Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality (review)

“The answer for all our national problems comes down to one single word: education.”

Lyndon Johnson, 1970

Johnson was delivering celebratory remarks at his alma mater; a little hyper-bole was understandable. But turning to education as “the answer” was by 1970 a standard move, not just in commencement platitudes but in law. The G.I. Bill had set a precedent, making college a chief agent of “readjustment” for servicemen and for the whole nation at the end of the war. The National Defense Education Act of 1958 put education on the front lines of the Cold War, after the Soviet Union beat the United States into space with the satellite Sputnik, a year earlier. A court decision, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), pointed to school as the critical place to combat segregation. Three years later, nine fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds marched into Little Rock High School with armed troops from the 101st Airborne Division, to challenge three hundred years of white supremacy and racial hatred. Through the years of Johnson’s presidency, Congress punctuated growing up with educational moments, from Head Start for pre-schoolers to Pell Grants for college students.

John Marsh tells this story well in Class Dismissed, but not in the triumphal or elegiac tone liberals often use when reviewing Great Society support for education. Rather, he sees that support as in part an alibi. Not that he is against liberal boosts to equal opportunity: “as a former Work-Study and Pell Grant beneficiary,” he writes, “I would not be writing this book without them.” But faith in education as “the answer” to poverty and inequality is in his view an ideological evasion, with serious political consequences.

Before I turn in some detail to his argument, let me underscore its relevance to “national problems” beyond race, poverty, and inequality. By the 1980s, the educational system was under attack not so much for discriminating against black kids as for failing all kids, and the future of the United States. The “back-to-basics” backlash of the mid and late seventies—against sixties movements and against a much older tradition of progressive education—was followed by a slew of commission reports saying that weaknesses in U.S. education were subverting the national welfare. A pivotal one announced in its first paragraph, “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people,” as “competitors throughout the world” take on “our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation . . . “ (A Nation at Risk, 1983).

By 1989, George H. W. Bush, in pressing for his Educational Excellence Act, could turn these dire warnings into a positive creed, asserting that “educational achievement promotes sustained economic growth, enhances the Nation’s competitive position in world markets, increases productivity, and leads to higher incomes for everyone.” Note the absence from this list not only of claims that education will enhance the minds and lives of the educated, but also of claims that it will lead to a more equal and just society. An economic rationale suffices to justify spending public dollars.

So it was in the main Bush II study, A Test of Leadership; Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education (familiarly, “The Spellings Report”; 2006). What “we want” is “a world-class higher education system that . . . contributes to economic prosperity and global competitiveness.” It goes on, what “we” are in danger of getting is a college and university system “characterized by obsolescence,” like the railroads and steel mills and other industrial ruins of an earlier time. Help Wanted, a report of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce (2010), says “we [who?] will need 22 million new college degrees by 2018”; falling short of that goal will “damage the nation’s economic future,” as well as the prosperity of millions of workers unprepared for work in the knowledge...