Equality, race and schooling
The complicated path to equal opportunity
Oct 1st 2012, 20:59 by S.M. | NEW YORK
IN A complaint filed last week, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund charged that the admissions procedures of Stuyvesant High School and other specialised high schools in New York City are “unsound and discriminatory” because the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT)—the sole factor in admissions—has yielded striking racial imbalances in the schools’ student bodies. They are asking the federal department of education to investigate:
The NAACP’s complaint, though, strikes at the heart of a debate about the meaning of equality that is animating much of the discourse in this year’s presidential election.
If a common thread can be found in the speeches delivered at the Democratic and Republican conventions, it is the meme of “equality of opportunity”. Speaker after speaker from both parties told narratives of hard beginnings, tall odds and redemptive outcomes. Ann Romney’s story of suffering through meals of “tunafish and pasta” in a basement apartment during her husband’s business-school years didn’t ring quite as true as Senator Marco Rubio’s account ofgrowing up poor in Cuba before encountering “the American miracle”. A week later at the Democrats' convention, Julian Castro, the mayor of San Antonio, offered a remarkably similar spin on the American dream.
Close as the parties sound on the value of equality of opportunity, they differ markedly on how it should be secured. The Republicans favour economic freedom and sharply limited government as the mechanisms for ensuring opportunity, while the Democrats focus on the social institutions that help individuals develop the tools to achieve their goals. So Mr Rubio emphasised that "we should be free to go as far as our talents and work can take us", while Mr Castro noted that "there are some things we can't do alone".
In the case of New York's schools, Michael Bloomberg, the city's mayor, stands on the Republican side of the debate. In a testy response to the NAACP complaint, he said, “These are schools designed for the best and the brightest. Life isn’t always fair. What we’ve got to do is make sure everyone has equal opportunity. We’re not here about equal results. We’re here about equal opportunity."
But how do we know when equality of opportunity obtains? In this case, do we look at the procedure by which seats in elite schools are distributed, or do we look at the racial identity of the individuals who wind up in those seats?
According to the theory of democratic egalitarianism developed by philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, equality is “a relationship among people rather than merely a pattern in the distribution of divisible goods”. Viewed in this light, the question of who belongs at Stuyvesant High School cannot be resolved by Mr Bloomberg’s deference to a purportedly objective test. Nor is it to be decided strictly by counting heads. Integration, though, is imperative: diversity is essential at all levels of education, and especially at elite institutions. De facto segregation may not communicate quite the same message of intolerance as does separating the races through legal decree, but many of its harms are just as weighty. Minorities who show promise and motivation in their studies but are excluded from excellent public schools on the basis of a single standardised test score will lack opportunities to develop skills and acquire social and cultural capital. Privileged students who do win a spot will miss out too, as Ms Anderson explains:
As philosophers Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift point out, schools provide a range of private benefits to students: the “non-positional” goods involved with discovering a “world of culture, complexity and enjoyment” and “positional” advantages such as business connections and competitiveness in labour markets. It matters greatly how these goods are distributed. Life may not “always be fair”, as Mr Bloomberg said, but the government has a duty not to entrench and enhance social inequities.
The raison d’etre of public education is the provision of public goods. Ultimately, as John Dewey emphasised a century ago, public schools should devote their energies to serving the public at large. So whether or not the federal government finds that New York City’s specialised schools’ racially-imbalanced student bodies represent an illegal “disparate impact” on disadvantaged minorities, a serious commitment to democratic equality requires that the specialised schools rethink and retool their admissions policies.
Year after year, thousands of academically talented African-American and Latino students who take the test are denied admission to the Specialized High Schools at rates far higher than those for other racial groups… For example, of the 967 eighth-grade students offered admission to Stuyvesant for the 2012-13 school year, just 19 (2%) of the students were African American and 32 (3.3%) were Latino.This complaint will likely go nowhere. Recent Supreme Court jurisprudence on the Civil Rights Act holds that “a prima facie case of disparate-impact liability—essentially, a threshold showing of a significant statistical disparity…and nothing more” is insufficient proof of racial discrimination. In order for a complaint of this kind to stick, there must be proof that the city decided to use the SHSAT despite the existence of “an equally valid, less-discriminatory alternative” admissions test. Holistic admissions policies yielding more diverse student bodies can be found at elite high schools in New York City and around the United States, but there is no evidence that the New York explicitly rejected these alternatives in settling on the SHSAT for its specialised high schools.
