Education’s Economic Divide

Not long ago, I went on a search for schools in the Portland, Oregon, area that are doing something different. By different, I mean schools whose philosophies provide parents with a real choice between their neighborhood public school and something else.


My findings were both exciting and discouraging. There are lots of great choices out there, but most of them are either private schools, public alternative schools, or public schools with specialized curricula that require a lottery for attendees outside their neighborhoods. So what, you might ask, choice is choice, isn’t it? I’d argue, no. Not all choices are created equal. As a matter of fact, some of the differences between these schools practically make them no choice at all.

Let me explain:

If you’re a parent looking for a school for your child, you’ve generally got two choices: public school or private school. The most obvious difference between these schooling paths is financial. Private schools cost families money while public ones don’t.

So if you’re like me and you can’t afford to dish out thousands (or sometimes tens of thousands) of dollars each year to educate your child, then you’re stuck with public schools. I say stuck, but I’m an advocate of public schools...in theory. After all, I went to public schools, even to earn my three degrees, and I turned out all right, as they say. (I’ll argue against this platitude later.) Besides, public schools are offering students many choices nowadays that they didn’t offer when I was in school.

Charter schools, for example, are great laboratories of innovation, as are magnet schools (to which I did go for a few years in elementary school). Parents can choose to send their students to schools that emphasize the arts, science, mathematics, technology, foreign language, etc. Often times, these public schools, because of their independent nature, can keep class sizes smaller and make decisions about curriculum that “regular” public schools can’t.

Sounds great, doesn’t it?
There’s only one problem. All this choice I’ve been talking about only exists in the most progressive environments. When I say progressive, I’m not being political, by the way; I’m using the word in the most general sense to mean progress. Cities like Portland, Oregon, are serious about giving their parents and students choices about their education, and because the city is big enough and progressive enough and because some parents and other groups have taken the initiative to build these schools, most of the community can benefit from it.

But this isn’t the case for some communities, and even for places like Portland, students either have to belong to a special population to qualify for attendance at an alternative public school, enter a lottery to attend a charter or magnet school outside their neighborhoods, be lucky enough to already live in one of those neighborhoods, or move to a neighborhood with one of these schools of choice in it.

This leaves low-income families, once again, at a disadvantage. In Martin Haberman’s essay “The Pedagogy of Poverty Versus Good Teaching,” methods used in urban schools, mostly populated with poor and minority students, are questioned. “Youngsters achieve neither minimum levels of life skills nor what they are capable of learning” (291). Skill drill is a typical classroom tactic, with memorization deemed more important—or maybe easier—than critical thinking and problem solving. This isn’t just an urban problem, though, but the fact that many of these students live in poverty makes the consequences more debilitating.

Actually, there’s another problem, too. Even cities like Portland that have dozens of choices, both public and private, are still stuck in a system that relies on top-down governance and standardized tests to regulate and measure success. Why we think these measures are necessary to educate students, I don’t know. In this and many other ways, the Finnish have it figured out. They only test their students once at the end of their schooling. All other standardized testing is completely voluntary and up to the teachers. Speaking of teachers, all teachers in Finland have Master’s degrees. But this is a different argument for another blog post.

Their potential and intent are what I was talking about when I said that I’m an advocate of public schools in theory. I believe 100% in free, compulsory education for all, and in theory this is what public schools are. In reality though, they are places burdened by political demagoguery and leadership failures. They’re places where teachers and staff have to take furlough days, not because this is in the best interest of students, but because it’s in the best interest of the budget.

So yes, I went to public schools, and I did turn out all right for the most part, but times they are a changin’. What does it mean when we use that old argument anyway? I think we’re trying to save face, to say that we’re functioning members of society who made it in whatever system we were forced through as children, so it must follow that the system worked and is still working, right? Wrong.

First, that logic assumes that our children are living in the same world we were, and they’re not. Second, it implies that turning out all right is our ultimate goal. That’s like being an athlete at the Olympics and being satisfied with sitting on the bench.

Okay, so we survived. Hurray! Now what? Well, our political system is in shambles, our schools are being attacked from every angle, and unemployment is rising...again. These are complicated problems with even more mind-boggling causes, so I’m certainly not saying that we should blame our good ol’ public schools for all this. No, no. I’d just like to recognize the past for what it is: over. It’s not the good ol’ days, it never was, and the idea that we turned out all right is a romantic way of saying let’s just keep things the way they’ve always been when we all know that the way things have always been isn’t good enough anymore.