The policies of the incoming administration with regard to the federal role in education, despite a great deal of fearmongering during the election season, have not yet taken shape. Though the administration nominated Linda McMahon for Secretary of Education this week, the administration’s priorities in education are being assessed on the basis of statements made by candidates during the election. Before McMahon’s nomination, Education Week reported that the Secretary of Education “will likely support slimming down if not dismantling the Education Department; expanding school choice; slashing K-12 spending; and attacking school districts’ diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.” It will probably be some time before we know how these positions will cash out in terms of policy choices.
Not on the horizon of the incoming administration are any proposals for reparations to the African American population of America’s inner cities. Such proposals have generally come from radicals. But could there be a centrist version of reparations to be found in education policy?
The Usual (Failed) Case for Reparations
The 2024 elections were, if anything, a mandate to reject the idea of reparations as they have been proposed on the left. Pressure from the left to enact reparations policies has multiplied since the George Floyd riots and demonstrations of 2020. In that year, the city council of Asheville, North Carolina, approved reparations for black residents in the form of subsidies for homeownership, businesses, and career development. More recently, San Francisco formed an African American Reparations Advisory Committee which has proposed that “every eligible Black adult receive a $5 million lump-sum cash payment and a guaranteed income of nearly $100,000 a year to remedy San Francisco’s deep racial wealth gap.” The proposal has been enthusiastically received by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. How it will be paid for has yet to be disclosed.
The San Francisco measure is typical of how the left thinks about reparations. The policies they propose are manifestly unjust. The more extreme activists are calling for a guaranteed minimum income, free healthcare, and housing for all African Americans—reparations through racialized socialism. Despite the sanction shamefully bestowed on such demands by media organs and many public officials, most Americans still have the good sense to recognize that enacting these measures would wreck the lives of both black and white citizens and lead to social turmoil if they were imposed on the vast majority of Americans who live outside of leftist enclaves.
Other proposals for reparations are more in line with the liberal priorities of the welfare state, which still has support from at least a large plurality of American voters. Typical is the Economic Justice Act, introduced in 2020 by Senate Democrats in response to the George Floyd demonstrations. This is a $350 billion measure described as a “down payment” to compensate for “systemic racism and historic underinvestment in communities of color.” Though the law, introduced by Sen. Charles Schumer, has never been brought up for a vote, and is surely DOA in the new Republican Senate, it is a revealing example of the old welfare-state approach to racial justice. The measure includes the usual set of liberal nostrums for improving the condition of African Americans: racial set-asides, Medicaid expansion, and infrastructure projects in high-poverty communities. More job training, despite the persistent failure of such programs in the past to yield results, are also included. Deaf to the lessons of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, the bill offers tax credits for down payments on homes, ensuring that more African Americans will be trapped into taking on unaffordable mortgages.
Particularly striking is what is missing from the bill: any measures that would improve educational opportunities for American blacks. Apart from funding for more childcare and preschool programs of dubious value, there are no provisions for improving funding or school choice options for blacks trapped in inner-city schools. There can be little doubt that this loud absence represents the preferences of a leading progressive constituency, namely the teachers’ unions. The teachers’ unions have long blocked access to the most important childcare program of all for poor, inner-city blacks: quality K-12 education.
Hold that thought, and now consider whether more centrist and conservative Americans have anything to offer black Americans in the form of reparations for slavery. Historians such as myself are likely to respond that reparations for slavery have already been made somewhere between Fort Sumter and Appomattox. Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural put it this way:
Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
Yet there is a weighty moral argument that the country still owes its black citizens a debt. Ta-Nehisi Coates—before he became a darling of the left—made a persuasive case that reparations should be made to blacks for discrimination against African Americans in the period from Reconstruction to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. For many decades, blacks lived under racist legislation imposed by local and state governments, north and south. Such legislation was tolerated and even supported by the Democratic administrations after 1932 which relied on the southern states to maintain their electoral majorities. The argument that a great part of the persistent income gap between whites and blacks is a direct result of this legal discrimination is not really in doubt anymore among economists. Coates argued that restitution should be paid, not only to the descendants of African slaves brought to America, but also to blacks injured by unjust enrichment authorized by white majority governments since the end of slavery.
