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3. Other Social Divisions
- Brookings Institution Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
The gap between the thinking of teachers and the public as a whole may be wide, but other opinion gaps compete for the attention of policy analysts and political leaders. For some, education politics is first and foremost an extension of the culture wars.1 For others, it is a by-product of class politics, with well-heeled suburbanites resisting measures to use their tax dollars to equalize spending across school district lines.2 Often, education conflict is cast in generational terms: will senior citizens support adequate education funding even though they have no school-age children , or do they want government funding to be concentrated on services for the elderly?3 Homeownership is sometimes regarded as the central issue, partly because schools have traditionally been funded by the local property tax.4 Partisan polarization is a favorite theme whenever education policy is under consideration at the state and the national level. Republicans have generally opposed increased federal control and federal spending , but more recently, Republican president George W. Bush used federal authority to hold schools accountable. Democrats have generally favored increased federal spending and regulation, but in recent years some Democratic members of Congress have raised questions about the use of federal power to require student testing and school accountability.5 Most clearly, race and ethnic conflicts have spilled over into the education arena. After all, it was school desegregation that was the focus of Brown v. Board of Education, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s concentrated much of its effort on the restructuring of school boundaries to minimize the educational effects of segregated residential neighborhoods . Racial and ethnic issues remain. Is further integration necessary? What is the best way to narrow racial and ethnic test-score gaps? How do CHAP TER THREE Other Social Divisions 31 schools best teach students whose native tongue is not English? Are affirmative action policies constitutional? Surely, one cannot talk about cleavages in American education without acknowledging the relevance of one of the country’s deepest divides.6 While all of the above-mentioned divisions are educationally relevant, our survey data suggest that none of them—with the possible exception of the racial and ethnic divide—impinge on school affairs with as much intensity as the teacher-public gap. We detect only modest divisions between parents of school-age children and other adults, between homeowners and renters, between the affluent and those of lesser means, between young and old, and between evangelical Protestants and others.7 Even the much-discussed polarization between Democrats and Republicans does not rival that between teachers and the public. Only the cleavages between whites and blacks and whites and Hispanics come close to rivaling in depth and range the disagreement between teachers and the public at large. Those divides, we argue, have the potential for complicating the teacher-public divide if school choice issues come to predominate. While minority opinion aligns with the views of teachers on such issues as education spending and some teacher prerogatives, on school choice issues the minority community and teachers are at odds. If those divides should gain in salience, they could strain relations between two constituencies—teachers’ organizations and ethnic minorities—that have long been among the most reliable supporters of the Democratic Party. The Broad Picture The shape of each social cleavage is displayed in appendix table A-1. Column 1 shows the differences between the opinions of teachers and the public that were reported in chapter 2. In the next columns, the opinions of parents (2), homeowners (3), the affluent (4), and those who say that they have been “born again” (5) are each contrasted with the opinions of all other survey respondents who took a side on the issue. In subsequent columns, the comparisons are more focused: the views of the oldest third of respondents (6) are contrasted with the views of the youngest third; Democrats’ views (7) are compared with those of Republicans (excluding independents), and African American (8) and Hispanic (9) opinions are 32 Other Social Divisions [54.166.200.255] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:46 GMT) each differentiated from white opinions (excluding Asians and others). In each case, it seems sensible to contrast the identified group with another equally defined group rather than with all other respondents, but the reader should note that such an analytic strategy may identify a sharper divide than if the group had been compared with the rest of the population (that is, for example, if the oldest...