On subway platforms around the world from New York to Brazil to London to Thailand, the words “watch the gap” or “mind the gap” appear as a warning to passengers not to step into the space between the platform and train when boarding. It is always easy to tell the difference between veteran riders who are used to the gap and board as though there is no space and the “newbies” who step over the gap as though it was a deep chasm of no return. In the month of March journalists from The New York Times to The Wall Street Journal have written about several types of gaps in the United States that I believe offer lessons for our education system: the income gap, “The Compassion Gap” and even a new form of missile gap.
From The Wall Street Journal’s story about the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) “warning that rising income inequality is weighing on global economic growth and fueling political instability” (14 March 2014) to The New York Times articles focused upon how differences in income have led to stark differences in “life chances” as well as significant decreases in life expectancy—18 years for men and 12 years for women—for America’s poor (16 March 2014 & 14 March 2014), the dire consequences of the income gap have been front and center for anyone payingattention. The level of inequality in the United States, according to the IMF, “has returned to levels not seen since before the Great Depression.”
While the income gap has many meanings for education (i.e., see the 28 March 2014 piece in The New York Times entitled “Project to Improve Poor Children’s Intellect Led to Better Health, Data Shows”), my focus is upon the recent Senate hearing on the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, especially on chairman Senator Tom Harkin’s statement: “Right now, if you are a high-income, low performance student, you have an 80 percent chance of going to college. If you are a low-income student, but high-performing with a B or better average, you only have a 20 percent chance of going to college” (NPR, 27 March 2014).
Combining Senator Harkin’s statement with the February 11th Pew Research Center’s findings regarding the importance of attaining a college degree produces a ‘threat advisory color code of red‘ for America’s education system and socio-economic strength. The Pew Research Center reported: “On virtually every measure of economic well-being and career attainment…young college graduates are outperforming their peers with less education. And when today’s young adults are compared with previous generations, the disparity in economic outcomes between college graduates and those with a high school diploma or less formal schooling has never been greater in the modern era” (PewResearch Social & Demographic Trends, 11 February 2014). The income gap has clearly widened the inequality of opportunity in the United States. The income gap lessons for America’s entire education system—from the importance of providing funding for pre-K programs to supporting the Common Core to accessing a quality college education—are so numerous and diverse that the best way of encapsulating all of them is through the words of Mark Twain: “We believe that out of the public schools grows the greatness of a nation.”
Another gap that Nicholas Kristof highlighted in a 2 March 2014 op-ed in The New York Times was the appropriately titled “The Compassion Gap.” Compassion, for me, has been one of the characteristics that define the “greatness” of our nation. Unfortunately, “A professor at Princeton found that our brains sometimes process images of people who are poor or homeless as if they were not humans but things.” America has historically stood and fought against dehumanization around the world. It appears as though it is time to re-strengthen our self-compassion. Our children should be learning not only concepts in school but values such as compassion. The byproducts of such curriculum are all positive: reducing the levels of bullying and other violence as well as creating more conducive learning environments to name just a few. “Educating the mind without educating the heart,” according to Aristotle, “is no education at all.”
The missileer gap has been covered by almost every media outlet available to Americans. The missileer gap is about the absence of honor where most Americans expect it to be in overwhelming amounts. The gap is centered upon the conduct of Air Force officers “entrusted with the launching of intercontinental ballistic missiles” and the levels of cheating they engaged in for the sake of their own promotions. The short story of the cheating scandal is best described by the secretary of the Air Force, Deborah Lee James, when she stated that “a culture of cheating had taken hold among missile launch officers” because their “careers” are determined by whether or not they achieved “100 percent on their monthly tests” (The New York Times, 28 March 2014). The officers seemingly have forgotten their Sophocles: “I would prefer even to fail with honor than win by cheating.” The lessons for our educational system is that an overreliance on standardized tests (i.e., No Child Left Behind mandated yearly tests) has more detrimental consequences to our society than testing proponents acknowledge. Einstein couldn’t be clearer than when he stated: “I believe in standardizing automobiles, not human beings.”
Let’s not become used to the gaps so that we ignore them “feel[ing] no pressure to act on these issues” (The Wall Street Journal, 28 March 2014). The gaps are currently being ignored to the point that America may be stepping into an inequality gap for which our educational system will have a difficult time reclaiming the title of ‘best in the world.’ We need to “mind the gaps” so that we can achieve our “greatness of a nation” together while avoiding a fall into a “great depression” that is between the platform of education and the track of economic prosperity.
Chris is Professor of Political Science at Western Connecticut State University, a Fulbright Scholar, Director of the Kathwari Honors Program, and founding Director of the Center for Compassion, Creativity & Innovation. He is also the author of "The Compassionate Achiever: How Helping Others Fuels Success" (HarperOne, 2017).
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