How a pandemic exposed – and may help fix – inequalities in education

In the early 2010s, Jon Valant, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, began researching Americans’ perception of the “achievement gap,” mainstream lingo for the difference in educational outcomes between historically advantaged and disadvantaged students. 

What he found surprised him.

As a scholar of education, he thought it was clear that systemic racism had long impacted the country’s school system. From the days of slavery, when it was illegal to teach Black children, to today, when researchers have found that school districts filled primarily with students of color receive billions less in funding than predominantly white school districts, students of color have faced undue difficulties. 

But most Americans, it turned out, did not see it this way. Indeed, according to a study that he released in 2016 with colleague Daniel Newark, most Americans – particularly white Americans – did not believe that discrimination or injustice played a role in the different educational outcomes of white and Black students. They blamed parenting and student motivation instead.

While respondents were interested in closing disparities between wealthier and poorer students, a majority were hesitant to support policies that experts believed would close the Black-white divide. “Most Americans at the time just did not believe that social injustice or discrimination played a role,” recalls Dr. Valant.

This year may be changing that. It may also be opening the door to what some scholars hope could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to revamp one of the most intransigent systems in American life, education; and one of its most intractable problems, inequity.  

Recent polling shows a dramatic shift in the way Americans see racial disparity. A majority of white Americans now believe policing is racially biased, according to a recent Associated Press poll, and there is a growing sense among white Americans that racial injustice is a continuing problem in the United States – something that most Black Americans have said for years. At the same time, the COVID-19

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