·rV\
382 Part V-The Economics of Race, Class, and Gender
The final straw came in her last semester at Hunter. She asked her supervisor for
a change in her schedule, so that she could fulfill a student teaching requirement
she needed in order to graduate. "I said 1 would work late, on weekends." When
WEP refused, she quit. Immediately, she lost her food stamps and Medicaid. At a
hearing downtown, she says, she asked a city representative, "Is it fair that I am being
pulled out of school to do a dead-end WEP job?" The city worker replied, "You need
to know what commitment is and what it takes to report to work. .. .
Even as New'York moves to the center of the national debate over welfare pol­
icy, local politicians are starting to respond to pressure to change the law-much
of which is coming from welfare recipients themselves. In 2000 the Welfare Rights
Initiative (WRI), a Hunter-based organization of current and former welfare recip­
ients, successfully lobbied the state legislature to enact a bill permitting work-study
and internships to substitute for work requirements. In spring 2002 Gifford Miller,
the Speaker of the City Council , proposed a bill allowing welfare recipients to sub­
stitute college course work for WEP. Nleanwhile, in Maine, legislators have used
state-level funds to support college students on welfare. The program (called Par­
ents as Scholars) has been very successful. The women it serves earn a median
wage of $11.71 upon graduation-compared with $8 for women before entering
college; they are also more likely to work in jobs that offer health benefits. Ninety
percent of Maine women who earned a degree while on welfare have left the rolls,
with every indication that they will stay off.
But while innovativ~ {ocal programs are all to the good, the restrictive federal
policies with r~gard to college for welfare recipients are part of a larger social shift
toward a constriction of access to higher education for poor and working-class
Americans....
When Bush ran for president in 2000, he described himself as the "education
President," because ever since Horatio Alger, education has been touted as the key
to upward mobility. But in truth, the question of who has access to college has al­
ways been deeply social and political. College enrollments exploded during the great
postwar boom, in the heyday of high union density and the welfare state, and today's
college gap simultaneously reflects and perpetuates the haughty isolation of the rich.
Young women like Jessica Rivera, though, clearly benefit from whatever changes
local organizations can make. Just when she was about to give up on school, Rivera
learned about WRI. With legal help provided by the advocacy group, she success­
fully pleaded her case before a hearing officer to substitute work-study hours for
WEP under the state law. The rising junior says she isn't yet sure what she wants
to major in, but she knows she wants to get a master's degree-even, someday, a
PhD. "Who wants to be on welfare? I'm going to have my own job and be inde­
pendent- I don't need to depend on anybody," she says cheenully. But, at the
same time, when she thinks about her mother, Rivera's face grows sad and reflec­
tive. With a gentleness that seems to contradict her spunk, she softly says, "Some
people just have to be on welfare." It is anybody's guess what our President-whose
Poppy surely paid for Yale - thinks young women like Rivera will learn about re­
<n()nsibility or commitment picking up trash in Central Park.
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"SAVAGE INEQUALITIES" REVISITED
• ••
Bob Feldman
Richer, Whiter School Districts Are Still Getting
More Public Funds, While the Federal Government
Looks the Other Way
In the late 1980s, I taught health and social studies in a New York City public
school. My students came largely from African-American and Caribbean families,
and the school was located in a high-poverty district. Because funding was so tight,
we had no textbooks for a required eighth-grade health class, no classroom maps
for seventh- and eighth-grade history classes, and no photocopying machines that
teachers or students could use for free. There was also no school newspaper or year­
book, and the school band had fewer than twenty instruments.
The coriditions in this school illustrated a crisis of funding inequality in the
U.S. public school system. In his 1991 book Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol,
a long-time critic of unequal education, famously exposed this crisis. He noted , for
instance, that schools in the rich suburbs of New York City spent more than
$11,000 per pupil in 1987, while those in the city itself spent only $5,500. The
story was the same throughout the country: per-capita spending for poor students
and students of color in urban areas was a fraction of that in richer, whiter suburbs
just miles away.
Over ten years after Savage Inequalities was first published, how close has the
U.S. public school system come to providing equitable funding for all students­
funding that is at least equal between districts, or better yet, higher in poorer areas
that have greater needs?
