Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong

That's the problem, we have to get rid of the idea that there's a set of ideas that kids "have" to know. Why don't you let the kid decide what he wants to study. Like there will be limitations but fuck it, if s/he is interested in something weird, encourage it instead of killing it.

> vastly more funding, so we can attract more skilled and experienced teachers and have smaller class sizes

I think that the teacher model doesn't scale. Develop MOOCs and like online communities. School will be the bridge from real world to these communities. Teachers will help you when you get stuck.

> more emphasis and encouragement around reading, which much fewer restrictions on what we consider "acceptable" to read (my high school did everything in its power to get kids to hate reading)

Exactly. Also remove the idea that reading means reading fiction. Make sure that the kid is doing something somewhat productive and that s/he's engaged. Engagement is key.

>systematic experimentation around different teaching styles and educational systems, so we can learn what works and doesn't

I actually think that Barbara Oakley really hit the nail on the head. She describes it e.g. in this article http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/how-i-rewired-my-brain-to...

> - more focus on practical psychology, rhetoric, debate, logic, and/or research in the curriculum (how can people become productive citizens and informed voters when they can't dissect an argument or perform research?)

Exactly. But also fundamentally just make sure the kids can explore whatever area of human endeavor they want to.

Wealthy kids will always have a leg up on poor kids. It can never become completely equalized, as whatever new attribute that does cause your children to do better will become a new aspect of wealth. That's one of the corollaries to what the GP was saying, and by its nature that leads to a system that leads to a system where the outcomes can never be entirely equalized as lone as you allow different wealth levels.

It's not that children from wealthy families do better (as any situation where that is not true points to a very sick society), but how much better they do, and how well we catch those that are disadvantaged when they fall. This is also complicated by the fact that poverty is relative (and when not, such as using official definitions, nobody can agree how useful it is), It's a very complicated topic, and in my opinion you are generally either stuck with so much nuance that it's hard to tease out some useful plan of action, or so little nuance that you risk taking away the wrong conclusion.

For example, in the end, is how wealthy your children are even the correct thing to be measuring for outcomes? What about happiness? What if we focused on increasing the number of people that reported being happy with their lives? That probably doesn't require people being in the top bracket for income, but it might require that most of the time they aren't in the lowest bracket.

hold up! I think it might just be a different flavor of it.

It's a ruse to imply that Reagan's policies don't play a role in this. GP didn't claim that he's exclusively responsible, just that correcting those mistakes would be a good place to start.

Do you think that kids aren't thrown in jail every single day for war-on-drug offenses simply because Reagan was president almost 30 years ago?