Reframing the Conversation
The contexts relevant to our thesis begin with the state of government in the United States today; the acting administration is led by President Trump and focuses on mainly conservative ideologies concerning the economy, free-market practices, and the institution of fewer government regulations.
President Trump at a press briefing on August 4, 2020. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
This is a continuation of past administrations’ policy, first implemented by Reagan in the ’80s and expanded upon by the Bush administration in 2002 with the No Child Left Behind Act. The other prominent context is the current worldwide pandemic that has revealed the existing inequities in education and society as a whole. This context is a vital frame toward understanding why the education system is failing certain demographics of students in mostly low-income neighborhoods. With funding prioritized for private institutions and voucher programs, the illusion of school choice in the pandemic becomes a vector with which the Trump administration’s education views can be marketed falsely as a fail-safe for all people when in reality, it is detrimental not only to surviving public institutions of education but especially the large demographic of people who rely on them.
NCES, "Common Core of Data," surveys and unpublished data.
This graph shows that federal funding for Title I, which provides grants to help disadvantaged children, rose from under $3 billion in 1980 to more than $7 billion in 2000 and nearly $14 billion in 2005. (not adjusted for inflation)
Having met virtually with Dr. Sebastian Royo, Vice President of International Affairs at Suffolk University, we asked some questions related to education during the pandemic and Dr. Royo’s role as a task force member on Suffolk’s Integrated Response Team for COVID preparations. When asked about the factors that contributed to Suffolk’s reopening plan, Dr. Royo highlighted health and safety above all else. While financial shortfalls were certainly a factor, he emphasized that economies don't function in a health crisis. There must be confidence in the system to ensure economic prosperity. To this point, health and human cost must come first and foremost in any situation, especially as it pertains to school reopening and the extended financial consequences. Although Dr. Royo states that Suffolk was concerned about how enrollment would be affected by a fully online semester, he explained that this fact was not more important to the Integrated Response Team than student and faculty wellness. We feel that this is an important guiding principle not just at Suffolk University, but for any school attempting to provide learning opportunities in the current pandemic.
Suffolk University, Boston, Massachusetts.. Credit: Michael J. Clarke
Students take exams while wearing masks and practicing social distancing at Lebanese University (Photo: Courtesy of Lebanese University).
In terms of the students’ educational well being, Dr. Royo explained how the Hyflex model developed for the fall semester was the best way to give students a transformative experience while also maintaining small class sizes and limiting contact between students to ensure the best safety standards possible on campus. This involves a flexible synchronous schedule for classes that allow for access either on-campus or online. This places the power of choice in the student’s hands and allows for in-person education for those who feel they need it while limiting the risks associated with person to person contact in the pandemic. Ideas like these should be shared and implemented across the country. Even if mandates from the government are unrealistic, the implementation of thorough guidelines designed to facilitate administrational challenges in schools across the country could be essential to a successful reopening of schools. This debate is informed by two themes of cultural difference that Dr. Royo highlights, between Europe and the United States; individualism and collective action.
Individualism is a key part of the ethos of the United States, a country rooted in the elevation of personal freedom. However, it becomes detrimental when exploited to the point of personal irresponsibility. For example, the politicization of wearing masks or not is a function of elevating free will above the basic human liberty to not be put at risk by another. Misinformation and anti-science bias feeds into what was originally upheld as an expression of free will. The scientific process is diluted by the insistence of conspiracy theory and corruption in the apolitical health agencies of the United States, and men, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, are targeted for defying these conspiracies in support of fact. What emerges is an administrative system of government that reframes value from science and fact to partisanship and muddy rhetoric.
An anti-mask protester holds up a sign that reads "My Body, My Choice" at the Texas State Capitol on April 18, 2020 in Austin. Sergio Flores / Getty Images file
Collective action requires the sacrifice of free will for the good of all. Inconveniencing yourself with a mask is not a great ask of European countries who are more adept at trusting in their governments to act in their collective best interest. Doubt and fear in the government make personal free will a necessity, an unalienable right that Americans feel they must employ under threat. What results is a destructive phenomenon of collective inaction among a certain demographic of Americans that has ultimately turned our fate, and our infection curve, in the opposite direction of Europe’s.
These themes of politicization as they relate to individualism and distrust of Government are not new phenomena to Dr. Royo, though they have been revealed in a new way by the pandemic. Not only do these themes inform and explain different reactions to the pandemic, but they also inform the balance of governmental ideology between Europe and the United States. Dr. Royo has written books about the evolving ideological regimes that have ruled Spain in his lifetime, and he has shown a specific focus on socialism and capitalism.
