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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’?

#441

Post by dwater »

wyager wrote: post #413
dwater wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> and that when students with those high needs are concentrated they are less likely to have them met. This is totally opposite to my experience in public school through age 11. I never got the advanced instruction I needed, trying to mix like 4-6 stddev of ability in a single classroom never worked, and no one on the low end really benefitted from it.

Your experience is not the issue I was addressing and it's not really the subject of the original article. I, and in my interpretation the article, was talking about the problem of education not providing the opportunity of success for those of lower means that has typically been considered the "American Dream".

Your anecdote does not appear to contradict my statement. I made a statement about students with high needs being concentrated in a class or school overwhelming the system, and you made a statement about being a single student with exceptional ability in what I interpreted to be a typical American classroom setting not getting personalized instruction.

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

#442

Post by AndresNavarro »

suifbwish wrote: post #424
water8 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its better to be born in the 95th percentile in intelligence vs the 95th percentile in wealth in terms of where you will actually end up.

People are doubting you but they fail to realize that the more intelligent the person, the more consequential functional applications they can see in everything around them. The difference between a baboon and a human genius is their ability to see tools and techniques by looking at what is around them. We might also consider that money, gold and other non useful items have valuable largely because very smart and inf…

People stay in cities because there are more opportunities there and they have a support network.

I have a property in a very small town around (1000 inhabitants, about 130 kms from the city) and I think it's great: kids can play in the street, I can hear and see horses when I go for a run on dirt roads, nice people, slower living with a close contact with nature. But then again I can work from anywhere and name my price, I have an appartmt in the city and a car and can switch between them as I please.

If you are poor and want to move there it would probably be hell: no much opportunities for a formal job and no one to rely on if you are an outsider... Poor people are not stupid

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

#443

Post by rejectedandsad »

nemo44x wrote: post #269
rejectedandsad wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly makes a crappy school? I went to the school dictated by my geography my whole life which online rankings don’t indicate as anything special - is this just a thinly veiled proxy for SES?

I went to both what people would consider "Crappy schools" and "good schools". Crappy schools have an awful student body, many of which don't want to be there, are further behind in their learning than their grade indicates, are disruptive, and teachers have to spend large amounts of time calling security to have students removed or disciplining students. Often, the parents blame the schools and teachers for all thei…

Reading this it seems closer to peer group than school itself. I guess I’m part of the peer group that has to be avoided at all costs, to the extent of paying $30-$50k a year for private school.

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

#444

Post by sokoloff »

WalterBright wrote: post #411
UncleOxidant wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then when they got to the 9th & 10th floors there was a pandemic.

I would certainly expect progress on the unstable foundation after a year and a billion dollars spent.

In this analogy, the foundation is “the years of schooling the student has already experienced”.

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

#446

Post by [deleted] »

Applejinx wrote: post #363
grumblenum wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here I thought I was underachieving because I was reading HN comments instead of doing anything productive. Now I see that the world, or at least subsets of the population I’m allowed to blame for my problems, has wronged me, which appeals to my petty sense of envy and bitterness and assuages the guilt I had about not actually trying. Perhaps this inequality is actually a grand conspiracy. I wish the press, academia,…

Don't get it twisted. By all means DO stuff. It's not going to wind up making you rich unless your family was rich, and if you're not rich, you're not going to be able to buy your way into mainstream attention, either. Go ahead and DO stuff. If you're the kind of person where it doesn't matter unless you can 'scale' and get real competitive with all the other heavy hitters, I guess don't bother? I would humbly sugges…

[deleted]

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

#447

Post by rejectedandsad »

usaar333 wrote: post #228
rejectedandsad wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m skeptical of tabula rasa myself (Speaking as someone on the less capable/“inferior”/low IQ side of the curve) but if true this will have to be remedied with a a robust safety net, right? Somehow Murray doesn’t seem to agree - as a set of policy prescriptions, it feels to me that the message is people like me should just starve.

There's leftists out there who argue just that. https://www.amazon.com/Cult-Smart-Education-Perpetuates-Inju...

Yeah, I’m closer to DeBoer on this than the median center left individual

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

#448

Post by rejectedandsad »

mc32 wrote: post #147
rejectedandsad wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being near the bottom of any hierarchy is bad, and without smashing these hierarchies people like me are just destined to suffer. After all, the elite class is usually not derided anyway - and many of the people deriding them (think JD Vance) are elites already.

I can totally understand wanting to reject and "smashing" the elite Ivy League. I can't understand wanting to join them if they are so bad. It's akin to slaves wanting the right to own slaves --that's not the solution to the problem of the institution.

This is true - I would love the validation the most!

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

#449

Post by randomdata »

aroundtown wrote: post #388

It was only a way to move up into and through the middle class. It was never a ticket to any place else. The reason is simple, lack of opportunity. Sometimes opportunity is money, privilege, or luck. Sometimes it's being at the right place at the right time, befriending the right person at a party, or working together on a group project. Every entrepreneur that I have known has come has some sort of privilege to get…

> It was only a way to move up into and through the middle class.

And failed miserably even at that. Incomes have remained the same – stagnant, to use more common terminology – through the rise of post-secondary education. Nothing has been gained, only lost in direct and opportunity cost.

All post-secondary education has shown is the those who have greater privilege, like not being born with a crippling disability that leaves one to struggle in school, tend to do better in school and have less struggles in the rest of their life because of those privileges.

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

#450

Post by prestigious »

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…

Generational wealth is way overstated. Steve jobs didn’t have generational wealth. Airbnb was funded by selling obama branded cereal.
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