OPPORTUNITY LOST: THE COSTS OF EDUCATION FOR ECONOMIC MOBILITY

Education is often portrayed as the means to provide economically disadvantaged students with opportunities for mobility in order to reduce the wealth and income gap. Achieving this goal is difficult and involves a number of costs and tradeoffs for poor students--costs and tradeoffs which are deemed acceptable only if mobility is successfully obtained, and to the extent that it is a worthy goal. Thus, recent scholarship has focused on how best to use education to provide mobility, but has not sufficiently considered how doing so results in policies, systems, and practices which treat education very differently for poor versus wealthy students. This dissertation examines the costs imposed on the poor from conceiving and structuring education as the primary institution for furthering economic mobility. It demonstrates how this aim of education creates a system with distinct goals, ultimately resulting in a narrowing and instrumentalization of educational opportunities for poor students as compared to their wealthier peers. It examines theoretical assumptions that lead to this narrowing, and provides examples of its effects on teachers’ ability to flourish in their roles, and on students’ decision making in higher education, all of which demonstrates that in the name of reducing economic disparity, new and significant disparities are being created within education itself. This dissertation illuminates some of the under-acknowledged costs of using education for economic mobility, deepening and enriching the scholarly and policy work on economic equity and education.