After Atlanta made the shortlist of cities vying for Amazon’s second global headquarters, HQ2, it submitted a multi-billion-dollar investment to try to seal the deal. (Other cities’ proposals were even bigger.) At stake is nothing less than the city’s economic future: HQ2 promises more than 50,000 high tech jobs with an average salary of more than $100,000. With the tech industry looking like the future of all industry, Atlanta landing Amazon’s HQ2 would be a dream come true.
But a dream for whom? Highly educated people, particularly those with technical skills, are the ones who are really eligible for these prized jobs. Those without that kind of education risk becoming even more marginalized in an increasingly tech-driven economy. In Atlanta, one of the most segregated cities in the United States, history has already largely determined who gets to benefit from the potential of Amazon.
[Read: Black workers really do need to be twice as good]
In 2016, there was only one census tract in Atlanta where the population is greater than 65 percent black and more than half of the population aged 25 and older has a bachelor’s degree or better. In 2000, there were 10. Here, black and brown students, and poor students of all backgrounds, often receive a substandard education that does not prepare them to be competitive for entry to the selective colleges and universities tech companies draw their workforces from. That means that with or without Amazon’s investment, the city’s black population likely won’t be able to land STEM jobs unless they can gain access to the rigorous educational paths required to compete for them. In Atlanta and the many other American cities still scarred by decades of racist education policies, the future of work is still largely defined by a past from which their residents of color can’t seem to break free.
Katie Guzdial is a recent graduate of Georgia Tech, where I work as the director of a center for equity in computing. She is white, her parents are university professors, and she is a product of a public school in Atlanta.
Segregation is only meaningful when the population of people is diverse. And Guzdial’s school was unusually diverse by race and ethnicity for an Atlanta high school: According to the Georgia State Department of Education, its population was roughly 35 percent white, 30 percent Hispanic or Latino, and 25 percent black. Guzdial told me that that the diversity of students was a real benefit to her, for all the reasons you would expect. It exposed her to people of different backgrounds, experiences, and world views. It offered the rich, social experience that we all hope our children might encounter.
But her experience of diveristy did not extend to the classroom. According to Guzdial, “there were only 2 or 3 Black kids in any of my AP [Advanced Placement] classes. I don’t know what they had to do to get into the AP courses, but there weren’t many of them there.”
That’s typical: Nearly everything related to educational performance is tied to race, and academic segregation is common in American education, even if no official policy creates that division. Even in schools that enroll students of different races and ethnicities, there is a filtration system at work. It keeps the most elite classes—honors and gifted, Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate, the ones that pave the way to top universities like Georgia Tech and top companies like Amazon—from being as diverse as the population within the school and within the city in which they sit.
Guzdial’s keen insight about the reality of education at her own school—“I don’t know what they had to do to get in”—demonstrates her sensitivity to the inequitable structure that technology companies propagate, whether they mean to or not. She recognized not only that she had no idea what black or Hispanic students had to do to get into AP courses, but also that she had to do very little. It just happened.
“I was chosen to be in the gifted program in kindergarten,” she explained. “From there your path is basically paved for you.” Guzdial suggested to me that she did not understand what makes a child “gifted” at 5 years old that is so intrinsic that the designation ought to last them across their entire time in school until they are 18. But it does. “They just told me which classes to take and I took them. I ended up taking seven Advanced Placement courses and a dual enrollment college course.”
There is no question that Guzdial is academically gifted. But even giftedness is correlated with race in Atlanta. According to the Atlanta Public Schools Equity Audit Report, nearly twice as many white students are identified as gifted as are black students.
And for every Katie Guzdial, there are a thousand stories of a student of color trapped in a broken system—even those who didn’t grow up in poverty.
Mari Chiles is black and highly talented. Her parents are both bestselling authors. She’s currently a Yale undergraduate studying public health, and before that, like Guzdial, she attended Atlanta’s public high schools. “When I started high school, they assumed that every negative stereotype of black kids was true of me,” Chiles told me. “They just looked at me and saw a black girl at an inner-city school and assumed I wasn’t smart.” According to Chiles, she never stopped having to battle those initial assumptions. “It was a struggle to navigate the school the whole four years. It felt as if my intelligence and ability were decided for me and they automatically put me in remedial classes.”
And unlike Katie Guzdial, who was shepherded into advanced classes early, and almost by default, Chiles told me her school counselors “were more of a detriment than a help.”
“It was my counselors who decided to put me in remedial and low-level courses,” she explained. “They couldn’t interpret my private school courses so they just put me in the lowest level classes as a default.”
Ultimately, Chiles was fortunate—she saw that she was not in the appropriate classes, and she was able to enlist the help of her parents, who themselves had attended elite universities and knew what was necessary for entry, and who fought to ensure that their daughter was placed in the appropriate classes. Otherwise, they feared she would have been trapped down a dead-end path.
[Read: School segregation is not a myth]
Parents with high-school age children who are on the path to STEM jobs might already know what to look for to set their kids up for the kinds of jobs Amazon might offer. Algebra in the 8th grade. Advanced Placement Calculus and Computer Science courses (the latter of which only two of Atlanta’s high schools offered.) Teachers and counselors committed to making sure they get a 3 or better on those exams. High performance on the math section of the SAT or ACT, regardless of their intended major. They know specifically what rigorous education translates into for their children.
Such was the case for Chiles, and for Guzdial: “My parents knew,” Guzdial said. And she got into Georgia Tech, whose College of Computing houses approximately 2,200 undergraduates, 145 of whom are black—just seven percent, in a city where 54 percent of the population is black. These numbers are among the best among elite computing programs in the United States—an ominous indicator of the future of black people in computing writ large, let alone in Atlanta.
