School Choice, Sacrifice and Morality

I think that we can't say, "This school is not good enough for my child" and then sustain that system. I think that that's just morally wrong. If it's not good enough for my child, then why are we putting any children in those schools?

This quote is drawn from an NPR piece about how "individual choices" maintain systemic school segregation. The piece profiles a black woman journalist's choice to send her child to a public school near her home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn where the students were mostly poor and black or Latino.  

The concluding question above is a very, very difficult one. And as a parent who has attended, sent my children to, and championed neighborhood public schools of varying quality, who has also helped to found a high performing public charter school that my children attended, and who may at some point use private schooling, I don't think there is a single answer. Race, class and gender make the question all the more difficult. 

I am somewhat cynical about the whole public education industrial complex. My cynicism grows out of the fact that this complex is partly sustained by what I call the "originalist" theory of education, a notion that has been stable across centuries of U.S. efforts at providing public education. This is the claim that all public educations are at least roughly fungible and that somewhere, somehow there is value to be gained that can be accessed by all. This has never been true. 

School has always been a local, often highly idiosyncratic concern that is very targeted in its individual delivery and deeply personal in its effect. Standards for teacher training and teacher hiring have always varied greatly. School wasn't even compulsory in some states until the twentieth century, and the ages of that compelled attendance have always varied across jurisdictions. Many children scarcely went beyond primary school in the early days of provision of public education. And even now, large numbers of students fail to complete high school. The latter fact is to be lamented. But far more lamentable is the fact that a sixth grader in some public schools is better educated than a twelfth grader at others. We lament, and yet we do little to address this sad fact. Short of overhauling our entire United States education system into something that looks more like a nationally administered, single curriculum, scrupulously same-resourced system that *also* could assure that all children have access to fundamentals such as adequate food and clothing, and safe and comfortable homes and neighborhoods, I really cannot imagine any significant changes coming to public education across the board.

Yes, individual parent choice may promote segregation and other ills. But the choice to use a local public school is not necessarily a virtuous or selfless choice. In my experience across decades, across school attendance zones and across state boundaries, well-educated middle and upper middle-class parents, especially white parents, *always* manage to extract more even out of ostensibly less well resourced public schools. Even when they don't ask for it, administrators and teachers  give them more. Sometimes this largesse is out of pure individual bias. Other times, perhaps the majority of times, the reason is more systemically pragmatic: savvy administrators and teachers want to keep these families in the local schools.

I don't say this as an accusation against parents whose children receive more educational goods (and education is a good; just ask people who have been charged with stealing it) even from otherwise poorly performing public schools. I am somewhat more inclined to blame school administrators in these instances, but the presence of educated, engaged, well-to-do parents and their children in a school tends to help the entire school. Among other value that they bring, children from more privileged backgrounds tend to do better on standardized tests (testing, testing, 1, 2, 3), and high test scores make public schools look better. So I understand why some administrators do what they do. 

But even while I do not accuse parents who receive high value from less well-regarded local public schools, I am very wary of those parents who claim the moral high ground while attempting to dislodge from that windy bluff any parent who does not also choose such  schools. Some of the very same people who disdain those who seek to enroll their children in public schools in more broadly middle class neighborhoods or who castigate charter schools as private-style education because of their localized control over curriculum or funding seem to have no problem at all raising thousands of dollars for their very own local public schools through private foundations that provide new equipment for classrooms, supplementary books, perks for teachers, trips for students, and other extras that local tax dollars cannot or will not buy. Neither do some of these parents have a problem with "gifted" classes, "enrichment" programs, "advanced" courses, or other educational offerings that function as small, elite, and frequently quite segregated academies in the center of otherwise low-performing, often largely minority-serving schools. 