Not very far, according to a new report by the Washington, D.C.-based Educa­
tion Trust. Entitled "The Funding Gap: Low-Income and Minority Students Re­
ceive Fewer Dollars," the report examines state and local expenditures in 15,000
school dist,icts during 1999-2000. Since federal funds account for only 7% of pub­
lic school resources, this study of state and local spending zeroes in on the source
of funding inequality.
According to the Education Trust study, the poorest 25% of school districts in
each state receive an average of $966 less in state and local funds per pupil than
Reprinted by permission of Dollars 6 Sense, a progressive economics magazine.
www.dollarsandsense.org
384
14 Feldman / "Savage Inequalities" Revisited
Part V - Th e Economics of Race, Class, and Gender
the richest 25%. This gap has narrowed by $173 since 1997, but it does not refl ect
uniform progress: in nine of 47 states examined, the gap widened by at leas t $100.
In states like New York and Illinois, spending differences remain staggering, total­
ing $2, 15 2 and $2,060 per student, respectively These figures, like all those in the
stud y, are adJusted to account for th e grea ter expense of educating students in poor
di stri cts and areas with a high cost of living. (See Chart I. )
Funding in equ ality puts students of color at a special disadvan tage. In two­
thirds of states in the Edu ca tion Trust study, th e quarter of school districts with the
highest percentage of students of color received at least $100 less in sta te and local
funding than the quarter of districts with the lowest percentage of students of color.
New York topped the charts for racial inequality: the quarter of districts wi th the
high est percentage of students of color rece ived $2,034 less in sta te and local funds
per student than the quarter of districts enrollin g the small est percen tage. (See
Cha rt 2.)
Betv/een 1997 and 2000, 30 of the 47 states studied did move toward provid­
ing eq ual or grea ter funding for stud ents in poorer districts- an d some states made
significant progress. Why did th is happen? According to Michael Rebell, execu tive
director of the Ca mpaign for Fiscal Equity, lawsui ts have produced some changes.
New Jersey, for ins tance, began channeling funds to its poorest districts after a
cou rt chall enge; as of 2000, the state government provided roughly ,three times as
385
CHART 2
Students of Color Get Less: States with Largest Per-Studen t Funding Gaps,
and U.S. Average
$10,000 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ­
$8,368
,.... $8,000
",0
41°
:::10
eM
11) .....
> ...
II)
..
e
$6,000
II)
_"tJ
!'II :::I
-ou'"'".
"tJ
e
Q.
!'II 41
41­
... .0
!'II !'II
..,:::
VI
$4,000
II)
$2,000
!'II
~
o New York
•
.
Wyoming Nebraska
Districts with highest minority enro llment
•
Kansas
Te xas
U.S.
Districts with lowest minority enrollment
Source: Department of Ed ucation and U.S. Census Bureau.
CHART I
Poor Students Get Less\S tates with Largest Per-Student Funding Gaps,
and U.S. Average
$10,000
$8.598
,.... $8,000
",0
41°
:::10
e~
41 ...
> e
f
41
_"tJ !'II :::I u ...
..
e
-o
'"
$4,000
"tJ 41
Q. 41 41­
!'II
... .0
....­
$2,000
!'II!!
VI
!'II
>
!'II
o .J;..~L--....L.""_---"New York
•
Illinois
Montana Pennsylvania Michigan
Districts with highest child poverty rates
Source: Dep"'rtment of Education and U.S. Census Bureau.
•
U.S.
Districts with lowest child poverty rates
much per-capita funding to the poorest quarter of districts as it did to the ri chest
quarter. While the state government's targeted funds are counterbalanced by wildly
unequal local resources , stu dents in the poorest quarter of districts now receive a
net of $ 324 mo re per capita than th ose in the richest quarter. States Iike Oregon
have ac hieved similar results not by targeting poorer districts, but by assuming a
greater share of responsibi lity for school funding sta te-wide. Strategies like New
Jersey's and Oregon's help explain th e narrowing fundin g gap, and could be mod­
els for oth er states.
