Sociopolitical Resistance to an
Equal Education Constitutional Amendment
Richard Neumann
San Diego State University
On March 4, 2003 Congressman Jesse L. Jackson, Junior (2003a) introduced to the House of Representatives a proposal for an amendment to the United States Constitution that would establish the right to equal high-quality education for all citizens. The proposal (H.J. 29) reads as follows:
Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), that the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States:
SECTION 1. All citizens of the United States shall enjoy the right to a public education of equal high quality.
SECTION 2. The Congress shall have power to implement this article by appropriate legislation.
Jackson’s proposal caused no fanfare in the House—a few dozen Democrats endorsed it—and was quickly buried in committee. It was first referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary, then to the Subcommittee on the Constitution where it continues to languish. The media did not give the proposal much attention either with a few short articles appearing in The Chicago Defender, The New York Amsterdam News, and Education Week. Jackson reintroduced the amendment in March, 2005 and again in February, 2007 but it did not gain much additional support.
The reaction to Jackson’s equal education amendment proposal in the House reflects a paradox in American society concerning avowed commitment to equality in public and official discourse and contradictory behavior of citizens and elected officials. This disjuncture is well substantiated in our history of slavery, segregation, subordination of women and people of color, and denial to certain groups of citizens the rights and opportunities enjoyed by white males. Although some progress has been made toward a reality more consistent with the principle of equality Americans profess so passionately, blatant, unconscionable shortcomings remain. Among these is reluctance toward, even resistance to establishment of a public K-12 education system of equal-quality schools. Indeed, for many the current system of unequal public education is a social form beyond question, beyond discussion, an ingrained social-structural condition that has long provided wealthy families a privileged advantage over the less wealthy. So strong are the values and norms that support legitimacy of privileged advantages in our equal-opportunity society, even many activists for greater equity in public education do not question funding arrangements that enable some communities to create vastly superior schools. Some, however, recognize the contradiction and have initiated what may become the civil rights cause of the twenty-first century—public schools of equal quality.
Major efforts to advance equality of educational opportunity in public education currently include standardization of school curriculum, standardized tests to measure student achievement, restructuring of school organization and operations, improvement of teacher preparation, and revision of school funding arrangements. While all of these strategies seek to improve students’ educational achievement, none of them has equal-quality school facilities and resources as a goal. Even in the face of research that links resources to student outcomes, the ethics of maintaining a system of public education that lavishes some children with resources and requires others to make do with meager amounts is rarely questioned. The condition of public schools is a highly charged third rail of educational politics, a hazardous terrain of money, morals and children’s futures that officials are careful to avoid. This article examines dimensions of social and political resistance to equal-quality schools.
The Case for Equal-Quality Schools and Dimensions of Sociopolitical Resistance
The principle of equal educational opportunity in American society has been promoted by egalitarians since at least the late nineteenth century and today is widely acknowledged as a just and necessary societal condition. The paradox, of course, is that the legitimacy of privileged advantage in public schooling is also maintained.
There are many dimensions to equality of educational opportunity and a sizable body of literature that examines them exists. While even a cursory review of this literature is beyond this article, there is one dimension of the principle that virtually every American adult understands clearly—the relationship between education and social and economic attainment in our society. Related to this, most adults would acknowledge that school facility and resource quality has a considerable effect on a student’s educational experience and achievement. The social, economic and personal growth value of education is the reason why parents work hard and mortgage themselves to the hilt to purchase homes in wealthy communities with attractive, well-equipped, effective public schools. Many other parents struggle to pay tuition for their children to attend prestigious private schools. The adage that attending good schools corresponds to good life chances for children is well substantiated. Elected leaders who send their children to fine private schools understand this relationship but nearly all of them have done nothing to ensure that all children have the same quality of public school facilities and resources essential to a fair chance in our competitive society. Outside of transforming the economic system and redistributing wealth more equitably, there is not much government can do to better equalize opportunity in American society other than providing all children with the same quality of public schools.
Clearly, public schools of equal quality ensure neither equal achievement among groups of students nor equal opportunity in society. Even without guarantees, most Americans would agree that equal public education is fundamental to the principle of equality at the core of our social contract and a requisite condition of equal opportunity in a modern, competitive society. Despite consensus on the link between education and opportunity, enduring inequalities in school facilities and resources have been largely ignored by elected officials, the media and the wealthy, and conspicuously avoided in education journals. Again, the class-based system of public schooling in the United States is beyond reproach.
