150 Years of Working for Educational Justice: The U.S. Experience

by Dr. Michael Feuer, Dean of the Graduate School of Education and Human Development, The George Washington University

From April 5-9, 2017, GSEHD hosted 95 international Fulbright graduate students at GW for a Fulbright Enrichment Seminar entitled "Overcoming Barriers to Quality Education in the 21st Century." This is a slightly edited version of the keynote address which I presented to them on the first day of the seminar.

Few events bring me as much personal and professional satisfaction as being in the presence of visitors to our great country – and university – from around the world.

The personal part is simple to explain. I am the child of immigrants, a first-generation American, whose parents arrived here after the nightmare of WW2 determined to start over and make their new home in New York, amid the masses and multitudes whose colors and languages and religions and national origins formed one of the most stunning demographic mosaics the world has ever known. My first language was French, my neighbors in Queens were Irish and German and Greek and Italian and Catholic and Protestant and Jewish – and perhaps most amazingly we all thought of ourselves as Americans.

You’ll notice there’s something missing in that story. Yes, black children were not part of the mix, in my neighborhood at least, until the mid-1960’s, when thanks to the efforts associated with people like Thurgood Marshall and Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King and Joachim Prinz and Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman and James Chaney and Rosa Parks and thousands of others we finally got serious about fixing the greatest tragedy of American history and started integrating public schools and housing developments and lunch counters and yes, even public bathrooms. Things are better now, in some ways, but worse or stagnant in other ways. I’ll come back to that in a moment.

For my parents, who had known the worst forms of bigotry and oppression, America was a dream. And one of the most fascinating aspects of their experience here was the uniquely simultaneous invitation they perceived: to “become American” and – at the same time – to proudly “hold on” to their heritage. In other words, a foundational principle of the grand experiment known as the United States was the idea that what unites us is our differences. The phrase on the Great Seal of the United States (which perhaps you’ll see on your visit to the Capitol) is not just a slogan, or a cheap piece of campaign rhetoric. If someone asks you to define America while standing on one foot, you might say “e pluribus unum (from many, one)” … and that all the rest is commentary. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Fast forward to 1983, and the basic story repeats, albeit in a different time and with different details. That was the year when my wife, born in Morocco to Algerian Jewish parents and raised in Paris – where despite having French citizenship they really were never made to feel “at home” -- acquired American citizenship. She, too, happily if somewhat skeptically, accepted the invitation to join the mix, to become American, and never on condition that she stop celebrating her own special (some would say “exotic!”) linguistic and cultural and religious identity.

American pluralism, as you can see, is not just a political concept: it turns out to be something most of us have etched in our personal, familial, local DNA.

So much for autobiography. What about my professional reasons for loving to see you all here? I can boil them down to a simple declaration: the greatness of America is due in large part to the vastness of its diversity.

Some data will help make the point: Between 1890 and 1930, over 22 million immigrants landed on US shores. That means that in four decades our population expanded by about 35% (we were about 62M in 1890).

And what do you suppose made it possible for so many of these newcomers to succeed, to prosper, to be “at home?” It was mostly two institutions—the public schools and foreign-language newspapers—that smoothed the way for these immigrants to enter into and thrive in American society. This is a central conclusion in a marvelous book by Jeff Mirel, of the University of Michigan, called Patriotic Pluralism. I recommend it highly.

Mirel is a fine historian, and is not naïve: during that time we had lots of fights about immigration – and lots of ugly rhetoric about “nativism” and the dangers of letting all those people in – yes, sometimes history repeats… But on balance, the story of America’s incredible demographic transformation is about how we resisted the temptation to force immigrants to abandon their cultural heritage as a condition for their acceptance. On the contrary, as Mirel so eloquently writes, the interactions in schools between immigrants and native-born Americans produced a “broader, more cosmopolitan, and ultimately more democratic vision of American culture and national identity.”

By the way, the success story didn’t end in the 20th century. Today’s immigrants are assimilating much as their forebears did, according to two reports by the National Academy of Sciences. The Academy, known as our premier scientific organization, found that although first-generation immigrants start out with less education, their children meet or exceed the schooling level of typical native-born Americans who are third-generation or more. In a more recent report the Academy concluded that children of immigrants—the second generation—contribute more in taxes than either their parents or the rest of the native-born population. I encourage you to keep these data handy – real facts do matter!

