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Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

nytimes.com

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

#391

Post by dwater »

wyager wrote: post #381
dwater wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the problem is not school funding but school segregation. It takes more than money to help high needs students, it takes attention and support. If your child needs attention and support and they go to a school where the majority of their peers have the same needs, none of them will get it.

Hold on… your claim is that students are not having their special needs met, and your solution is to put them in a school that’s even less equipped to handle their special needs? Schools absolutely should be segregated, as much as possible, by things like academic ability. That’s the only way schools can effectively meet students where they’re at. It takes a totally different strategy to help a low-performing student…

My claim is that more of the students that attend schools in impoverished areas need significant support beyond being presented instructional content than students in affluent areas, and that when students with those high needs are concentrated they are less likely to have them met.

My experience as a secondary school teacher in multiple Title 1 schools was that when you are responsible for a classroom of 30 students, once you have more than a few with high needs (3-5 in my experience) you are unable to provide any of them the support they need. When I taught in an affluent school, I saw that students who were in Special Education programs were given a lot more personal attention and support, which provided them the structure they needed to be successful. Students where those needs are concentrated don't get the attention and support and as a result are very, very unlikely to be successful academically.

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

#392

Post by AdrianB1 »

mgh2 wrote: 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

Did you ask these cab drivers why did they pursue a PhD with the associated cost in time and money if they knew in advance there is no opportunity to use it? Most people that I know with a PhD working outside universities did it for status or for spending some more years studying and not working, not because they needed it.

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

#393

Post by jacobr1 »

vinceguidry wrote: post #226
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have not noticed a strong relationship between "the ability to DO THINGS" and someone's social or economic status. Are we talking status relative to others or relative to the starting position? There will always be the deadbeat child of someone wealthy who's still wealthier than you but all the "doers" I know have climbed the socioeconomic ladder at least a couple rungs in their adult lives.

The real problem with this line of thinking is this conversation needs to revolve around things we can put on a political agenda, and there's no way to put "make more kids that do things" on a political agenda. We can put access to education on that agenda, and did, back in the 90s. I don't know what the next societal band-aid will be, but it probably won't get us any closer to actual equality of opportunity. Still d…

Access to capital? The small business loan system could be modernized to support a wider variety of businesses, could incorporate grants, could be more generous - especially if we wanted to advantage certain groups - like first time entrepreneurs.

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

#394

Post by arminiusreturns »

erik998 wrote: post #389
arminiusreturns wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree strongly about curriculum. Just to give an example, here is an exerpt about the language curriculum at Eton from a modern (90s) graduate: "Everyone must learn Latin and French for the first two years. Most boys have studied Latin and French for a couple of years before they arrive at the school. The cleverer boys also do Ancient Greek. There are many more languages offered besides these ones. The additiona…

Actually, Mark Zuckerburg went to Phillips Exeter Academy. "At Ardsley High School, Zuckerberg excelled in classes. After two years, he transferred to the private school Phillips Exeter Academy, where he won prizes in mathematics, astronomy, physics, and classical studies." [no coding classes, hmm?] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Exeter_Academy The facebook idea came from the booklet tey give each class with…

"At the same time, I believe if you want to participate in the American oligarchy or compete with them, you need to become familiar with where they get their training."

Well observed! This has also been my conclusion, but I have to admit a curious line of thinking it spurred. With modern technology, it should be possible to spread this training to the public. If that happened though, what would be the impact? An oversaturated world of elites? Some new faction of elite that would then clash with the old-guard? It's a fun though experiment at least.

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

#395

Post by aroundtown »

naturalauction wrote: post #209

The oped touches on one thing I noticed during my time at the University of Cambridge. Almost everyone I talked to there had parents who invested heavily in them either monetarily (hiring nannies, intensive pre-school/after-school care/private school) or time wise from a young age. Increasing access to early child education as argued for by the author seems like no-brainer to bridge some of the gap between children o…

Improving access to education is not enough.

