Social Classes

Minding about the gap

...the biggest determinant of how far you go in life is how far you go in education. The gap in income between the college-educated and the non-college-educated rose from 31% in 1979 to 66% in 1997. But access to college is increasingly determined by social class. The proportion of students from upper-income families at the country's elite colleges is growing once again, having declined dramatically after the second world war. Only 3% of students in the most selective universities come from the bottom income quartile, and only 10% come from the bottom half of the income scale.

The obvious way to deal with this is to use the education system to guarantee a level playing field.... Alas, there are at least three big problems with this.

1. The first is that the schools the poorest Americans attend have been getting worse rather than better. This is partly a problem of resources, to be sure. But it is even more a problem of bad ideas. The American educational establishment's weakness for airy-fairy notions about the evils of standards and competition is particularly damaging to poor children who have few educational resources of their own to fall back on. One poll of 900 professors of education, for example, found that 64% of them thought that schools should avoid competition.
2. The second is the politics of education reform. The Democrats have much deeper roots in poor America than the Republicans; they also have much greater faith in the power of government. But they are too closely tied to the teachers' unions to push for sensible reforms, such as testing and school choice. Their notions of improvement seem limited to pouring in more money.
3. The third reason is the most powerful of all: that the educated classes still do such a superb job of consolidating and transmitting their privileges.... America's college-educated class is now a much larger share of the population than it was.

The article closes with what the writer describes as "the basic fact that so many people have become so good at passing their educational privileges on to their children."

So the problem is the Education Faculties and the unions are standing the way of reforms, and "so many people" are doing too well. How about we find some way to stop these "many people" from doing so well, eh?