Five years ago, New Yorker writer Atul Gawande interviewed several of his high school classmates in Athens, Ohio, to get their perspectives on the provision of government-funded health care. In the article, Gawande recounted a conversation he had with Betsy Andersen who shared her thoughts on Ohio voters opposition to the biggest government funded health care program — Medicaid. Ms. Anderson, an eighth-grade English teacher at Athens Middle School with 15 years’ experience, recalled that in her early years as a teacher her most satisfying experiences came from working with “eager, talented kids who were hungry for her help in preparing them for a path to college and success.” But it soon dawned on her that by the time students reached her eighth-grade English class their futures were set and fully half of the students had no chance of getting into college, and those students were disillusioned and disengaged. She was committed to helping those kids in the middle but it was a challenge. As Gawande reported in 2017:
“The honors kids — the Hillary Clintons and Mitt Romneys of the school — sat at the top of the meritocratic heap, getting attention and encouragement. The kids with the greatest needs had special-education support. But, across America, the large mass of kids in the middle — the ones without money, book smarts, or athletic prowess — were outsiders in their own schools. Few others cared about what they felt or believed or experienced. They were the unspecial and unpromising, looked down upon by and almost completely separated from the college-bound crowd. Life was already understood to be a game of winners and losers; they were the designated losers, and they resented it. The most consistent message these students had received was that their lives were of less value than others’. Is it so surprising that some of them find satisfaction in a politics that says, essentially, Screw ‘em all?”
As one who attended and worked in public schools from the 1950s through 2011, I witnessed this sorting of students into “winners and losers” from several perspectives and can appreciate how the “designated losers” might feel resentment toward the game they were playing.
In the 1950s and early 1960s the message that some students were “un-special and unpromising” was explicit. Students were tracked throughout their school years. In elementary and junior high schools they were assigned to reading groups or placed in gifted classes based on standardized test scores. In high school they were placed in “college prep” and “vocational” tracks based on how well they performed in earlier tracks. This practice was seen as an efficient means of identifying talented scientists and leaders who would help us compete against the Soviet Union. During that era, this practice was not seen as limiting the future of students since a high school degree was sufficient to secure a job where they could readily earn middle class wages and college was limited to only the highest achieving students.
From the late 1970s onward, though, the economy changed. Manufacturing jobs moved offshore or to locales that paid lower wages and technology displaced many relatively well-paying clerical jobs. At the same time state legislatures downshifted costs for K-12 education to local governments. This downshifting led to austere budgets for school boards, budgets that largely ignored the needs of the kids in the middle in favor of their college-bound classmates and students with the greatest needs. It is no surprise that when these “un-special and un-promising” kids in the middle graduated and went to work they resented their taxes being used to fund programs for anyone who failed to do so, safety-net programs like Medicaid. And it is also no surprise that the “screw ‘em all” messages of anti-government candidates running for office resonated with many of them.
Democracy is grounded in egalitarianism, Democracy assumes we can work together to reconcile our differences of opinion and solve problems. It assumes that the government can establish rules that assure everyone an opportunity to thrive. And most importantly, democracy is incompatible with a “screw ‘em all” ethos. If we hope to strengthen our democracy in the future, our federal, state and local governments need to convince the kids in the middle — those who have been systematically ignored for decades — that they are aware of this oversight and are working to correct it. How can this be accomplished?
First, our K-12 schools need to spend as much time, energy and resources on the kids in the middle as they currently spend on those who aspire to go to college and those with identified learning disabilities. Schools need to develop programs that engage these overlooked students who, as we’ve seen from the pandemic, ultimately provide our most essential services.
Secondly, governments at all levels should offer incentives to employers who provide entry-level training for jobs that do not require a four-year degree and employers who offer multi-year contracts to employees who successfully complete those programs.
Third, Congress should penalize businesses who engage in outsourcing, downsizing and off-shoring.
When running for office, politicians in both parties bemoan these practices and promise to put an end to them. Middle class jobs and wages cannot be restored if businesses engage in race-to-the-bottom wage practices, practices that reward wealthy shareholders at the expense of employees.
And who will pay the price for this? The government … and us.
Today governments at all levels provide subsidies to businesses. In 2021, governments at all levels spent just over $23 billion on three corporations — Boeing, General Motors and Intel — and just under a trillion in total on three sectors — utilities and power generation companies, military contractors and the auto industry. Redirecting even 10% of those funds would go a long way to helping those in the middle who have been neglected for decades as children, teenagers and adults.
Finally, all of us will need to pay more in the form of higher taxes and higher prices on some goods and services; and those who clearly benefitted from the system in place, those who received more attention, encouragement and opportunity, should be especially willing to give back to achieve the economic egalitarianism that accompanies democracy instead of the wide economic disparity that accompanies autocracy.
Wayne Gersen lives in Etna.