Rebell notes, however, that sta te-level remed ies are fundamentally limited:
among states, they are "complex and uneven," and nationall)/, they leave millions
of students unaffected . A more powerful solution might be for the fede ral govern­
ment to fund the public school s)lstem directly, as governmen ts do in Canada,
Japan, and most social democratic countries of Western Europe. Today, the US .
government does channel money to poor di stricts through Title I, th e largest sin­
gle federal investment in education. But Title I fund s are not intended to eq ual­
ize funding with in states: the federal government leaves that responsibility to state
and local au thorities, who plainly do not comply.
The needs of stu dents would be justly served by federally gua ranteed fund ing,
but current state and federal po li cies guaran tee someth ing very different. As
Jonathan Kozol explained a decade ago, "Th e present system guarantees that those
386 Part V-The Economics of Race, Class, and Gender
also be able to provide
home in an affluent suburb
is still
schools." The U.S. public
the United
whiter districts; and as Rebell
this
exhibits
States remains "the only· major developed countrv in the world
shameful pattern of educational
Bob Feldman is a Dollars & Sense intern.
RESOURCES
Savage
Children in America's Schools (Crown Publishers,
December I, ]993 interview with Jonathan Kozol.
"The Funding Gap: Low-Income and Minoritv Students Receive Fewer Dollars," The
Education Trust, Inc., (www.edtrust.org).
[2J
CAUSE OF DEATH: INEQUALITY
•••
Alejandro Reuss
Inequality Kills
You won't see inequality on a medical chart or a coroner's report under "cause of
" You won't see it listed among the top killers in the United States each year.
All too often, however, it is social inequality that lurks behind a more immediate
cause of dcath, be it heart disease or diabetes, accidental injury or homicide. Few
of the top causes of death are "equal opporhmity killers." Instead, they tend to
strike poor people more than rich people, the less educated more than the
educated, people lower on the occupational ladder more than these higher up, or
of color more than white people.
Statistics on mortality and life expcctancy do not provide a perfect map of so­
cial inequality. For example, in 2002, the life expectancy for women in
five years
than the life expectancy for men,
women are subordinated to men. Take most indicators of soby perm ission of Dollars 6 Sense, a progressive economics www.dollarsandsense.org 15 Reuss I Cause of Death: Inequality 387
cioeconomic
~ bet that
however,
increasing as status
you'll find
and injury
decreases.
than a
people between the ages of 25 and 64, those with
(or equivalent) had an age-adjusted mortality rate more than three
with at least some college, as of 2003. Those without a high
more than triple the death rate from chronic nOllcoml1lullica­
diseases (e.g., heart disease), more than 3Vz times the death rate from
and nearly six times the death rate from HIV/AIDS, compared to those with at least
some college. People with incomes below the poverty line were nearly twice as
likely to have had an asthma attack in the previous year (among those previously
diagnosed with asthma) as people with incomes at least twice the poverty line. Poor
people were over
times as likely to suffer from a chronic condition
their activity and over three times as likely to characterize their own health as
or "poor" (rather than "good" or "very good"), compared to
the poverty line. African Americans have higher
whites from cancer e~ higher), heart disease (lJ3 higher), stroke
higher), dia­
betes (twice as high), homicide (more than 5 times as high), and AIDS
8 times as high). The infant mortality rate for African Americans was, in
over twice as high as
whites. In all, the lower you are in a social hierarchy, the
worse your health and the shorter your life are likely to be.
The Worse off in the United States Are Not Well off
by World Standards
You often hear it said that even poor people in rich countries like the United States
are rich compared to ordinary people in poor countries. While that may be true
when it comes to consumer goods like televisions or telephones. which are widely
available even to poor people in the United States, it's completely wrong when it
comes to health.
In a 1996 study published .in the New England Journal
of Michigan researchers found that African-American females
a 65% chance of surviving to age 65. That is less than the probability to age 65 for women in India, according to 2000-2005 data. Meanwhile, Harlem's African-American males reaching age 15 had only a 37% of surviving to age 65. That is less than the probability at birth of surviving
to age 65 for men in Haiti. Among both African-American men and women, dis­
eases of the circulatory system and cancers were the leading causes of
It takes more income to achieve a given life expectancy in a rich country like
the United States than it does to achieve the same life expectancy in a
ent country. So the higher money income of a low-income person in the United
States, compared to a middle-income person in a poor country, does not necessarIT<]Ml.,~" into a longer
span. The average income per person in African­