2011

The Struggle Between Individualism and Communitarianism:
The Pressure of Population, Prejudice, and the Purse

Gene V Glass

A. G. Rud
Washington State University

“Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” (Du Bois, 1903, p. 1)

Du Bois’s idea of the color-line has not disappeared from American culture and politics. Perhaps it has grown fainter with the momentous changes of the last half-century, culminating in the election of the first Black U.S. President in 2008. But the 21st Century promises to feature a different line, one that partially grows out of the color-line. It may prove to be the century in which the battle of between individualism and communitarianism is contested. Public institutions of all sorts in America are struggling for survival against the forces of demographic shifts, the divisive influence of racial and ethnic prejudice, and the exigencies of a seriously weakened economy. This struggle is critical to the future of K-12 public education. We briefly discuss the competing conceptions of individualism and communitarianism as a lens through which to view how population pressures, prejudice, and financial concerns shape the politics and public debate over schools.

For more than 100 years, but intensifying in the last two decades, the importance of individual liberty and achievement, which we shall refer to as the philosophy of individualism, has stood over against a belief in the importance of the community or shared achievement, or the philosophy of communitarianism, in debates on how to promote the welfare of society. This great debate is rising to the consciousness of ordinary Americans in various vernacular forms transmitted through and heightened by popular media. In the 21st Century, the contest between private and public good will have profound implications for all public institutions, including K-12 education. In the U.S. today, individualism appears to be ascendant as a political philosophy both to conservatives on the Right and neo-liberals on the Left. The causes for this rise in the rhetoric of individualism are rooted in a few fundamental forces that we discuss in this chapter: population changes, working their effects through the mechanisms of representative democracy; prejudice, lurking behind the veil of individual choice of affiliation; and economics (the "purse") through policies of taxation and privatization. These forces have already had a profound effect upon social institutions, family life, and schools in the U. S. as well as many other industrialized nations. They will exert pressure on developing nations, not only ones that are driven by nascent market economies, but also upon communitarian nations and current day theocracies.

Individualism stands for the freedom from interference by any group or organization, including government, in the individual's quest to achieve his or her own goals. Individuals are to be protected from obligations imposed by the state. Individualism is distinct from liberalism in that the latter places more emphasis on tolerance of others' beliefs, values, and life styles. Individualists have a more inward focused ethic than that of liberals. They view outside influence as intrusion or meddling. For many, the individualistic ethos would be captured in popular writings by such authors as Ayn Rand, or recent grass-roots political movements such as the conservative “tea party” wing of the Republican Party in the US. Ayn Rand’s vision of a strong individual unfettered by government is echoed in the rhetoric we hear from the tea party as well as from right-wing extremists such asTimothy McVeigh and Anders Behring Breivik. Modern communitarianism emerged in the 1980s, largely as an antidote to prevailing philosophies of liberalism that placed too much emphasis, some believed, on individual rights and too little emphasis on social responsibilities. Starting from the understanding that autonomous persons do not exist in isolation, communitarians argued that the values of community (starting with family, then neighborhood, and extending to school, city, and beyond) are necessary to balance a society too often tipped in the direction of self-centeredness, greed, and power seeking. Amatai Etzioni has been the most visible proponent of communitarianism over the past 20 years. Etzioni's notion of "responsive communitarianism" is an attempt to find a third alternative to radical forms of individualism and communitarianism, and thus negotiate a path between excessive individual autonomy and government control. His philosophy found favor among neo-liberals in the 1990s in the U.S., particularly with the Clintons, even though such neoliberals were also partial to individualism.

Individualism vs Communitarianism

It is not necessary here to parse the many distinctions among "communitarianism," "ideological communitarianism," "responsive communitarianism," vs "liberal Individualism," "political individualism," "economic individualism," and the like. As Daniel Bell has pointed out:
"… philosophical concerns [about the nature of liberalism vis a vis communitarianism] in the 1980s have largely given way to the political concerns that motivated much of the communitarian critique in the first place." (2001, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved April 23, 2010 from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/communitarianism/)

It is with these political concerns that we wish to engage in what follows. The impact of either general philosophy on the well-being of the nation will depend on the conception in the minds of the citizens of a representative democratic society of how to promote and maintain that well-being. These contesting conceptions are everywhere apparent as Americans debate social policy in popular media: newspapers, talk-radio, cable television, and the local coffee shop.