You have to improve opportunity.

For example, I grew up extremely poor, and went to a small school. The most my parents knew about college was that I was going to go to one. Now I had the intelligence to get into just about any school I wanted, but I had no idea what/where those schools were. I also was unaware of how scholarships worked, or that I could have afforded most schools because we were poor. So I didn't apply to the few dream schools I knew of (MIT, Harvard, and Yale were the only big schools I knew about).

I applied and was accepted to two state schools in my region and went to one of those. My partner is appalled at the lack of opportunities I had growing up. No amount of money at the time would have fixed the situation, only moving to an area with better opportunities for me would have.

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

#396

Post by rayiner »

wyager wrote: post #348
lappet wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the main con of American individualism. The alternative is the culture in Asian societies and perhaps to some extent in European ones as well - there is always an Uncle or Aunty who is watching out for you. Of course that has cons where you can't do things that are unconventional, but at the very least you have a stop gap to help young people who are lost.

The greatest and most rapid creation of wealth in human history occurred in the US under an even more extreme form of American individualism than exists today. Europe is quite poor relative to America precisely because its anti-individualism prevents the formation of economic-political environments conducive to wealth creation.

I don’t think that’s quite accurate. Economically, there was less government imposed communitarianism. But American society itself wasn’t all that individualistic at the community level.

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

#397

Post by nebula8804 »

bhupy wrote: post #360
wyager wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The greatest and most rapid creation of wealth in human history occurred in the US under an even more extreme form of American individualism than exists today. Europe is quite poor relative to America precisely because its anti-individualism prevents the formation of economic-political environments conducive to wealth creation.

One could argue that this historic wealth creation also coincided with a high degree of Judeo-Christian religiosity. We're yet to see if the same success can be replicated under an equally individualistic culture, but one without a unified moral fabric via religion. And I say this as an Asian who was raised a Hindu and is now an atheist.

>We're yet to see if the same success can be replicated under an equally individualistic culture, but one without a unified moral fabric via religion.

Isn't China an example of that?

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

#398

Post by hodgesrm »

bsder wrote: post #380
Applejinx wrote: post #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 sho…

Agreed. Bill Gates was smart, but: 1) He had access to a computer via his prep school in 1968 . This is way ahead of the vast majority of people in the world. Money bought him 5-10 years of advance knowledge. 2) Gates' mother had direct access to the IBM CEO 3) Gates' father could cut a sudden check to the tune of $50,000 to back his son's business venture Kildall was just as smart as Gates, but didn't have the advan…

It's not clear what Gary Kildall has to do with this argument. He had a Ph.D. in computer science and developed one of the first successful operating system for microcomputers. It's really hard to see him as disadvantaged. The legend of course is that he whiffed one of the biggest business opportunities in the history of computing, but lots of people have blown it in business. [1] The IBM story was interesting because Kildall was already successful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall

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

#399

Post by AdrianB1 »

the_solenoid wrote: post #107
slibhb wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't get locked up to work in order to afford healthcare, food, etc. - and are thus more free to take chances. If Europeans are more free to take chances, why is there substantially less innovation in Europe? I don't think Europe is "worse" than the US. I think Europe is optimized for the poor whereas the US is optimized for the middle class and above. There are good arguments for both of these situations. In…

And to the rest of your comment - paying in taxes and getting universal benefits benefit society as a whole, not just the poor. I think it was finland that got rid of private schools, and all of aa sudden schools got WAY better , for everyone. Insulating people with wealth from everyone else is an overt societal negative. People are their experiences, and if you go through life without meeting people with different e…

Finland has good results because of the methods of teaching, not because of the ownership of the schools. We have a school on this system in my town and 2 kids in the family went there, the system is better even if the school is ... private.

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

#400

Post by notJim »

Applejinx wrote: post #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 sho…

Is it right to focus so much on entrepreneurship? Of course at the top, it matters a lot, but isn't a lot of mobility also driven by more average careers?
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