Abstract
What no one disputed regarding the 1972 publication of Christopher Jencks and colleagues Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America was that the volume, as one New York Times commentator put it, “has already created a big fuss, and it is almost certain to create a bigger one.” Americans have long celebrated the notion that equalizing educational inputs (such as school funding, curricula, quality teachers, peer culture, or effective learning environments) was essential for equalizing social and economic status among adults. Inequality represented the twentieth century high point of social scientific critiques of this idea—a critique that implied that a wider social welfare infrastructure was needed to do this egalitarian work. This paper asks why this probing social scientific critique of American egalitarian thought—which, given its authors’ Harvard credentials, status as a former Washington insider, lavish funding, and cutting-edge quantitative methods, had all the marks of an authoritative monograph—generated such widespread debate and had minimal policy impact. Inequality caused a wave of controversy, the paper argues, because it worried key constituencies otherwise predisposed to support its message in a rightward moving political context where many possible supporters were on the defensive. As the War on Poverty was dismantled amidst the rightward turns of the Nixon years, many educators and civil rights activists feared that Inequality would rationalize reduced school funding and retreats from civil rights gains. Some social scientific findings, Jencks’ critics suggested, were better left unsaid.