Vanderbilt Political Review Spring 2014 | Page 18

DOMESTIC VANDERBILT POLITICAL REVIEW A lesson not yet learned Could educational inequity be a catalyst of today’s partisan divide? by EMILY STEWART ‘16 P olitical polarization and congressional gridlock are familiar buzzwords used to describe America’s current political culture. The do-nothing Congress, the divided government, and the strong partisan loyalties that typify twenty-first century American politics lend themselves to a political environment in which tensions fly high and passing meaningful legislation is difficult if not impossible. Simultaneously, income inequality in the United States is quite high. In fact, according to an article published by Drew DeSilver of the Pew Research Center, “U.S. income inequality has been increasing steadily since the 1970s, and now has reached levels not seen since 1928.” The link between income inequality and political polarization is not a new one, nor is it unique to the past decade. According to McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal in their article “Political Polarization and Income Inequality,” the second half of the twentieth century witnessed a phenomenon in which “partisanship...become more stratified by income.” According to a PayScale study reported in Derek Thompson’s article in The Atlantic, the partisan income divide occurs at around $70,000. Voters are “more likely to vote Democratic” below this income level and Republican above it. The causes of income stratification into opposing political parties, however, are myriad. One of the principal causes of income inequality, and thus indirectly of political polarization, is education. Educational inequality in America is one of the key drivers of inequality, and thus indirectly of the partisan divide today. Despite the traditional American rhetoric that through hard work and ed- 18 ucation one can improve his or her economic well-being and financial position in life, the reality is that rigid educational inequalities in the public school system prevent the age-old bell of America as the land of opportunity from ringing true. The income gap in the United States today is perhaps a factor of American political polarization. Due to the ingrained inequities in the American public school system, educational inequality acts as at least one indirect factor that drives the gridlock in Congress. Whether income inequality drives the educational inequities so prevalent in the American public school system today or vice-versa typifies the chickenor-egg dilemma. The fact of the matter, however, is that education is not equal for all American students in the public school system. In fact, the poor are at an extreme disadvantage in terms of quality of schooling, while the well-off benefit from a greater concentration of resources and higher-quality education. According to an article by Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane in The Atlantic, the residential divisions that separate the haves from the have-nots translates into educational districts that are wellendowed with financial resources and those that are not. The result: a startling disparity in the quality of education that mirrors the income gap that is a partial contributor to the polarization threatening the effectiveness of American government. The majority of states in the United States today allocate disproportionately more funding to educational districts that are less in need of financial help than to those districts that are characterized as “high-poverty,” according to The Education Law Center, as cited in an article by Eduardo Porter in The New York Times. In comparison with other developed countries, the United States devotes a shockingly low amount of res