Paul Batalden, a professor emeritus of community and family medicine at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, was known for his saying, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” While Batalden was referring to inefficiencies and high costs in the health care system, his idea applies to our education system as well. A look at the stark racial disparities in educational outcomes reveals that the education system fails to be a great equalizer. Calls to reform a broken system ignore a harsh truth: our nation's education system isn’t flawed or broken; it was intentionally designed to produce the disparate outcomes that disadvantage Black and Latinx youth. Over time certain systemic practices have changed—separate and unequal schools, or disciplinary practices creating pipelines to prison rather than postsecondary education—but the education system and many other systems formed at the time this country was founded and slavery was legal continue to create racial inequity in America.
JFF has launched a community of practice, Building Equitable Pathways, that is attempting to unearth the fundamental causes of inequity in our current systems, and create a more equitable education and workforce system, beyond the school reform movements of the last several decades. We believe that systems that may seem impermeable can be changed. We also acknowledge all the hard work that has already taken place to disrupt relics of oppression that are promoted in the current systems. Together, we seek to increase our collective capacity to hold ourselves accountable for not succumbing to the tired methods of data, policy, and equity practices that do not get to the root causes and for disrupting historical and ongoing inequities in the design and outcomes of our education and workforce systems.
This work has led us to the conclusion that while systemic inequity may be intentional, it is not inevitable. It can be changed if we are willing to challenge existing framing and assumptions about the problems and how to solve them. A framing that suggests the system is designed to be inequitable can be more daunting than framing the system as broken, but this framing is a key part of reforms that can address fundamental or functional equity issues.
Understanding the ‘Fruit’ and the ‘Root’ of Systemic Racial Inequity
Clair Minson, a leader in the field of racial equity in the workforce, offers a “fruit and root” metaphor to differentiate between the causes and effects of racism. The “fruit,” Minson explains, is the outcomes of the racism embedded within systems, visible and magnified. For example, when Black and Latinx young people are disproportionally directed to pathways that lead to low-wage employment, the intervention is typically focused on strategies for increasing representation in pathways or eliminating pathways to low-wage jobs, often without also examining what factors have created this disproportionate representation. Most often, the “fruit” gets most of the attention because it is most visible and seemingly easier to address.
However, achieving racial equity requires that we acknowledge the “root” as well—the institutional and systemic causes that uphold and perpetuate racial inequality:
- Individual biases against other individuals or groups and internalized biases against one’s self based on a socially disadvantaged racial identity
- Interpersonal dynamics and ways individuals engage other individuals and groups of individuals who have been historically excluded by law or custom from societal benefits and resources
- Institutional policies, practices, and culture that keep people marginalized based on race or ethnicity, or perpetuate segregation and social sorting, and that elevates one race and diminishes others
- Structural features of society, including systems, policies, cultural norms, and representation, that collectively operate to maintain racism and the ideology of white supremacy.
Collectively, these factors work together to maintain inequity and perpetuate white supremacy—the normalized assumption that white people are superior to others—within systems and programs. In Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1960s Birmingham, the law codified these assumptions of white supremacy and explicitly required interactions that sustained a racial caste system. In our time, narratives and practices that promote white supremacy are perpetuated through custom and practice, both largely invisible but still contributing to the manifestations of racial inequity and racial injustice.