Why Compensatory Schooling Seems to Make “No Difference”

Abstract

Several major studies seem to show that schooling cannot be a means for achieving social equality. Indeed, schooling seems to magnify initial inequalities. Compensatory schooling apparently fails to help disadvantaged or black children improve their standing on measures of academic achievement and post-school success in relation to the standing of middle class or white children. Some commentators conclude that there must be genetic factors involved: perhaps a gene for intelligence is linked with the gene for race in a manner similar to the linkage between color blindness and sex. But such conclusions are not necessary. The data on the “failure” of compensatory schooling can be accepted as true without concluding that intelligence is affected by race or that compensatory schooling should be abandoned. Linguistic and cultural characteristics deeply influence the manner in which young children perceive the world and learn to think, feel, and behave. These linguistic and cultural characteristics happen to be very different among various racial and social groups. Children who acquire nonstandard ways of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and behaving early in life will never operate as effectively in the “standard” ways as children who grow up with the “standard” folkways. To achieve complete social equality of opportunity for all biologically and socially identifiable groups, we would have to adopt Plato's suggestion for very-early-childhood education: to take all infants from their parents and rear them under equal conditions in state-operated nurseries. Otherwise, we must think of compensatory education as analogous to foreign language instruction: it is meant to help people of one group who choose to do so learn how to “succeed” as well as possible according to the standards of a different group. Compensatory education would be important for the dominant group as well as for minorities.