The Political Costs of Unequal Education · 2019. 5. 30. · Jane Junn, The Political Costs of...

The Political Costs of Unequal Education

Jane Junn

Department of Political Science &

Eagleton Institute of Politics Rutgers University

Paper prepared for the symposium on The Social Costs of Inadequate Education

Teachers College, Columbia University October 24-25, 2005

DRAFT – Do not cite without permission [email protected]

Executive Summary

The Political Costs of Unequal Education Jane Junn

• Education is a cornerstone of U.S. democracy, a notion supported by political philosophers and contemporary politicians from both sides of the political spectrum.

• Education makes democracy possible because it aids in the cognitive, ideological, and

strategic development of democratic citizens, allowing voters to acquire political information, deliberate about issues, voice perspectives, and engage in politics.

• The importance of education to democratic citizenship is neither solely a normative

dream nor a tool of political rhetoric. There is a long and well-documented empirical relationship between level of educational attainment and citizen political engagement.

• Americans with more education are more likely to be wealthy, and less likely to be

African American or Latino. Consequently, political activity in American democracy is characterized by divisions in class and race.

• Despite the egalitarian potential of education, the racial and class stratification in

democractic participation in the United States is the result of inequities in education.

• Education thus plays a dual role in driving democratic citizenship, at once enabling individuals to be active and engaged citizens, while simultaneously replicating structural hierarchies that reinforce inequality.

• Recognizing both the equality-enhancing and inequality-producing roles of formal

education is a reminder to carefully scrutinize educational policies designed to attenuate inequality.

• Policy change must therefore be directed in a broad context, focusing attention on both

education and the political system. American democratic institutions and practices must work together with education to enhance equality.

• The vigor and legitimacy of democracy in the United States depend on adequate and

equal education for all children in America.

Jane Junn, The Political Costs of Unequal Education, p. 1

1 Unequal education and the cost to democracy Even during times of war and economic recession, American voters consistently rank

education among the most important political issues facing the nation. While education has in

recent years slipped in prominence behind contemporary concerns such as terrorism and health

care, it remains high on the agenda because voters recognize the critical role education plays

both in individual social mobility, and in maintaining the overall health of the nation. It is

therefore a near-universal phenomenon for politicians to emphasize their support of education,

citing the good more education will bring to families, communities, the economy, and

democracy. The nature of education policy, however, differs dramatically among politicians

arrayed along the ideological spectrum, though it is difficult to imagine a successful candidate

for national political office running on a platform advocating less education. More is always

considered better. Yet the critical questions are how much more, what kind of education, and for

whom?

These questions are not easily resolved, and despite billions of dollars and decades of

policy intervention, children in the United States today remain separated by vast disparities in

educational quality and attainment. These inequalities have enormous social and economic

implications, opening opportunities for the well endowed, and foreclosing life chances for

students who fall behind. No more evident is the manifest significance of education than in the

political sphere, where it is those with higher levels of education who participate in the civic and

political life of the nation. In the 2004 election, for example, college graduates were nearly three

times as likely to vote as Americans without a high school degree, replicating a longstanding

pattern of political participation directly proportional to educational attainment. In this regard,

E.E. Schattschneider’s observation that the voice of the people is a “chorus with an upper-crust


accent,” remains as accurate today as it was nearly fifty years ago.1 Education policy is not only

driven by partisan political forces, but education – its quality, distribution, and content – has

enormous consequences for the conduct of politics and the legitimacy of democracy in America.

It is in this vein that I expand our discussion of the social costs of inadequate education to

include the political costs of unequal education.

I argue that the vigor and legitimacy of democracy in the United States are threatened in

the absence of equal education. Simply put, democracy loses when its citizens lack adequate

cognitive, economic and psychological resources and motivation for meaningful political

participation. Inequities in education have the result of creating systematic political disadvantage

for citizens who receive less schooling and education of poor quality. Likewise, when political

engagement is stratified by class and race, the resulting “voice of the people” is composed

disproportionately of the most advantaged citizens in American society, further straining the

legitimacy of U.S. democracy as a polity representing all of its people. The greater social and

economic advantage bestowed upon individuals through superior educational attainment

translates into unequal political voice that serves to compound discrepancies between Americans

separated by race and class. In what follows, I present data documenting the relationship between

educational attainment and citizen political participation, highlighting in particular the disparities

between Americans separated by race and class.

