The Economic Payoff to Investing in Educational Justice
Educational equity is a moral imperative for a society in which education is a crucial determinant of life chances. Yet there is reluctance by some authorities to invest in our most needy populations and even a skepticism on whether money makes a differen
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10. THE ECONOMIC PAYOFF TO INVESTING IN EDUCATIONAL JUSTICE1
Educational equity is a moral imperative for a society in which education is a crucial determinant of life chances. Yet there is reluctance by some authorities to invest in our most needy populations and even a skepticism on whether money makes a difference in educational results for such students (e.g., Hanushek, 2002). Fairness in access to good education is a matter of justice rather than simple economic rationality as measured by investment returns. Yet one can also ask whether there is a positive economic return on this investment, even beyond the issue of educational fairness. We know that inadequate education affects not only the poorly educated individual but also the society because of lost productivity, lower tax revenues, and higher costs of public services. Therefore, it is useful to consider not only the important issue of educational justice but the question of whether seeking such justice through greater educational investment in at-risk populations provides an overall economic payoff to the public that exceeds the costs. This issue, specifically as it applies to the United States, has been a preoccupation of mine from my early career to the present, where I am now of a certain age. My attempt to address this question began almost 40 years ago in the early autumn of 1970, when I received a call from a staff member of U.S. Senator Walter Mondale’s Select Senate Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity asking me to testify on how the federal government might improve equality of educational finance. The Committee was established to buttress the momentum of the major civil rights victories and the War on Poverty reforms of the 1960s. It was also charged with addressing the surprising finding, asserted by the Coleman Report (Coleman, 1966), that improved educational finance could not benefit poor and minority students who remained in schools with high concentrations of similar classmates. Only since 1968 had serious desegregation gotten under way, and the Committee sought to set out an agenda of what should follow. I trekked to Washington from San Francisco and delivered my prepared testimony before the Committee on October 1, 1970, responding to questions from Senator Mondale and his colleagues and staff members of the Committee on ways to improve equity in educational finance (U.S. Senate, Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity, 1970, pp. 3503–3538). Upon completion of my testimony, the head of the staff approached and asked if I would have dinner with Senator Mondale.
P. Siljander et al. (Eds.), Schools in Transition, 161–188. © 2009 Sage Publications. All rights reserved.
H. M. Levin
I was taken aback by the suddenness of the invitation, but, of course, I accepted. The dinner was palatable, although I knew that this was not a culinary event. At dessert and coffee, the senator turned to me with a formal challenge: “Our committee has entertained considerable testimony, all telling us that if we do not improve the education of
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