Many Americans, and not only those on the progressive left, continue to feel that we as a people need to make some kind of restitution for past discrimination.
In view of this more recent pattern of racist discrimination, many Americans, and not only those on the progressive left, continue to feel that we as a people need to make some kind of restitution for past discrimination. Doing so would allow America to right a great wrong and allow African Americans, at long last, to lay aside their just resentment and integrate into American society as full members. It will allow white Americans aware of the evils in our past to feel that justice, at long last, has been done.
The difficulty with the reparations argument has always been practical, not moral. It lies in the questions, by whom, to whom, and how much? Who has the obligation to pay? Who has a just claim to be paid? And how much of the relative poverty suffered by modern black Americans can be measurably traced to the discriminatory practices of the past?
Most people who reflect on these questions thoughtfully will conclude that we as a people can never really make restitution for slavery and the racial discrimination of the past. The damages can never be calculated in monetary terms. Nor will we ever be able to explain to the Chinese businessman in my neighborhood, a man whose parents brought him to this country in 1956 to escape communism, why his taxes should go up to compensate African Americans, some of them now well off and college educated, for discriminatory housing policies in 1940s Chicago.
A Centrist Form of Reparations
While reparations in the form of cash payments is obviously impractical and unjust, what we can do as a people is embrace policies that will both close the wealth gap between white and black Americans and increase the prosperity of all Americans. It is possible to have a form of reparations that truly serves the common good: a policy oriented to equalizing educational opportunity. What holds poor African Americans back more than any other circumstance is the wretched quality of public schools in the inner cities. This is not really in doubt. But the inner cities also hold the largest untapped reservoir of talent in America: badly educated African Americans. If we could find a way to improve how these young men and women are educated, we could reduce the poverty gap quickly and dramatically improve social relations in America.
We have the resources to do so without raising taxes. The federal government spends $240 billion annually on grants, work-study programs, and loans for post-secondary education. Instead of spending those funds on middle-class entitlements, which often just inflate tuition at wealthy private colleges and for-profit schools, we could convert those funds to education vouchers that would give African-American parents the resources to choose better K-12 schools for their children. Instead of loading middle-class students with mountains of debt, we could provide a solid benefit to those who need it most.
Educating a young black man so that he can profit from college is a much wiser use of public funds than educating future baristas.
Surely those funds would be much better spent on the part of our society that has the most potential for improvement and for contributing to the general welfare. Given the misallocation of educational resources caused by lavish federal spending in higher education, shifting funds to basic education makes a great deal of economic sense. Those of us who have watched with alarm the performances of our college-educated youth in the last year following the events of October 7 will not regret reducing government subsidies for poisonous indoctrination. Educating a young black man so that he can profit from college is a much wiser use of public funds than educating future baristas in subjects of small value to society. Educating African Americans well at the earliest stages of their development will make us all better off.
Improving African Americans’ education, moreover, would reduce the pressure for “equity,” defined as equality of outcomes. The progressive concept of equity is the chief obstacle at present to the principle of merit—the principle that should govern all education. The current progressive solution to black education—trapping black children in terrible K-12 schools, then pretending that their educational achievement in college matches those of their peers—is not helping them or anyone else.
In the current educational landscape, this proposal has the benefit of not being easily locatable on the simple-minded left/right spectrum used by most political commentators. The political benefits that would accrue to any administration that takes up this proposal for shifting educational priorities should be evident, but let me spell them out a bit.
The country would stop over-investing in higher education. This would have the effect of reducing the influence of higher education on the political beliefs of graduates simply in terms of numbers. Reducing federal support for college loans should also have good effects within universities. Political indoctrination in many schools is a luxury addition to the basic curriculum, made possible in part by the flood of federal dollars that has been put at the disposal of university administrators. Reducing subsidies for higher education would force administrators to choose between their basic mission—to educate students in ways that benefit them—and the desire of activists to use the university as a platform for indoctrination.
It is a well-known economic dictum that if you subsidize something, you get more of it. Subsidies also reduce the efficiency of the free market. If students are not subsidized to enjoy what many of them look upon as a four-year vacation from the workforce, they will be forced to make better decisions about their investment in education. Black Americans will have more reason to be grateful to the sane center of American politics. And we will all feel that we have done something to redeem ourselves as a nation from the injustices of the past.