2 Education and the voice of the people

If there is a consistent refrain in the vast literature concerning education in America, it is

that it is good – good for democracy, for employment, for social mobility, for building strong

communities, and for democratic values. Indeed, education is most often viewed as a necessary 1 Schattschneider, The Semi-Sovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America, 1960.


resource for the development of democratic citizens, providing the building materials of

knowledge about American government, political literacy, critical thinking ability, and positive

affect for politics. That is a high bar indeed, but even the least ambitious among us would find

merit in the argument that education should provide, among other things, the basic cognitive

skills to participate in politics. Education, and more of it, has clear value for increasing the

likelihood that citizens will make their voices heard. For all forms of political participation for

which political scientists have standard measures, and since systematic data on the subject have

been collected, level of educational attainment and political behavior are positively and closely

linked. One scholar has given formal education the moniker of the “universal solvent” to

describe the strength and the consistency with which education predicts voting, campaign

activity, contributing money, writing letters, protesting, and engaging with other citizens.2 Table

1 presents data on voting in the 2000 and 2004 U.S. election by educational attainment. The data

clearly show a strong relationship between education and the proportion of citizens who reported

voting.3

2 Philip E. Converse, “Change in the American Electorate,” in The Human Meaning of Social Change, eds., Angus Campbell and Philip E. Converse (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1972). 3 Estimating voter turnout is an area of some controversy, and the data reported in Table 1 represent self-reported turnout among respondents interviewed by the U.S. Census Bureau in the Current Population Survey in 2000 and 2004. Official government estimates of voter turnout, calculated by tallying vote records from states, are typically 5% or more lower than the self-reports from surveys. People often mis-report and over-report their voting behavior in an interview setting. An additional controversy within voting studies is the use of the “voting age population,” versus the “voting eligible population” as the denominator for turnout statistics. The U.S. Electoral Assistance Commission, the official government organization charged with distributing information about voting in the United States, continues to utilize the former, which includes disenfranchised convicted felons and non-citizens, for example. In the last 10 years, the U.S. Census Bureau has estimated reported voter turnout with the CPS data for both the total population and among citizens only.


Table 1. Voting in 2000 & 2004 by Educational attainment % Citizen

population reported

voting, 2000

% Citizen population reported

voting, 2004

Proportion of population,

2004

Less than 9th grade

39 39 6

9th to 12th grade, no diploma

38 40 10

High school graduate or GED

53 56 32

Some college or Associate’s degree

63 69 27

Bachelor’s degree

75 78 17

Advanced degree

81 84 9

Total

60

64

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, November 2000 & November 2004

Less than half of Americans (39%) without a high school degree voted in the elections of

2000 and 2004. In contrast, just over half of high school graduates, nearly two-thirds of

Americans with some formal education beyond high school, and more than three-quarters of

those with a college degree or higher, report having voted in the Presidential elections. While not

shown here, the data for previous election years shows a remarkably consistent pattern of a

strong, positive and mostly linear relationship between educational attainment and voting.


Table 2: Voting in 2004 by Racial Group % Citizen

population reported

voting, 2004

% Total population reported

voting, 2004

White

67 66

Black

60 56

Hispanic/Latino

47 28

Asian

44 30

Total

64

58

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, November 2004 In national elections, at least, the voice of the people is disproportionately one that is well

educated. Table 2 documents voting participation in the 2004 election by race, and shows a

similar pattern of stratification, but along different dimensions. Figures are given for both the

proportion of the citizen population that reported voting, as well as the percent of the total

population of whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asians who said they voted in 2004. I present the data

in this way in order to highlight important differences in political activity between the citizen and

total Latino and Asian populations. Currently, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that 40% of

Latinos in the U.S. are immigrants, while 66% of Asian Americans are foreign-born. The rate at

which Asians naturalize to U.S. citizenship, however, is significantly higher than among Latino

immigrants. Table 2 shows that even holding constant U.S. citizenship, Asians and Latinos are

far less likely than their white and African American fellow citizens to vote. Two-thirds of

whites said they voted in 2004, while 60% of blacks voted. Less than half of Latino citizens, and

only 44% of Asian American citizens voted in 2004. The data show a clear pattern of louder

voice at the voting booth among white Americans as compared with minority citizens.