With the exception of Congressman Jesse L. Jackson, Junior, whose proposed constitutional amendment for equal, high-quality education could be construed as requiring school facilities and resources of the same quality, no elected official in the United States has advocated equalization of schools and resources. Instead, many officials have partaken to confuse the public with standards and paper-and-pencil tests that supposedly show whether a school is good or bad. Rather than working diligently to provide schools of equal quality, officials have been busy identifying what is soon to become an embarrassingly large number of bad schools that cannot show adequate yearly progress in student achievement. One cannot help but wonder if the standardized testing promoted by officials is really an artifice to divert attention away from the resources necessary for student achievement and truly equal education.
However debasing the establishment of high-stakes exams to blame students and teachers in dilapidated, poorly-equipped schools may be, the political astuteness of the tactic must be acknowledged. Curriculum standards and high-stakes tests require virtually no tax increases or redistribution of educational resources and portray officials who promote these so-called “solutions” to educational inequities as defenders of justice and equality. Curriculum standards communicate a message that all children are getting the same education. Standardized tests effectively circumscribe knowledge and provide “scientific” numbers to place on the foreheads of children and teachers, and the doors of schools. Defining equal education as curriculum standards and rating students, teachers and schools on the basis of one simple test score appeals not only to bureaucrats and the like-minded, but also many other Americans’ senses of individualism, personal responsibility and fairness. Still, as Abraham Lincoln admonished, “you can’t fool all of the people all of the time,” and some inevitably ask the question: If school facilities and resources are not factors of educational opportunity then why do the wealthy make sure they have the best of both for their children?
Antonio Gramsci called government the managerial arm of the dominant group (Borg et al., 2002; Forgacs, 1988). Although Gramsci’s work in the 1920s has become obscure, his assertion is still worth consideration. Could it be that elected officials, in maintaining a system of unequal public education, assist the upper classes in holding their position in society? Are officials accommodating a process of social reproduction that ensures furtherance of the dominant group? If officials are oblivious to their complicity in social reproduction, is their behavior then not unethical? One’s answer to these questions would probably depend on their answer to another question: Is it morally defensible to be for both equal educational opportunity and a public school funding arrangement that relegates some children to schools and resources that are far inferior to those available to other children?
Dissecting the Paradox
The paradox of commitment to equality and determined maintenance of a system of unequal public schools is difficult to unravel. Like the classic blues lyric—“everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die”—one would be hard-pressed to find an American who would admit to being opposed to the principle of equal educational opportunity, but one could easily find Americans opposed to a public school funding arrangement that did not allow them to create superior schools for their children. In an individually competitive society one should perhaps expect that people would strive to acquire advantages for themselves and their children over others. After all, competition for occupations that provide a disproportionate share of socially produced wealth requires that for a few to win, many must lose. Even so, the conflict between moral commitment to equality many Americans profess and the reality that, by and large, the quality of public education one receives in the United States depends on the wealth of the community to which he or she was born must be psychologically uncomfortable for a lot of citizens.
Like many people who use denial to suppress psychological discomfort in relation to things such as alcohol abuse, sexual abuse and eating disorders, many Americans appease themselves with false notions about school quality: public schools in the United States are similar enough that all students have essentially the same opportunity to achieve at high levels; educational outcomes may be fully explained by differences in intellectual capacities or application of intellect; where a young person ends up in society is solely the result of his or her motivation, effort, academic achievement, demeanor and acquisition of technical skills and knowledge. Just as the half-pack-per-day cigarette smoker reconciles his habit as not really harmful, so too do legislators and many citizens placate themselves with delusions about equality of schooling and opportunity in the United States. Although Americans may claim to want a fair playing field with respect to public education and other things that affect life chances, many instead prefer a stacked deck.
Of course, there has been some progress toward greater equity in public education and opportunity in society. Disregard of glaring contradictions to foundational principles of liberty, justice and equality has been shown to produce widespread social-psychological estrangement that can disturb domestic tranquility and foment revolution. Every few decades or so some conspicuous affirmation of principle and marker of progress need to occur. It may have taken nearly a century for the United States Supreme Court to recognize that separate public schools for black and white children are inherently unequal, but progress toward greater equality of educational opportunity was averred when segregated schools were outlawed. Although there are still many who do not want integrated public schools and find ways to prevent their realization, it was crucial to national equilibrium that the principle of equality was reaffirmed in Brown v. Board of Education.
