Alan Jenkins is Executive Director of The Opportunity Agenda, a communications, research, and advocacy organization with the mission of building the national will to expand opportunity in America. He is the co-editor, with Dr. Brian D. Smedley, of "
All Things Being Equal: Instigating Opportunity in an Inequitable Time."
One year from now, our country will choose a new president. And while the candidates have debated extensively on individual issues like health care, the war, the economy, and the environment, they have offered far less in terms of a positive, overarching vision for our country that both addresses and transcends individual issues.
While candidates' positions on the issues of the day are crucially important, it's equally important to take their measure on what George H. W. Bush called "the vision thing": the clarity of ideals, values, and principles that inspire and shape a president's approach to a broad range of issues, including ones that no one could have anticipated on the day he or she was elected.
A new book by The Opportunity Agenda offers such a vision on the domestic front; one to which we hope the presidential contenders of both parties will respond. Not surprisingly, that vision centers on opportunity, the idea that everyone deserves a fair chance to achieve his or her full potential. In the book "All Things Being Equal: Instigating Opportunity in an Inequitable Time," a dozen leading thinkers paint a picture of what opportunity means in our society, where we are falling short, and what must be done to instigate opportunity for all. Their vision bridges myriad issues—education, employment, housing, criminal justice, immigration, health care, human rights—and disciplines—public health, economics, criminology, law, sociology, psychology, education, social work. The authors provide a clear and hopeful path to the future, a wake-up call to our nation's current and future leaders, and concrete solutions that promise to carry us forward.
As I've written before in this column, opportunity is not just a set of national conditions, but a body of national values: economic security, mobility, a voice in decisions that affect us, a chance to start over after missteps or misfortune, and a shared sense of responsibility for each other-as members of a common society. Analyzing their own and others' research through the lens of those values, the authors of All Things Being Equal warn that opportunity is increasingly at risk for all Americans and, therefore, for our country as a whole. They find that many communities are facing multiple barriers to opportunity that cannot be overcome through personal effort alone. But, most importantly, they find that we have it in our power as a country to turn those trends around.
A chapter by economist Jared Bernstein reveals that intergenerational economic mobility-American families' ability to improve their economic condition over time-is hamstrung in our country. Bernstein finds, for example, that it would take a poor family of four with two children approximately nine to ten generations-over two hundred years-to achieve the income of middle-income four-member families.
While old fashioned racial bigotry has declined significantly over the last few decades—Jena, Louisiana and the disturbing surge of noose incidents notwithstanding—covert and, often, subconscious racial bias continues to hamper opportunity for people of color in America.
Margery Turner and Carla Herbig of the Urban Institute report that racial discrimination in employment and housing, while lower than in past generations, remains strikingly high. A study by the Department of Housing and Urban Development using "testers" with identical qualifications but of different races found that African-American renters experienced discrimination in 22 percent of rental encounters, while discrimination against Latino renters was at 26 percent. In employment, they cite studies showing that white applicants with criminal records have a greater chance of being called back for job interviews than similarly qualified African Americans without criminal records.
Research shows that racial segregation in our nation's public schools is on the rise. Education scholar Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University analyzed these and other trends, finding that racial segregation is correlated with disparities in educational resources, including teacher training, instructional quality, per-pupil expenditures, across school districts. Segregation is both independently harmful and inextricably linked with educational neglect.
Brian Smedley reviews a large body of research highlighting the cruel nexus in which some 47 million Americans of all races lack health insurance, while people of color and immigrants are both most likely to be uninsured and most likely to receive inferior care even when they have insurance. Patients of color are less likely to have a regular source of health care and to receive potentially life-extending procedures like cardiac catheterization, bypass graft surgery or kidney transplantation, but more likely to receive undesirable treatments like amputation for diabetes.
Over the last two decades, our criminal justice system has also emerged as a barrier to opportunity for millions of Americans. Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project documents how the historic goal of rehabilitation has increasingly been replaced by retribution, and how social programs designed to strengthen families and treat addiction have given way to incarceration as a primary tool for social control.
Sociologists Edward Telles and Vilma Ortiz report the results of a groundbreaking study of the progress of Mexican immigration in our country, across several decades and multiple generations. They find that coming to America has clearly benefited Mexican immigrants and their families, especially in terms of educational attainment, but that an educational gap persists for the children and grandchildren of those immigrants and, in some cases, is getting worse instead of better. "To make matters worse," Telles and Ortiz write, "the labor market is increasingly polarized into good jobs and bad jobs, the latter offering fewer ladders for mobility than they did in the first half of the twentieth century, when European immigrants and their children entered the labor force."
Most important about the book is the synergy amongst its findings and recommendations. Taken in isolation, its findings have troubling implications for large numbers of the American people. Taken together, however, they represent a crisis of opportunity that hampers the progress of all Americans, with communities of color facing especially steep barriers, from education to employment to healthcare to housing, to criminal justice. As the book's opening chapter suggests, only a transformative, cross-cutting response can enable our country to be the land of opportunity that it aspires to be.
The book also explains why individual policy fixes, when they occur, do not produce the broad changes in social equity that one might expect. Increased resources to under-funded schools, for example, can mean a lot to students and parents in those schools, but they do not dislodge the patterns of residential segregation, inequitable health care, or job and housing discrimination that face the same communities. Similarly, substituting substance abuse treatment, mental health care, and other rehabilitative policies for the overuse of incarceration is urgently needed, but would not dismantle the erosion of job opportunities, educational access, and voting rights of people who've already paid their debt to society.
Accordingly, the book offers both individual policy solutions and a transformative policy vision for instigating opportunity that sweeps across issues and communities, expanding opportunity for all Americans while focusing particular attention on those communities that face multiple barriers. The authors recommend, for example, that governments plan for opportunity when fashioning or funding new programs and policies, using tools like an "opportunity impact statement" for publicly funded projects, and reforming land-use, zoning, and transportation policies to promote economically and racially diverse communities, affordable housing, and access to quality jobs.
Another set of recommendations includes updating skills for a changing America, including expanding job training focused on quality jobs in the new economy, reducing financial barriers to college by increasing need-based grants over student loans, and helping new immigrants learn English and understand their rights and responsibilities.
Also recommended is a renewed commitment to human rights, including increased enforcement of anti-discrimination laws in employment, housing, voting, credit, and other sectors; assisting well-intentioned employers to promote fairness and diversity in the workplace; and crafting new human rights laws that better address covert and subconscious bias while reaching areas like criminal justice and health care that are largely untouched by current protections.
To be sure, the recommendations in "All Things Being Equal" cannot cure all that currently ails our republic. The book does not address war or foreign policy, for example, nor does it touch meaningfully on the environment or energy policy. It offers part, though by no means all, of a compelling vision for our country's future. We hope that, in this season of politics and policy, it can contribute a bit of the vision thing.