While voting is certainly an important indicator of citizenship, it is but one activity of

many that Americans can take part in to express their political voice. Table 3 presents data on

political participation by racial groups across a wide range of political activities. These data

come from a survey of the U.S. population conducted in October 2004, just before the

Presidential election. The main purpose of this study was to gather data on the identities and

political activities of members of various racial groups, with a special emphasis on the young

adult population. The method and scope of the resulting data collection differs in important ways

from the U.S. Census Bureau Current Population Survey, and as a result, the properties of the

Latino and Asian American respondents are distinctive. In particular, the sample is younger, and

the Latino and Asian American populations are significantly more likely to be born in the U.S. or

to be naturalized citizens. I present these data not as a comparative frame to the earlier Census

data on voting shown in Table 2, but to facilitate comparisons across the four racial groups

surveyed in this study across a range of political activities. Acts of political participation beyond

voting were asked of all respondents, including electoral activity such as persuading others how

to vote, attending campaign meetings or rallies, working for a candidate, and contributing money

to a campaign. The first half of the table documents the proportion of respondents in each of the

four racial groups who reporting participating in electoral activities. The data clearly show that

white Americans are the most active, followed closely by Asian Americans. Only in voting do

blacks Americans outpace Asian Americans, and for all other electoral activities, African

American and Latino voices are heard with lower frequency than the other two groups.


Table 3. Political Participation by Racial Group, 2004 % White % Black % Latino % Asian

American Electoral activities Voted in 2000 Presidential election

68 65 51 61

Persuade others how to vote

22 18 22 22

Attend campaign meeting or rally

9 4 7 7

Work for candidate

5 3 4 3

Contribute to a campaign

14 5 8 12

Average number of electoral activities

1.16 .95 .92 1.05

Other types of participation Contact government official

16 9 9 14

Sign petition

24 17 20 23

Protest

4 4 4 5

Boycott

11 6 11 11

Average number of other activities

.55 .36 .44 .53

N 421 416 416 354 Source: 2004 Ethnic Politics Pre-election Study, Junn 2005 Questions about activities beyond electoral politics were also asked in this study.

Americans reported whether they had contacted a government official, signed a petition,

protested, or engaged in a boycott. The results are shown in the second half of the table, and the

same pattern of white and Asian American advantage pertain here as well. Contrary to the

conventional expectation that resource-poor citizens would engage more frequently in the street

politics of the “weapons of the weak” – including protesting and boycotting – there was little

difference between any of the groups on the former, and African American are less likely to

boycott to express their political voice. Here again, the voices of those with more modest

economic resources are overshadowed by the political participation of the resource-rich.


While there are some surprises in these data, particularly the findings regarding the Asian

American population in the 2004 Ethnic Politics Study, the data provide strong evidence for the

finding that educational inequality drives disparities in citizen political engagement. Indeed, and

as scholars in this symposium document more fully, there are substantial differences between

Americans classified by race in terms of educational attainment. To highlight the divergence, I

include data from a 2003 U.S. Census Current Population Survey on educational attainment by

race in Table 4. The table shows vast differences in education between whites and Asians on the

one hand, and African Americans and Latinos on the other. Indeed, the inequality in educational

resources is staggering, particularly in comparing Latinos and Asians, the latter of which is both

most highly educated and more heavily immigrant population than the other three groups. Fully

half of Asian Americans are college-educated, and only 13% do not have a high school degree.

Conversely, 41% of Latinos did not finish high school, and 25% have less than a 9th grade

education. Only 12% of the Latino population in the U.S. has a college degree. African

Americans are also heavily disadvantaged in terms of college degrees, and 17% of blacks are

college-educated, compared with 32% of whites. Double the proportion of African Americans

(19%) than whites (10%) have less than a high school education.