The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 is another example of efforts to maintain equilibrium in the American psyche. Although many applauded NCLB for its “emphasis on achievement for all students and its attention to certain groups of students that have had the lowest achievement in the past” (Linn, 2003), the paucity of funds allocated for school resources to make even a reasonable attempt at meeting required adequate yearly progress goals situated the Act deep in the realm of unreality. Impractical goals of 100% student academic proficiency by 2014 and inadequate funding were cited early in implementation of the Act. A review of studies on funding requirements for NCLB by William Mathis (2003) found that at the very least an additional $84 billion annually, nearly half the amount spent each year to sustain our troops in Iraq, would be needed to address student achievement goals. It is ironic that while NCLB intends to improve education, the number of schools that failed to meet adequate yearly progress for two or more years nearly doubled from 2003 to 2004 (“Test and Punish,” 2004). In short, NCLB is analogous to giving nutritional guides to starving people in Africa; it is a semantic ploy like the recent Clear Skies Initiative, which actually relaxes air pollution standards; it is what Murray Edelman (1988) calls political spectacle, a symbolic gesture intended to placate the doomed and appease critics of schooling inequities.
Many Americans are uncomfortable with the term oppressor and more than few deny oppressive social-structural conditions exist in the United States; let alone attribute such conditions to oppressors and their enablers. For many oppressors who do not recognize themselves as such, events such as the Brown decision and NCLB confirm the ability of a democratic republic based on capitalist economy to correct injustices over time. Indeed, many oppressors-in-denial do not see themselves as purposefully or even indirectly maintaining oppressive conditions; nor do they see themselves as having the power to improve things. Rather, the world many of these sometimes kinder, gentler oppressors see is a place where what is construed as a long-standing, inevitable, “naturally” stratified social system offers different degrees of possibility for individuals to realize their potential depending on the strata to which they are born. Some of these oppressors recognize that society is less just than official rhetoric and cultural myth purports it to be, but they believe the foundational values espoused by leaders and the populace will ultimately lead to a just society. While delusions of equal opportunity and perceptions of possibilities for improvement held by some oppressors are not as far-fetched as others, all oppressors are responsible for their actions, and inaction.
Documentation of oppressors’ actions and inaction is abundant and readily apparent to honest eyes. Some of the most eloquent accounts related to schooling appear in Jonathan Kozol’s (1991, 2005) Savage Inequalities and The Shame of the Nation, which, taken together, provide a powerful indictment of our society and its leaders. For children relegated to ugly, dingy schools with leaking ceilings, flooded toilets, out-dated textbooks, ill-equipped labs, broken or non-existent computers, over-crowded classrooms, and unprepared or under-prepared teachers, anyone who plays a part in holding them down, directly or indirectly, is culpable.
Rationalizing Inequality and Negotiating Guilt
The argument that oppressors, witting and unwitting, commonly offer to explain the justness of a public educational system of unequal schools is that facilities and resources, and ergo money, do not matter. For a long time the strongest support for this argument was to be found in James Coleman’s classic 1966 study Equality of Educational Opportunity, which asserted that resources had very little impact on student achievement. Further support for the resources-don’t-matter argument was provided in the 1980s by Eric Hanushek (1981, 1986, 1989), whose synthesis of research led him to essentially the same conclusion Coleman reached. Subsequent study and analysis, however, challenged the accuracy of Coleman’s and Hanushek’s investigations: Coleman’s data sets were too crude and Hanushek’s method of analysis too blunt to detect relationships between school resource inputs and student outcomes, including achievement. In the mid-1990s Rob Greenwald, Larry Hedges and Richard Laine (1996a) employed a sophisticated meta-analytical technique to summarize information about the relationship between school inputs and student performance drawn from all studies ever done on the subject. These researchers concluded that “a broad range of resources were positively related to student outcomes, with effect sizes large enough to suggest that moderate increases in spending may be associated with significant increases in achievement” (p.362).
As is often the case when policy contradicts principles—for instance, sustaining the tobacco industry when it is known that cigarettes are addictive and smoking kills—officials rationalize their maintenance of unequal public school facilities and resources by citing controversy in the research. Recent studies on school resources and funding, however, continue to confirm what Greenwald, Hedges and Laine (1996b) told us a decade ago: “While disagreements persist, scholarly debate should not obscure the fact that the best evidence, upon close inspection and the application of appropriate statistical methodology, demonstrates that student achievement is related to resource availability” (p. 411). Even more convincing than research that substantiates intuition about the link between school resources and achievement is the popular wisdom that compels parents to do all they can to get their children enrolled in attractive schools with good teachers and up-to-date textbooks and equipment.