Individualists maintain that their wealth has been gained entirely by their own, independent effort. Their money is theirs and theirs alone and the "government has no right to take it." Political debates and elections of representatives turn on just such starkly simple arguments. Barbara Finkelstein (2002) named this belief “The Myth of Individual Autonomy”:
Among the more cherished and universally revered national myths in the United States is the one that projects the autonomous individual as the center of a democratically conceived and virtuous body politic. The autonomous, choice-making individual—i.e. the theoretical American citizen—is, relatively-speaking, free of the constraints of governing agents, free of the weight of tradition, free of the tyrannies of family, church, and state, free to compete as an individual, free to exercise political agency through involvement in competing interest groups. … In education, the autonomous individual is a student in possession of, among other things, a specific and identifiable learning style, a measurable capacity, a diagnosable need, a differential capacity to compete effectively and to learn easily—that is, if they behave obediently and work diligently."

Some observers have seen America’s public schools “awash” in individualistic competitiveness (Bellah, R.N., Madsen, R., Sullivan W.M., Swidler, A., Tipton, S.M., 1985.) This competitiveness results from the emphasis on individual achievement. Students are measured against one another, and this metric drives funding, employment for teachers and administrators, as well as real-estate values in the communities where the schools are located. The assumption is that the testing metric measures what is worthwhile.

However, when the metric measures narrow skills or does not take into account a more holistic process of learning, it can become an abstracted end in itself. Teachers will teach to the test in exclusion of other learning activities, as many observers have noted. Analysis of this narrow activity of teaching to the test is made by Sharon L Nichols and David C. Berliner in Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts American Schools (2007). Nichols and Berliner cite a well-known adage in social science to explain what is going on:
"Campbell’s law stipulates that 'the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it was intended to monitor.'” (Campbell 1975, in Nichols and Berliner 2007, pp. 26-27)

Some parents have chosen to respond to what they see as individualistic and competitive concerns in schools through homeschooling their children. Robert Kunzman (2009) portrays several conservative Christian homeschooling families. He is sympathetic to their assertion as parents of the right to educate their children as they see fit, and finds that homeschoolers are varied in their approaches to critical thinking and inquiry within a conservative Christian religious outlook. In a recent book, Hanna Rosin (2007) gives an inside look at Patrick Henry College outside Washington DC that caters to conservative Christian homeschoolers. Students are not only shielded from what are seen as deleterious or immoral influences, but they are steeled to go out and fight for what they believe is true, moral, and good, and to defend their beliefs against opposing views in the wider culture.

On the other hand, when addressing purely economic concerns, communitarians maintain that much of the wealth accruing to individuals is the result of the efforts of a larger community of persons living and dead who have together created social capital through a multitude of collective efforts. Philosophical communitarianism advocates policies that run off in a variety of different directions, all reflecting more or less some concept of a community: promotion of family life, urban renewal, promotion of national service, family-owned businesses, public transportation, opposition to "gated" communities, and the like. Kenneth Strike (2010) has presented a vision of small schools as a means of interrupting the erosion of a communitarian ethos. Democratic communities, in Strike’s construction, are built on the assumption that “We are all in this together” (WITT). Individualistic societies on the other hand are organized around an assumption of “You’re on your own” (YOYO). Modern schools in America engender and reinforce a “possessive individualism.” Strike sees smaller schools as more likely to revive a communitarian ethos among their students.

Robert Putnam illustrated and documented the deterioration of community institutions in Bowling Alone: The collapse and revival of American community. Putnam stressed the effects of such phenomena as the invention and spread of television as an entertainment medium replacing small local gatherings. What Putnam discusses are those public gathering places where we form informal ties of friendship. He is not discussing a public gathering place such as a jury pool. The loss of these public gathering places and the social ties therein have been lamented by others (Oldenburg 1999), and Christopher Higgins (2011) has pointed out that these informal gathering places, Oldenburg’s “great good places,” can provide the social and emotional fund of experience that allow us to participate in public, and perhaps alienating, acts such as jury duty. However, we choose to examine the causes of this erosion of community—or more accurately the communitarian ethos—at the level of the nation's demographics (both in terms of age, race and ethnicity) and economics (a rise in consumerism that expends disposable income at historically high levels, thus putting downward pressure on public revenues). Added to these is the influence of racial and ethnic prejudice and antipathy causing people to withdraw from broader public life to where they can share public goods only within socially and ethnically homogeneous communities.