Socialism is an ideology of government that values collective action and trust in government. Capitalism, however, values a free market above all else, as a free market can fairly dictate a Darwinian theme of survival upon which an inherently unjust government will impede. Free will and trust in the market over government are key features to a purely capitalistic society. These two differing ideologies present themselves in different ways between Dr. Royo’s native Spain and the United States where he lives and works now.
Smith Campus Center at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts..Photographer Janie Airey and Nic Lehoux
One notable difference that he emphasizes between the two countries is in the “tension between access vs. quality” in the education system, especially with regards to higher education. With exponentially more expensive institutions of higher education here in the United States, there are contrasts in the financial capability of a highly funded university compared to a governmentally subsidized University in Spain or elsewhere in Europe. However, with such high costs, it also contrasts the availability of higher education in Spain and around Europe with the exclusivity of American universities in cost alone. Dr. Royo rhetorically asks us of this tension, “How do you find that balance between access and quality?” He goes on to say “I think it’s not an either/or proposition.” What we see is that the free market, given almost unrestricted power by our capitalistic American government, has empowered our institutions of higher education with funding unseen anywhere else in the world.
However, in the free market, quality translates into cost, and with these virtues in our society, underprivileged demographics are priced out of the higher education system altogether. When racism and prejudice infiltrate this system, it fuels inequity based on race or class. In other words, the private sector simply doesn’t account for unequal opportunity, which has proven itself to be a problem created in part by the very education system that boosted more privileged peoples before less privileged peoples from the inception of the system. In this way, the system functions to keep certain classes of people above others on a reciprocating basis.
The Community College of Philadelphia THOM CARROLL/ PHILLYVOICE
Claiming that “the people who are suffering the most are the ones at the bottom of the economic ladder, and also the minorities,” Dr. Royo tells us that inequities in class and race are becoming more apparent as a result of the pandemic and he feels that this fact should not be lost on those who are in positions of authority on decision making. He credits minimum wage workers for enabling much of our society to function under the new normal of stay at home orders and economic shutdowns. Dr. Royo plainly states that it is “a moral obligation” to address these inequities in the state of our mid-crisis society, and it becomes clear that his primary value in policy-making for Suffolk is based on this social empathy. This understanding is crucial to progress not only on the pandemic but on the racial and class divides as well. As an administrator for higher education, Dr. Royo feels that education as a fundamental right is a “key instrument that we have in our hands to address this issue.” This, of course, goes back to Dr. Royo’s point of ensuring access to education for all citizens in the nation and centering that balance between quality and access.
A U.S. News opinion piece written by former state education official Gerard Robinson, “The positive privatization narrative”, argues that politicized narratives framing President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos as radical figures in the debate over education reform have led to a misunderstanding of the true nature and virtues of public/private partnerships in the education sector, like charter schools. Robinson uses the rhetorical strategy of redefining the conversation in an attempt to let the narrative better represent the use of the private sector in education. This is examined on a micro level and doesn’t represent the full picture. Lower-income demographics are left out of Robinson’s calculus.
American Enterprise Institute Resident Fellow, Gerard Robinson
The truth of the matter is that no voucher program will reach every low-income community in America, and those who cannot pay for prioritized private schools will be left to be educated by the now defunded public institutions that remain. This is targeted progress for those who can afford it while ignoring the needs of the people who are least privileged already. This is a brutally capitalistic, Darwinian view of progress that is not even occurring according to free nature because disenfranchised communities don't have equal opportunities in the first place. In this context, what seems like a far-right view on access to schooling becomes an instrument of oppression to hold minorities and lower-class families in their caste of society.
Suffolk University, Boston, Massachusetts.. Suffolk University
In conclusion, when we look at the aspects of what inform capitalistic values in government, we can see that there is a lack of empathy, if not a complete disregard, for real social problems that afflict minorities and under-privileged classes of people in America. It is in these situations that government social assistance, in the form of ideologically socialist programs, is essential to hold up those who are struggling and creating real equal opportunity. This way, the benefits of free-market quality can bear fruit for everyone, rather than widening the gap and fueling the emerging social castes of racially segregated financial classes. As Dr. Royo emphasized, this begins in our institutions. A culture of empathy is essential to structure a government in its reflection. Beginning in the way that Suffolk has chosen to reopen its campus during the pandemic, we feel that Dr. Royo has highlighted the most important principles that can be applied not only to this crisis at hand but in the greater conflict of balance between public health and the economy, privatized and nationalized schools or capitalism and socialism in general.