Grassroots/Hank Kalet

A Different World for the Poor

If you’re poor in the United States, you effectively have no legal protections. nnThe judicial system views you with hostility. You are unable to hire the kind of lawyers available to those with more resources, and you are likely to get bogged down in debt as fines and fees compound.

If you’re rich, well, it’s a different world altogether.

That’s the lesson we should be taking from the so-called “Varsity Blues” scandal, in which nearly three dozen wealthy parents — Hollywood stars, hedge fund managers, and so on — were charged with bribing their kids’ way into elite colleges.

The sentences have started coming in and they look nothing like those meted out for similarly egregious behavior by those unlucky enough to lack monetary resources.

In September, actress Felicity Huffman and California businessman Devin Sloane were sentenced — her to 14 days and him to four months. Others await trial and still could face more, though probably light, jail time.

The media has focused primarily on Huffman and fellow actress Lora Loughlin, a b-level star whose daughter has a social media following. But we should not let that obscure what this says about our social and economic dysfunction, about the ways in which class and race determine not only legal outcomes but access to education and about privilege itself.

Think a poor black or Latina parent in an area like Newark, N.J., would have received the same treatment as Huffman and the others who’ve been charged? It’s an absurd question. Poor blackberry and Latinx parents don’t have the resources to engage in this kind of bribery and, for the vast majority of them, these elite schools are out of reach. It’s not a matter of whether they can use their money and influence to gain their kids entrance into Stanford, but do they have the money — even after state and federal aid is accounted for — to pay for a good state school, or to get their children out of failing high schools in poor neighborhoods.

There are numerous cases we can point to in which parents have been left with the difficult choice: Live outside on the streets with their kids or move into a storage container for shelter, as one woman outside it Trenton New Jersey did several years ago. She was charged with child endangerment and only escaped a jail sentence because of a community fundraising effort. Allow their kids to attend inferior schools, or falsify an address to get their kids’ into better-funded and better-equipped public schools, as Kelley Williams-Bolar did in Ohio and Tanya McDonald did in Connecticut. Both were caught, charged and convicted.

As Anne Larry wrote in The Atlantic, “Williams-Bolar and McDowell made their choices in an educational system rife with inequalities, among them deeply unequal per-pupil financing and persistent school segregation,” she writes. “School districts have a way of turning a public good into a private good. Rich families enroll their kids in neighborhood schools, hoarding opportunity through boundary enforcement, zoning laws, real-estate prices, and redlining. The structure of education financing gives parents a sense of entitlement and ownership: They pay for schools with their mortgages and property taxes, and therefore the school is theirs. (Of course, the math is more complicated than that.) In-boundary parents are often the initiators of boundary-hopping investigations; they believe that out-of-boundary parents are stealing.”

In addition, the rich can put their kids in private or parochial schools, and they have the option of moving to a better district,” she adds.

“Rich families have the option of coaching their kids through standardized tests, and helping ensure they get into gifted and talented programs and specialized schools,” Lowrey writes. “Rich families have the resources to investigate what different public schools offer, and to game lottery and ranked-choice enrollment systems. Later on in their kids’ lives, rich families have the ability to provide tax-deductible gifts to colleges to get mediocre students accepted. Rich families sometimes skirt the law, too — cheating on standardized tests, making up their kids’ athletic accomplishments, paying bribes.”

For the poor, the options are far more limited. They often are trapped in place, held down by a system that privileges ZIP Code without acknowledging the deeply segregated nature of American housing patterns.

College admissions are not meritocratic. Schools use a variety of factors in the admissions process that have little to do with pure academic merit — test scores and grades, but also community and school involvement, racial, ethnic, and social diversity, athletic ability, among them. Money and legacy are used, as well, factors that favor the rich and help maintain social and economic disparities.

Huffman’s actions were illegal, but not really different than those with wealth who use legacy and donations to rig admissions in their favor. Legacy students and those who benefit from their wealth assume that — know that — their money gives them advantages that others that the poor lack.

That’s the crime here. Huffman probably deserves a longer sentence, but the outrage should not focus on this so much as the systemic inequality that underfunds urban schools and all schools with so-called majority minority populations Technically, the law is blind. But in practice, it favors those who already have the most.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter, @newspoet41 and @kaletjournalism.

From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2019

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