The NAACP’s complaint, though, strikes at the heart of a debate about the meaning of equality that is animating much of the discourse in this year’s presidential election.
If a common thread can be found in the speeches delivered at the Democratic and Republican conventions, it is the meme of “equality of opportunity”. Speaker after speaker from both parties told narratives of hard beginnings, tall odds and redemptive outcomes. Ann Romney’s story of suffering through meals of “tunafish and pasta” in a basement apartment during her husband’s business-school years didn’t ring quite as true as Senator Marco Rubio’s account of
Close as the parties sound on the value of equality of opportunity, they differ markedly on how it should be secured. The Republicans favour economic freedom and sharply limited government as the mechanisms for ensuring opportunity, while the Democrats focus on the social institutions that help individuals develop the tools to achieve their goals. So Mr Rubio emphasised that "we should be free to go as far as our talents and work can take us", while Mr Castro noted that "there are some things we can't do alone".
In the case of New York's schools, Michael Bloomberg, the city's mayor, stands on the Republican side of the debate. In a testy response to the NAACP complaint, he said, “These are schools designed for the best and the brightest. Life isn’t always fair. What we’ve got to do is make sure everyone has equal opportunity. We’re not here about equal results. We’re here about equal opportunity."
But how do we know when equality of opportunity obtains? In this case, do we look at the procedure by which seats in elite schools are distributed, or do we look at the racial identity of the individuals who wind up in those seats?
According to the theory of democratic egalitarianism developed by philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, equality is “a relationship among people rather than merely a pattern in the distribution of divisible goods”. Viewed in this light, the question of who belongs at Stuyvesant High School cannot be resolved by Mr Bloomberg’s deference to a purportedly objective test. Nor is it to be decided strictly by counting heads. Integration, though, is imperative: diversity is essential at all levels of education, and especially at elite institutions. De facto segregation may not communicate quite the same message of intolerance as does separating the races through legal decree, but many of its harms are just as weighty. Minorities who show promise and motivation in their studies but are excluded from excellent public schools on the basis of a single standardised test score will lack opportunities to develop skills and acquire social and cultural capital. Privileged students who do win a spot will miss out too, as Ms Anderson explains:
Segregation also deprives the more advantaged of knowledge. To the extent that they lead lives that are isolated from the lives of the disadvantaged and personally know few disadvantaged people, they are liable to be relatively ignorant of the problems the latter face in their lives and of the constraints within which the latter must cope with their problems. When the elite is drawn overwhelmingly from multiply advantaged, segregated groups, their cognitive deļ¬cits hurt the disadvantaged, because elites constituted in this way lack awareness of and responsiveness to the problems and interests of the disadvantaged.But what about Mr Bloomberg’s claim that schools like Stuyvesant are rightfully intended “for the best and the brightest”? Isn’t there room for schools that cater to the gifted, as Chester Finn argued recently? There is no good reason to close schools for more promising students, but the standards for accepting students to these institutions must be matched to their overall purpose.
As philosophers Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift point out, schools provide a range of private benefits to students: the “non-positional” goods involved with discovering a “world of culture, complexity and enjoyment” and “positional” advantages such as business connections and competitiveness in labour markets. It matters greatly how these goods are distributed. Life may not “always be fair”, as Mr Bloomberg said, but the government has a duty not to entrench and enhance social inequities.
The raison d’etre of public education is the provision of public goods. Ultimately, as John Dewey emphasised a century ago, public schools should devote their energies to serving the public at large. So whether or not the federal government finds that New York City’s specialised schools’ racially-imbalanced student bodies represent an illegal “disparate impact” on disadvantaged minorities, a serious commitment to democratic equality requires that the specialised schools rethink and retool their admissions policies.
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