The pressures on a communitarian ethos exerted by the nation's rapidly shifting demographics (population) and economy (the purse) are having a profound effect on public institutions of all types, especially K-12 public education. Our focus here is on those pressures and how K-12 public education in America is being affected.

Population

We assume that in the U.S. at least and other representative democracies, the translation of political philosophies—or less grandly, political “values”—into policy is greatly influenced by the nation’s demographics. The size of categories of voters will determine to some extent the nature of elected officials who will then play key roles in enacting policies through laws, regulations, and executive orders. This is probably less an assumption than it is a truism.

The most significant shifts in U.S. demographics are these: the population is growing Browner (more Hispanic) and it is growing older. Both of these trends—the latter having been apparent for a half century, the former for a couple decades—will continue well into the 21st Century.

The U.S. population is growing Browner.

The largest demographic shift in the U.S. population in the last half-century has been in the population share of Hispanics. (Note 1) The Black share has remained constant at approximately 13 percent and the non-Hispanic White share has decreased from approximately 90 to 65 percent. The percentage of the population identified as Hispanic has nearly tripled to 15% since 1970. Hispanics are currently the largest minority in the nation. The eighth and ninth most popular surnames in the 2000 U.S. Census were "Garcia" and "Rodriguez," respectively. It is projected that Hispanics will constitute 25% of the U.S. population by the year 2050. The number of Hispanics under age 20 in the U.S. is expected to more than double by 2050, from about 14 million in 2005 to nearly 33 million in 2050.

The growth in the U.S. Hispanic population is due to both the greater fertility of Hispanic women and to immigration. Immigration in turn is due to the appetite of American business for low cost labor; it eagerly employs workers from Mexico and Central America. In addition, neo-liberal economic policies of the 1990s have depressed the rural economies of Mexico and Central America which has caused out-migration of rural peoples to the U.S. seeking work.

Thirty years ago, the White Non-Hispanic birth rate fell below the “replacement rate” (2.1 live births per woman). The rate for Non-Hispanic Blacks has fallen gradually to about replacement level (2.26 live births per woman). The fertility rate for Hispanics, 3.11, is by far the highest of the three groups. Live births to Hispanic mothers constituted one of every five births in the nation in 2000 (See Table 1.) The fertility rate for Hispanic immigrants is 3.51, compared to the fertility rate of 2.40 for women who remain in Mexico. It has been estimated that one in every ten babies born in the U.S. in 2002 was born to a native of Mexico or Central America. (Note 2)

From 1901 to 1920, 86 percent of all immigrants to the U.S. were from Europe while only 3 percent were from Latin America. Between 1980 and 1993, European immigration dropped to 13 percent as Latin American immigration rose to 43 percent. (Note 3) Since 1970, the contribution to U.S. population growth due to the fertility of what demographers call the "population stock" (i.e., the population present in the country in 1970) has been equaled by the growth due to immigration. If there had been no immigration to the U.S. since 1970, the 2010 population of the country would be about 250 million persons; at present, it is somewhere between 306 and 313 depending on how one resolves various ambiguities dealing with the counting of immigrants. Accurate counts of persons residing in the U.S. without proper authorization are difficult to obtain. Estimates of unauthorized persons who have entered the country vary between five or six million and twenty million. Such figures are hardly to be trusted. The highly credible Pew Hispanic Center estimates that more than four-fifths of unauthorized immigrants to the U.S. come from Mexico, or Central and South America. (Note 4)