A combination of research, legal suits, court orders and perhaps a dose of good-old-fashioned guilt obliged officials in many states in the 1980s and 1990s to reform their school funding arrangements. One of the earliest states to attempt greater equity in school funding was California, which actually changed its funding structure in the late 1970s as a result of a court order emanating from the Serrano v. Priest decision in 1971. The court mandate along with passage of the famous tax revolt measure Proposition 13, which turned property tax into a state tax, made school districts wards of the state. By the 1980s California was distributing school funds more equitably, but it accomplished this by allocating less money to high-spending districts rather than raising revenues to low-spending districts. Wealthy communities, however, were not about to let their schools deteriorate to the quality of public schools attended by lower- income children.
As Eric Bruner and Jon Sonstelie (1996) report, shortly after the passage of Proposition 13 the California State Legislature gave communities the authority to impose a local parcel tax, which is a form of property tax that requires approval by two-thirds of community voters. The parcel tax is not levied on the dollar value of property but rather on its characteristics. From 1983 to 1995, 44 school districts instituted a parcel tax; all but 7 of these were located in the San Francisco Bay area with 13 in wealthy Marin County. Another form of supplemental revenue for California school districts is voluntary contributions. Again, following passage of Proposition 13 a rapid growth of non-profit educational foundations supporting K-12 schools occurred where by the mid-1990s more than 500 were operating in California; before Proposition 13 there were only 22. Although these foundations have helped some communities supplement state expenditures on education, the dollars have not amounted to much for districts with a preponderance of low-income families. Another way some school districts in California have been able to provide vastly superior education to that of other districts is through business-and-school partnerships. For instance, Silicon Valley’s Challenge 2000 program raised $21 million for area schools; during the same period a similar-size urban area in southern California could identify only $394,299 in cash donations (Louv, 1997).
In the year 2000, nearly a quarter century after California began its effort to create greater equity in school funding, a study by the Public Policy Institute of California (Betts et al., 2000) reported, “the extreme variation in school resources remains troubling” (p. v). Although California created a more equitable arrangement for distributing tax monies collected by the state for public schools, it maintained its system of unequal education. The Legislature failed to address conditions that allowed appropriations for state educational funds to be minimized, and it provided opportunities for local districts to circumvent revenue raising and spending restrictions and allocate local wealth directly to the enhancement of local schools instead of all public schools in California.
Following the California experience, state supreme courts in many other states began to rule school funding arrangements unconstitutional. As a result, many of these states attempted to establish greater equity in education by leveling up school funding for poor districts. An authoritative study on school funding reform politics and policies in the last quarter of the twentieth century by Kenneth Wong (1999) concluded: “[T]he state’s effort in leveling up the lower-spending districts is far from effective in narrowing the gap between wealthy and poor districts” (p. 85). Among other evidence, Wong cited a survey conducted by the Congressional Research Service, which found that even long after state finance reforms were underway “the highest-expenditure districts spent almost three times as much per student as the lowest-expenditure districts in many states” (p. 86). As Wong explained, “[n]aturally, attempts at any kind of Robin Hood redistribution have met with staunch political opposition from the haves” (p. 88). For example, following a court decision in New Jersey, the Democratic governor proposed $2.8 billion in new and increased taxes to fund deficiencies in the poorest schools, but after Republicans obtained key wins in the November election that year, the reform plan was significantly subducted.
Despite the shortcomings of California and other states to create greater equality in their public school systems, efforts by states to reform school funding have generally resulted in more equitable outcomes in student performance. A national study by Thomas Downes and David Figlio (1997), subtitled Do Reforms Level Up or Dumb Down, found that “school finance reforms, if anything, level up student performances” (p. 24). The researchers also reported from their data that, “when state governments implement finance reforms that dramatically reduce the incentive for districts to raise revenue locally, other changes are made that increase statewide support for education and encourage more productive use of existing resources” (p. 25). Furthermore, “in states that implement reforms that increase the incentives for districts to raise revenue locally, there is relative decline [statewide] in student performance in reading and mathematics and that the decline in mathematics is statistically significant” (p. 27). Similar results were found in study by David Card and A. Abigail Payne (2002) who concluded that, “equalization of spending leads to a narrowing of test score outcomes across family background” (p. 1). As encouraging as these findings are for egalitarians who point to school funding reform as one approach to creating a more just and equitable society, other studies reveal that simply equalizing spending may not be enough. For instance, the argument by renowned ethicist John Rawls that the more needy should receive more social support than the less needy, while perhaps obvious to some, is borne out in an educational cost study by Andrew Reschosky and Jennifer Imazeki (2000) who concluded that concentrations of children from poor families result in higher costs. In light of what has been said above, however, persuading Americans to endorse greater educational resources for the needier would likely be much more difficult than enlisting support for equal-quality schools and resources—current school finance reform initiatives based on achieving “educational adequacy” avoid even discussion of equalizing school quality or resources (Verstegen, 2006).
