EdFix Episode 8: Tackling Inequality in America - One Foundation's Approach

TRANSCRIPT

ADAM GAMORAN:
We know enough about where inequality comes from and how it works to begin examining the responses to inequality. And while some of that work is going on, we need much more of it.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Welcome to EdFix. I'm Michael Feuer. I'm your host for this podcast, which is all about the insights on the practice and promise of education. The William T. Grant Foundation is a relatively small philanthropic organization in New York City with a big agenda, and the President of the William T. Grant Foundation, Adam Gamoran, has been with us here at GW now for about a day. Before joining the foundation in 2013, he was for just about 30 years a member of the faculty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and I would say that Adam is among the five or 10 most distinguished sociologists of education working in the United States, and it's a great pleasure and honor to welcome you to EdFix. Adam, say a little bit about the foundation, Madison, what took you from one place to the other, and then we're going to get into some of the issues that you're dealing with.

ADAM GAMORAN:
Sure. Well, I had a fantastic career at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I loved it there, and I had opportunities not only to do my own research, but to work with other researchers in my roles there as a department chair and a center director. I enjoyed the opportunity to support other people to get their research carried out, and when the opportunity to lead a foundation came, for me, it was an extension of the kind of work that I had been doing, the chance to nurture a much larger group of researchers and take work in innovative new directions that I think our field needs.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
So say a little bit then about the foundation's agenda.

ADAM GAMORAN:
Yeah. The William T. Grant foundation, which was started in 1936, supports research to improve the lives of young people, focusing on young people in the United States, ages five to 25. Within that broad mission, we have two primary areas of interest. One is on reducing inequality in youth outcomes. The argument here is, inequality in the United States is excessive, and you can see that if you compare the United States to other countries, or if you compare us to our own historical past. Inequality is at a height that has not been seen in the time we've been collecting data on these matters. Second, excessive inequality is harmful. It's a drag on our economic productivity, and it's socially divisive. However, third, we are not paralyzed in the face of inequality. On the contrary, inequality responds social programs and policies. And so fourth, if inequality is excessive, excessive inequality is harmful, but inequality responds to policy, then we need research to identify programs, policies, and practices that reduce inequality.

ADAM GAMORAN:
So that's the first area of focus. The second area, improving the way evidence from research is used in policy and practice. Now, we're in the business of supporting research, because we're trying to improve the lives of young people, but if nobody listens to the findings of the research, that is not going to go very far in helping young people thrive. So what can we do to increase the chances that research gets used? Now, it's not uncommon for research to be cited by policymakers, but usually it's after they've made the decision about what policy to undertake and they cherry-pick the research to support the decision they've already made. We call that the tactical use of research. What we're interested, instead, is the instrumental use of research, where the question is, "I have a challenge. I have a problem. I want to implement some policies to respond to that problem. Let's see what the research says."

ADAM GAMORAN:
We're also interested in the conceptual use of research, where policymakers and practitioners use research to think in new ways about a problem, to identify a new solution set. And so we're interested in research that will identify conditions that foster the instrumental and conceptual use of research. It turns out that the quality of research is not a strong predictor of whether it's used in policy and practice. Instead, it's more about the relationships between the producers and the consumers of evidence and the intermediaries who bind them together. So we want to support research that will identify conditions that create those relationships, supports those relationships, conditions such as research practice partnerships, where researchers and decision makers work together to jointly identify a research agenda so that the questions asked in the research are ones whose answers really matter to the policymaker, and to build the capacity of the policy institution to use data in its decision making and to create incentives for researchers to ask questions whose answers are relevant to the pressing needs of our day.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Can you give us a little bit more of the ways in which you define inequality? Are we talking about inequality mostly of opportunity, or are we talking about inequality of outcomes, or both?

ADAM GAMORAN:
Yeah. There's a tendency to try to find inequality in terms of opportunity, because it's all too easy to say, "We need to put people at an even starting line. That's our responsibility. Fairness demands that everybody gets an equal start." But it turns out that even when people have an equal start, they're not running the race with the same freedom. So we need to focus on results. We need to look at the outcomes and ask, "What conditions promote more equality in outcomes?" Look, we can think about inequality in two different ways. One, in the overall dispersion of some valued good like income or test scores, but inequality also means group differences, like the black-white test score gap, or disparities in mental health services, or other differences between groups.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
It is my understanding, from reading some of the data, that income inequality, in particular in America, has exploded over the last probably 30 years now. To what extent does that big change in income inequality in the United States mirror similar trends in other countries? And second of all, what happened? How did we allow that explosion to take place?

