This has to be read to be believed: “Criminal or Great Parent: Black Mother Jailed for Sending Daughters to White School”. And the photo of that poor mother, oh my god, heart-breaking.
White people are very good at using social capital, it is one of the many ways that we get ahead. Upper class and upper-middle class people are exceptionally clever at using social capital, it is one of the assets they pass down to their children. Of course, social capital can lead to out-right corruption but mostly it doesn’t. What it is, is letting your friend know that there is an opening at your Montessori school so she can apply for it ahead of everyone else. It is mentioning to your neighbor that your husband’s firm is going to be hiring soon so it might be a good time for them to send in a resume. It is asking your family for recommendations for a good electrician they have used. It is letting your friends know that you have an interview at the club and can they put in a good word for you. It is feeling a sense of belonging, too. It is pitching in, keeping an eye out, and taking care of others.
Generally social capital isn’t used in a malicious way, it is nothing worse than helping out people you know and like because they’re part of your network. We’re social animals and we like to live in little groups. Even when we’re situated in big crowded cities we tend only to form close ties with a village-size number of people in that city. The problem with social capital is that while it locks up advantage among a particular network of people, it also locks up disadvantage among a particular network of people, too.
Say you’re unemployed and your family has a history of unemployment. You’re probably all quite poor and consequently you live in an area with other poor people. Maybe it is a cheap area to live in because it is also an area with little in the way of public transport and few good facilities – all of this means that employment and growth prospects in the area are limited. So there you are and almost everyone you know is unemployed… who has the connections in your community to let you know about the firm that is hiring soon? Who looks over your resume and picks up on the errors, so that yours doesn’t end up at the bottom of the pile? Who can lend you a tie for the job interview? Who went to university via a bridging course and can share with you the process for following that path if you’d like a higher qualification? Who tells you about the short-cuts, the ways around, the tricks to the system, the name-dropping cues? Social capital not only informs you of how the rules work but also how they bend and flex, and even better, what to do if you find yourself caught breaking them. Social capital gives you the capacity to negotiate yourself out of a corner. Social capital is a powerful mechanism; policy makers expend enormous energies trying to find ways to mimic and borrow some of it for welfare programs.
Sending your children to a school in a better area because you can; because using your father’s residential address as your children’s address would get them into the catchment area for that school; because being at a better school will give your children all sorts of improved opportunities, is a classic example of social capital. Maybe it isn’t always fair, but when everyone is using their social capital (however much of it they have) everywhere and everyday, where exactly are you going to draw the line? Apparently you draw it with the black mother.
I know of an Assistant Prin of a SC in Melbourne who spends an assigned chunk of the year checking that students actually live where they say they live (ie in that high-performing gov’t school’s zone). Families will rent in the area as much as possible but sometimes they have a relative in the school-zone (or even a property they own and rent out) act as the “address” to fool the school admin.
(I only know if one family who’s done it, but the gossip reports it to me as something ‘the Chinese families’ do. Apparently. I suspect its just anyone with the gall to lie like that. )
If they’re caught out, the school asks them to justify the need for their kid to go to *this* school, and may end up having the student transferred to their actual neighbourhood school in the next year if they don’t figure it out.
I think the response to this case in the US is mean, disproportionate and unreasonable.
We are going the same way as this basket-case of a country (even leaving aside the egregious and obvious racial discrimation – we have that, too) because our governments slavishly imitate every US policy they can put their hands on.
Yes, I’ve known the mum that mysteriously moved to the University High catchment area and then out again just as mysteriously when daughter finished VCE. I also know the stuffy WASP family who miraculously embraced catholicism when they couldn’t afford the CEGGS.
Yeah – exactly!
I have heard that people do the dodgy-address / move in Sydney. I’ve probably ranted about this before, but I am a staunch and vocal supporter of public education and don’t like the idea that some schools have ‘prestige’ so they are automatically ‘better’.