Let me offer some additional context, especially about the role of education in our very multicultural society.

First some good news.

• Compulsory schooling was essentially invented in America, and by the early 1950s we already had roughly 78% of our teenagers enrolled in traditional high schools, compared to 12% in Germany, 15% in the UK, and 18% in Finland;
• there was for a long time a great and steady increase in average years of schooling, almost a year per decade between 1876 and 1951;
• nationwide, based on the measures we have, academic achievement in the core subjects has been improving – and, very significantly, it is worth underscoring that black and Hispanic students have been making greater gains than white students; and
• compared to the early 1970s, before federal legislation intervened, when only 1 in 5 children with disabilities attended public school, today most such students spend a majority of their school day in regular classrooms.

This is really quite extraordinary, especially when you consider the shameful statistic that 22% of our children are under the poverty line and that income inequality in America has exploded in the past 3 decades to levels never before achieved.

Which is a proper segue to the bad news part of my story.

A colleague of mine used to say that if you fall out of an airplane while flying across the country, you have a good chance of landing in one of the best schools in the world and as good a chance of landing in one of the worst—and often they are only a mile apart.

Should that be surprising, given our very peculiar history of fragmentation in the organization of schools and schooling? We have about 15,000 independent districts, operating in 50+ states that control most of the purse strings and important curriculum and teaching decisions. Yes, there is virtue in local control and community-based innovation; some of our political leaders like to cheer about how “parents know what’s best for their kids, and we don’t need a national school board, etc., etc…”

But we have also learned that states’ rights has produced lots of states’ wrongs, and that our national identity cannot tolerate national disgrace.

Thanks to the increasing federal role, starting roughly in the mid-1960s, we have made strong progress for minority and disadvantaged children, for English learners, for students with disabilities. But the tension between local control and the national ethos persists, and at times it seems like the elastic will snap. We seem to like the confusion, but we don’t – or shouldn’t – like the inevitable inequities that it aggravates.

Indeed, our biggest educational challenge is not our average performance; it’s the persistent, vexing, untenable inequality – of opportunity and of outcomes – that plagues us. To borrow from the language of statistics, our problem isn’t the mean, it’s the variance. (I would note that our persistent variance is, indeed, very mean!)

Think back to my childhood in Queens and to the missing piece in that otherwise lovely mosaic I depicted: the great experiment in universal schooling, which began in America ahead of most other countries, was fundamentally flawed in its exclusion of our African American brothers and sisters. They were invited, grudgingly, to the inclusion party only in the mid 1950s, after centuries of slavery followed by continued and rampant legal discrimination. And though there’s been progress, there’s obviously lots of work left to do.

The big question we face, then, the one that keeps me awake at night, is whether we will be faithful to our traditions and stand strong in the pursuit of equity and justice in the allocation of educational resources. Our pluribus is becoming ever more exciting: today roughly half of our public elementary and secondary school pupils are white, 16% are black, and 25% are Hispanic. Fifteen of our most populous states have non-white majorities of K-12 enrollments.

Writing in 1990, the preeminent historian of American education, Lawrence Cremin, noted this about our educational challenges: “If there is a crisis in schooling it is … balancing [a] tremendous variety of demands [we] have made on [our] schools and colleges – of crafting curricula that take account of the needs of a modern society at the same time that they make provision for the extraordinary diversity of [our] young people…”

What will the next generation of historians say about our work today? Can there be any doubt what our assignment must be? It is to strengthen, not retrench, our commitment to educational justice, and to the public schools that educate 90% of our children.

Not to close on a sad or pessimistic note, let me tell you why I’m optimistic. I have two main reasons:

The first is because of what I know this country stands for. We’re at the George Washington University, so it’s fitting to remember his mission and vision. In his letter to the Jewish community of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790, he wrote this: "The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy—a policy worthy of imitation... which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance…” I want to be confident that even in stressful times, our noble traditions will prevail. I’m glad to be living in a country whose capital is named after him, and quite fortunate to be working in a university named after him too!

The second reason for my optimism is because you are here, with us, for at least a while, and that means we can learn from you and from your countries’ diverse experiences and knowledge. I hope you soak up as much of this at times bewildering American culture as possible while you’re here, and that you will keep the image of George Washington – the man and the university – in your minds as you contemplate the complexities of what you’re witnessing.

My best wishes to all of you. Please do stay in touch!

4/6/2017