One possible measure of the shallowness of privileged families' actual beliefs in "merit" is how intentionally they strategize for their children from the time they're toddlers. From selecting preschools, to moving to the best school districts and then negotiating for the best teachers and highest academic tracks, to hiring coaches to position their children for admission at the best possible colleges, these parents leave little to chance. No one believing that social systems simply reward the brightest and most hard working would invest so much in bending those systems to their will.
Poor and working-class families are able to exercise much less control over their children's futures. We know that especially with federal budget cuts, many families cannot pay preschool tuition, afford to live the neighborhoods where schools have smaller class sizes, or enroll their children in enrichment activities after school. Few of these things are affordable to the poor and working-class parents of children who are also very bright and hardworking.
Josh Cohen, education policy scholar at Michigan State, writes about how some states are stepping up to fund vital educational supports to families and children as federal programs are being cut. But there is wide variation across states.
In Colorado, a poor/working class child may be supported by state investments in high quality childcare, preschool, tutoring, free school meals without stigma, and enriching after school programs.
Yet if her family had moved a few states north to Montana when she was born, she'd benefit from these things only if her family could pay for them.
Cohen's estimates how common (or rare) such access to affordable state-funded family supports is:
20 states fund some form of high-dose tutoring, from literacy initiatives to tutoring grants that began as part of COVID-recovery plans that states developed in addition to federal support.
20 states fund afterschool programming through a variety of out-of-school time grants and funding streams.
20 states have their own child care investments beyond a federal baseline called the Child Care Development Fund that’s been the subject of Trump’s attacks on so-called waste, fraud, and abuse in Minnesota.
Nearly all states have invested in formal pre-K services, ranging from near-universal services in states like Florida, Georgia, Michigan and Oklahoma, to more targeted coverage in the rest.
Only 9 states have universal school meals, but another 5 are broadening their more limited meal programs.
By this count, only six states—California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, and New York—are investing in all five program areas beyond federal support. Quite a number of other states like Minnesota, New Jersey, Texas, and Washington are investing in four of the five, or beginning partial investment in all areas.
Cohen is doing this analysis in part to argue that democrats should include child and family supports within a broader "affordability" political agenda, as these are
the kinds of costs parents really do lose sleep over and do argue about at the kitchen table every day: how to pay for tutoring, afterschool programs, preschool, and other services directly associated with their children.
I wholeheartedly support that broad "affordability" agenda and also think, as is my way, about the political education that we need about unequal access to these things in the first place.
As I've often written, first-gen programming on campus focuses on students' personal resilience and assertiveness as they try to catch up academically. The literature on first-gen students frequently acknowledge their "struggle" in college, but says little about how students in some states might be struggling a little less if they had access to an afterschool science club in middle school, or to quality preschool before they ever got to kindergarten. There is little talk in this programming about unequal childhoods as a source of the "struggles"; instead, first-gen students learn implicitly that remedies to unequal childhoods are best offered in the first year of college.
I like to imagine that over the four (or six or longer) years that students may engage with this programming on campus, supporters could replace some of the inspirational speakers during "First Gen Week" or other campus inclusivity projects to instead talk about how, as citizens, we do well to analyze the deep economic inequalities between states, communities, and schools and to learn how democratic participation can change public policy that currently normalizes unequal childhoods.
I will imagine this because I have yet to see any clear explanation for why these campus support programs frame the vestiges of class inequalities in childhoods as personal "struggle", when allocation of public resources is subject to public policy making within our (weakening) democracy.