However…
When it was time for all six of us Year Six students to leave our 30-student-strong primary school, in our (NSW coastal) area there wasn’t much choice. Go to the next small town to the K-12 with a really poor reputation; travel three times as far to the biggest high school with a really good reputation; travel even further for a couple of other good public schools and one good private school. Not much choice and you had to travel anyway.
We weren’t in the catchment area for the nearest big school, so my parents pulled the ‘alumni’ card – my mum (and her seven brothers and sisters) went to that high school. When she went she had to board in town sometimes because it was too far to get home! But then, maybe they are more flexible in the country/coastal areas – it’s a long way to get to any school if you don’t live in one of the bigger towns, let alone have any choice about it. (The area has since had an explosion of religious high schools… not happy about this.)
So while I might fault people for buying into the ‘private schools are better’ idea without considering that there are many good public schools, I really can’t fault people for using their social capital to get their kids in the school they want. Because I agree – I love your outline of social capital bluemilk – people in upper / middle class might do social capital better, have more advantages etc, but everyone does have the potential to use social capital.
If I was that poor woman I bloody well would have done the same thing.
[...] Blue Milk links to this story about a mother from Akron Ohio who was tried, convicted and jailed when she bent the rules to get her daughters into a better school. [...]
[...] is a lot of theft that is pretty hard to empathise with, but the so-called theft of education for children? Not so hard to understand. In the most recent case, Tonya McDowell, a black mother who lived [...]
Wow! I have read non-sense like this (Bluemilk) for years. School districts derive their finanicial support from the tax base provided by and from its residents.
Anyone living outside the school district should not break the law and enroll their children into a “better” school. What this Black Mother did, sending her daughters to a white school is criminal. It is outright theft.
Bluemilk, theft has nothing to do with “social capital.” Ms. Kelly Williams-Bolar used lying and falsification of school district resident records and county laws.
Social capital, as defined by wikipedia, is a social concept, which refers to connections within and between social networks. The concept of social capital highlights the value of social relations and the role of cooperation and confidence to get collective or economic results. The term social capital is frequently used by different social sciences.
Ms. Kelly Williams-Bolar used geography and deceit in order to rob other American citizens of they’re liberties, taxes and freedom of economic and educational association.
How long must the productive elements of society fund and support those who refuse to utilize books, libraries, internet, and meaningful content to educate themselves.
Yonni Bar Davi
“Ms. Kelly Williams-Bolar used geography and deceit in order to rob other American citizens of they’re liberties, taxes and freedom of economic and educational association.
How long must the productive elements of society fund and support those who refuse to utilize books, libraries, internet, and meaningful content to educate themselves.”
I disagree with pretty much everything you say, Yonni Davi, and the thoughts above most of all.
Because funny thing about the so called ‘theft of education’… you might just find that it’s the kind of ‘theft’ that pays back the community several times over. Human capital works that way. In fact, wiser and kinder people would consider a high quality education for that black mother’s children to be an investment.
Blue Milk,
Have you read the Coleman Report? Dr. Coleman found there exist little difference in the funding of Black and White schools. Although the report was published in 1966, follow-up studies continue to espouse the Coleman Report initial findings, that financial resources are not the primary reason for the educational or acedemic achievement gap between black and white. It is social and family background.
Lawrence Harrison articulates this very point in his landmark book Underdevelopment: A State of Mind. Thomas Sowell, and others too numerous to mention here, have concluded, the problem with black under-performance is not a lack of FUNDS, it is social and cultural.
Ms. Williams-Bolar could have her children live in an ALL WHITE school year round. The outcome would not change. Today, the data stares us in the face, yet we stubbornly and blindly refuse to make peace with the cold hard facts.
Lawrence Harrison, writes, culture plays an essential part of any society’s progress. In Michele Lamont’s “The cultural territories of race: Black and White boundaries,” Black Americans, she finds that Black immigrants have out-paced native born African-Americans. Her findings are similar to Gunnar Myrdal (Nobel winner), W. Arthur Lewis (black Nobel winner–author of The Theory of Economic Growth), and Thomas Sowell, a noted economist and writer, that acedemcis are much higher among black immigrants than native born black Americans.