Table 4: Educational Attainment by Race (population 25 years and over), 2003 % White % Black

% Latino

% Asian

Less than 9th grade

3 5 25 8

9th to 12th grade, no diploma

7 14 16 5

High school graduate or GED

33 36 28 20

Some college or Associate degree

27 27 19 18

Bachelor’s degree

20 12 9 30

Advanced degree

11 5 3 20

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplement, 2003

The data on educational attainment by race speaks volumes about why the patterns of

political engagement are as clear as they are. African Americans and Latinos are less likely to

express their political voice through participation in part because they possess significantly fewer

of the educational resources that facilitate political activity. But education is not the only

resource influencing participation, and income also plays a significant role. Table 5 details data

from the 1990 Citizen Participation Study by Sidney Verba, Kay Schlozman, and Henry Brady.4

The table compares the proportion of people with low annual income (less than $15,000) and

high income ($75,000 or more) who participate in a variety of political activities. Across the

board, the wealthy clobber the poor in expressing their political voice; the order of magnitude in

the difference across the two poles is substantial.

4 Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).


Table 5: Political Participation by Income (%) Income less

than $ 15,000Income $ 75,000 or

more

Voting

52 86

Campaign work

4 17

Campaign contributions

6 56

Contact government official

25 50

Protest

3 7

Informal community activity

13 38

Board membership

1 6

Affiliated with political organization

29 73

N (weighted) 483 224 Source: 1990 Citizen Participation Study, Verba Schlozman and Brady 1995 Education is again implicated in this important resource for political participation,

because income and earnings are so strongly tied to formal educational attainment. Table 6

presents U.S. Census Current Population Survey data from 2003 on average earnings by

educational attainment for the four racial groups. The bottom row in the table reiterates the story

of higher education contributing to stronger earnings for whites and Asian Americans. There is

more to the story than this overall conclusion, however, as the remaining cells in the table attest.

While Asian Americans have much higher levels of education overall than whites, their average

earnings, while larger, are not as big as one would predict in a population where half the

population has a college degree. Indeed, the only reason why the total income for Asians is larger

than whites is because there are so many more Asian Americans with high levels of education,

but who earn less than their white counterparts at every level of education. For example, whites

with a Bachelor’s degree earn just over $53,185, while the average earnings for Asian Americans


in the same educational category is $46,628. This pattern is repeated with even greater

magnitude for African Americans and Latinos. Again, at every level of educational attainment,

blacks fare the worst in terms of earnings, with average wages of $42,285 for those with a

Bachelor’s degree, twenty-five percent less than their white counterparts. Similarly

disadvantaged in terms of returns to educational attainment are Latinos, who also systematically

earn less than their white counterparts at every level of education.

Table 6: Educational Attainment and Average Earnings by Race, 2003 White Black

Latino

Asian

Not a high school graduate

$ 19,423 $ 16,516 $ 18,981 $ 16,746

High school graduate

$ 28,756 $ 22,823 $ 24,163 $ 24,900

Some college or Associate’s degree

$ 32,318 $ 27,626 $ 27,757 $ 27,340

Bachelor’s degree

$ 53,185 $ 42,285 $ 40,949 $ 46,628

Advanced degree

$ 74,122 $ 59,944 $ 67,679 $ 72,852

Total

$ 39,220 $ 28,179 $ 25,824 $ 40,793

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplement, 2003

Taken together, these data demonstrate a clear pattern of advantage in economy and

politics for those who achieve higher educational attainment. But that is not the entire story.

Even these simple tables reflect the searing reality of political and economic inequality at the

same levels of education for people of different racial groups. Education is most often viewed as

a resource that, when fairly distributed, can provide equal opportunities for individuals in society

to succeed. It is easy to drawn into the claim that more education is better, not only for its

normative appeal, but also because of the sheer quantity of evidence that supports the notion that

education contributes in a positive sense to many important individual-level outcomes. However

it is clear that education buys neither the same amount of political voice, nor an equal sum of


dollars in exchange for labor in the United States for minority Americans as it does for whites.

Something is clearly amiss with the notion that education is an equal-opportunity promoter

wealth and political advantage, and the data lay the groundwork for a story of the dual role of

education in American democracy.