Barricades of Opposition, Windows of Opportunity and a Strategy for Activism
In a paper discussing his proposed amendment, Jackson (2003b) stated that local communities should still administer and operate public schools but they “should do so within the framework of a high minimum standard that a constitutional amendment would provide.” As radical as Jackson’s idea may be, even he dared not challenge the unquestioned social condition of unequal public schools. Jackson’s notion of a “high minimum standard” is still susceptible to all the problems mentioned above regarding the setting of standards, particularly the attraction of setting standards low, and would allow wealthy school districts to continue to far exceed any “high minimum standard” with provision of superior school facilities and resources. While Section I of Jackson’s amendment proposal might be interpreted by the courts as requiring equal-quality schools and resources, it could also be construed as simply requiring that all schools have equally high curriculum standards, which is something much different. Whatever the case, resurrection of Jackson’s proposal could serve as a rallying point for activists concerned with advancing equality of educational opportunity and parity in school facilities and resources in particular.
One approach to examining sociopolitical resistance to a constitutional amendment for equal education that may have practicality is to consider resistance from the perspective of activists: What would promoters of such an amendment be up against and what might be some effective strategies for action? One of the most obvious and formidable obstacles to achieving equal-quality schools is the aversion many Americans have for social welfare programs for the needy. However, if reluctance to support equalized public education is juxtaposed with the humanitarian compassion revealed in Americans’ response to hurricane Katrina, the Indonesian tsunami disaster and the professed commitment to high moral standards we hear so much about, a key strategy for enacting an amendment for equal education emerges—activism must focus on appeals to moral integrity. In order to take the high moral ground activists will need to promote different ways of thinking about schools other than prevailing production-cost conceptions. Some insight on different ways of thinking might be gained from the words of Christopher Jencks (1970) and his colleagues who more than thirty years ago in their influential study Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America maintained: “Eliminating these differences [between schools] would not do much to make adults more equal, but it would do a great deal to make the quality of children’s (and teachers’) lives more equal. Since children are in school for a fifth of their lives, this would be a significant accomplishment” (p. 256).
There are few things more difficult than changing the way people think. Fortunately, for equal education activists, a sizable portion of their work may involve helping people clarify values and beliefs rather than actually changing their thinking. Still, the challenge is great. The paradox sketched above involving avowed commitment to equal educational opportunity and the reality of an educational system intentionally structured to be unequal suggests many Americans might be dealing with considerable psychological turmoil—they want equal education for all but also an advantage for their kids. Since for many this unsettled psychological state is probably intermittent and involves a lot of denial, therapy is likely to be complex and protracted. Given these conditions, the prognosis for curing the condition of unequal education might seem poor. Actually, when certain sociocultural conditions are taken into consideration, it may be decades before there is a more propitious time to advance an equal education constitutional amendment. How could this be, one might ask? How could the country unite behind the cause of equal education when it appears so divided?
Indeed, as more than a few have observed, social tension in the United States has increased substantially in recent years. Discord that erupted during the 2004 election campaign continues to resonate in the public consciousness. Many have compared the divisiveness between red and blue states to the strife between blue and gray states a century and a half ago. While no major civil conflicts have erupted yet, the scale of culture war has clearly elevated. Some claim an underlying source of the dissonance is conflicting moral values. Others argue that the issues getting attention are trivial and that the values we should be concerned with are those that have more profound bearing on social life. Whatever the case, even as President Bush approaches the end of his beleaguered second term and Democrats have taken control of the House and Senate there is still a lot of talk in the media about moral values. Republican pundits and evangelical Christians remind us often of a “moral mandate” they claim was bestowed on the twice-chosen leader. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, moral values were foremost on the minds of many Republican voters in the last presidential election (Pew, 2004; Trends, 2005). If concern for virtue in social life is as great as many claim, activists for equal-quality schools may find their decisive victory on the field of moral values.
