WINTER 2012 - National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and ...

FROM THE GUEST EDITOR
slower to get off the ground, and their trajectories were forever in the
shadow of the other children. Why?…In answering the question, Hart
and Risley discovered that some things don’t matter. For example,
race/ethnicity doesn’t matter; gender doesn’t matter; whether a child
is the first in the family or born later also doesn’t matter. But what
does matter, and it matters very much, is relative economic advantage.
(Bloom, in foreword to Hart & Risley, 1995, p. x)
Regardless of the explanatory power of social class variables, mainstream
academic public administration generally ignores such matters, especially the role
of socioeconomic origins for determining the arc of people’s lives, including their
relationship to democratic government and formal education (Oldfield, 2011, p.
254). Most of our students graduate with little if any appreciation or awareness
of how much social class matters in understanding the study and practice of
our profession (see, e.g., Oldfield, 2003; Oldfield, Candler, & Johnson, 2006;
White, 2004; Wyatt-Nichol, 2008). Perhaps our field marginalizes this topic
because, we, like most Americans, too readily accept the mythology that even if
we agree it is better to have wealthier, well-schooled parents, our formal learning
system will offset these early disparities in opportunities—education as The
Great Equalizer. Perhaps these misperceptions are why social class inequalities
have not become a central focus of our social equity and diversity concerns,
notwithstanding our self-proclaimed commitment to these ideals.
SOCIAL CLASS AND SOCIAL EQUITY
Despite our field’s general reluctance to address class questions, above all
the profound and lifelong effects of socioeconomic background, a few intrepid
public administration scholars have been challenging this reticence. In his
introduction to a recent JPAE symposium, Johnson (2011, p. 165), acting as the
collection’s editor, mentioned that the contributors (Wyatt-Nichol, Brown, &
Haynes, 2011) of one article argued, “Social class education . . . is overlooked
in the public affairs literature and classroom.” Elsewhere he said these same
authors “see the lack of social class information in the public affairs classroom as
creating a generation of public administrators with no depth of understanding
[of] how social class creates barriers and obstacles for individuals and families
that are working class or poor,” a shortcoming their article addresses. Johnson
(2011, p. 163) gave these class concerns an ethical context by noting how the
National Academy of Public Administration’s Standing Panel on Social Equity
in Governance acknowledged that, “Issues of fairness, justice, and equity have
always been a part of public administration.” Perhaps there is reason to hope that
with enough push, socioeconomic inequalities can become a major focus of our
field’s social equity and diversity efforts.
10 Journal of Public Affairs Education