Education reporter Jennifer Berkshire has gone looking for education policy in the platforms and press releases of office holders and political candidates from the left and found ... almost nothing.
In her excellent post, she asks why a movement focused on justice and equity would ignore public education as a public good for the millions of families with children in public schools. With Berkshire, my own politics are firmly left, and with her, my frustrations with the left's disengagement from public education run deep.
She critiques democrats' earlier policies that sometimes conveyed that "every economic problem is really an education problem". Current leftists would clearly want to distance themselves from such simplistic takes as they advocate for broader economic reform.
But why has the growing left come up with so little else on public education?
Berkshire wonders about data showing that many members of growing Democratic Socialists of America, for example, are "highly educated but downwardly mobile", perhaps fanning a generational cynicism about education as a pathway to economic security. DSA members are overwhelmingly white, college educated, and urban. Their own schooling set them up to be among the only 35% of the US adult population with undergraduate degrees and 15% with graduate degrees. Cynicism is understandable when the relatively high quality schools they likely attended did not deliver the economic pay-off that they'd been promised.
But disillusionment with their own trajectories is an entirely different question than that of the politics of how many of their generational peers were assigned to K-12 schools without the college counselors, AP courses, or qualified teachers that many DSA members may have taken for granted. A politics based on their own experience does not explain their relative disinterest in how many of even their college-bound peers --especially those from rural communities – were sorted into resource-starved community colleges or regional state colleges, as if stratification in higher education is irrelevant in shaping life chances and democratic participation.
Berkshire observes that many leftist activists are young and do not have children, though all have experienced years of schooling. And I'm especially curious about how their own schooling informs their disengagement with the politics of education that left hundreds of thousands of students of their generation struggling to get to and stay in college, if they aspired to college at all.
Yet we do not know how many leftist leaders were educated in private or elite public schools, and I believe strongly that it matters. I often try to verify whether highly-educated Leftist activists speaking on behalf of "the people" in politics were educated among poor and working-class people who could inform their understanding of the world. Anecdotally, a disproportionate number of people in leadership in Leftist organizations (and the political consultants that guide their campaigns and policy agendas) came up through relatively elite private education and may have only weak ties to people educated in public schools.
Activists and writers and campaign consultants and candidates educated among the very elite do hear from faculty and staff about how deserving they are of all of the resources on those campuses because of their unique potential and their innate intelligence and character; it's less clear that they learn anything about admissions policies that favored the wealthy, not just the innately talented. It's less clear that they learn anything about underfunded public colleges and inequalities in K-12 education.
And, as with the disproportionate number of college faculty from privileged families, it may simply not be in the interest of many politically active leftists to acknowledge educational inequalities from which they benefitted, especially if they speak about equity and justice from platforms that they accessed via exclusive networks of other elite educated people.
The Children of Opportunity Hoarders?
Beyond the possibility that many leftists attended college surrounded by the elite, highly-educated white students likely also witnessed their parents' opportunity hoarding when they were in K-12 schools. No article can address everything, but I do wish that Berkshire had questioned what the children of educated white parents learned as those parents navigated the tensions between investing in political activism for educational equity for other families and the time required for the intensive parenting that even progressive parents leverage to access opportunities for their own children within systems with too few resources for everyone.
For example, while Berkshire acknowledges that elected leaders may fear backlash from teachers' unions when proposing reforms, she does not write about how advocacy on behalf of ones' own children generates intense political backlash from powerful parents convinced that their own children are more deserving than others.
Whether they were educated within public or private schools, any social movement of white, highly-educated young people will likely include a disproportionate number of members raised by parents who insisted that their children deserve the best teachers, the special academic programs, the riches of private fund-raising when those things are out of reach for other children.
And as children, they likely heard that all of this was "just wanting what's best for my [special] children", not a collective politics of privilege.
We have no idea how the children raised by privileged parents studied by scholars like Lareau, Calarco or Hamilton now make meaning of the politics of their own advantages within deeply unequal schooling. It seems a worthwhile question to explore, especially as at least some of those children are now adults holding leadership in leftist organizations.
We might hope, in a movement centered on advocacy for workers, that we'd have much more transparency about the class backgrounds of movement leadership.
In the meantime, given the racial and economic segregation of public schools, it's not clear to me how many leftist activists even know much about the inequalities in public education.
Public Education in Political Crosshairs
Berkshire contrasts leftist silences about education with the decades-long project of the right to dismantle public education and to blame teachers for structural poverty. Elsewhere, she's written extensively about the right-wing's embrace of school vouchers and the "mom populism" of centrist voters pushing back against vouchers and subsequent cuts to school funding and to the culture wars that the right wages over school curriculum.
Thus, at this intensely political moment, the left's indifference to public education is a loud silence.
Imagining Education From the Left
Berkshire challenges the left to imagine how school might now be otherwise, to imagine institutions grounded in democratic and not just economic purpose, schools in which every child is afforded the resources that they need to learn and to thrive.
But without broader social-class representation in the leadership of leftist organizations (and in their political campaigns) we may keep talking about why those who won the education game are still struggling instead of also asking why so few students ever got to the starting line.
Education reform will never be the primary driver of economic equality, but now, educational inequalities deepen growing economic inequality and almost no one in Leftist political leadership is engaging those politics. I am a strong advocate of publicly-educated people from working-class families being at the table for those deliberations, though they are now too rarely there.
It's excellent that Berkshire has opened these conversations.