ADAM GAMORAN:
Yeah. So other English speaking countries, UK, Australia have experienced some expansion in inequality, but not to the degree that the US has, and other European countries have not experienced the expansion of income inequality that the US. A wonderful source on this is Thomas Piketty's recent book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which lays out these comparisons of national differences in inequality expansion, and the US really stands out compared to other western countries, in the dramatic increase in income inequality. And you're right to date it over the last 30 years, and it has to do with a variety of macro social trends, changes in taxation policy, which have reduced taxes on the wealthiest citizens, the technological revolution, which have rewarded education and training in ways that have exacerbated gaps between those who have high levels of education and technical skills compared to those who don't, and this has a variety of pernicious consequences on our society to drag on social mobility, for example.

ADAM GAMORAN:
There's some controversy about the relation between inequality and mobility, but I think the weight of the evidence suggests that excessive inequality makes it difficult for young people to be upwardly mobile. It's certainly socially divisive, wrecks cohesiveness, and I think part of the political divide we're seeing in our country today is a result of economic inequality, of income inequality. And we see the implications of income inequality in a variety of realms, in education and health, in mental health, in public services. Implications are quite dramatic, and this is why President Obama, former President Obama in 2013 declared that income inequality is the defining challenge of our time.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
You used the word "mobility" earlier, and I just want to make sure we're understanding that by this you really mean the likelihood that children will achieve a higher level of socioeconomic status than their parents, as opposed to "mobility," meaning the capacity to move from Madison to New York City, which is another form of mobility.

ADAM GAMORAN:
Yeah. You know, there's a famous study of the American occupational structure which showed that for the World War II generation, two-thirds of the sons of blue collar workers became white collar workers. That is a tremendous upward mobility. We no longer have that kind of mobility, and part of that has to do with the high degree of inequality we have today, and part of that has to do with a slowdown in economic growth. We're not experiencing, except for perhaps this small period of artificial growth, which resulted from an unwarranted tax cut for rich people, we're not experiencing that kind of growth these days, as Robert Gordon has displayed in his recent book. And so mobility cannot occur to the same degree as it did in the past, and this is one reason why inequality is so damaging, because in a period where everybody is improving, where all boats are being lifted by the tide, inequality doesn't seem so problematic. But in a period where the tide is lifting some and holding down others, the growing inequality is even more problematic.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Say something now about the relationship of research about an issue to research to change an issue?

ADAM GAMORAN:
Yeah. That's a great question. So most of my work, and certainly most work in sociology and much of economics has been understanding the extent and sources of inequality. And it's my stance that we know enough about where inequality comes from and how it works to begin examining the responses to inequality. And while some of that work is going on, we need much more of it. We need to be looking at programs and policies that can reverse this increasing gaps that we're seeing, that can reverse the increase in inequality.

ADAM GAMORAN:
And whether it's programs like financial aid for college students, or instructional approaches that support the learning of English learners, or social-psychological interventions that mitigate the threat of stereotypes, all of these are approaches that have been devised, they have some theoretical basis, have empirical grounding, and need to be taken into the field and examined. And similarly for others that are not so far advanced as those three examples that I just gave, but need to be developed and implemented, and at the foundation we're supporting a range of efforts to examine specific approaches to responding to inequality on the basis of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or immigration status.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
As a dean in a university that is all about promoting knowledge production, the phrase, "We know enough," is not the kind I would probably get very far putting on my letterhead.

ADAM GAMORAN:
Well, we know enough about what? We know enough about one thing and so we need to ask a different question. That's the argument I'm making. We know enough about where inequality comes from, and how much it is, and how bad it is to begin a much greater scrutiny of responses to inequality. The typical sociology paper about inequality, it's about 20 pages long. The first 19 pages are about how much inequality there is, what its sources are, and what its terrible consequences are. And then in the last page, the author says, "Now if we could just stop doing these bad things, we'd have less inequality."

ADAM GAMORAN:
What we're trying to fund is research that leads to 20 page papers on inequality where the first page is about how much inequality there is, what its sources and consequences are, and the other 19 pages are about what we can do about it and how well those efforts work out. So we need to increase our scrutiny. It's not that we know enough about everything, it's that we need to move from understanding inequality to reducing inequality. We need to move, as sociologist Thomas DiPrete has put it, we need to move from framing the problems of inequality to examining efforts to reduce inequality.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
How do you double down in an era when there is so much skepticism, mistrust for scientific evidence? Can you make the case that research really can and should matter, and here's how?