The causes of this immigration from the South are complex. The claim that a corrupt Mexican government has impoverished its own people who now seek employment north of the border is a gross exaggeration, harboring a grain of truth. The causes are both political and economic, and they have much to do with U.S. economic and business policy. The Free Trade Agreement of 1994 (NAFTA, as it is commonly known) and federal subsidies to giant agricultural corporations have combined nearly to destroy the profitability of Mexican corn farming. Corn is a staple of the diet of the people of Mexico; the average citizen of Mexico eats about 10 corn tortillas a day. After 1994, when U.S. corporations (Archer Daniels Midland, Conagra), enjoying reduced tariffs and government subsidies, began selling their corn to Mexico at rates as low as one-third their production costs, the Mexican corn market virtually collapsed. Poverty in rural areas worsened. The Mexican farmer could not compete with these new arrangements. Migration was one alternative. “[M]igrants from Mexico represented 77 percent of the U.S. farm workforce in 1997–98, up from 57 percent in 1990." (Mora and Taylor, 2006, pp. 22-23) Approximately 15 percent of the village population of Mexico was estimated to be working in the U.S. in the first few years of the 21st century. Many maquiladoras along the U.S.-Mexico border are being dismantled because Mexican workers are becoming more expensive than workers in China and India, and the problems of immigration are further exacerbated. Public attitudes toward immigration from Latin America are negative and growing stronger. A strident, anti-immigration politician (former Representative Tom Tancredo, R-Colorado) was able to make a serious third-party bid for Governor of Colorado in the 2010 elections, outpolling his Republican opponent three-to-one. Even more significant for schools than headcounts of immigrants, documented or not, are the numbers of persons who speak mostly Spanish at home. Data from the 1980 through 2000 Censuses show remarkable increases in these numbers (See Table 2.)

The U.S. population is growing older.

In 1960, children age 17 and younger constituted more than a third of the U.S. population. By 2030, the percentage of children is expected to drop below 25%, and they will be outnumbered by persons age 65 and older. (Nichols and Good, 2004) "The demographic facts are familiar, but quite dramatic: While life expectancy in the United States in 1900 was a mere 47 years, people in the 21st century are expected to live to be almost 90. Hardly any facet of society will be unaffected by such sweeping change" (Yankelovich, 2005).

Medical technology has both increased life expectancy and decreased women's fertility. The result is a rising median age of the population with fewer families raising fewer school-age children. Pharmaceuticals are extending life beyond anything imagined a century ago. The leading causes of death in the U.S. in 1900 were pneumonia, influenza, tuberculosis, and diarrhea, all of which today are far down the list of causes of death. The elderly (age 65 and older) constituted 4% of Americans in 1900; in 1995, they made up approximately 12% of the population; and in a few years, 20% of Americans will be classified as elderly. Between 2010 and 2050, the percentage of the U.S. population older than 85 will quadruple. Fischman (2010) has documented the manifold ways in which this “shock of gray” will shape future U.S. society. Ironically, perhaps, the U.S. and the world must prepare to pay a significant price for the increased life expectancy of their populations.

As America ages, proportionally fewer families will have children of school age. In 1970, half of the married couples had one or more children under 18 in their household. By 2005, that percentage had dropped below 35 percent. In 1970, the balance between White and Hispanic students in U.S. K-12 public schools was approximately 80% White v. 5% Hispanic. These numbers swung dramatically across subsequent decades: 1980: 73% W v. 9 % H; 1990: 68% W v. 12% H; 2000: 61% W v. 17% H; 2010; 55% W v. 23% H. During the same period, African American figures remained relatively constant. Interest in the fate of public education can be expected to wane as fewer families with political power send their children to school. (Note 5)

When the aging population is categorized by ethnicity, marked changes in the composition of the U.S. population are apparent. The Hispanic population is much younger than the non-Hispanic (largely White) population. Figure 2 shows age pyramids for the Hispanic and Non-Hispanic populations of the U.S. from the 1980 and the 2000 Censuses. The Hispanic population of the U.S. is proportionally much more heavily represented among the younger ages. Whereas Non-Hispanic Whites constitute only about half of the school age population in the country, they constitute more than 75 percent of the persons older than 50. It is naïve to think that disparities like these will not play out with obvious political consequences.

Prejudice

Religious fundamentalism and a pervasive suspicion and unease felt by all peoples in the presence of the "other" are combining to pressure public policy in "apartheid" directions in the U.S. Such a claim rises to the level of a virtual truism in the experience of Americans everywhere, and yet it eludes the attempts of researchers to observe it directly. A half century after Brown v. Topeka, the public are at least sensitive to charges of racism and will be careful not to vouchsafe such sentiments where any observant social scientist might observe them. The evidence of racial and ethnic prejudice must be inferred from patterns of behavior, and school choice reveals such prejudices readily.

