Thirteenth AnnualBrownLecture in Education Research: Public Education and the Social Contract: Restoring the Promise in an Age of Diversity and Division

Abstract

Building on the premise that closing achievement gaps is an economic imperative both to regain international educational supremacy and to maintain global economic competitiveness, I ask whether it is possible to rewrite the social contract so that education is a fundamental right—a statutory guarantee—that is both uniform across states and federally enforceable. I argue that the federal government was complicit in aggravating educational inequality by not guaranteeing free, public education as a basic right during propitious political moments; by enabling the creation of a segregated public higher education system; by relegating the Department of Education and its predecessors to a secondary status in the federal administration, thereby compromising its enforcement capability; and by proliferating incremental reforms while ignoring the unequal institutional arrangements that undermine equal opportunity to learn. History shows that a strong federal role can potentially strengthen the educational social contract.

Serendipitous Sociologist: Transitions and Turning Points in My Journey

“…Despite improvements since 1980, Hispanics lagged whites and blacks in educational attainment, especially in college completion (Schneider et al 2006). Even as college completion levels rose among all groups, gaps between Hispanics, whites, and Asians continued to widen (Tienda 2017, Flores et al 2021). The NRC panel did not make policy recommendations, but the report cautioned that failure to close education and language proficiency gaps would weaken Latinos' future economic contributions and hamper their social mobility.…”

“…Membership on the board of the Jacobs Foundation (1998)(1999)(2000) and affiliation with the Center for Research on Child and Family There was good reason to be concerned about the plight of youth, particularly Hispanics, who were coming of age as support for public higher education was falling (Tienda 2016b). In the 2017 American Educational Research Association's Brown lecture (Tienda 2017), I argued that the shifting of dependency burdens from youth to seniors warrants larger educational investments so that smaller birth cohorts can replenish public coffers to support large baby boom cohorts in retirement. Yet because two-thirds of public spending on youth comes from state and local governments (Isaacs et al 2018), state disparities in school funding risk widening educational attainment gaps among demographic groups, as I showed for the state of Texas .…”