ADAM GAMORAN:
There is a movement to support evidence-based policymaking, and that movement has supporters on both the right and the left sides of the political spectrum. Not in the extreme of either side, but certainly it was Paul Ryan from the right and Patty Murray from the left who sponsored the Commission on Evidence Based Policymaking, which started its work under the Obama Administration, and concluded its work under the Trump Administration. The House of Representatives have passed a bill to increase the use of evidence and build an infrastructure for use of evidence in government policymaking, to take advantage of the data we're already collecting to make smarter policies, and that awaits some action in the Senate. There remains a current of interest in evidence-based policymaking in government, despite the harsh anti-evidence rhetoric. So we're not shut out. However, I do think this is a great time to be taking stock of our expectations and how far we can go with the movement to support evidence-based policymaking.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
The pipeline between the research findings and some evidence that that evidence is being used seems to encounter clogs-

ADAM GAMORAN:
Resistance.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
... and resistance.

ADAM GAMORAN:
Yeah. Yeah. I agree, but that, again, it doesn't mean more paralyzed. It doesn't mean the situation is hopeless. It means we need to develop stronger relationships between researchers and policymakers. We need structures that support those relationships. We need a culture of evidence within our government, and that's not just the federal government. State and local policymakers also need access, they need support, and they need a pipeline where they can develop trusting relationships with honest brokers of evidence that will help them weigh the evidence as part of their deliberations. Not that it will drive deliberation, but that it will be at the table when decisions are made.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Do you view part of your mission as a small but influential foundation to shore up our optimism for the continued investment in research?

ADAM GAMORAN:
Well, we can't make up for cuts in government funding, not even the Gates Foundation, which is the biggest foundation, can compete with the government with levels of funding. But what we can do is serve as a catalyst. And so in our portfolio of research on reducing inequality, we're trying not just to support a few studies, but to influence the field to shift its interest from understanding to reducing inequality, and in our support for research on improving the use of evidence, we're trying to build a field of knowledge utilization, to build the science of knowledge utilization, and to bring other funders along with us, including government funders, and we've had allies in the Department of Education, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Health and human Services who are very interested in building up this field of knowledge of utilization.

ADAM GAMORAN:
And so we can serve as a catalyst. As far as serving as a ray of optimism in dark times, I think that's a role we can play as well. Indeed, after the unexpected election results of 2016, we thought about, "What role can we play in responding to the divisiveness and hostility that's been unleashed?" Following the 2016 election, we decided to create a small program to try to quickly protect populations that were increasingly vulnerable under the Trump Administration, gay and lesbian youth, immigrant populations, refugee populations, language minority groups, and we issued a series of rapid response research grants to synthesize existing findings, apply them to a particular context, and enact an action plan, an engagement plan that would take the use of research into the field.

ADAM GAMORAN:
So an example here is the Duke University working in collaboration with World Relief Durham and the Durham Public Schools that has developed a professional development program for teachers on integrating Muslim refugee children in the Durham Public Schools. This program has been successful. It's been picked up, and will be sustained in Durham, and hopefully spread to other communities.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
The initiatives to address problems of vulnerable populations you have described as being, to some extent, in response to political change. This might be a good opportunity for you to distinguish the prerogative of a philanthropy to express itself on certain kinds of norms, social goals, attitudes and values, while at the same time remaining pretty neutral with respect to political partisanship.

ADAM GAMORAN:
A foundation like ours is prohibited from lobbying, so we do not advocate for or recommend or promote particular pieces of legislation. We also don't support political candidates, and we are open to working with any party, and we have certainly engaged in conversations with members of the Trump Administration about the evidence findings, and we interact with Republicans and Democrats at both the national level and the state level, and we work with the actors in local communities, whatever political party they come from. Some might perceive that by our choice of priorities, for example, the priority to reduce inequality, we're taking a political stance. I don't look at it that way. It is a expression of values, but I don't think it's a political stance.

ADAM GAMORAN:
Our board of trustees consists of people from various political persuasions. Inequality is an issue for Republicans as well as for Democrats. Certainly historically, after all, George W. Bush passed No Child Left Behind, which was intended to support the learning of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. So increasing inequality is not a Republican or a Democratic issue. It's a national issue.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
So I would like to hear a little bit more about your own, there you go, you're all about youth and opportunity, say something about your own youth and where this all came from.

ADAM GAMORAN:
I come from a family of educators. Both of my grandfathers had PhDs. My maternal grandfather got his PhD at the Sorbonne and was a professor of political economy. My paternal grandfather got his PhD in education at Teacher's College of Columbia University, and he became the first education director of the Reform Movement, the Jewish Reform Movement in the United States, and he brought modern methods of teaching to Jewish education in America. Both of my grandmothers were also educators. My maternal grandmother was a teacher, and my paternal grandmother was a teacher and an author of textbooks for Jewish education. So while my grandfather was transforming the educational system, my grandmother was supplying the textbooks to meet that system. Both of my parents are also educators. My mother was a high school Spanish teacher, leading to a career as a teacher of the homebound, and my father is a Rabbi and the fundamental element of the role of Rabbi is to be a teacher. So certainly education was in my bloodstream, and turned out to be both my chosen profession as a professor, and the topic of my study.