Sociologist Orlando Patterson (Harvard), his studies suggest that black American mothers lack “social capital” and this essential attribute is the major reason for the lack of achievement. All things being equal, there is little left for consideration.
The essential missing link is not MONEY, OPPORTUNITY, ACCESS or any other external factor…the problem lies within.
Although, I admire your passion, it can better be served by looking at the reality based facts and then exhorting Ms. Williams-Bolar to apply her efforts on acquiring the needed social capital her children lack. Forty-years of reality based facts have spoken. NO matter how many black children with poor mothers dropping their offspring into rich-white-school districts will close the gap.
Yonni Bar Davi
Fuck me, this is getting tedious.
You are basing your school funding argument on a single study published in 1966, are you kidding me? You don’t think school funding policies can vary across jurisdictions or change during a period of fifty fucking years?
Social and family background *are* key determinants of social capital, they’re not separate things.. this mother was using that which she had to try and give her children the benefits of a good school, and going to a good school is one important way of acquiring social capital. For fucksake.
I’m an economist, I read a LOT of studies on social and economic disadvantage and its causes, most of them a great deal more recent than 1966. I have also read a lot of studies on discrimination and the impact of it on economic wellbeing. There is a wealth of data to substantiate the conclusion that the systematic oppression of black people in your country has undermined their opportunities to succeed and that this has a devastating legacy effect which is further compounded by continued widescale racism.
“The essential missing link is not MONEY, OPPORTUNITY, ACCESS or any other external factor…the problem lies within”.
Can’t see the wood for all the trees. Why do you think black mothers lack social capital? How do you think people acquire social capital?
Stop the patronising tone in your comment… and don’t bother admiring my passion, spend a bit more time studying this stuff yourself before you go entering a debate on it.
The “finding” that there was “little difference in the funding of Black and White schools” in the United States in the 1960s is absolute bollocks. Such a claim was made in Brown v Board of Education (hence why counsel had to argue that separation in and of itself leads to inequalities). The expert testimony (which could even have been given by Coleman – I can’t find the name on the court record) was discredited as being effectively perjury. I was taught by Jack Greenberg (counsel for the plaintiffs in Brown) and he is adamant that the claim is an outright lie.
I am not sure how anyone can argue with a straight face that schools with a majority black student body gets the same amount of funding and resources as white schools. And to then rely on one report from fifty years ago to support such a claim is even more ridiculous.
It goes without saying that I also disagree with pretty much everything else Yonni has written but just don’t have the energy to respond. Sigh.
Correction…
NO matter how many black children with poor mothers dropping their offspring into rich-white-school districts will NOT CLOSE the gap.
Yonni Bar Davi
Yonni – I have removed your latest comment and your time on this blog is over. With quotes like this in your latest comment –
“I have lived and visit parts of the middle east, Africa, latin America, and the far east. I’m not impressed. Black Americans should get down on their knees and thank heaven they live in AMERICA.
Apparently, they do. I checked the State Department files recently…Not many African Americans leave America for better pastures overseas locations like Africa, Latin America, India, China and other wonderful places”.
- I can only say that you have a degree of racism that is best described as shit-loads.
There are places where your ridiculous ignorant opinions will be welcome, but right now you’re on the Internet and in case you couldn’t tell you’re talking to a whole world of people out here, and some of us aren’t white and some of us aren’t American, in fact some of us even live in these places that don’t impress you – the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and the Far East – and guess what? we’re not interested in your fucked up stupidity so fuck off!
[...] cannot emphasize enough (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) that the justice system – prison, policing, [...]
[...] about Kelley Williams-Bolar being jailed for ‘stealing’ education for her kids, which absolutely broke my heart has taken an interesting turn.. Parents are no longer running just the bake sales [...]
I am sorry you to have waste your time.