Abstract
An educator finds empathy is key to conntecting students with each other and with their instructors.
“If [our society] wants to rid itself of the achievement gap, it must first reduce the empathy gap,” a bright, earnest 15-year-old sophomore declared to an interviewer on my research team at his affluent, suburban high school. A civically engaged leader on the Mayor’s Youth Council, Judah (a pseudonym) tried to help us understand the differences between educational opportunity in material and non-material terms. Incisively, he targeted an intangible dynamic that few sociologists write or think about: if a quality education is to be primarily a private commodity, then radical self-interest will undermine the common good of the United States. Closing the empathy gap entails massive departures from an ethos of self-involvement to building relationships on all sides: becoming familiar, sharing experiences, and caring whether our societies will be better for all, not just ourselves and our loved ones.
Why are “good schools” still failing kids of color?
Here’s a paradox: many affluent families invest in strategic practices that not only heighten their children’s competitive advantage and chances for upward mobility but also keep us wedded to a phenomenon that widens inequality—segregation. While many consider educational inequality a “bad” in the abstract, few of us grapple with how our everyday choices and practices foster inequitable behaviors that leave many children and youth—mainly low-income and of color—out of the folds of educational opportunity.
Since the release of the 1983 “A Nation at Risk” report under the Reagan Administration, America’s attitude has reinforced the idea that the test score is the most significant indicator of quality, ability, and excellence. This presumption drives the accountability systems of all 50 states and the national No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law. Further, it detracts from an awareness that if you have over 30,000 high-performing students applying to a selective university, considerably less than 10% will be admitted. Even if you are a high school class valedictorian, maintain more than a 4.0 grade point average, attain stratospherically high SAT or ACT scores, and participate in a multitude of extracurricular activities, that’s no guarantee. Both past and current events beg the question of whether U.S. policymakers, educators, and leaders should re-evaluate the messages we transmit to our youth about the purposes of education.
Today’s test-score ideology fuels a sense of entitlement among some families and students, especially among those who score highly on standardized tests. It also motivates some to cheat in order to be perceived as competitive and worthy. In 2011, law enforcement officials arrested college and high school students on Long Island, New York in a testing scandal ring. Younger students paid hundreds of dollars to older students to take the SAT on their behalf. And in 2015, eight educators were convicted and sentenced to jail time for cheating in the Atlanta Public Schools District (what became the largest testing scandal in American educational history). The prevalent testing ideology can also erode relationships between teachers and school officials, teachers and parents, and teachers and students as stringent accountability standards seek to identify who is to blame for either no-gain or flat results annually. Consequently, we have cultivated a narrow-minded national culture about what learning and academic achievement are. Critically, this mindset overemphasizes the “me” and “mine” and neglects how inequalities endure when we lose sight of others’ well-being.
Congress will soon determine the future welfare of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which, in its current incarnation, is what we refer to as the relatively unsuccessful NCLB law. The original ESEA implicitly treated education as a public good—a resource for the nation to minimize inequalities between families and communities and to maintain a healthy, functioning democracy and thriving economy. With its passage in 1965, the ESEA was a critical piece of the Great Society programs. Lawmakers aimed to reduce poverty and the disadvantages that severely limit youths’ life chances. Although historians and analysts of American social and educational policy have duly noted that education alone cannot sever the ugly head of inequality, ESEA’s main objective, nonetheless, aimed to improve the capacity of impoverished communities and schools to imbue all students with significant competencies in literacy, numeracy, and critical thinking.
High-stakes testing reproduces inequalities.
Scripps National Spelling Bee, Flickr CC
ESEA emerged during the Civil Rights era, a moment in history when some lawyers and advocates believed that the fairest chances for educational opportunity would come from the integration of Asian, African, Latino/a and Native American students and their White peers in schools and classrooms. Over forty years ago, Judah’s school was one of the few in the country to voluntarily desegregate. Yet what Judah shared during our observations of his school—documented in my book Stubborn Roots: Race, Culture, and Inequality in U.S. and South African Schools—is that affluent schools must also pay attention to unequal educational experiences of different social groups within their walls. They have to address social and cultural distances between these groups—what Judah refers to as the “empathy gap” (or an inattention to the lack of concern for and interaction between all groups of students)—if they want to diminish academic achievement disparities.