A K-12 public school student is nearly twice as likely to be Hispanic or Black as a private school student (37% v. 20%; see Figure 3). Private school enrollments are declining slightly over time as a percentage of enrolled students because alternatives within the public school system are being created.

The White majority would prefer to isolate its own children in private schools, where they assume they will be safer and given a superior education. Daunted at the prospect of funding this form of exclusive schooling, the White middle class is seeking to fund an ersatz form of private education within the public school system by means of vouchers, charter schools, tuition tax credits, open enrollment, home schooling and the like.

If there ever was an idea whose time refuses to come, it is school vouchers. A few small pilot programs have been funded—most notably in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—with the intent of running an “experiment.” These programs have been "means-tested," in the sense that only families below certain income levels qualify for the voucher. However, no state has implemented school vouchers on a wide scale. Indeed, one even wonders if the bills that are repeatedly introduced are merely stalking horses, setting up the opponents to compromise on "half-a-loaf" bills creating charter school programs or tuition tax credits. Voucher opponents have settled for compromise legislation establishing charter schools in dozens of states in the U.S.

There is little question that to the person on the street, state funded charter schools are seen as "private" in spite of the fact that they are indeed public, i.e., they are required to admit all students for whom there is space, adhere to federal laws governing special education and the like, and they receive their funding from local and state revenues. In the fall of 2004, approximately 3,000 charter schools were in operation in 37 states. Approximately 1.5 percent (or about one million) public school students nationwide were enrolled in charter schools. The District of Columbia had the highest percentage of students enrolled in charter schools (11 percent), followed by Arizona (6 percent) and Delaware (4 percent).

Wherever charter school enrollments have been studied, the specter of racial segregation has raised its ugly head. "Charter school students across all racial groups in most of the sixteen states are more likely to attend intensely segregated minority schools than are public school students …." (Frankenberg & Lee, 2003; also see Frankenberg, E., Siegel-Hawley, G., & Wang, J., 2011) There is evidence that in such states as Arizona, charter schools are being used for “white flight” from high minority public schools. (Cobb & Glass, 1999; Cobb & Glass, 2009) In California, the same is true to a lesser extent, and some home schoolers will cooperate to form a “charter school” in name only. Miron and his colleagues studied enrollment patterns in charter schools in Delaware, a state with the third largest percentage enrollment in charters. “Because individual charter schools enroll students that differ greatly from sending districts, one can argue that many of the charter schools may be accelerating the resegregation of public schools based on race, class, and ability by leaving them more fragmented. However, one must also recognize that other school choice programs (such as interdistrict choice and the neighborhood schools program) are also promoting the acceleration of the resegregation of schools” (Miron, Wygant, Cullen & Applegate, 2006, p. ii).

Where “choice” is prominent, the resegregation of the American public school system is not far behind. (Note 6) Since Hispanics and African-Americans are disproportionally the clients of public institutions (schools, hospitals, welfare agencies), these institutions will increasingly be the object of policy changes unfavorable to minorities. “The sociologist William Julius Wilson (1987) contends that Americans will not support policies that are believed to benefit minorities primarily. … I have a corollary to Wilson’s thesis [Ernest R. House wrote]. Americans will support policies that are harmful to minorities that they would not tolerate if those same policies were applied to majority populations” (House, 1999).

The Purse (Economy)

The popularity of consumption of goods and services rather than the act of saving income has characterized the U.S. economy for decades. Consumerism has become an American way-of-life since the invention in the 1970s of the non-collateralized small loan industry known as "credit-cards." In 2007, average household credit card debt exceeded $10,000 and net savings in the U.S. were negative for the first time since the Great Depression. The “Subprime Mortgage Crisis” that hit the U.S. and world economies in 2007-2008 has produced what is likely a temporary shift in personal finances toward savings; but when these economies right themselves, as they surely will, businesses can expect a return to heavy consumption on the part of the population. The aging of the U.S. population will exert significant pressures on the nation's economic circumstances. Excluding defense expenditures and debt interest, more than half of federal budget supports persons older than 60 years. Social Security and Medicare are obvious large expenditures. In 1995, the cost of Social Security and Medicare was 17 percent as a share of workers' taxable payroll; that figure is projected to rise to between 35 and 55 percent in the next 30 years. (Peterson, 2000) There are also veterans' benefits and pensions for civil service employees, retired military, and elected officials. Medicaid is increasingly used as aid for elderly, departing from its original purpose. Benefits for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will drive expenditures for seniors upwards. Older voters will vote for benefits for older citizens. It is highly unlikely that some change in the political winds will shift power toward younger people or minorities. Arguably, the most powerful political group in the nation today is the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) (Morris, 1996). AARP projects 70 million members by 2015. Information on the rate of minority membership in AARP is not readily available.