Moral values cover a lot of territory. Decisions regarding taxation, regulation of air quality, Social Security, Medicare, and invasion and occupation of a foreign country are all fundamentally moral judgments. These matters, however, and others in the 2004 election concerning foreign policy, economics, health, education and the environment were not referred to by mainstream media as questions of moral values. It was only a small cluster of issues that were commonly designated by the media and voters as matters of moral values—same-sex marriage, stem-cell research and the perennial subjects of prayer in public schools and abortion. Of all the issues in the election, only one had the gravity to warrant a commitment by President Bush to amend the foundational charter of our society—gay marriage.
It is difficult to gauge the indignation of opponents to same-sex marriage and how much George Bush’s promise to amend the United States Constitution to prohibit these unions contributed to his re-election. Referendums for state constitutional bans on gay marriage, which passed with strong support in eleven states, provide some sense of how far some Americans are willing to go to get their moral values legalized. It appears same-sex marriage will again be a major issue in the 2008 election. Although some, and perhaps many may be unsettled by the primacy of moral-values issues such as same-sex marriage and school prayer among a large segment of voters, avowed commitment to high moral ground by a sizable portion of the electorate could be valuable in drawing attention to and action on the dismal moral failure to provide equal educational opportunity. Again, if activists for equal-quality schools can find ways to effectively promote introspection on values and the social good, they may just be able to redirect some of the moral outrage in America devoted to the banning of gay marriage toward a constitutional amendment that could truly advance foundational values of equality and justice by guaranteeing equal education for all children.
Although the channeling of moral vehemence toward advancement of an equal education amendment is an important piece of a strategy for activism, the strength of certain values, beliefs and attitudes in American society present formidable challenges. In some quarters, arguments against an amendment for equal-quality schools will surely be built on deep-seated convictions concerning states’ rights. These arguments are likely to be strong and effective; witness the longevity of slavery, segregation, withholding of the vote from women and Native Americans for more than 140 years, and other oppressive social-structural conditions maintained under the banner of states’ rights.
The power of oppressors notwithstanding, achievements in correcting injustices mentioned in the preceding paragraph show the oppressed can sometimes use contradictions to avowed principles to aid their liberation. Equal education advocates may also find encouragement in other, more contemporary acts of liberation. An especially pertinent example is the accomplishment of certain activists in the 1960s. The outrage of these activists over the insufferable injustice of compelling a man to fight for his country in Vietnam while denying him the franchise produced a campaign that succeeded in achieving the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, which secured the right to vote for any citizen age eighteen or older. Even though the Supreme Court, in its interest to protect states’ rights, held that Congress could only lower the age qualification to federal elections, the States ratified the Twenty-Sixth Amendment in 1970 to avoid maintaining two sets of voter registration books. Once more, as with slavery and suffrage for women and Native Americans, the right of states to hold certain groups of people down had been thwarted.
While the attainments of abolitionists, suffragettes and civil-rights champions of the sixties are inspiring, their experiences show that generating moral and political will for change requires a great marshalling of forces. Even with favorable sociocultural conditions mentioned above, dissonance between red and blue states indicates that success of an equal education campaign will undoubtedly require more than a few divisions of committed recruits. Although many may think demand for equal-quality public schools and resources in these early years of the twenty-first century is beyond the pale of proper sensibility, so too was renunciation of slavery at the beginning of the nineteenth century and demand for school desegregation in the South during the first decade of the twentieth century. Forty-two years ago the Governor of Alabama had his troopers brutally instruct freedom marchers in Selma to go home and be thankful for what they had—most Americans honor those marchers for not acquiescing. Forty years from now what will Americans say about activists for equality of educational opportunity at the beginning of the twenty-first century?
In constructing a stratagem for continued denial of equal education a likely complement to the states’ rights argument will be the invocation of tradition. Essentially, the argument would amount to something like this: Public education has long been a community matter and community has been defined by the boundaries of a school district rather than boundaries of a state or nation. Fortunately for advocates of equal-quality schooling, more than a few Americans acknowledge that the state should have some authority to develop standards for public schooling and establish a minimum level of educational adequacy that citizens would have collective financial responsibility to maintain for all children. However, as research reported above indicates, one problem with relying on acknowledgement of collective responsibility for public education as a lever for equalizing schooling is the temptation to set the level of educational adequacy low. Low standards of educational adequacy cost less and, under current school finance arrangements, would be especially appealing to wealthier families because they would result in lower state taxes. Savings from state taxes along with other local riches could be used to construct beautiful schools in a district and lavish them with resources. As educational finance reform experiences reviewed here reveal, even when courts attempt to make spending on schools more equitable, judges and officials are cautious not to preclude opportunities for local districts to create superior schools. Moreover, as political rhetoric on education in recent years has demonstrated, it is quite simple for officials to dismiss demands for school funding increases and equalization by claiming an amount of funding is adequate and criticizing teachers and students for not working hard enough. Still, activists promoting an equal education amendment may find a foothold for their campaign in notions of collective responsibility.
