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Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

nytimes.com

321–330 of 548 posts

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#321
A lot of people here need to talk to some entrepreneurs.

It doesn't matter how good, or how well funded, the school system is: if the family is poor, you're not going to be able to float rent on the storefront you need, or purchase initial inventory of whatever you're making, much less soak up a few false starts, much less take out a bank loan to do any of these things.

Period.

This does not in ANY WAY mean there shouldn't be good school funding across the board.

It means that anybody who thinks 'the schools are now funded, so the kids from poor families are now equally able to start a business' is high… or disingenuous.

Let's assume these kids are hungrier, more motivated, and just generally better than most people. If you expect them to simply get busy competing with lazier and less capable kids from wealth and privilege, because they ARE better than the lazy rich, you are overlooking the role of generational capital and access to capital. It would not matter if you were in fact significantly better, smarter and more motivated: banks want collateral, and entrepreneurial exploits don't always bootstrap up from zero. I think it's far more common to prime the pump, sometimes to the tune of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each time.

By all means educate, but don't con yourself that it will matter, in the absence of any other changes.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#322

The oligarchs have been working to detroy the middle class for a long time now (see the Norman Dodd interview or The Leipzig Connection), and education is a key piece of that work, because it truly can be a great equalizer. You will notice not just different curriculum, but entirely different methods being used at a posh place for the elite like Eton, vs a (US) public school or even most upper middle class private sc…

I hear this a lot and I have a hard time believing it. What is something the rich have done with the intent to destroy the middle class?

Your example with public vs private schools has less to do with diminishing public schools and everything to do with their maximizing their own children's education. If we end private schools, do we still allow paid tutors? If so, I don't see how that field gets levelled.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#323

The oligarchs have been working to detroy the middle class for a long time now (see the Norman Dodd interview or The Leipzig Connection), and education is a key piece of that work, because it truly can be a great equalizer. You will notice not just different curriculum, but entirely different methods being used at a posh place for the elite like Eton, vs a (US) public school or even most upper middle class private sc…

I hear this a lot and I have a hard time believing it. What is something the rich have done with the intent to destroy the middle class? Your example with public vs private schools has less to do with diminishing public schools and everything to do with their maximizing their own children's education. If we end private schools, do we still allow paid tutors? If so, I don't see how that field gets levelled.

> What is something the rich have done with the intent to destroy the middle class?

https://www.fastcompany.com/90642878/worker-pay-went-up-just...

And that’s not even starting on lobbying and policy.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#324
post #196

Education is worthless if there are no opportunities. In Argentina, there are PhDs as cab drivers. Opportunities are correlated to how well authorities run the country. There is some data trying to pinpoint relationships with other factors: GDP, corruption, and religion, etc. https://m-g-h.medium.com/in-data-we-trust-2978dacc8c22

Don't forget that Argentina's economy was the brainchild of the right wing in the United States, and specifically the Chicago School of economics.

They overthrew a democractically elected government and installed a military dictatorship, in order to push their preferred economy

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#325
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funding in U.S. schools is super unequal. Most school funding in the U.S. comes from local property tax. But if a district has a lot of poverty, then revenue from property tax is low. That means low funding for the local school, which lowers the quality of education for students, which makes it harder for the students to get out of poverty, which keeps the district's poverty level high. It's a self reinforcing cycle,…

This might have been true at some point in the past, but it is very much false now, and has been false for at least a decade or two. If local property tax revenues are low, the shortfall is made up for with state and federal funds. Just look at the data: worst performing urban schools often have more funding than better performing ones in rural areas or in smaller towns. If you don’t believe me, just show me a few ex…

"Does School Spending Matter? The New Literature on an Old Question" (https://works.bepress.com/c_kirabo_jackson/38/)

"All but one of the several multi-state studies find a strong link between spending and outcomes –indicating that money matters on average. Importantly, this is true across studies that use different data-sets, examine different time periods, rely on different sources of variation, and employ different statistical techniques. While one can poke holes in each individual study, the robustness of the patterns across a variety of settings is compelling evidence of a real positive causal relationship between increased school spending and student outcomes on average. However, an examination of single-state studies suggests that,on average, money matters, but that this is not always so in all settings or in all contexts."

