Obama and the American Class System

Imagine you’re an admissions officer at an elite college or university, which admits just one out of every ten students who apply. In your job, the university’s prestige and reputation are always on the line in every admissions decision you make. You operate within a framework of relatively narrow parameters. While the company line says that no single factor should dominate the decision, such as SAT scores, you know differently. If you accept too many students who don’t fit the right profile of your prestigious and elite institution, you risk the school losing favor with trustees, parents, alumni and, god forbid, U.S. News & World Report.

But there is some wiggle room with the student profile at your elite institution. That’s when you start looking for “hooks.” When the kid who wants into your school has one of several possible hooks, the chances that you’ll take a good hard look at that applicant are substantially improved. Being a lacrosse player, a high school quarterback or another kind of athlete that the college’s athletic department has recruited is a really big hook. Being the “legacy” child of a former graduate of the college is another good one. And, at some selective universities, being the child of a rich guy who has tantalized the college’s development staff with a potentially very large gift -- no quid pro quo, of course -- is another hook that gives the children of rich people a boost in the elite admissions game.

There’s another important hook as well, one that could receive a great deal more attention in coming months during the presidential campaign, and that is the admissions advantage that elite colleges and universities give to underrepresented minorities, in the jargon of the admissions business.

Yes, I’m referring to Barack Obama.

According to a recent study of the admissions practices at a few dozen elite colleges by Eugene Tobin of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and his co-authors, the underrepresented minority hook provides such applicants a 28 percent increase, on average, in the chances of admission, second only to the recruited athlete average boost of 30 percent. Legacies, with a 20 percent increased chance of admission, ranked as the third most powerful hook. In sharp contrast, students from low-income families or those who’d be the first in their families to attend college got essentially nothing from the admissions offices at the elite colleges and universities

Obama, who identifies himself as African American, is the son of a Harvard PhD from Kenya who married Obama’s white mother from Kansas when both were students at the University of Hawaii. Obama grew up with all the advantages afforded a child of well-educated parents, who provided him with the right cultural, economic and social capital that schools value and reward, enabling him to attend an elite private school in Hawaii. All of this put him on a power path that led to Columbia University and Harvard Law School and enabled him to pursue a life in high-octane national politics.

In short, Obama is a full-fledged member of the power elite. He and his wife will pass that privileged status onto their children and they will pass it onto theirs. The American education system will handsomely reward Obama’s children with many advantages, using selection, admissions and sorting systems that perpetuate upper-class privilege. His daughters will be placed into the top academic tracks at the best schools with the best teachers.

That’s the American class system at work. And the inconvenient truth is that it is based upon birth. Class privilege doesn’t guarantee one’s success in life, but you’d have to be pretty dumb and lame to screw it up.

The Obama scenario raises all sorts of touchy questions regarding affirmative action in college admissions and the growing class divide in American education. Educationally, economically and culturally, Obama has a lot more in common with affluent and well-educated whites than he does disadvantaged blacks and their children who to this day attend segregated schools across the United States. And, in a weird sort of way, former president Bill Clinton, who grew up relatively impoverished with a single mom, has a lot more in common with disadvantaged blacks that Obama. (Perhaps that partly explains why the African American community adopted Clinton as one of its own).

So my first question is this: Should Obama’s children be provided a special admissions advantage to attend Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or any number of elite universities that routinely provide an admissions boost even to such culturally and economically affluent people of color?

Being a good liberal, I find myself cringing when I ask that question. But, to remain intellectually honest about this touchy subject, I can’t help but think about kids like Melissa Morrow. When researching my new book, Tearing Down the Gates, about the growing class divide in America and its education system, I ran across a poor white high school student named Melissa, who grew up in urban Tacoma, Washington, and then in rural Montana. Her father left when she was young and her mother never finished high school. In Melissa, I found young woman who could have grown up to be a brilliant scientist. (She might still but the odds are heavily stacked against her.) After a high school science teacher recognized something special about her intellect, he encouraged her to take part in his science program and persuaded her to spend part of a summer with counselors at the Math and Science Upward Bound program (One of the endangered federal TRIO programs for disadvantaged students who hope to go to college that has been on George W. Bush’s hit list for years). Melissa discovered who she was through science, and she started winning regional science competitions.

