<p>Uck, I really cannot stand you guys. </p>
<p>It may be a great advantage to be lower class when you’re applying to college, but the simple fact of GETTING to that point where you can apply is 10,000 more difficult if you’re a lower-income student than, say, a kid at Exeter or a top private school. Most inner city public schools are, honestly, ****. I go to one, trust me. Teachers are underpaid and don’t care (for the most part). Lots of students don’t care either and are content with scraping by with Ds. Those that do care get lost in the philosophy of “teaching to the bottom line” and teachers clinging on until retirement.</p>
<p>An example: at my crappy public middle school, no classes were allowed to be separated by ability because students who weren’t in the top level might “feel bad.” Even though at the time I had scored 700 in CR on the SATs, I had to sit in class with students who were still figuring out what an apostrophe was and reading “MC Higgins the Great” for three months. Halfway through the year they created one class separated by levels, reading, and it was the joy of my day–we read The Grapes of Wrath, Things Fall Apart, 1984, etc.</p>
<p>The next year they cancelled the class because “It’s not fair that some students get to read The Grapes of Wrath when others can’t. If some students can’t read Steinbeck, then nobody should be able to.”</p>
<p>And my school was considered the best in the city.</p>