Just as all public education is not the same, neither are all sacrifices. Indeed, some of what passes as sacrifice is what morality theorist Romano Guardini has described as camouflaged assertion of status. It is a fine thing to choose a local public school where your child is "learning a lot" or "becoming a good citizen." But if none of those things were happening for your child, would the local public school still be a viable choice if the only outcome of that choice was to promote greater good for strangers? That is the test of true sacrifice.

Do my children deserve more than other children? That's not the question for me. I would put it another way: Do my children deserve as much as it is possible for me to obtain for them in the way of education? Yes they do.  And with what I hope will be their excellent educations, maybe they can be a part of overhauling the fiefdoms that characterize United States public education.

Title IX, Single Episode Sexual Harassment and Telling Stories Out of School

This June marks the 40th anniversary of Title IX. Its principal provision reads as follows:

“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance”

Educational institutions from primary schools to universities who receive federal funding are subject to the law. Title IX is best known for having transformed the arena of women’s sports. Title IX, however, has a much broader reach: it applies in a number of other key areas, including sexual violence, sexual harassment and gender-based harassment. The latter may include acts of verbal, nonverbal, or physical aggression, intimidation, or hostility based on sex or sex-stereotyping, even if those acts do not involve conduct of a sexual nature. One of the  controversial aspects of Title IX jurisprudence is that sexual and gender-based harassment is not only defined by persistent behavior but may also be found in a single episode. This latter fact is the subject of numerous critiques. But what is sometimes missed in such criticism is the full nature of even a “single episode” of harassment, especially within educational institutions.

According to social theorist Anthony Giddens, all social life is episodic. By this Giddens refers to specific beginnings and endings, and to particular sequences within those beginnings and endings.  Even seemingly small single episodes usually effect main institutions within a social totality. This is nowhere more true than in the case of sexual or gender-based harassment in educational settings. Social dominance and hierarchical organization are key features of many educational settings; the relationships between students, teachers, support staffers and administrators are characterized by power and authority, distinction and subordination. Combined with these are hierarchies that exist well beyond educational settings: stratifications of gender, race, class and sexual orientation are just a few.  These conditions may easily give rise to episodes of sexual or gender-based harassment.

Despite the seriousness of such events, they are all too often deemed of little importance in educational settings. As scholar Robin Patric Clair notes, incidents of sexual harassment rarely receive "the same public exposure, legitimation or respect" as other sorts of problems in institutional settings. This may be especially true in the context of education. All too often such concerns are deemed plebeian, mean and  inimical to the storied liberal values, high-minded erudition and studied self-reflexivity thought to prevail in many educational institutions.  Hence, narratives of sexual or gender-based harassment may be, according to Clair, “sequestered”—intentionally segregated from the mainstream and rarely considered an appropriate subject of publicly shared anecdotes.  Because exposure of sexual or gender-based harassment may be harmful to dominant interests in such settings, such narratives are frequently re-framed by rhetorical devices that influence interpretation of the incident without being part of the content of the incident. In such re-framing, victims are often said to have harmed institutional interests, and/or to have misunderstood the harasser and/or to be “too sensitive” to the natural, harmless, and socially appropriate ebullience or humor of the harasser. Finally, re-framing may deny the occurrence of harassment altogether. In short, re-framing can and does make claims of sexual and gender-based harassment “go away.”

Given the climate of sequestered stories of sexual or gender-based harassment found in many educational settings, employing Title IX in such cases can be a challenge since liability is typically triggered only once an institution knows or reasonably should know of the claimed sexual or gender-based harassment. Victims must therefore be empowered to tell their stories, whether of persistent or single episode harassment--in school and out.  The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights April 2011 “Dear Colleague Letter” was a needed reminder of the responsibility that educational institutions bear in addressing claims of sexual harassment, gender-based harassment or sexual violence under Title IX. While not a solution to the these problems, when deployed Title IX can offer push-back to re-framing and allow victims yet another means of articulating the legal and ethical wrongness of such behavior.

[Versions of this article are cross-posted at the blog of the American Constitution Society and the blog of the National Women's Law Center]