But despite her obvious brilliance, Melissa was never in a million years ever going to Harvard, Amherst, or even the University of Washington, which would have been the most selective university near her home in the Northwest. Melissa grew up with uneducated parents, who saw college as an alien place full of different sorts of people -- largely affluent young people who spoke differently and acted differently than the poor-people’s culture they were used to. Melissa knew little about getting on a path to college. As well intentioned and emotionally supportive as her mother was, the family could never afford expensive tutors and private college counselors for Melissa -- advantages that affluent families provide children as a matter of entitlement.

So my second question is this. Should Barack Obama’s children be afforded special consideration for admission to an elite university that children such as Melissa are never going to receive, because she happens to be the wrong color? Is color really what this is all about anyway? Should colleges and universities begin to look beyond color and to socioeconomic class?

In fact, the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action admissions programs based upon race have been affluent whites. That’s because, the poor unhooked schmucks who apply over the transom are screened according to entrenched notions of merit with primacy given to SAT scores and the like. It’s a system that primarily works to the advantage of students from well-educated and affluent homes. “Diversity” has been the all the rage in higher education, but diversity has been rather narrowly defined, as colleges and universities, particularly elite ones, have become homogenous along class lines. For example, while the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor was fighting the good fight for affirmative action before the U.S. Supreme Court, it enrolled a meager 13 percent of students from lower-income families. In one important study by the Century Foundation, just 3 percent of freshman at 146 of the nation’s best universities are from lower-income families, while fully 75 percent are from upper-class families.

When you consider, as former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor noted in her opinion on the University of Michigan case, that those elite, often-private universities are the primary training grounds for the nation’s future leaders, those are disturbing statistics indeed about the future direction of the American democracy.

In an oblique way, Obama himself seemed to answer both my questions in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week” last Sunday. When his two young daughters eventually apply to college, they ''should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged,'' Obama said.

Obama went on to suggest that social and economic class transcends color and that diversity-seeking colleges perhaps ought to take a second look at kids like Melissa, regardless of race. While noting that “there are a lot of African-American kids who are still struggling,'' Obama also said, ''I think that we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and been brought up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed.”

Perhaps that’s not the stand he’ll eventually settle upon as the campaign solidifies its positions on hot-button topics, but a class-based solution to the affirmative action controversy is certainly the direction he seems to be hinting. If so, he’s sounding a lot like Martin Luther King Jr. did during the weeks and months before his assassination, when both he and Bobby Kennedy were taking the American civil rights battle to the next level, and they both began to speak far more pointedly about how the American class system transcended the color line.

It also remains to be seen whether the admissions offices at elite universities will treat a poor girl growing up in rural Montana as nicely as they now treat the soccer player from Harvard-Westlake who grew up with every privilege in sight.

We Need a Revolution in Imagination and Leadership

Stay the course. Don’t give in to the naysayers and defeatists. Forge ahead with the same failed paradigms for improving schools, creating democracies, closing achievement gaps and winning the war against terrorism.

Indeed, the parallels between the Iraq War and George Bush’s education centerpiece, No Child Left Behind, became even more pronounced recently. That’s when the Education Trust, a highly influential educational advocacy organization that played an important role in the creation of NCLB, announced its plan for revising the 2001 education law.

Or, should I say, a plan for reshuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic.
“In the months ahead, many education groups will argue that the current law demands too much,” says Education Trust founder and president Kati Haycock. “Giving in to that argument would be a terrible mistake and a huge step backward in America’s uneven march toward educational opportunity for all. Instead of asking less, Congress should ask more of our schools.”

From the beginning, the school accountability movement, embodied with tragic perfection in a bureaucratic and Orwellian nightmare called No Child Left Behind, has been full of such unassailable rhetoric. We’ve heard all the homilies: World-class standards. Leave no child behind. No Excuses. Bush and his allies painted critics of NCLB as virtually unpatriotic child abusers. Either you were for improving the educational achievements of minority and poor kids, or you were a bad person stuck in old days of educational neglect, willing to abandon poor, black and Hispanic students as being inherently incapable.

