It has been 25 years since Savage Inequalities was first published, and there have been some changes. Schools are still funded primarily by local property taxes, guaranteeing that wealthier school districts will produce better educated children. However, the federal role in education has greatly increased, and funds from Title I and other revenue streams have in some cases ironed out the most glaring disparities. According to a 2002 study by the Government Accounting Office, pupils in Boston, Chicago, and St. Louis now receive more investment than their suburban counterparts.
But I have worked in two of these districts, and I have seen and heard about conditions at some schools that would not be tolerated in Newton or New Trier. Without engaging in an extensive critique of the GAO’s numbers, I will say that there are some reasons why they may be misleading. Dropout rates, in part of a product of inferior schools, are much higher in the city. In fact, as Kozol points out, schools often plan for and rely on substantial numbers of students dropping out. Thus, 35 students may be assigned to a classroom with 27 desks on the safe assumption that 8 of those students will not be attending school by the end of the first semester. While per-pupil spending may be high for those students who remain in school, the numbers may not be so rosy when distributed across all of the students that the district ought to be educating.
Moreover, federal education funds are from a free lunch. No Schools Left Behind, the latest incarnation of the Elementary and Secondary Schools Act that authorizes most federal education spending, including Title I, imposes stringent requirements on schools to raise their standardized test scores or lose their money. The result is ‘teaching to the test’, an education built as much around test-taking skills as around knowledge. Even when asking very progressive, well-meaning administrators for relatively paltry sums of money, I am often asked about how debate affects test scores. Dutiful booster that I am, I’m prepared with an encouraging answer, but sometimes it’s hard not to feel like a part of the problem myself.
In the realm of desegregation, there has been no improvement. If anything, segregation has gotten worse than it was when Savage Inequalities was published and is now as bad as it has been since the Brown decision more than 50 years ago. Sadly, the trend seems to be towards ever greater segregation, as courts around the country are scaling back or eliminating busing schemes. The new conservative majority in the Supreme Court ruled during its last term, in a decision in the case of Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, that school districts may not even voluntarily elect to desegregate themselves by making race-based student assignments to public schools. It is cruel and ironic how the 13th amendment, the Brown decision, and even the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, have been co-opted by the conservative agenda in defense of segregation and, by extension, inequality.