St Edwards University - Tower Yearbook (Austin, TX)

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Ili f | vhich success would no longer be associated pi vith skin color, economic background, or yther “‘irrelevant” factors, but only with ac- “ual merit. What they wanted, in short, was what they called “equal opportunity.” | Their strategy for achieving equal op- T lested on a series of assumptions that went oughly as follows: |) Eliminating poverty is largely a matter of relping children born into poverty to rise ‘but of it. Once families escape from poverty, hey do not fall back into it. Middle-class ‘thildren rarely end up poor. 2) The primary reason poor children cannot sscape from poverty is that they do not ac- quire basic cognitive skills. They cannot ‘ead, write, calculate, or articulate. Lacking hese skills, they cannot get or keep a well- paid job. 3)The best mechanism for breaking this . ‘vicious circle” is educational reform. Since y +. 2 —— q ‘e children born into poor homes do not ac- quire the skills they need from their parents, 4 they must be taught these skills in school. ’ This can be done by making sure that they , if ‘attend the same schools as middle-class chil- ‘ ‘dren, by giving them extra compensatory yy programs in school, by giving their parents a voice in running their schools, or by some | ‘combination of all three approaches. | | | | | | Our research over the last four years suggests that each of these assumptions is erroneous... Implications for Educational Policy These findings imply that school re- form is never likely to have any signifi- cant effect on the degree of inequality among adults. This suggests that the prev- alent “factory” model, in which schools are seen as places that “produce” alumni, probably ought to be abandoned. It is true that schools have “inputs” and “out- puts,” and that one of their nominal pur- poses is to take human “raw material” (i.e., children) and convert it into some- thing more “useful” (i.e., employable adults). Our research suggests, however, that the character of a school’s output depends largely on a single input, the characteristics of the entering children. Everything else—the school budget, its policies, the characteristics of the teachers—is either secondary or com- pletely irrelevent, at least so long as the range of variation among schools is as narrow as it seems to be in America. These findings have convinced us that the long-term effects of schooling are relatively day-to-day internal life of the schools, in contrast, is highly variable. It follows that the pri- uniform. The cost of participating in a social system. mary basis for evaluating a school should be whether the students and teachers find it a satisfying place to be. This does not mean we think schools should be like mediocre summer camps, in which children are kept out of trouble but not taught anything. We doubt that a school can be enjoyable for either adults or children unless the children keep learning new things. We value ideas and the life of the mind, and we think that a school that does not value these things is a poor place for children. But a school that values ideas because they enrich the lives of children is quite different from a school that values high reading scores because reading scores are important for adult success . . . In America, as elsewhere, the long-term drift over the past 200 years has been to- ward equality. In America, however, the contribution of public policy to this drift has been slight. As long as egalitarians as- sume that public policy cannot contribute to equality directly but must proceed by ingen- ious manipulations of marginal institutions like the schools, this pattern will continue. If we want to move beyond this tradition, we must establish political control over the eco- nomic institutions that shape our society. What we will need, in short, is what other countries call socialism. Anything less will end in the same disappointment as the re- forms of the 1960s. SR of Education, October 1972 Copyright, Saturday Review, Inc. The “cost of living” is not the cost of buying some fixed set of goods and services. It is the 37