Along with tradition and states’ rights, lack of money is certain to be another excuse foisted in denial of a constitutional amendment that mandates equal quality in schools. Money, however, is a non-issue, since any just equal education amendment would rightly concern dividing whatever size education pie the state can bake equally among all children at the table. If officials, parents, industry leaders, and other citizens do not think a big, delicious education pie is worth baking, then children would get whatever grownups felt is their just deserts. High quality schools and resources will likely require maintenance of the estate tax, repeal of federal tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the wealthy, and additional taxes or reallocation of major revenue expenditures such as those dedicated to invasion and occupation of foreign countries.
Perhaps the greatest challenge for proponents of an equal education amendment is the growing impulse to privatize public education. While it is difficult to gauge the magnitude of this force, Republicans’ continued support of President Bush’s “ownership society” may expand beyond health care and the currently stalled initiative on Social Security to public K-12 education. The incorporation of vouchers in initial conceptions of NCLB and backing of research on voucher plans by powerful political leaders are indicative of the intentions some social managers have for the institution of public education. For more than a half century following the birth of our nation the idea of tax-supported public schools was considered very radical and strongly opposed by a coterie of the elite. These sentiments linger. It is not difficult to imagine one of our fifty states, in the near future, supplanting its conventional system of public schooling with voucher-financed educational services. In this scenario “educational adequacy” might be assigned a dollar value, and parents would have the option of supplementing their state issued voucher to obtain the kind of schooling they think is best for their children. Public schools would be subjected to market forces and compete with other schools, public and private, for students.
A voucher approach to education is consonant with free-market values held by many Americans; it transforms public education into a commodity and subordinates the public’s interests in schooling goals to personal preference. A voucher method of providing educational services has many appeals: it could substantially reduce taxes; it fits well with many American’s conception and valuation of individualism; and it would be especially attractive to parents who have children attending expensive private schools—the same group that exercises its political power most effectively. It may very well be that promotion of an ownership society through voucher-generated privatization of public education by George W. Bush and subsequent Republican administrations will countervail the best efforts to achieve equal-quality public schooling for all.
Despite strong forces of opposition, should a significant group of Americans find the wherewithal to initiate a civil-rights style movement for equal education, we could be in store for a real moral showdown in the United States. With activists promoting critical consciousness through Internet forums, websites and weblogs on schooling inequities, and emboldening the media to challenge politicians about their position on equal-quality schools and resources, there could be significant repercussions. Journalists might spend more time questioning officials on other serious matters such as health care, Medicare and the conscientious management of energy. Network televised news programs might be extended to an hour and time devoted to the affairs of celebrities might be substantially abbreviated. The possibilities for contagion are intriguing. Perhaps the heat and light of social consciousness that has been smoldering for decades could be rekindled.
An Equal Education Amendment and the Scope of Federal Control
Many Americans probably believe the only practical consideration of an equal education amendment would be in relation to a state constitution and not the Constitution of the United States. For those who could envision and support a U.S. constitutional amendment, many would probably expect its scope to be limited to an obligation for each state to equalize its schools; not the equalization of public schools throughout the country. The notion of a federal system of public K-12 education is very foreign to Americans. In light of federal directives such as the No Child Left Behind Act, it is difficult to imagine thoughtful citizens considering, let alone supporting nationalization of public schools. While apprehension about federal management of schools is certainly justifiable, if we think public education should be an equalizer of opportunity and prepare young people to become responsible, democratic citizens of the United States rather than just citizens of a state or town, then a system of state operated public schools with differentiated quality and disparate goals regarding preparation for American citizenship is difficult to defend. Young people in Ohio need the same citizenship skills as young people in Florida; to prepare a person for life in one state and not others goes against the very notion of nation, of a United States. Furthermore, most Americans do not perceive equal opportunity circumscribed by the town or state in which a person was schooled but rather as the opportunity to realize one’s potential wherever one may choose to live in the United States. Still, as activists in the great Civil Rights Movement of the last century frequently advised, it is often more judicious to capitalize on what is feasible at the time. It may be that the highest level of equal public education the majority of Americans are capable of conceptualizing and supporting in the early twenty-first century is state K-12 schooling; and even keeping eyes focused on this prize could be extremely challenging. However, if the best Americans can do is to create high-quality schools in a few wealthy states, they should not delude themselves or try to make children believe that equal educational opportunity and its correlative, equal opportunity, exist in the United States.
