America prides itself on being a vessel for equal opportunity in myriad ways. We claim that anyone can make it, irrespective of his or her background. This is a myth that helps to mystify the ongoing violence and class warfare against poor and working class people.
In many ways, we like to think that we are where we are in life because of our good work ethic. People in positions of power especially like to pat themselves on the backs for all the hard work they’ve invested in their careers. However, the myth of meritocracy in America undermines the fact that in this country, where you stand is largely a result of your various privileges. If we look at how this translates into the educational system, we can develop a framework through which we can better understand how the educational system does a disservice to poor and working class people.
Now, I want to be clear: People who manage to transcend poverty and make it big in the world exist, but they are rare. People in positions of power then protect their class interests by exploiting these exceptions, claiming that if one person managed to climb the social ladder, then everyone else has an equal opportunity to do the same. This argument fails to take into account the social conditions that contribute to poverty and the ways in which our world is shaped by power structures.
Where we stand matters. Oftentimes, we fail to understand the significance of race, gender and class. The problem with putting people who manage to break barriers (e.g. poverty) on a pedestal is that expecting other working class people to follow the same route to the top is unrealistic.
Students do not start on an even playing field. If a student is hungry and living below the poverty line, how can people expect that child to focus in a classroom and use education as a ladder to better himself? How can people possibly believe that children who come from middle and middle upper class families don’t have the advantage of having parents who know how to navigate elite institutions and understand the importance of putting their children in extracurricular activities that hone their developing skills?
Take, for example, the fine state of South Carolina, which, in November 2014, was sued for failing to allocate the adequate amount of funding to rural schools. If you ask who suffers from the failure of the state to provide the adequate amount of funding, the obvious answer is poor, working class people in these areas. The not-so-obvious answer to this question is that poor, working class black and brown children suffer even more from these conditions. In South Carolina, approximately 27.5 percent of children were living below the poverty line in 2014. If we take the entirety of the South Carolina population estimate of children under 18 from 2014, which was 1,082,476, that means that approximately 297,681 kids in 2014 were living in poverty.
This number is only getting worse each year. To put things in perspective, if we go as far back as 2010, the percentage of children in poverty was approximately 22 percent.
So what does the trajectory of poor kids growing in rural South Carolina look like? What does their mobility look like?
Your environment matters a lot more than people would like to think. If you grow up in a rural school, one that is underfunded by our state, then you are disadvantaged in myriad ways. First and foremost, the school you attend is likely to have old or outdated textbooks.
Books last a long time, though, so what’s the big deal? That is certainly not that case when poor students find themselves with books that have missing pages and books that leave them uninspired. If you’re in a school that has few resources, that translates into having fewer AP classes; it translates into things like lacking in the much-idealized International Baccalaureate program.
If you’re lucky enough to live in a district where you are placed in the respective honors classes you’ve been set up to take from early on in your childhood, then your trajectory looks great. I often think about the ways in which the school system has made me upwardly mobile, and how people who are poor but know how to work the system in these areas can make it. I went to a school where kids were expected to go to college; there was no doubt about it.
In turn, I internalized the attitudes of my peers. I went to a school that had expensive sports like lacrosse, where we were privileged enough to take courses like Theory of Knowledge, an epistemology course, or 20th Century World Topics, wherein we explored white supremacy in South Africa, topics usually reserved for institutions of higher learning.
The allocation of resources matters and leaves a more eternal imprint in our trajectories than people would like to admit. We like to think that we are where we are because we worked very hard, which is especially true of the older generation who claim “they lifted themselves up by their bootstraps,” despite the fact that they lived in a much different America than we live in today.