Letters

From the February 2000 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Jay Rosner
The Princeton Review Foundation
Mill Valley, CA
[e-mail]

Nick Gillespie's article on the now defunct "strivers" program was one of the most mean-spirited essays REASON has ever published. Is Mr. Gillespie claiming that most children coming from impoverished families and neighborhoods and high schools are not at a disadvantage competing against children from more affluent areas? Is he claiming that society has no obligation to try to level the playing field?

Gillespie writes, "I assume that my son would be hard-pressed under a strivers regime to ever distinguish himself." He seems to believe that his child, with two parents with Ph.D.s, will have a problem competing with those from less advantaged backgrounds. If his son grows up with that sort of logic, he will indeed be hard-pressed to distinguish himself.

Gillespie also states, "By holding against children the advantages parents have worked to give them, programs such as the strivers initiative punish such behavior even as they deny it exists." I presume you have no problem with wealth transfer as well as intellectual and ambition transfer. I must then assume you agree with the plan of many Republican legislators to get rid of the inheritance tax. Let's go all the way to a Third World society, with the better people living on the hill in their gated communities with the one-way glass gazing at the rest of us down below.

Frank Williams
Palo Alto, CA
[e-mail]

Nick Gillespie replies: Jay Rosner, Frank Williams, and I all agree that class mobility is a good thing. We disagree on whether substantial mobility exists in the contemporary U.S. and what best facilitates it.

As I wrote, the most extensive longitudinal study of the matter, a University of Michigan study of more than 50,000 taxpayers, documents that it does exist. These findings accord with those of virtually all other studies that track specific individuals over time. Together, they suggest an America that, far from being a caste system, is fluid in a way Messrs. Rosner and Williams must surely approve. What I find "insidious" about the strivers initiative is precisely that it ignores this reality and thus presents a distorted picture of American society. Such plans also obscure, discount, and weaken what I called "generational striving," parents' efforts to give their children advantages.

I applaud Mr. Rosner's work with underprivileged kids, though it's worth noting that his employer is the nonprofit arm of Princeton Review, the SAT prep course company that makes its money by charging about $750 to mostly middle- and upper-middle-class kids and guaranteeing a 100-point gain on their total scores. Princeton Review is as tied to the test as its fiercest supporters. To its credit, it has demystified much about the SAT and demystification is always to the good in an open society.

Contrary to Mr. Rosner, however, I wouldn't lay the educational problems of the poor or underrepresented minorities at the feet of the SAT, especially since most college students attend schools with open or near-open admission policies where SAT scores don't really matter. Although he accuses me of wanting to "pull up all the ladders and not create any new ones," nothing could be further from the truth. Here's one idea: We should radically deregulate public education, a far more obvious source of "injury" to the relatively poor than the SAT. Despite spending about four times as much per pupil (in constant dollars) as it did in the 1950s, the U.S. public school system provides a substandard education, especially to low-income students. There's a good reason why support for school vouchers is so strong among poor inner-city residents.

If Mr. Williams is a regular reader of REASON, he knows I'm no fan of Republicans. But if he is interested in furthering class mobility, he should in fact think seriously about abolishing estate taxes, which rarely hurt the mega-rich but often effectively dissipate the wealth of the ascendant middle class. Indeed, while redistributive or "progressive" taxation is typically sold as a means of helping the poor, its actual effect is to reinforce class. It's no accident that countries with high taxes also have little class mobility.

Mr. Williams asks whether parents should be able to give their children money as well as brains and ambition. None of these things can be transmitted with much certainty. One of my favorite days in high school was when SAT scores came back and I realized that I'd done better than most of my classmates from more privileged backgrounds; there's a real limit to what parents can do to ensure the success of their children, as I fear my own son will learn one day. But undercutting those efforts serves no purpose other than to weaken a system that is already pretty good at redistributing income, opportunity, and wealth.

Flawed Digital Data

The danger of the Commerce Department's latest study on the "digital divide" between race and ethnic groups is that it comes from a credible source. People everywhere are quoting from it, although, as Adam Clayton Powell III pointed out ("Falling for the Gap," November), the study is deeply flawed. That the federal government would use such old data and pass it off as new is revealing--and sad.

Maria T. Padilla
Senior Reporter
Orlando Sentinel
Orlando, FL
[e-mail]

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