3 The dual role of education

There is a longstanding belief in the critical role of education in the maintenance of a

healthy democracy. Political philosophers as diverse as Aristotle, John Locke, John Stuart Mill,

Thomas Jefferson, Horace Mann and Martin Luther King identify the enduring role of education

in the development of democratic citizens. Of particular significance is the role education plays

in inculcating a set of values supporting democratic principles and practice, training people to

prioritize norms of liberty and equality. In its first function, then, education is a socializing

mechanism, imparting values and teaching citizens how we ought to behave and what we need to

know about politics, tolerance and democratic principles of equality and fairness. At the same

time, education serves as a powerful sorting mechanism, conferring skills and signaling a higher

placement in the economic and social hierarchy for individuals based on educational attainment.

Indeed, generations of labor economists and sociologists have documented this second role of

education as one of the most powerful agents of stratification in post-industrial society. In this

regard, the same data that validate the critical importance of education to social, political and

economic outcomes and inform the position that more education is better, also identify education

as the main mechanism perpetuating hierarchy and inequality.

A simple counterclaim to this somewhat gloomy conclusion would be that despite its

equality-attenuating role, more education should still be better for politics and democracy


because it should engender more political participation, and consequently, more political voice.

If education is so strongly, positively, and consistently correlated with citizen engagement,

shouldn’t more education predict higher rates of political participation in the aggregate? It does

not. Educational attainment has never been higher for Americans, yet the rate of voting – the

most basic and widely-documented act of citizen participation – has remained constant over the

exact time period in which the proportion of Americans with a high school degree has nearly

doubled, and the college-educated population tripled. Table 7 presents trends in voter turnout and

educational attainment between 1964 and 2000. Scholars who view this set of relationships as a

puzzle make the mistake of extrapolating longitudinally from the cross-sectional evidence that

higher education predicts more participation. It is not only empirically incorrect to predict there

is more citizen participation over time as a result of more education, it also theoretically wrong

to expect the relationship to pertain.

Table 7: Trends in voter turnout* and educational attainment,** 1964-2004 Year National

voter turnout (VAP) %

High school graduate

%

College graduate

%

1964 62 48 9 1968 61 53 11 1972 55 58 12 1976 54 64 15 1980 53 69 17 1984 53 73 19 1988 50 76 20 1992 55 79 21 1996 49 82 24 2000 55 84 26 2004 NA 85 27 Source: Electoral Assistance Commission (EAC); U.S. Census Bureau * The EAC calculates national voter turnout as a function of the voting age population (VAP), including all residents 18 years and older in the U.S. regardless of disenfranchisement (e.g., felony conviction) or citizenship. Official estimates of voter turnout in 2004 are not yet available. ** Percentages calculated for the population 25 years and older.


Instead, uncovering the answer lies in the recognition of the importance of the relative

distribution of education among politically relevant groups. More education for all – increasing

the adequacy of education – implies a framework for returns to education in real terms, serving

to “raise the floor” in terms of educational resources. This is clearly important, but it is an

insufficient solution to the necessary imperative to “level the playing field” among democratic

citizens separated by disparities in social and economic resources, chief among them, their

degree of educational attainment. As the engine driving labor market participation, occupational

certification, and income earnings, education is a prime mechanism behind economic

stratification. To the extent that political influence follows financial resources, in politics as in

economy, the rich get richer. Politicians disproportionately hear messages and feel political

pressure from those with greater economic, and therefore, political resources. If there were no

differences in terms of policy preferences and political attitudes between groups of people

categorized by financial resources and education, the phenomenon of preferences voiced

disproportionately from well-heeled citizens might be more benign. But this is not the case; not

only do educationally- and economically-disadvantaged voters participate in politics at a far

lower rate than middle-class and wealthy citizens, they have distinctive political preferences.

Raising the floor by providing more adequate education for this group of Americans certainly

aids their ability to advocate for their positions, but they remain at a relative disadvantage to

those already ahead of them in the educational and political game. Education is thus a force that

is both positive-sum and zero-sum, imparting skills to those who take part, but also acting as a

powerful sorting device, by placing some at the top of the hierarchy and leaving others at the

bottom. In this regard, and as a mechanism of social stratification, education can be conceived as

exactly the opposite of an equalizing force. Education can at once be both a purveyor of


individual-level resources while at the macro-societal level, act to reproduce and legitimate

structural inequalities that drive disparities and nurture inequality.