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The Schools and Equal Opportunity An advance report by the authors of the study Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling i America. Americans have a recurrent fantasy that schools can solve their problems. Thus it was perhaps inevitable that, after we rediscoy- ered poverty and inequality in the early 1960s, we turned to the schools for solu- tions. Yet the schools did not provide solu- tions, the high hopes of the early-and-middle 1960s faded, and the war on poverty ended in ignominious surrender to the status quo... Today there are signs that some people are beginning to look for new solutions to these perennial problems. There is a vast amount of sociological and economic data that can, we think, help in this effort, both by explaining the failures of the 1960s and by suggesting more realistic alternatives. For the past four years we have been working with this data. Our research has led us to three general conclusions. First, poverty is a condition of relative rather than absolute deprivation. People feel poor and are poor if they have a lot less money than their neighbors . . . The problem is economic inequality rather than low in- comes. Second, the reforms of the 1960s were misdirected because they focused only on equalizing opportunity to “succeed” (or “fail’’) rather than on reducing the economic and social distance between those who suc- ceeded and those who failed . . . Third, even if we are interested solely in equalizing opportunities for economic suc- cess, making schools more equal will not help very much... The main policy implication of these findings is that although school reform is im- portant for improving the lives of children, schools cannot contribute significantly to adult equality. If we want economic equality in our society, we will have to get it by changing our economic institutions, not by changing the schools. Poverty and Inequality The rhetoric of the war on poverty described the persistence of poverty in the midst of affluence as a “paradox,” largely attribut- able to “neglect.” Official publications all assumed that poverty was an absolute rather than a relative condition. Having assumed this, they all showed progress toward the elimination of poverty, since fewer and 36 fewer people had incomes below the offi- cial “poverty line.” Yet, despite all the official announce- ments of progress, many Americans still seemed poor, by their own standards and their neighbors’. The reason was that most Americans define poverty in relative rather than absolute terms .. . The changes in the definition of pov- erty are not just a matter of “rising ex- pectations” or of people’s needing to “keep up with the Joneses.” The goods and services that made it possible to live on $15 a week during the Depression were no longer available to a family with the same real income ($40 a week) in 1964. Eating habits had changed, and many cheap foods had disappeared from the stores. Housing arrangements had changed, too. During the Depression many people could not afford indoor plumbing and “got by” with a privy. By the 1960s privies were illegal in most places. Those who still could not afford an indoor toilet ended up in buildings that had broken toilets. For these they paid more than their parents had paid for privies. Examples of this kind suggest that the “cost of living” is not the cost of buy- ing some fixed set of goods and services. It is the cost of participating in a social system. It therefore depends in large part on how much other people habitually spend to participate in the system. Those who fall far below the norm, whatever it may be, are excluded. Accordingly, rais- ing the incomes of the poor will not elim- inate poverty if the cost of participating in “mainstream” American life rises even faster ian. Schooling and Opportunity Almost none of the reform legislation of the 1960s involved direct efforts to equal- ize adult status, power, or income. Most Americans accepted the idea that these rewards should go to those who were most competent and diligent. Their objec- tion to America’s traditional economic system was not that it produced inequality but that the rules determining who suc- ceeded and who failed were often unfair, The reformers wanted to create a world in By Mary Bane and Christopher Jencks i) hy lh 7 | 7] ae, — = — =] ay Illustrated by Sybil Ingram

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The New Naturalism By Daniel Yankelovich Sick my colleagues and | first began to study the revolution in campus values in the mid-1960s, I have been reminded of Alfred North Whitehead’s dictum that “oreat ideas often enter reality in strange guises and with disgusting alliances.” Whitehead was referring to the emergence, three millennia ago, of the idea of the essential equality of men. But our studies have led me to won- der whether the college student move- ment might conceivably harbor an idea of comparable importance. Should its claim to transform our moral sensibili- ties and national life-styles be taken seriously? Were we witnessing a new chapter in an authentic and serious movement in American cultural history or merely a nervous spasm elicited in re- sponse to the unsettling events of our time? In the course of our research with college students, | have come to regard these questions as the most crucial ones that can be raised about the student movement. Critics of student protest offended by long hair, rioting, open sexuality, and challenge to authority, see mainly the strange guises and dis- gusting alliances. Devotees of the coun- terculture, on the other hand, romanti- cize the movement, hailing each new a- ? berration as the inspired expression of 38 a great idea. But is it not possible that both sets of judgements, even though they seem to contradict each oth- er, form a single truth? Is it not like- ly, as Whitehead implies, that any im- portant new idea as it struggles to be born will assume transitional forms, some of them ugly and contaminated by passing circumstances? My own conclusion is that White- head’s formula holds true for the stu- dent movement: It does harbor a great idea, and that idea has entered current American reality in many strange and misleading guises. Conceptually, the movement’s central idea is neither whol- ly original nor yet a platitude. It has, in fact, recurred as a theme of our civilization many times over hun- dreds of years, though it has probably not been urged in so compelling and noy- el a form since the time of Rousseau. The essence of the idea is that we must initiate a new stage in man’s re- latedness to nature and the natural. In the hierarchy of values that consti- tute man’s conception of the summum bonum; the student-led cultural revo- lution elevates nature and the natur- al to the highest position. Whatever is natural is deemed to be good; whatever is artificial and opposed to nature is bad. But what is truly natural and what is opposed to nature? The answer is by no means self-evident. We have i- dentified almost twenty meanings of the concept “natural” as the student movement defines it. Some meanings are obvious, others are subtle. Some are superficial expressions of life- styles that students experiment with and then abandon like so many one- night stands; other meanings are fun- damental to man’s existence. To be natural, in the student lexicon, means: To push the Darwinian version of nature as “survival of the fittest” into the background, and to emphasize