So We’re Not Very Socially Mobile
by Lin Yang on February 28, 2008 in The Blackboard
The theme for this week’s Issues in Education Policy class is social mobility. Specifically, the general consensus is that America, the swash-buckling, individualism-driven, land of opportunity doesn’t provide as many “rags to riches” stories as other industrialized nations around the world. You know that feeling of reading through pages and pages of depressing statistics, to the point that your eyes start to glaze? To save you from horrendous reminders of grad school, here’s a brief summary of the findings:
- If a father is in the 20th percentile of earnings, his son has a 57.5% chance of also being in the lowest percentile.
- 74% of students that enter into top tier universities come from the top 25% of income.
- About half of white teenagers and three-quarters of black youth that start out in the poorest fifth stay poor in their lifetime.
- Social mobility has become more restrictive in recent times, with the likelihood of an individual from a poor family staying poor rising from 1969 to 1989.
What I want to take issue with is how these statistics are used to inform education policy. Ideally, this information should create a sense of urgency that our education system has not been successful in evening the playing field for students from low-income communities. This research should spawn a drive for school innovations, greater resources, better teaching methods, more qualified teachers, and more career development for high school students. In essence, they tell us what many educators on the front lines already know, that something must be done to improve our schools and place them at the forefront of improving social mobility.
But too often, they have been used to discredit how much our education system can do to close the income gap. Hidden behind the intergeneration data is a common argument that “parents matter in the outcome of their child” and “part of the reason for low achievement is heredity.” When I taught in the Delta, a common complaint from burnt-out teachers was how the quality of the parents have dropped compared with when they were teaching 20 years ago. It makes the tasks of schools seem almost impossible. How can schools counter lofty patterns of increased inequality? How can our education system counter the ill effects from shifts in our economy, to reduced social welfare programs, to the break-up of the American family and the rise of the MTV generation?
Well to start, our school still runs on the agrarian calendar, with long summers off so that students can work on farms. Of course, kids don’t do that anymore. Our education system needs to change with the changing times. No longer can policymakers and educators continue to make excuses of why our system cannot counter the endemic ills of our society, and start finding new ways to teach our kids and empower them into higher income groups. Call me an idealist, but I still think the goal of education is to provide equal opportunities to children, no matter what background they come from. Let’s use these statistics as an urgent call to action.
Written by Lin Yang · Filed Under The Blackboard
Lin Yang taught high school mathematics for two years in West Helena, Arkansas, as part of Teach for America's Mississippi Delta Corps. He is currently a Master in Public Policy candidate at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, concentrating in U.S. education policy.
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