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-
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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