^ @xiggi The “wall of separation between church and state” makes the prospect of government supplying any kind of funding to religious schools constitutionally suspect, at best. If it would advance any religion, or religion generally (and it seems very likely a judge would find that it does), then it would be unconstitutional.
Actually, yes it does. Societal interventions can help fill the gap, but they will never fully replace them. I do not know how familiar you are with cognitive development, but it is impacted from birth, not starting at preK. Language deficits begin to be evident as early as 18 months. Children in language rich environments not only have larger vocabularies, but they also learn to read both earlier and easier due to phonological exposure and the correlation to pre-reading skills. These all start to snowball and have cumulative effects. I completely disagree with the notion that things start falling apart at the high school level. The disparities exist before the child even steps inside a classroom.
I am by no means suggesting a “pass.” I am simply stating that interventions are limited in what they are able to achieve. Educational reform can not solve societal ills. Many of the disparities exist due to societal issues that extend far outside the scope of public education.
While this might be true, it also has little relevance to the effectiveness of a school system versus another one.
You are making it too complicated. All what was meant is that from a mildly competitive K-4, an average middle school, our public high schools turn into academic wastelands with a combination of high dropouts and abysmal set of learned skills.
We’ll have to disagree. FWIW, I do not believe I am making it too complicated, but that you are oversimplifying. 
There is no reason why social intervention can’t start before “preK”. We have social intervention for pre-natal care and birth complications. We have social intervention for infants in the form of visiting nurse programs. We have (limited) social intervention to provide cash and food subsidies to families with young children, and to provide health insurance to children even if their parents are uninsured. And, yes, we have social intervention for educating infants and toddlers through a variety of programs at the local, state, and federal levels, and the long-term evidence is that some of them, at least, work fairly well, not necessarily to eliminate the effects of social disparity but to mitigate them and to provide a better chance of a good outcome for the kids. Educating parents is also important, and that happens as well.
The data increasingly shows that personal characteristics, more than the quality of the school, has the greatest impact on student achievement. Grit, resilience, self-control, etc. The book reviewed below is very interesting reading; I recommend it highly.
Even when you put low SES kids in great charter schools (the kind they make movies about) and those kids achieve greatly in those charter schools, those kids often fail when they get to college. To get those kids to succeed in college, the schools (in addition to providing a great education) or other programs often have to replicate the character building aspects that are more typically provided by the family.
Ironically, the SAT was designed by the then president of Harvard so that Harvard could diversify itself away from priveleged, NE, prep school kids. The SAT was the tool that could identify the best and the brightest in Kansas and North Dakota so that they could be brought to Harvard.
Of course, the SES-elite and their prep schools of the 1950s and before were not particularly top-end academically. HYP’s top students then were the scholarship students from public schools, while the SES-elite students were satisfied with their gentlemen’s C grades. Now, of course, the SES-elite and the prep schools know that elite-level academics are also required, so the money is put to that use.
Years ago in coursework, we read from a book called “Ecstasy and Education” ( I think). I don’t remember much about it other than one study it cited regarding who became successful in life. According to my memory, they said that kids who grew up in the school of hard knocks did less well than those from more nurturing backgrounds. The one’s who did best had adopted an attitude that everything would be all right if they just kept trying.
It strikes me that todays messages to kids are tragically flawed. Just like this article, the message is that if someone is doing better, its proof that its all rigged.
The newest fad in parenting is “resiliency”, which is a counter to the self-esteem parenting style.
For resiliency, you actually need BOTH nurturing and hard knocks. Low SES kids will often lack the nurturing; some high SES kids lack the hard knocks (trying; failing; figuring it out for the next time). The ideal (so this theory goes) is to have a kid who is optimistic and also gritty. So problems become things that are temporary and solve-able – things that can be overcome with work and attention.
@tk21769, the number of slots in all colleges has definitely expanded by a lot over the past hundred years. They haven’t as much at most of the elites in the past few decades, granted, but you can argue that slots have expanded by the movement up by the big privates USC & NYU from being schools for rich kids who couldn’t get in to a decent public to being, if not quite near-Ivies, in the tier just below (with some of their schools now garnering as much prestige as Ivy-equivalents/near-Ivies).
BU is making that transition as well with UMiami farther back on that path.
@xiggi, yep, the US definitely doesn’t pay grade school teachers or give them the respect the way that Finland does.
It was framed as a question, but you seem to have had a strong reaction to it.
The real problems our schools have are rooted in the first few years kids have at home. It’s very difficult to get away from that short of changing sensibilities culture wide.
If Finnish teachers are held in high regard, that, right there, says something to me about how (Finnish parents) might differ from parents here in the US. And, of course, it’s those same parents who are getting the kids their start.
There is a commonality for both salaries and respect. They should be EARNED and not the result of a scale that merely follows tenure and political clout.
Finland restricts the respected profession by recruiting from the best students and trains them to become specialists. We start from the bottom and develop pedagogical generalists who expect to be respected by default.
Better teachers are needed and better salaries should paid to the deserving ones. A prospect that departs from six decades of unionized jug.
It is sadly true. At this moment thousands of newly hired teachers are struggling to pass examinations of ‘General Knowledge’ or tests in their own supposed area of specialty. They repeat these tests multiple times…like a D student hoping for an ACT of 29.
Even if they pass the tests, they are no smarter; their poor study habits, weak knowledge base, and insecurities are just shared with the students. We have experienced such teachers in private school, charter school, and public school.
Unfortunately, our few great teachers are lumped into this group and many leave the profession.
I’m more concerned about the fact that “helping clever kids who don’t have posh parents” is so often reframed as ‘penalizing kids who have posh parents by claiming that they are all lazy and overprivileged while exalting those kids who don’t have posh parents who perform equally well on the same exams.’ I’m afraid that attempts at rebalancing the scale often seem to result in perspectives which use the term “wealthy” in a pejorative sense, along with implying that everyone who is wealthy got where they are ONLY because of advantages, and that somehow kids from wealthy families are by definition underperforming or lazy or less competent. The Lani Guinier article seems to imply that parents who provide their children with extra resources and tutoring are somehow ‘cheating’ and participating in a conspiracy to defraud the kids who don’t have posh parents. So is the solution to mandate that no one read to their child in order to have everyone on the same playing field? What a ridiculous notion!
@FCCDAD
I agree that is how many interpret it, but I would argue that as long as the government leaves you free to choose any type of religious school, or a school that is not religious at all, then it is not promoting or establishing religion in any way. And after all, it was our money to start with. They are just giving it back to selected parents for the directed purpose of education. But even ignoring that last comment about taxes, as I say I fail to see how government is violating the constitution by simply leaving people free to choose or not choose a religious school, and should they choose a religious one it can be of any faith, just as long as the school is accredited.
Of course, we’d rather have everybody read to their kids, but that’s not gonna happen.
I think rebalancing the scale comes simply in terms of opportunity.
Wealth and privilege confers a lot more opportunity on kids and the rebalancing has to do with making sure the underprivileged kids get some too. In no way is that pejorative.
Yes, the flavor of the day is “1st gen”.
You guys should read The Bell Curve and/or google “the cognitive elite”
My parents came from middle-class families, worked their butts off to get scholarships to good colleges so they could get good jobs, and have worked super hard for years and now after my hard work and theirs they won’t be able to send me to a really good college because all of the top and semi-top schools give out almost only financial aid and almost zero merit scholarships. I’d be more likely to get in and be able to afford it if my parents worked at mcdonalds.