The Great Recession of 2009 hit older Americans particularly hard. In 2005, the average "baby boomer"—the earliest of whom became 60 years old in 2006—had total net worth—assets, including real estate equity, minus liabilities—of $110,000. The Subprime Mortgage Crisis of 2009 substantially reduced their real estate equity and home foreclosures swept the nation. Economists are beginning to speak of the Silver Tsunami and the 50-50-50 problem: half of the people over age 50 in the U.S. have total savings (including 401K and retirement) under $50,000. The average baby boomer can expect to inherit from his or her parents less than $50,000. This Silver Tsunami will exert tremendous pressures on the political and economic systems of the nation. Foremost among those who will suffer from these constrained economic circumstances will be those who utilize the services of public institutions of all kinds.

Impact of Population, Prejudice & Purse on Public Education:
Making It Cheaper and Segregated

Classic arguments for the "externalities" (Note 7) of public education are withering in the face of large increases in minority populations in public schools and deteriorating personal finances of Americans of all ages, but particularly the finances of older citizens.

Three influences—population, prejudice and the purse—are combining to shape many of the education reform proposals of the last 30 years. These proposals—emanating from conservatives and neo-liberals alike—are largely driven by, or at the very least supported by, the desire of the democratic majority to reduce the costs of public education and to "quasi-privatize" public education for the children of the White middle-class.

School vouchers, although failing to gain wide public support, are clearly aimed at increasing the enrollments of private schools, many of them religious schools. The amount of the voucher in the few experimental programs attempted to date is well under the per pupil cost of the traditional public schools; and if ever implemented on a wide scale, vouchers would have to be supplemented by parents to meet private school tuition costs.

Charter schools are subsidized by tax revenues at rates substantially under the per pupil cost of traditional public schools. They represent a cheapened form of K-12 education without many ancillary services and often with uncertified teachers paid lower salaries. The contribution of charter schools to the resegregation of public education is now well documented. Tuition tax credits—a dollar-for-dollar forgiveness—of state income taxes that are donated to “tuition scholarship organizations” are being used for the benefit of White middle-class families to send their children to religious schools, thus achieving a segregated schooling at reduced cost (Moses, 2000; Welner, 2000; Wilson, 2000). The tuition tax credit system of Arizona will soon be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. A resurgence of interest in “open enrollment” (parents shifting their children among schools both intra-district and inter-district) appears to be satisfying a White middle-class wish to secure a public education in more racially segregated circumstances (Howe, Eisenhart, & Betebenner, 2000).

The manner is obvious in which home schooling, the fastest growing sector of the school choice movement percentagewise, satisfies both the motives to segregate children from the larger K-12 education system and reduce the cost of providing schooling. Private corporate interests have now identified home schooling as a rich source of profits (Glass, 2010). Online virtual schooling is forging business partnerships with home schoolers and charter schools to provide courses that are ultimately paid for by taxpayers’ dollars. The largest such provider of online courses is K12 Inc., a Virginia-based company. K12 Inc. was founded in April 2000 by former U.S. Education Secretary William J. Bennett and Ronald Jay Packard, a former mergers specialist with Goldman Sachs. K12 Inc., which became a publicly traded company in 2008, owns a network of virtual charter schools in California called the California Virtual Academies and supplies courses for the Ohio Virtual Academy as well as tens of thousands of home schooled children nationwide. A bizarre virtual school is based in a tiny school district in southern Colorado, less than a mile north of the New Mexico border. Branson, Colorado had fewer than 100 persons in the 2000 Census and no grocery store or gas station. Branson is a most unlikely place to have received more than $15,000,000 in state support for its 1,000 "virtual students" from around the state in the first four years (2001-2005) of its online school.