For too long, the teaching profession, teachers unions, school administrators and the rest of the education establishment caved to the political bullying from Washington. In effect, Bush upended a long tradition of locally based school systems operated by states and local school boards, replaced by a federal system of crimes and punishments, allotting federal Title I funds based upon the performance of children and schools on high-stakes standardized tests.

Unlike the political supporters of NCLB in the corporate world and testing and educational consulting industries, Haycock and her organization, I believe, do have the best interest of disadvantaged children at heart. The organization is an amazingly effective and vocal advocate, and Haycock is on the speed-dials of virtually every education reporter in the country.

If only Haycock would put that voice to better use.

Just as the Bush administration failed utterly to anticipate the consequences of invading Iraq, NCLB’s advocates failed to understand what would happen on the ground when the consequences of failure for schools became so high that teaching and learning have become reduced to little more than prepping for the next round of testing.

I rarely meet an educator these days, especially those who’ve been in the field for years, who are not sickened by what is happening. Good teachers are turned into mediocre technicians whose job has been bureaucratized and de-professionalized. Great teachers leave the profession. Young teachers don’t see teaching as a career, but as a first job that might lead to better things.

And, as always, the brunt of the damage falls hardest upon poor and minority children, because they attend schools that have the most ground to make up in the NCLB race to make 100 percent of students “proficient” in reading and math by 2014.

As for affluent schools in the suburbs, NCLB is a mere annoyance. Rich families with children in “gifted and talented” programs and other such havens of privilege for high achieving kids simply won’t tolerate the intrusion. While poor kids are drilled for tests, rich kids are treated to the most enriching learning environments imaginable. They learn more than poor kids because they are taught more and in more interesting and engaging ways. They are blessed to attend schools that have little fear of federal agents looking over their shoulders.

If the intent of NCLB is to close the achievement gap between the rich and poor, it is a failed policy because it is a technocratic solution -- a politically expedient Band Aid -- to a much deeper economic and sociological malady. From the time of the landmark Coleman Report in the 1960’s, sociologists have understood that the lion’s share of the achievement differences among schools was attributable to vast socioeconomic class differences of families and individuals. What’s more, most of the achievement gaps between white kids and black kids has been driven by social class differences -- the wealth, incomes and occupational status of parents and grandparents -- a gap that has narrowed over the years owing to greater relative wealth in the black community.

While the achievement a gap along race lines has improved, the class divide has remained stubbornly persistent. For instance, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 34 percent of white high school graduates go on to complete a BA degree within eight years compared to 24 percent of black graduates. That’s a troubling difference, to be sure. But consider the huge achievement gap by class: 46 percent of graduates from the highest socioeconomic quintile earn a BA within eight years compared to a mere 12 percent of the poorest students.

I’m sure Haycock is a smart woman. But the Education Trust’s stance on NCLB suggests that the organization has underappreciated how America’s vast economic disparities produce the gaping divide in the cultural and social capital that parents provide children from birth – the intergenerational transmission of human capital that can mean success or failure in the American school system. American schools were never designed to address such disparities. In fact, in our decidedly anti-egalitarian era, in this shameless new Gilded Age of ours, American schools have actually become very good at exacerbating inequality, playing the handmaiden’s role in perpetuating the social and economic gaps between rich and poor.

For those genuine advocates like Haycock, NCLB is a failure of imagination, the failure of well-meaning people locked into the American style of thinking and policymaking that technological solutions can fix any problem. It ain’t gonna happen.

Sure, Haycock will tell you that NCLB has “changed the conversation” -- or something like that -- about America doing something to help disadvantaged kids succeed. Yeah, it’s hard to ignore the power of the federal government, which definitely has changed the conversation to include the end of public education, as we know it. NCLB is paving the ground for profiteers to seize control of public schools that fail its tests. By changing the conversation, NCLB has only made matters worse.

We need more than a change in the conversation. We need a revolution in imagination and leadership -- leadership of the heroic kind that we haven’t seen since Martin Luther King Jr. led the civil rights movement. America has everything it needs to make futures brighter for the schools and children NCLB is supposed to help. We have the wealth -- were we to direct it to perpetual education and not perpetual war. We have great teachers. The question is, when will we, at long last, unleash that wealth and talent to make a real difference?