Teaching About Economic Inequality in a Diverse Democracy: Politics, Ideology, and Difference

• In Event: Roundtable Session 56
  In Roundtable Session: Teaching About Economic Inequality Across the High School Curriculum

Abstract

Economic inequality in the United States and Canada has been increasing at rates that have raised concern among both scholars and policymakers (Bartells, 2008; Frank, 2007; Stiglitz, 2012; Wilkerson & Pickett, 2010). The highest one percent of U.S. income earners now controls approximately 40 percent of the nation's wealth and almost half of all investment capital. Forty-three percent of Americans are "liquid assets poor," meaning they lack the money to live for three months if their main source of income were lost. In Canada, between 1980 and 2009, the wealthiest 20% saw household market income increase by 38% while that of the bottom 20% of Canadians decreased by 11.4% (Conference Board of Canada, 2012). Despite the clear significance of these issues, however, little attention has been focused on whether or how schools address economic inequality as a subject of study.

This paper draws on three types of data from a broader in-depth cross-national study of what schools teach high school students about economic inequality: social studies curriculum frameworks from all 50 U.S. states and all Canadian provinces and territories; survey responses from 3,000 teachers in the U.S. and Canada; and interviews with 150 teachers (approximately 100 in the U.S. and 50 in Canada). We ask the following questions: (1) How does the frequency, content, and ideology of teaching about economic inequality differ across social studies, English, and mathematics? (2) How does the frequency, content, and ideology of teaching about economic inequality differ across schools with varying socio-economic contexts? (3) How do teacher beliefs about economic inequality affect the goals, strategies, and content of lessons? (4) How does ideological coherence between teachers’ beliefs and the local context of the community and school affect what is taught about economic inequality? (5) What constraints to teaching about economic inequality exist across different discipline areas and across varying communities’ political, socio-economic, and ideological contexts?

Preliminary document and survey analysis suggests that there are significant differences in the goals, strategies and ideological positioning of teaching and learning in the different contexts described above. For example, teachers in elite private schools in both the U.S. and Canada are more likely to teach about economic inequality in ways that encourage the exploration of competing perspectives on issues such as taxation, government intervention, and the impacts of free-market capitalism than are their colleagues in public schools in high-poverty communities; English teachers are more likely than social studies teachers to address inequality that occurs today in North America (rather than inequality in the past or in between developed and developing countries); teachers whose political beliefs about inequality differ from the beliefs in their surrounding communities report constraints to their teaching that vary from the constraints reported by their colleagues who have greater ideological coherence with their school communities. Our paper will use statistical analysis to examine how these responses vary along several dimensions as well qualitative analysis of interviews to examine how teachers make sense of this work.

Authors

• John S. Rogers, University of California - Los Angeles

• Joel Westheimer, University of Ottawa