Quote:
Originally Posted by nekokami
I am hesitant to get into this topic, but things have been civil for 4 pages, now, so I'll dip in a toe.
The most effective predictor of academic success in the US is socio-economic status, i.e. the financial status of the family of the student. This is a very uncomfortable fact for American educational researchers. The proposed explanations vary from nutritional support (which affects brain development at an early age) to lack of safe environments in which to study to working-class parents not having enough time to read to their young children (the second most significant predictor of academic success). People will toss around ideas about cultural values of different groups in the US, too. I don't think the explanation is simple, and research has not supported any single explanation so far.
But the implication is that people don't really get an equal start here in the U.S., and although we certainly have "rags to riches" stories about people who made it big despite humble beginnings, if we look at the statistics, the children of the poor tend to remain poor (or get poorer).
Let us hypothesize that an education of equal quality for all children could minimize this difference between the starting points of individuals, to somehow create a perfect meritocracy (or at least a closer approximation of it). What I often hear people say is that they don't want to have to pay for the education of other people's children. They want the best for their own children, to make them "able to compete," and though they rarely say so out loud, one gets the sense that if the "other" children don't have as many educational opportunities, so much the better for the kids lucky enough to be born into "good" families.
I don't feel comfortable with this social setup, but I don't have the answers, either. To me, this seems like the sort of thing government exists to deal with. But I expect others will feel differently.
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Neko, IMO a large part is not what happens in the school environment but what happens in the home environment. I agree that there is a correlation between family wealth and a child's education, but I don't think it is a direct correlation. I think you have to look deeper and see the correlation between the parents education and the family wealth. The true (maybe I should say the proper) correlation is between the education level of the parents (or whoever keeps the kids when they are at home) and the child education because that is who sets the child's life expectations and those expectations are what's of vital importance. Yes, sometimes that person might be a non-family member, e.g. an exceptionally good teacher, a minister or priest, a neighbor, but most often is the person or persons who spend the most time with the child.
When my wife taught 5th grade in rural Mississippi, we found that most of her class's expectations were to grow up to drive a gravel truck, work in a factory or beauty parlor. It was all they knew to expect.
On the other hand, when I grew up (poor) in rural Mississippi, my (college educated but poor) grandmother was an intimate part of my life. Both my father and mother went back to college. My mother was a college drop out but my father went on to get a master's degree. Because of all this, education was shown to be very important to me and I achieved a good education and a nice middle class income as an engineer.
So what is needed, IMO, is to instill a breath of possibilities for a child to choose from and to let them strive for their own goals in life.