– An excellent article. I get discouraged at times by this world but there are still good people doing good work to try to improve our self-understanding and thus, the possibility that we can avoid shooting ourselves in the foot.
– dennis
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By SEAN F. REARDON in the New York Times Opinion Pages
Here’s a fact that may not surprise you: the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion.
Whether you think it deeply unjust, lamentable but inevitable, or obvious and unproblematic, this is hardly news. It is true in most societies and has been true in the United States for at least as long as we have thought to ask the question and had sufficient data to verify the answer.
What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially.
– More… ➡
– Research thanks to John P.
Summarized and commented on in Seattle Times today. For a country founded on egalitarian concepts and a search for equal opportunity, we seem to have strayed a loooong way. If hard work were the ONLY issue, we might be OK. But since physical ability, skin color, religion, luck, contacts, etc. all play a role, it seems to me that the wealthier portion who are patriotic would actively be supporting efforts to make the starting line at the same point on the racetrack.
Wait — that might reduce their chance and margin of winning. Sorry, I forgot. How naïve of me.