Thoughts on Savage Inequalities

I don’t know where to start. I picked up the book Savage Inequalities out of my library and decided to read it.

I’m pretty sure I had to buy it for my HST103 class and it was one of many books that never got read in my school years. (Its actually sort of ironic, I’ve become a semi-voracious reader, after I stopped going to college, go figure.)

The book is about the conditions of schools and the inequalities between schools in different areas. A recurring figure is the amount spent per pupil. This goaded me into figuring out how much money has been spent on my education. Its astonishing, from pre K Kindergarden to 12th grade there was over $100,000 spent on my education. Compare this to Mississippi where the same amount of money would’ve educated at least six students. Scary ain’t it?

I’m reminded of a comment one of my philosophy professors said about Islam. He stated that one of the failings of radical Islam is specifically ignoring half their population. (All females in some Islamic societies are essentially considered property and not allowed to contribute to society.) While we are not as guilty of ignoring such a large population of our society, we are guilty for not properly educating ALL of our children.

If you want to think of it in purely economic terms, children are a perishable good that must be invested in to have an economic return to society. There are two basic scenarios here. We take child A, who lives in a upper class New York City suburb where they spend $11,000 a year on A’s education. Because the community spends so much on A’s education they’re able to place A in a class of 18 students and provide A with a large list of extracurriculars to choose from. On the other end of the spectrum we take child B, who lives in a mediocre area of Brooklyn where they spend only $4,950 a year on B’s education. Because the community neglects B’s education B is in a class of 28 students that shares a room with another class of 27 students. The teacher is underpaid and specifically teaches toward the test. There are no extracurriculars to speak of whatsoever. (BTW: A’s and B’s parents were uncreative with names.)

This of course is a simple argument, B’s community does not care and therefore will let B’s education languish. This neglects the fact that the land owners in Brooklyn tax themselves (or are taxed by their tenants) at a higher percentage rate than the land owners in A’s suburb.

But I have assumed that it is logical and meaningful to define A’s and B’s communities by the location of their home. But the community that will be affected by the results of A’s and B’s education is much larger. While by the very nature of how lives are lived it is difficult to determine what the return to society A or B will make. The returns can be measured in multitudes of ways: children successfully raised, net value added to the GDP, taxes paid into the treasury, number of lives saved from a cancer treatment, amount of money spent incarcerating one or both after committing a crime, etc, etc. The point being that if one wished someone could provide scores that codified what a specific person contributed to society at large, and what they took from society at large. People usually take the most from society the younger they are and eventually start making returns. Children are society’s long term investment, the results of which will not be realized in the economy for upwards of 20 years. Plainly, individually children are a long term investment with a reasonable amount of risk, but a population taken as a whole the investment will pay off.

Given the ability to extrapolate A’s and B’s contribution to society as a whole it is ludicrous to tie their education to something as arbitrary as the location of their home. (This is not to say that this did not make historical sense when people were unlikely to leave the community in which they were born.)

As a result the method that is the most logical given the potential nationwide impact of A’s and B’s education is providing a majority of funding at the national level. In a way we already do this, just inequitably as Jonathan Kozol states in Savage Inequalities:

Because the property tax is counted as a tax deduction by the federal government, home-owners in a wealthy suburb get back a substantial portion of the money that they spend to fund their children’s schools –effectively, a federal subsidy for an unequal education. Home-owners in a poor districts get this subsidy as well, but , because their total tax is less, the subsidy is less. the mortgage interested that homeowners pay is also treated as a tax deduction — in effect, a second federal subsidy. these subsidies, as I have termed them, are considerably larger than most people understand. in 1984, for instance, property-tax deductions grated by the federal government were $9 billion. An additional $23 billion in mortgage-interest deductions were provided to home-owners: a total of some $32 billion. Federal grants to local schools, in contrast, totaled only $7 billion, and only part of this was earmarked for low-income districts. Federal policy, in this respect, increases the existing gulf between the richest and the poorest schools. (p. 55)

In addition funding education at a higher rate may in the long term reduce the need for federal and state expenditures, as a likely result of the lack of properly educating the whole population, is the need to incarcerate a significant portion of the population currently costs most governments approximately $20,000 per year, enough to educate two students at a reasonable quality level.

As a result we truly have dismissed one of our most fundamental responsibilities, ensuring freedom via a well educated populace. Thus by not educating and ensuring the productiveness of all children in this great nation, we are not only injuring those who are not educated well, but injuring ourselves.