|
Public Policy and Cultural Capital
February 29, 2008
Alex Usher, Vice President, Educational Policy Institute
The world over, governments think they know how to deal with inequality. Through progressive taxation, they take from the rich and give to the poor.
That's also the basis of what are called high-tuition, high-student aid programs. Tax the rich through tuition fees, and give it out through need- or income-based student aid. When governments get the parameters right, this strategy works pretty well in the main. Poor students pay almost nothing for their education (as is surely right), universities get more money than they could get through relying on government funds alone, and they use this money to enhance quality and expand access by letting in more students. That's why access in countries with tuition fees tends to be the same as (or even a little better than) access in countries with no fees at all.
And yet, the world over, regardless of what kinds of student aid policies are in place, gaps in access between students from wealthy and poor families remain. And there is an increasing amount of evidence out there that the best explanation for this is what might be called "cultural capital"; basically, the attitudes, habits and modes of thought and speech that one picks up from one's parents and other family members.
Cultural capital affects kids' chances for higher education in a number of ways. The most important is probably cognition. Kids whose parents are from better educated families tend to hear more words than kids from poorer families. From exceedingly early ages, gaps open up in vocabulary and comprehension. These remain and grow wider as time goes on. Even in the most egalitarian countries like Canada and Finland, by age 15 the average gap in reading comprehension between youth from top and bottom quartile income families is equivalent to about one entire year of schooling. In countries like the UK, US and Germany, it's more like two years. That's an enormous gap, and as far as access and persistence go, even the most generous student aid regime can't make it up.
Cultural capital also affects ambitions. You're more likely to want to go to university if you grow up with everyone taking it for granted that you will. You're more likely to have good study habits if your parents taught them to you. You're more likely to be a good reader if you're surrounded with books.
It often looks as if these things are correlated with having rich parents. But actually, having rich parents and having parents who give you lots of cultural capital are actually both correlated with a third factor: how much education your parents have. In country after country, the results are very similar: what matters in terms of achievement and access is parental education, not parental income.
From a public policy point of view, this is a problem. If educational inequality were just about income, then standard re-distributional policies would make a difference. But you can't redistribute parental education. You can't redistribute cultural capital. Short of adopting Plato's ideal society (you know, where all the kids are taken away from their parents at the age of 8 to live with philosophers) kids are stuck with the parents they've got. And that means we're stuck with unequal cultural capital.
So what can we do about it? Well, governments can add to cultural capital through schools and school programs. That's what school reading programs and various school reform programs like AVID are meant to do. But the problem is that educational opportunities are difficult to distribute in a way that can actually close the gap between rich and poor. If you give an educational improvement to all students, often it's the ones with the most existing intellectual and cultural capital who are best able to absorb it - and so these measures can actually widen the gap.
To close the gap, sometimes you have to only give some educational improvements to those who need it most. Head Start does this, and in a more roundabout way No Child Left Behind is also meant to create incentives for school boards to concentrate resources on those who need it most. But these are politically difficult projects. Part of having a lot of cultural capital is making sure that your kids have "the best", and it's tough for school officials to say to articulate and motivated parents that someone else is getting the best because they need it more.
And yet, that`s exactly what we need to do if we want to close the gap in achievement and in access to PSE. We have to be unequal in our distribution of resources in order to give as much of a hand up as we can to those who start out with low levels of cultural capital. We're capable of doing it in student aid (and a big congratulations in this vein to those folks in the Canadian government who this week brought in a completely income-based set of grants: a big improvement over need-based grants for sure!), why can't we do it on educational preparation as well?
Enjoy the weekend.
NEXT WEEK: Scott Swail will talk about his observations at today's EAIE Conference on International Education in Munich.
|