These inconsistencies in expectation and outcome provide another way to look at

education as an individual-level resource. While formal education may indeed encourage the

development of cognitive ability and individual resources, it may also be the case that these skills

are far less relevant to securing one’s place in the social hierarchy of American life. Instead, the

important of education to stratification may be the role it plays as a powerful socialization

device, teaching students who are successful and who progress through educational institutions

to also become initiated into the hierarchical norms of commerce, politics, and social life.5 In

short, education may be a particularly effective means of reproducing cultural, political, and

economic practices. As one of the primary mechanisms behind social stratification, education

can also be conceived as exactly the opposite from an equalizing force. Instead, at the macro-

societal level, education may reproduce and legitimate structural inequalities that in turn drive

vast disparities in wealth, and nurture the persistence of the dominance of the in-group to the

systematic disadvantage of out-groups.6 How can education be understood simultaneously as

both an equalizing force and a stratification mechanism? Education both enables and restricts; it

is a location for the development of both individual agency and structural constraint.

The value of the resources conveyed upon individuals by educational attainment must be

considered in relation to what level of resources are held by others in the society. The value of

education to social outcomes like income earnings and political participation must be assessed in

5 See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu 1987, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, 2nd ed., (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1990). 6 This “revisionist” perspective identifies education as critical to the maintenance of capitalism. See Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976). But also see Paul Willis, Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977) for his analysis of the Hammertown lads subjectively reproduce labor power through resistance to and rebellion from middle-class educational imperatives.


relative terms to how much everyone else has. More education in the aggregate does not

necessarily improve conditions at either the macro-societal level or the individual level. Instead,

more education simply shifts the baseline upward. If the pace of gains by disadvantaged groups

does not keep up with the growth in education by advantaged groups, the former fall further

behind even as they are making progress in level of educational attainment in an absolute sense.

Far from a simple theoretical exercise, this situation reflects the current reality of more rapid

gains in education by the advantaged over African-Americans and Latinos, who continue to

operate at a distinct educational disadvantage. The gap in educational attainment between whites

and Asians on the one hand, and African-Americans and Latinos on the other, has narrowed, but

not disappeared. These conclusions about the collective outcomes of education are sobering for

minorities and the poor, who have more to lose from the educational progress of advantaged

groups.

Disadvantaged groups stay that way not only by virtue of their relatively low placement

in the educational hierarchy, but also because the legitimacy of this unequal structure is

propagated in part by American educational institutions themselves. Rather than sitting outside

of the political, economic, and social structures that reinforce inequality and domination,

education is a part of it. Education plays two important roles in the maintenance of an ideology

of meritocracy in the United States. In its sorting function, formal education confers certification,

degrees and other scarce outcomes that places those with what are defined as the best credentials

at the top of the hierarchy, and those with lesser near the bottom. In its role as a powerful

socializer, education teaches the ideology of meritocracy, by grading on normal curves and

assuring those who finish on the right tail that they will succeed because they deserve to. The

second role is critical, for it is necessary to have some mechanism which reliably reproduces the


ideology that maintains the positions of power for those at the top who benefit from the system

as it already exists.7 When outcomes are positional or scarce – when not everyone can be rich,

and not everyone can be granted admission into a top school – the liberal democratic ideology

must have an answer to its production of unequal outcomes. Merit can be used as a justification

for inequality of outcomes in a system where the rules are supposed to be fair.

This discussion of the dual role of education as both a location for the development of

individual agency as well as and structural constraints is intended as a gentle if unpleasant

reminder that policies that seek to redress the consequences of political inequality cannot assume

that providing more resources for competition in an unequal system will eliminate the inequality.

To the extent that education contributes to the maintenance of social stratification, sorting those

with high attainment and credentials to the top and those with less toward the bottom, while at

the same time reproducing an ideology of meritocracy, we cannot expect that mechanism in its

same form to also dismantle the hierarchy.