Equal opportunity would obviously require a great deal more than equal K-12 schools. Among other things it would require transforming public higher education from a system that deters low-income people with the onus of decades of heavy debt into a system where higher education is available for free or nominal cost. While a review of requirements for equal opportunity is beyond this article, from what has been presented in these paragraphs, educators and other adults should appreciate the need for judiciousness in their promotion of beliefs about equal opportunity in the United States to young people.
In considering possible implications of Jackson’s proposed amendment, it is important to note that his proposal does not obligate the federal government to responsibility for public education. Consequently, even if the amendment is interpreted as requiring equal-quality school facilities and resources, it would be a matter for each state to address and there would still be a great deal of variation in school quality between states. Although equalization of school facilities and resources in a given state would be a momentous achievement, it would not constitute equal-quality public education for all children in the United States.
In light of the resistance to equal schools described above, it is likely that “the right to a public education of equal high quality” proposed by Jackson would be interpreted as requiring availability of the same high-quality curriculum at every school in a state, which parents and their children could opt out of or be effectively “counseled” into another educational program that is more suitable to the child’s needs or interests. Interpreting Jackson’s equal education amendment as the same curriculum for all children would be appealing to cost conscious officials since it would at most require modest additional expenditures for public education.
Actually, many states have already standardized curriculum or are in the process of doing so. Some states even claim to have achieved equal, high-quality education for all children with requirements that specific, detailed content standards for every grade and subject be taught in all state schools. Given these existing perceptions, it would seem advantageous for politicians seeking to present themselves as champions of equal-quality education to support Jackson’s proposed amendment, which, construed as a requirement for high-quality curriculum standards in all schools, would not threaten wealthy voters with higher taxes or reallocation of tax revenues to needy schools. High-quality education defined as high-quality curriculum standards could even result in tax reductions by eliminating the condition of school facilities and extraneous resources such as lab equipment, computers and other electronics from the equal-quality standards equation. As mentioned previously, the wealthy could use savings from reduced education taxes along with other local riches to bestow privileged advantages on their children in the form of attractive, well-equipped, superior public schools. Indeed, it is odd that large numbers of congressmen and congresswomen have not recognized the opportunity for political spectacle in promotion of an equal education amendment defined as the same curriculum for all. It would be an inexpensive gesture, replete with virtue, which could garner a lot of votes and reaffirm belief for at least some lower income folks that there really might be a light at the end of the tunnel.
If Americans are earnest about equal-quality education, they will have to demand an amendment to the U. S. Constitution that is unequivocal in its aim and includes the right to equal-quality school facilities and resources. If equal schooling is to be made available to all children, it seems necessary that school quality becomes a responsibility of the federal government. Otherwise, the quality of public education a child receives in the United States will depend on the wealth of the state in which he or she was born. While equalized schooling in a given state would be a significant improvement over existing conditions where the quality of public education a child receives is largely contingent upon the wealth of the community in which he or she is born, it does not achieve the equality Americans avow so strongly in public and official discourse.
Conclusion
Dimensions of sociopolitical resistance to equalization of public school facilities and resources presented in these pages illustrate a paradox of avowed commitment to the principle of equality in public and official discourse and the contradictory behavior of citizens and public officials. Obviously there are many different opinions on what constitutes equality of educational opportunity. For many Americans, provision of schools and resources of equal quality is not a necessary factor in the equal-education equation. Although this article does not represent an exhaustive analysis of the subject, it seems reasonable to conclude that, for the foreseeable future, some children in the United States will attend attractive, well-equipped public schools and be lavished with rich educational resources while many others will be relegated to inferior facilities and make do with fewer and poorer quality resources.
Implicit in the analysis provided above is the assumption that a high-quality education for all children in all schools is in the best interest of society. Moreover, a constitutional amendment that guaranteed equal schools for all children could help ameliorate contradictions in American society regarding principles of equal opportunity and justice. It could improve possibilities for all young people to realize their potential.
The current presidential race is an opportune occasion for raising consciousness on shortcomings in achieving equal educational opportunity. If equal public schooling is not the foundation of equal opportunity in American society, then what is?
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