In Stubborn Roots, I detailed a number of everyday school practices that not only produced dissimilar educational experiences for both low-income and racial and ethnic minority (not all poor), and wealthier White students, but also potentially widened both achievement and empathy gaps. At the two richest U.S. schools, I saw very few African-American and Latino youth enrolled in the advanced placement and honors classes, which, presumably, are meant to prepare students for the rigors of college and university life. In these high schools, I had to carefully navigate my own position among students, including choosing carefully where to sit in a room because students divided themselves by race or ethnicity in the cafeterias. Similarly, I observed a strong association between participation in different extracurricular activities and the students’ social backgrounds. In one school baseball and cheerleading were to White boys and White girls, respectively, as basketball and step-dancing were to Black boys and Black girls. In another, band and orchestra, language clubs, and chorus were more likely to be for the Asian and White students, while a Black culture club was the main extracurricular activity of African-American students.
If quality education is primarily a private commodity, then radical self-interest will undermine the common good.
On occasion, students offered an unconvincing explanation: their de facto segregation is a matter of differences in choices, tastes, and styles. Varied choices may be essentially fair and benign in a wholly equal and just society, but in a divided one with high academic stakes, these differences matter. Consider that advanced placement and honors courses frequently feature weighted grade point averages that differ from either regular or non-college preparatory classes. Orchestra, band, and foreign language club members travel the world and acquire exposure to experiences that expand the student’s horizons, consciousness, and social networks. These experiences serve other purposes, too; they are instrumental in writing those attention-grabbing college essays needed for admission to selective colleges and universities.
After parents complained, Judah’s school terminated advanced placement courses in English and history to defuse the competition for the spots in the nation’s most selective colleges among its middle- and upper-class students. Strikingly, until then, his school barely paid attention to the fact that neither Judah nor his peers from the central city were enrolled in these classes, nor did they go on the trips to Asia, Europe, or Latin America. It did not matter whether they had the same educational experiences. It mattered more that privileged students could evenly compete with one another. Empathy had its bounds: the social boundary between “us” and “them.”
Truthfully, Judah attended a significantly better school in terms of material resources—high student spending, teachers more experienced with their subject matter, sophisticated educational tools, and so forth. Yet, my observations demanded that I think more deeply about why so-called “good schools” are still failing students of color. The answer, I discovered, lies in the differences between a strong school resource context and a strong school sociocultural context. High-quality material contexts are necessary but insufficient if all students are not fully embedded in the life of a school.
A deeper inquiry into the school’s sociocultural context highlights another critical distinction. Sociologist William Trent once stated: “Desegregation is about demographic changes [in schools], and ‘integration’ is about normative change,” a shift in the collective hearts and minds of the people. In a similar vein, legal scholar john a. powell has written that while desegregation assimilates racial and ethnic minorities into the school’s mainstream, true integration transforms the mainstream. Relationships between students and teachers are very different under desegregation (proximate contact) versus integration (deep intercultural exchanges in learning where no group is on the margins). Integration weakens thick social boundaries and fosters empathy among people of varied social backgrounds as they teach, learn, communicate, and interact within a school community in ways that till the soils of a burgeoning democracy.
Empathy is not merely about increasing the civility of one social group toward another. In her book Talking to Strangers, political theorist Danielle Allen argues, we should be able to negotiate loss and reciprocity without feeling stripped of our political agency and will when educational institutions step in to equilibrate resources and opportunity. These institutions stand in for a consensus that is hard to achieve in the face of the limitations of human self-interest. Yet, they have the power to achieve equity.
Today most communities around the nation have forsaken some of the most integral connections between schools and society by ignoring the potential of social integration. To truly shift the tides of social and educational inequality, we cannot afford to give up on an aspiration that the nation has yet to accomplish. Very likely, educational equity inheres in true integration, but its achievement can only be realized in communities with empathic hearts.