4 Education for citizenship

The magnitude of the loss for democracy from inadequate and unequal education is not

easily measurable. For it is difficult to quantify the cost to the American democratic polity for

the loss of citizen political participation and social engagement, and it is tricky to enumerate the

lost political capital that stems from the absence of a sense of belonging and empowerment in the

community. Nor is it clear whether strengthening democracy through expanded citizen

participation is a goal shared by all. Skeptical observers point to the strategic calculations

manifest among political players with precisely the opposite imperative – to keep people out of

7 Charles Tilly, in Durable Inequality (University of California Press 1999) describes these processes of “emulation” and “adaptation.”


the political sphere. The power elite, including political incumbents occupying “safe” legislative

seats, are most comfortable when constituents are predictable voters or abstainers; adding

newcomers to the mix only introduces uncertainty to elections. The extremely high degree of

incumbent success in the United States Congress – less than 10% of seats in the House of

Representatives are expected to be competitive elections in 2006 – provides strong testimony to

the creativity of those in power to control the political system. In this regard, foes of expanding

the electorate and increasing citizen participation come in all partisan stripes. In addition, a long

tradition of political thought deeply embedded in the American political experience has defined

politics as the province of the elite. This is perhaps best exemplified in founding elements of

American democratic institutions including the Electoral College and a bicameral federal

legislature designed to insulate the Senate from the popular will. While many of the vestiges of

this 18th Century elitism are no longer clearly visible (U.S. Senators are now elected directly

elected by voters from the states), the legacies of elitist democratic theory remain evident today.

Taking their cue from enlightenment philosophers, modern political theorists in the elitist

tradition continue to make a strong normative case for encouraging political participation only

among educated and informed citizens who are least susceptible to political manipulation and

demagoguery.

From quite the opposite pole emanates a different critique of the normative position that

more participation is good for democracy. More political activity has been advocated as a

procedural and substantive solution for distributional inequities in social and political goods.

Increasing political activity among those traditionally disadvantaged and politically

underrepresented can help create public policies that take their interests into account as well as

empower those previously disenfranchised to take political stands in order to develop and


forward their interests. Because minorities tend to participate in politics at comparatively lower

rates, people in these groups have become the target for calls for political activity through

naturalization and voter registration drives. Such well-intentioned campaigns seek greater

equality in political outcomes by making the electorate more descriptively representative of the

population at large. The inference is that policies beneficial to those previously disenfranchised

are most likely to be adopted when the face of the electorate mirrors the face of the polity.

Conversely, undesirable political outcomes are reasoned to be the result of the lack of political

activity among those whose interests are at stake. Under circumstances of relatively modest rates

of political activity among minorities, what falls under scrutiny for change are the individuals

who supposedly influence the institutions and process of democratic government, rather than the

institutions and practices themselves. In this regard, the analytic emphasis on the individual-level

subject has trained the focus for change on the non-participant citizen while at the expense of a

critical examination of the structure and institutions of democracy in which agency is acted out.

But if we relax the assumption that the political process – the democratic culture,

practice, and institutions of democracy – provides equality of agency for all regardless of race or

some other politically-relevant category, then the comparatively low rates of participatory

activity among minority Americans can be interpreted in another way, as an indicator of the

structural inequalities present. The analytic strategy of holding the assumption to greater scrutiny

does not necessarily imply a structurally functionalist argument. Rather, it asks us to consider the

location of the significance of race for political participation on the dichotomy between structure

and agency that make up the ends of the continuum from the debilitating determinism of a

system continually reenacting domination, to the unwarranted optimism of unencumbered

agency.


In developing strategies to enhance democracy by improving the adequacy and equality

of education, we first need to ask “what good is more education for democracy?” rather than take

it for granted. To fruitfully address the problems of democracy, we must train the focus of our

policy recommendations not only on the education community at large, but on the structures and

institutions of government itself. We must ask whether citizens are being presented with

adequate resources to act, and question how we might re-envision the incentives for political

engagement to be more inclusive of all citizens. John Dewey observed that one of the most

important roles of education is to promote the social continuity of life. If one of these

continuities in a democracy is based on principles of liberty and equality, and in that regard

innovation, it should be the case that we should continually strive to improve our democratic

system of institutions and structures. Ultimately, more education and more democracy do hold

promise for a better America. But it must be a democracy that is enacted in a way that provides

equal access and opportunities to participate. Education can make democracy possible, but it

must also be the case that democracy enables education to find its transformative potential.


The Political Costs of Unequal Education · 2019. 5. 30. · Jane Junn, The Political Costs of...

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