Also see "It’s not nothing: The role of money in improving education" (https://www.brookings.edu/research/its-not-nothing-the-role-...) and "How Money Matters for Schools" (https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/how-money-matter...).

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#326
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A degree holder in any field in 1970 could open many doors. Today a degree by itself could land you at Burger King. You need more education to obtain less now.

It doesn't help that any student can get a loan to study whatever they want, often without any regard for future income potential. Most STEM majors don't have problems finding jobs. The days of an Art History degree being enough to qualify you as a "college graduate" for a 9-5 desk job in an unrelated field are certainly over. Which makes sense, economically. More college graduates means more specialized degrees to f…

The problem with this, from the angle of the employee, is that if they want to move from an HR position to something else they have to entirely retrain and acquire a new degree. Gets cost prohibitive quickly and puts even more emphasis on getting that choice right the first time.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#327

The oligarchs have been working to detroy the middle class for a long time now (see the Norman Dodd interview or The Leipzig Connection), and education is a key piece of that work, because it truly can be a great equalizer. You will notice not just different curriculum, but entirely different methods being used at a posh place for the elite like Eton, vs a (US) public school or even most upper middle class private sc…

I believe the gap between private schools and public schools, because I've seen it (a good friend of mine had to repeat a grade coming from his rich-area public school to our private school). But is there any evidence of a gap in instructional quality between (eg) Eton and upper-middle-class private schools? I don't know a ton about the topic, but this would be pretty surprising given my current low-confidence unders…

Even here on HN I've seen "looking to hire" posts where they basically come out and say they will only consider people from elite colleges and universities. It's hard to see stuff like that, so blatant, and not conclude there's a signaling-networking phenomenon going on. It comes up in other things I've seen too, where I know some idea has been floated over and over again by various groups, and then some deal is announced in the news where some institution (university or corporation) is given the grant or funding or whatever, for the same thing as all the other proposals, and it's obvious it's a rich get richer phenomenon.

These issues are always so complicated because they don't operate in any of the ways that people assume stereotypically. One person will be hit by circumstance positively or negatively in a way that's idiosyncratic to them, and privilege operates in subtle ways sometimes.

As for your question, a few years ago there was a blog post making the rounds showing that across colleges, students improve across their undergrad years on standardized testing, but it's pretty much uniform across colleges. More selective colleges have higher means (and in some studies lower variance) but the rate of learning isn't any different, and there's huge overlaps in distributions between institutions. I've tried to find it but haven't been able to from where I'm at at the moment.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this a lot and I have a hard time believing it. What is something the rich have done with the intent to destroy the middle class? Your example with public vs private schools has less to do with diminishing public schools and everything to do with their maximizing their own children's education. If we end private schools, do we still allow paid tutors? If so, I don't see how that field gets levelled.

> What is something the rich have done with the intent to destroy the middle class? https://www.fastcompany.com/90642878/worker-pay-went-up-just... And that’s not even starting on lobbying and policy.

So the rich made stocks go up because they want to destroy the middle class?

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#329
post #315
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At great cost, yes you could. This is one of the reasons everything costs so much in America, because we insist on making 50 independent systems.

Then why healthcare isn't greatly expensive in Europe, with, you know, 40+ independent countries?

Because you pay your taxes to the central entity that is running those programs. In the US, the majority of taxes go to the Federal gov't, not the states.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#330
post #196

Education is worthless if there are no opportunities. In Argentina, there are PhDs as cab drivers. Opportunities are correlated to how well authorities run the country. There is some data trying to pinpoint relationships with other factors: GDP, corruption, and religion, etc. https://m-g-h.medium.com/in-data-we-trust-2978dacc8c22

I had a tow truck driver who had a Ph.D in mechanical engineering. He worked for an engineering company for a few years before he decided to move back to the mountains. I learned so much about control theory riding with him in the cab of his truck.

People like that resemble modern day "wise men" or sages to me. Our middle school janitor was a math PhD who left academia, became a farmer for decades, and eventually our janitor.

He rarely told anyone his credentials. Most people thought he was just some old man. I watched parents and teachers be rude to him, but he'd always smile and be polite. Some of us used to help him from time to time. He was very kind and would always listen to our kid-sized problems while we worked.

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