Escaping the Education Trap

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• Escaping the Education Trap
• William D. Goldsmith (bio)

Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021. 384 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, and index. $36.00. Daniel S. Moak, From the New Deal to the War on Schools: Race, Inequality, and the Rise of the Punitive Education State. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. xiv + 326 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021. 400 pp. Photos, illustrations, appendices, notes, and index. $29.95.

“America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages!” That was the exclamatory question put to policymakers as the 1990s dawned, the title of a report from an illustrious group of politicians, academics, educators, labor leaders, and business executives who had joined forces as the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. The report’s framing was not narrowly focused on how investing in education would promote economic growth or productivity—it pitched more and better education as a way to raise pay for average workers, lower poverty, and equalize income distribution. Bill Clinton incorporated the message on the 1992 campaign trail, and several committee members joined his presidential administration.

The “America’s Choice” report was one of many published in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s that preached what W. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson skeptically dubbed the “education gospel,” this emphasis that better schools would mean a better economy for everyone, that more credentials would lead to higher wages, that college for all would create economic security for all.¹ In retrospect, it is far from clear that America did face a choice between high skills and low wages, then or since. The education gospel treated the construction of the global economy as beyond policymakers’ control, ignoring the roles of trade policy, labor policy, and tax policy in hollowing out the middle class, enriching a narrow economic elite, and driving a further wage [End Page 244] wedge between those with and without bachelor’s degrees. Jason Resnikoff’s Labor’s End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work (2021) dissects how postwar policymakers employed the concept of “automation” to speed up, intensify, and degrade work, underscoring how rarely the “skills gap” diagnosis captured the economic facts of life in the 20^th-century U.S. And yet, in contrast to the 1990s free market zealots, “America’s Choice” at least acknowledged that economic inequality was getting worse and that government should do something about it.

It is hardly surprising that Bill Clinton would vigorously promote a solution that turned out to be conceptually half-baked. What is remarkable retrospectively is that such wide-ranging representatives could come to consensus around this “high skills or low wages” framing. The 23 members of the commission included the president of the United Auto Workers, the head of the National Urban League, a vice president from Ford Motors, and the former secretaries of labor under both Reagan and Carter. How could so many divergent interest groups and policymakers narrow their scope to education and training as the centerpiece of equitable economic policy?

A growing number of scholars are trying to make sense of why liberal policymakers dealt so poorly with growing economic inequality in the period after 1980 that Gary Gerstle dubs the “neoliberal order.” While Gerstle’s The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (2022) sees an intertwined project with strands from the left and right to maximize markets that Reagan started and Clinton consolidated, Lily Geismer’s Left Behind: The Democrats Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality (2022) focuses on how the Clintons—drawing on ideas circulating through the Democratic Leadership Council—chased economic equality through market-based tools of credit expansion, tax-incentivized empowerment zones, and support for budding entrepreneurs. Brent Cebul’s Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century (2023) posits a longer continuity in the way that the federal government since the New Deal has leaned on local business elites to conduct economic development through public-private...