ADAM GAMORAN:
My mother's father always said, "When are you going to deal with the big questions?" When I was an early a PhD student and then an early assistant professor, I was doing research on ability grouping in first grade, and my grandfather thought that was too small a matter. I needed to deal with the big questions, and I tried to explain to them that we can only answer the big questions if we can get the small questions right. So I think I'm finally dealing with the big questions, certainly reducing inequality in American society, which is what we're really after at the William T. Grant Foundation, that's certainly a big question.

ADAM GAMORAN:
I had the opportunity to be a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and I loved my 30 years at Wisconsin, and certainly nothing chased me away. It was the chance to do something new, and so when the chance to lead a foundation with a great staff, a great reputation, and the chance to define new focus areas for the foundation came up, a strong board of trustees, it was a great opportunity and I was eager to take it. Also, I lived in Madison, Wisconsin for 30 years. Now I live in New York City, and so that's a lot of fun too.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
I know that the William T. Grant Foundation is, because of your work on inequality, interested in mechanisms that can actually promote the advancement of a diverse student body and a diverse faculty. And that's a segue into asking you about one of the projects of the foundation, which has to do with what we call mentorship.

ADAM GAMORAN:
Yes. So the foundation has long had an interest in building a diverse faculty and building a diverse community of researchers who are our grantees, and who are engaged in the kinds of research that we support. And for a number of years, our William T. Grant Scholars Program, which is our fellowship program for early career research, our career development program for early career researchers, has had the opportunity to compete for supplemental awards to support mentoring. And what's unique about this mentorship program has been that the focus is not just on the mentees, the recipients of mentoring, who are graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from underrepresented backgrounds, but also on helping the mentors, these early career faculty members, become better mentors. And a key focus has been on mentoring across difference, so this means different backgrounds. For example, a white faculty member mentoring students of color. What does the faculty member need to know? What sensibilities and sensitivities does the faculty member has to have? What unique challenges to students of color or postdoctoral fellows of color face, and how can the mentor help address those challenges?

ADAM GAMORAN:
Recently, we expanded this effort to our major research grantees, so they also have an opportunity to compete for these mentoring awards, and the goal is both to advance the career of the mentees, to give them experiences and research that will help them build the resume and body of experiences that will lead them to be successful faculty members, and to help the mentors think about their roles as mentors, particularly to build skills and assets as mentors across difference.

ADAM GAMORAN:
Now, we've had our mentors and mentees in for a number of conversations. We've scrutinized the successes and challenges faced by this mentoring program, and we noticed that successful mentoring and the advancement of the careers of the mentees is only partially under our control, because it turns out that faculty of color face barriers within their institutions that are beyond the confines of the mentoring relationship.

ADAM GAMORAN:
Recently we released a report called Moving it Forward, which is about the institutional barriers faced by junior scholars of color and how universities can confront those barriers and overcome them. So some of these barriers include the fact that there are so many service obligations on early career faculty of color, because every committee wants a faculty member of color to serve on it. We call this cultural taxation, special burdens on our early career faculty. Implicit bias, which is a pervasive problem in American society, but has manifested within our universities, where there might be a unanticipated and even unconscious disdain for the contributions of scholars of color. There are social networks that may exclude faculty of color, and so that results in a kind of an isolation.

ADAM GAMORAN:
And so when mentors are aware of these challenges, they can help bring them to the attention of the university and to try to respond to them. Scholars of color get into their work very often because they are committed to serving their communities, to giving back, and they are going to be more effective in the long run if they establish their work as successful scholars first and then provide these service obligations. So we hope that this report, Moving it Forward, will serve as a curriculum for universities across the country to develop more effective strategies for supporting the career progress of junior scholars of color.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
So this example is important both substantively, because it's a topic that is of great interest to a growing number of universities and departments and programs, but it also suggests something about a product of the foundation that I would say has the potential for having indirect as well as direct effects. Because you are writing these reports, they're on your website, people who didn't necessarily benefit from a direct grant from the foundation are able to partake of some of the knowledge and the wisdom and the evidence that is summarized in these kinds of reports. Keep that website humming and keep those reports coming. It's been a great pleasure, and as always, I am very inspired by your thinking, your words, and your work, Adam, and thank you for coming to GW and to EdFix.

ADAM GAMORAN:
Thank you. It's been my pleasure.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to the EdFix Podcast on iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Stitcher, SoundCloud, or Player FM. And for more information about the podcast, our guests, you can visit our website at go.gwu.edu/edfix. Thank you so much.

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