Robert Reich has an annoying habit of claiming that education really is the ticket up the social ladder. It just isn’t the case. Consider Mark Zuckerberg. He wasn’t some poor kid who networked with the elites at Harvard and clawed his way to the top. Both his parents were highly paid professionals — certainly well inside the upper class. And then Zuckerberg didn’t even graduate. Or what about Daymond John? He had no college education. I realize that these are just single instances, the data on it is shockingly inconsistent. And the question is no longer, “Does a college education raise you up?” It is now, “Does the cost of the education pay for itself over the course of your working life?” On that issue the answer seems to be: probably. That isn’t anything close to what a college education would do for you in the 1970s.
But apart from this little affliction of Reich’s, he’s right about the problems with our educational system, How a Wealthy California Town Makes Sure No Poor Kids Attend Its “Public” School. In the article, he discusses the town of Orinda, which is very wealthy and so has a really well funded public school system. This is the number one thing that is wrong with our educational system: we give the rich far more money to educate their kids than we give to the poor. That’s real “equality of opportunity” for you!
To give you some idea of the inequality here, all the schools in Orinda, 94% white or Asian, get a perfect score of 10 on the GreatSchools rating system. Twenty miles away in Bay Point, a majority Latino town, the grammar schools get ratings of 2 to 4 points. Equality of opportunity! Equality of opportunity! Hooray! But that’s not all. The Orinda school district uses part of its torrent of cash to pay private investigators to make sure that the children in Orinda schools really live in Orinda. This is the public school equivalent of a gated community. For the rest of this article, just inject “Equality of opportunity!” after every sentence.
Reich highlights one such student: Vivian a seven-year-old Latina. Her technical address is in Bay Point of the Awful Schools. But she lives with her mother in Orinda during the week. Her mother is a live-in nanny for a rich couple in Orinda. And Vivian has her own bedroom. On weekends, they both live with the grandmother in Bay Point. So it is clear that the Orinda school district is using whatever means is necessary to get rid of the Latina interloper.
The article was written a week before the school was set to throw out Vivian. And as expected, the school did exactly that. But the whole thing blew up in the Bay Area news. So a day later, the school district reversed course. But what’s interesting here is that previous to this whole thing, the school denied Vivian a free school lunch because they said that she was an Orinda resident. So I guess the idea here was just to “Get the Latina!” at all costs.
But my main interest here is not about this particular student and this particular school. It is the broader issue that we have an incredibly unequal educational system. Some of our public schools are the best in the world. And others are right at the bottom. What’s more, the resources are being used poorly. The children at the bad schools are the ones who need the greatest help. But this is entirely typical of this country: aflict the aflicted and comfort the comfortable. I wonder when Billie and Mindy are going to start caring about this issue. My guess is: never.