If the formal path to rigorous STEM education is challenging for students of color, what about informal paths? Tech firms like Google and Apple are among a growing number of companies that no longer require a college degree. With the cost of college higher than ever, a surge of coding boot camps and certification courses have appeared, hoping to provide an alternative path. But even there, the road is littered with obstacles.
When Lonnell Warner was in middle school, his family moved from Atlanta to a suburb just outside town. “My parents wanted to get us a better education and not deal with all the craziness in the schools in our neighborhood,” he told me. The school he moved to was predominantly white, and Warner says the environment felt hostile to him and the few other black students there. Eventually Warner got into a fight with a white student. He was expelled, despite having no history of misbehavior, being in good academic standing, and even over the objections of the parents of the other student, according to Warner. Sometimes schools hold back black students by filtering them out of elite courses, like Chiles’s did. In other cases, a draconian administration of discipline is to blame.
Warner secured his degree by homeschooling back in Atlanta, but he was off track for the jobs in computing that he had hoped to pursue after graduation. Those alternate pathways to computing education, like boot camps and IT certification courses, would seem to offer the perfect solution for aspiring tech workers like him. But the barriers of cost, access and circumstance are significant.
Not from lack of investment in these programs, however. In advance of its promise of 50,000 new jobs to its chosen HQ2 location, Amazon has pledged $50 million to STEM education over the next five years. $10 million of that already went to Code.org, a nonprofit that supports expanding computer-science education and diversity. Some of Code.org’s efforts target formal school programs, others on informal, out-of-class activities. Among the latter is the “Hour of Code,” an event Amazon supports at its offices around the country (Microsoft, Google, and Facebook have also donated millions of dollars to Code.org). Amazon also donated $300,000 each to Greater Foundation and the Technology Access Foundation, investments meant to help local nonprofits help students without access to computer science education.
Students with time and money to spare can pursue informal education opportunities early and often. But Warner had to make a living, so he took a job doing facilities work at a local university. Quickly, he felt a ceiling of opportunity closing in over his head. “It’s hard labor with a future of more hard labor,” Warner told me. He hoped to transfer into an IT job, a route that might allow him to pick up the necessary skills to enter the tech industry without needing a four-year degree. From there, a different future seemed possible.
He bought an A+ Certification book in the hopes of becoming an entry-level personal-computer technician. “I do volunteer work at computer repair shops at night to get help and practical experience because the certification courses are too expensive,” Warner explained. When you’re living on facilities salary of $20,000 per year or so, and certification courses cost between $3,000 and $4,000, there is not enough time or money to invest in improving your life. And informal activities like the Hour of Code might not offer sufficient immediate, practical benefit to seem worthwhile.
Meanwhile, Mari Chiles hopes to attend medical school after she graduates from Yale. She arrived at that success despite the system, and only after mustering the aid and experience of parents fighting continuously on her behalf. Lonnell Warner is still trying to break free of that system. He is on track to take the A+ certification, but he is unsure whether it will be enough. According to him, people with degrees who also have these kinds of certifications and skills are more marketable than those without. Even if Amazon or Google is open, in theory, to a candidate like Warner without a college degree, he still feels like he needs one to work his way up the ladder. For other black students, especially those who are poor, and whose parents do not understand the higher-education system, the future looks even more grim.
[Read: How Slack got ahead in diversity]
Atlanta’s education professionals recognize the problem, but solutions are difficult. According to a senior Georgia education department official, “the basic challenge is that one whole sector of the city doesn’t provide kids the access they need.” Existing wealth, which is largely divided along racial lines, mostly decides which students can tread the better path. According to a study by the Brookings Institute, the average annual income of the bottom 20 percent of Atlanta households in 2016 was approximately $17,000. They were mostly black families. The average for top five percent of households was about $306,000—18 times as much—and they were mostly white. “They are trapped in the web of poverty and its symptoms and the schools haven’t been able to break that pattern,” the school official added, along with the worry that an influx of high-paying jobs, like those Amazon HQ2 would provide, could amplify gentrification and produce even worse educational inequality. “As the city transforms and there is less and less space for low income life, there will be less and less opportunity for them.”
With Amazon’s decision still lurking on the horizon, the high-paying tech jobs it would bring seem like an opportunity for whatever region wins the new headquarters. Amazon official said that the company asked the finalist cities to account for underrepresented minorities in its technology workforce, along with its future plans to produce more of them. How the company will use that information to make a decision about HQ2 is unclear. But for the large black population in Atlanta—and the brown and poor ones in other cities vying for Amazon’s nod—success might reduce rather than increase opportunity. People with high-level technical skills are valuable in a city transformed by technology. In Atlanta, the majority of students are black and the majority of them are not getting the kind of rigorous education they need to participate in a STEM-based local economy. They will not be able to earn the salaries necessary to live in the city. They will be priced out—shown the door by educational neglect.
Coming to terms with the possibility of Atlanta, of all places, being a city with very few people black people has catalyzed action. At Georgia Tech, we are building an infrastructure for rigorous computer science education for high school students in Atlanta Public Schools and across the state. Part of our responsibility as a public institution is to attempt to offset the patterns of segregation by democratizing education in the areas of our expertise. But to succeed, that effort must connect with a larger solution. Hoping that things will get better on their own is foolish. But so is imagining that the arrival of Amazon—or any other big tech savior—will create economic benefit by magic. No matter how much money a city like Atlanta or a company like Amazon might invest, the results only count as opportunities for the people who can attain them.
from Technology | The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2RaqduG