How we assess students, particularly in the use of widespread high-stakes testing, is rife with economic implications. The costs of high-stakes testing are clear at one level and more subtle at a deeper level. The tests can be written, printed, distributed, and scored for an entire state for half the cost of building a single elementary school. The less obvious long-range impact of high-stakes testing can be discerned in the questions that high school students immediately ask when confronted with a high-school graduation test. "If I pass this test, and this test is what I have to pass to graduate from high school, then why do I have to stay here after passing it?" And the larger public asks themselves, "Yes, why continue to pay for schooling when a student can show on a test that he or she knows what they need to know to succeed?" In 2007, a bill passed quickly through both the Arizona House and Senate that authorizes the payment of $1,500 in college scholarship money to high school seniors who complete required hours for graduation and pass the state’s high school graduation test, provided that they leave school before the beginning of their final semester. The cost of maintaining a high school senior in school for a semester is about $3,500. Trading a $3,500 for a $1,500 expense is an exchange most politicians are happy to make. Finally, advanced placement, alternative certification of teachers, and even ESL teaching for mono-lingual Spanish speaking students have obvious cost-saving implications.

Politics

In a true democracy, demographics are destiny. The people's will is eventually expressed and politics is the mechanism of expression. If demographics are destiny, then there are certain likely predictions that rest on the quite reasonable assumption that the majority will use government to promote material self-interest and secure health, safety, and comfort.

American demographics have undergone a tectonic shift as a result of technological invention and economic policy―a shift in ethnicity and a shift in age. Immigration and a differential birth rate account for the rise of Hispanics from a small minority class to a major social and political force. The wealthier White majority—with fewer children and grandchildren than in the past, and with increasing debt and life expectancy—grows less willing to support financially the institutions that serve poor minority children. Peter G. Peterson, former Secretary of Commerce under Richard Nixon and Director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, proposed a series of solutions to the inescapable fiscal crisis brought about by the aging of the American populace not unlike those offered 15 years later by the Bowles-Simpson Bipartisan Fiscal Commission. (Peterson, 1996) Viewed in light of the voting power of the expected 75 million AARP members of mid-21st century America, these proposals, with the possible exception of raising current workers' contributions to FICA, appear quixotic. Peterson stirred imaginations in frightening ways as he documented the impending economic pressures on an aging populace, not just in America but throughout the world. "…I believe that global aging will become the transcendent political and economic issue of the twenty-first century. I will argue that―like it or not, and there's every reason to believe we won't like it―renegotiating the established social contract in response to global aging will soon dominate and daunt the public policy agendas of all the developed countries." (Peterson, 1996, p. 179) The problem of an aging populace in America, far more so than in other developed nations, will be exacerbated by the existence of ethnophobia.

Several things could deflect or reverse the trends in population growth and public policy noted here: changes in immigration policy; cultural shifts in the Hispanic population, particularly regarding religion and the choice between large families vs consumption of luxuries; international trade agreements; campaign financing; even such seemingly mundane things as federal subsidies to corn growers. A great deal of importance has been placed in our analysis on the burgeoning Hispanic population, their place on the economic ladder, and their relationship to public institutions. In the heat of the 2008 Presidential campaign hardly any issues were more heatedly contested than health care and immigration. Whether the immigration debate was mere campaign rhetoric soon to be forgotten after the votes were counted is unclear. Currently, the Hispanic influence in politics is in its early stages. Hispanics serving in presidential cabinets have been far outnumbered by African Americans. The influence of Hispanics at the polls has yet to be felt. From 2000 to 2004, Hispanics accounted for 50 percent of U.S. population growth but only 10 percent of the increase in votes cast. Hispanic voting participation rates consistently trail voting rates for Whites or African Americans. Many Hispanics are either under the age of 18 or are ineligible to vote. Only one in five Hispanics voted in the 2004 presidential election, compared to 50 percent of Whites and 40 percent of African Americans. The aging White population and its economic circumstances will continue to play the dominant role in the future of public life.

