inflicted problems on them, lasting solution will continue to elude us.

The Reality of "Choice"

Gail Collins writes about the growth of online K-12 charter schools, the most successful being for-profit K-12, Inc.

"...a big private online education business. It was founded by a former Goldman Sachs banker and by William Bennett, the Republican writer and talk-show host, with an infusion of cash from the former disgraced junk-bond king Mike Milken. Its teachers generally work from their homes, communicating with their students by e-mail or phone. (At one point in Arizona, essays of students attending an online academy run by K12 were outsourced to India for correction. K12 says the program was a pilot and was discontinued.)"

Having taught at a charter school with a major emphasis on homeschooling, and that was increasingly moving towards an online model, I can speak to some of the concerns people have about these schools.  There was little transparency in terms of how the school was run, and financed its activities.  This is a critique of charter schools in general, removed as they are from conventional public school accountability.  This was especially concerning to me, as I worked at one of the satellite campuses, which was located in a poor neighborhood and drew from a largely disadvantaged population.  I worried that the students' needs were not being met and being given short-shrift by the charter's more middle-class, home-schooled demographic priorities.

Another concern people have with online programs is that they'll further inhibit poor brick and mortar schools' ability to serve the special needs of their populations.  As with brick and mortar charters, they will further siphon off the families with means, leaving behind the families with the fewest resources.  The poor are often thought of as a homogeneous demographic, defined only by financial capital.  But in reality there exists a great diversity of means, in terms of human and social capital, the efficacy of individual parenting, family education levels, issues with substance abuse or criminality, etc.  Statistically, only a very small percentage of poor parents have been actively trying to get their children into charter schools as alternatives to traditional public schools.  These are the parents who would be raising higher performing students, and realize that their students are being subjected to the many negative social pressures and forces at work in ghettos.  This is simply a function of geography and property values.

The effect of this movement of high-capital families out of poor schools is to further segregate communities by means.  While certainly a great benefit to those who know how to take advantage of the process, those left behind are further isolated and concentrated in their disadvantage.  For instance, an average poor classroom might have 20% of its students suffering from emotional, behavioral, and academic deficits owing to severe neglect and strife at home, and another 20% enjoying the benefits of a cognitively stimulating and loving environment at home, able to complete work and be actively engaged in positive learning.  In a class of 30-35 students, this presents an enormous challenge for a teacher in differentiating his instruction to adequately meet the needs of every child.  In removing the top 20% of students, you are essentially (if my math is correct) removing 100% of the highest performers, in return for a 5% increase in the lowest and 15% increase in middle performers.

Now, in a perfect world, this may not be the worst thing.  There are many advantages to less differentiation, or more homogeneity in a classroom.  With a smaller range of needs, the teacher is better able to manage his instructional specificity.  At the site level, resources can be more focused and delivered more efficiently.  Unfortunately, this doesn't really happen.  The poor have a tendency to get neglected.  In the classroom, more low-performing students means more interruptions, more truancy, more remediation, lower standards, and greater teacher burnout.  Class sizes remain the same, only increasing the teacher's burden.  At the site level, while more services are often offered, the decline in parent means translates into less local community resources, and more demand for interventions, requiring ever more services and attention.  Socially, the negative pressures are reinforced, while the positive pressures are reduced.  Net negativity is thus increased.

It doesn't have to be this way.  If class sizes were reduced, more services were offered, and resources were made available for teachers and staff to leverage, you would have a system in which high concentrations of disadvantage and dysfunction were ripe for efficient, targeted intervention.  Yet the system would have to be designed to support this extra burden.  From the ground floor up, it would take into account the population's special needs, and not expect teachers to primarily bear the burden.  Currently, "teacher accountability" is frequently mentioned, but more rarely is "systemic accountability".  Where is the accountability when systems are in place that shovel highly needy, at-risk populations into traditional classroom environments.  It is as if schools, teachers and students are set-up to fail.

I would not be as skeptical of educational innovations such as charter schools or online programs, if they were understood in the context of larger socioeconomic issues in education.  For many poor parents, online schooling might make the most sense, and be a good fit for their child's needs.  For many others, their children's needs may be better served by an environment that can set the bar higher, knowing that students will be able to competently meet it, as opposed to simply being set-up for failure.

I've long thought a rigorous socio-economic assessment regime could be designed that measures and then places families into school settings designed to appropriately meet their specific needs.  To me, this is truly what "choice" looks like.  It isn't bottom-up, in terms of parents being "allowed" to send their children wherever they like.  But that concept assumes that poor families are homogeneous in their ability to best see to their children's development.  The reality is that many poor families need top-down help, and giving them "choice" is a false notion, implying that poor performing families are "choosing" not to be successful.  Everyone wants to be successful, even the families struggling with poor parenting skills, single-parenthood, substance abuse, etc.  But they don't know how.  The sad reality is that we only have two choices when it comes to many poor families - the nanny state, or the neglectful parent state.  Contrary to the fantasies we would like to believe about human behavior, reality is that, due to the many disadvantages and behavioral constraints besetting poor communities, owing to numerous historical and systemic factors, we are in a position of "parenthood", in that if left to fend for themselves, too many families - and their children - will not be successful.  That is the reality.  That is the reality of "choice".