The mid-term elections of 2010 provided one of the biggest opportunities for political shifts in education policy in decades. (Kelly, 2010) While the public’s attention was distracted by federal level pyrotechnics, a quiet revolution was taking places in state legislatures across the nation. Nearly 700 legislative seats shifted from Democrat to Republican, and 10 formerly Democrat governorships became Republican. The significance of this change for education policy is that 28 states faced “redistricting” in the months following the election because of the completion of the 2010 Decennial Census. Redistricting (or “reapportionment”) is a powerful tool in the hands of majority political parties who can “gerrymander” voting districts at all levels to solidify their power. This powerful tool has recently been sanctified in law by the U.S. Supreme Court. (VIETH V. JUBELIRER (02-1580) 541 U.S. 267 (2004) 241 F. Supp. 2d 478, affirmed.) Since education policy is largely formulated at the level of state governments, the nation may see a decade of public education reform serving the interests of a conservative White middle class seeking lower taxes and greater privileges.

Whether the trend toward education policy serving the individual interests of the most powerful political classes will gain momentum or be replaced by a rising sense of responsibility for the welfare of the community is left to the reader to predict.

References

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Authors

Gene V Glass is a Senior Researcher in the National Education Policy Center in the School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is an Emeritus Regents' Professor of Arizona State University. He was elected President of the American Educational Research Association in 1974 and received that organization's Distinguished Contributions to Education Research award in 2008. He is a member of the National Academy of Education.

A. G. Rud is Dean of the College of Education at Washington State University. With Jim Garrison and Lynda Stone, he edited John Dewey at 150: Reflections for a New Century, (Purdue University Press, 2009). His book Albert Schweitzer's Legacy for Education: Reverence for Life, was published in 2011 by Palgrave Macmillan. He has served as the Editor of Education and Culture, the peer-reviewed international journal of the John Dewey Society.

Consultant

Chistopher Higgins is an Assistant Professor, Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His PhD in Philosophy and Education is from Teachers College, Columbia University. His areas of philosophical interest and expertise include virtue ethics, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, and neo-praxis philosophy (i.e., Aristotle via Hegel, Marx, Heidegger). He has published on the work of Hannah Arendt, Jessica Benjamin, Martin Buber, John Dewey, Sigmund Freud, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Oakeshott, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Plato.

Notes

1. The U.S. Censuses of 1970 and earlier did not recognize Hispanics as a separate ethnic or racial group. In 1980, the Census began to count Hispanics but was confused by fact that Hispanics as an ethnic group represent multiple races. For the 2000 Census the following rubric was adopted: "Is the person Spanish/Hispanic/Latino? a) Mexican, Mexican-American, Chicano; b) Puerto Rican; c) Cuban; d) Other Spanish/Hispanic/Latino?" Population figures for Hispanics are not comparable from 2000 to previous censuses. However, the lack of discontinuity in the curves in Figure 1 suggests that the slightly changing questions posed by the Census takers over the decades did not have serious effects.
2. The Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund disputes this claim of the Center for Immigration studies. Camarota, Steven A. (2005a). Birth rates among immigrants in America comparing fertility in the U.S. and home countries. Washington, D. C.: Center for Immigration Studies. Retrieved November 5, 2010, from http://www.cis.org/articles/2005/back1105.html.
3. Immigration and Naturalization Service Yearbooks of Immigration Statistics. Retrieved March 23, 2010 from http://www.dhs.gov/ximgtn/statistics/publications/yearbook.shtm.
4. Pew Hispanic Center. (2006). Modes of entry for the unauthorized migrant population. Retrieved February 26, 2007, from http://pewhispanic.org/files/factsheets/19.pdf.
5. U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports; and America's Families and Living Arrangements: 2000, 2003, 2004, and 2005.
6. Patricia Gándara has written eloquently on the effects of segregation on Hispanic students and how some have overcome these disadvantages. (Gándara, 1994, 1995).
7. "In economics, an externality (or transaction spillover) is a cost or benefit, not transmitted through prices, incurred by a party who did not agree to the action causing the cost or benefit. A benefit in this case is called a positive externality or external benefit, while a cost is called a negative externality or external cost." (Emphasis in the original. Retrieved November 30, 2010 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#cite_note-0) For example, Joe Schmo from Kokomo, who has no children, gains benefit from the education of all children because, for two reasons: An educated populace has better health and commits fewer crimes—thus lowering Joe's health insurance costs and increasing his safety, these being the external benefits.