<p>…and Hanna’s comment was misinterpreting my comment, because I did not make any sort of judgment about the value of immigration. All I said was, if you encourage the immigration of millions of poor, uneducated people, you will get…millions of poor, uneducated people.</p>
<p>“limabeans–feel free to spend a day at your local “social services” department and tell me I am wrong. There is very much a faction of the low income population that are lifers on the system and work the system to their advantage…whether you choose to believe that or not.”</p>
<p>Unfortunately you’re correct and their children are raised to think the same way.</p>
<p>Not all immigrants are poor an uneducated but I agree that most are. We had a family in our town, the husband was a highly trained professional, beyond brilliant, but couldn’t speak English and was doing factory work until he could speak well enough to get a job in his highly technical scientific field…but the first thing he did when he moved to town was to sign up for ESL classes…and you better bet that his kids were doing well in school. It was interesting to watch this particular family. The family assimilated into the community quite quickly so you heard a lot about them. Our son was friends with their younger son. Math and science were “easy” for them but classes like history and civics were really difficult and they were being tutored in those classes. Many things our kids grow up just “knowing” because they hear about it all the time–how the general election process works, for example, was a very foreign concept for them and accepting that they could go in and color a circle–and not get shot for coloring in the WRONG circle was almost overwhelming at first.</p>
<p>One can’t deny the inequality of resources in this country- state to state and even within a state. </p>
<p>There is a huge disparity among schools in poor neighborhoods verses middle class neighborhoods in our county (Los Angeles), to say nothing of the well-to-do neighborhoods. The poorer schools may have no art, music or even science curriculum to speak of. Materials and personnel are sorely lacking. This is an obvious problem that could be helped by more money, or at least a system that provides some equality of resources. Schools that are only a few miles apart can look like two different worlds when considering the experiences of the students attending.
As long as the money is linked to property taxes and immediate neighborhood wealth, the disparity will remain.<br>
Granted, this is not the only problem. But it is one that we could address if people cared enough, and it would make a difference.</p>
<p>My Dd works in an under served public school in an outreach program providing science experiences to elementary students. All of the lessons and materials she brings to this school are provided as a matter of course by their own classroom teachers to our schools up the hill, where she was educated because her parents could afford to buy into a better neighborhood.
I just don’t see the fairness in that, no matter what the home life or parent involvement may be. If we could at least provide some equality within the public school system, we’d see improvements in student achievement.</p>
<p>Many immigrants, my grandparents included came to the US legally not illegally. They tried to assimilate in our culture and learn the language. They had to as there weren’t any safety nets. Today, many immigrants particularly Hispanic Latinos do not attempt to learn the language, expect the teachers to communicate with them in Spanish and cannot be assimilated to the extent that they can get higher paying jobs.</p>
<p>Even if all those kids in the lowest income groups read at grade level etc. there’s still a question of how do you jump the divide? Emeraldkitty pointed out some place up there that 43k is too much for a family of 4 to receive free or reduced lunch. Many other types of aid like SAT fee vouchers and reporting waivers, Profile fee waivers, free test prep, application fee waivers, Questbridge, athletic fee waivers and club sports scholarships, “young Doctors and Engineers Days” or summer programs, and state based sliding scale premium health insurance pools are tied to those income numbers. There is a whole group of kids in that no-man’s land between poor enough for aid and having an income large enough to meet basic needs and modern educational expectations.</p>
<p>Yes, kids can go to the library and use the computers, but now everything is done on computers including turning in chemistry and physics problem sets and all papers. Back when D was a Sophomore and benevolent grandma had purchased her a laptop but out family still used an ancient, slow PC with dial up I had to drive her at 10pm to idle at the curb outside the public library to tap into their wi-fi to turn in an assignment. At that moment I was thinking about the kids who didn’t have a laptop or a parent to take them to a hotspot. How do you get your homework done in the evening after hours? How do you get all those apps turned in and online FA forms that have to be checked and rechecked and send back multiple confirmations and require online upload of tax information?
We have been clinging to that edge of what it takes to really provide those modern basics, but I know that there are bright “plucky” engaged kids who do pretty well who with a bit more resources would have higher test scores or better applications, or not make deal breaking mistakes on their Profile form like I almost did before I paid an expert $75 to go through it line by line with me.</p>
<p>moonchild–how much of the lack of programs is the lack of interest in those programs though? LA schools might be a totally different beast but the inner city schools here do have a lot of those programs available…but little participation. They also have almost double the per pupil spending that the more affluent suburban schools have. We also have some unique programs here where any student can go to any school no matter where you live. The Minneapolis schools even provide free busing for kids that want to go to schools outside of the city…they are dropping that next year for lack of participation and because the “success rate” isn’t any better, meaning that the kids taking advantage of the programs aren’t getting any better grades outside of the district than they were inside the district and it is costing millions-like 10 million each year. There were 110 kids out of 29,000 using this option.</p>
<p>You see a lot of movement between districts in the suburbs so kids can take advantage of higher quality programs in one district but academically the schools are all pretty much on par. One school gets a lot of kids to enroll because they have a top notch Debate program, for example. Other kids transfer for sports or music programs. It is basically what a voucher system is designed to do for low performing schools and it hasn’t changed the low performing schools, or the low performing kids, at all.</p>
<p>Ugh!</p>
<p>Another post about how the rich are somehow treating everyone else unfairly.</p>
<p>Could not it simply be that the kids of rich parents grow up in an environment where education is stressed more than in a poor family?</p>
<p>And isn’t it likely that the child of two doctors is going to be smarter than the child of two ditch diggers?</p>
<p>The fact that Asian kids from poor families who go to poor inner city high schools still do great belie, at least to a certain extent, the contentions of this study.</p>
<p>Yes, it is true that a rich kid can afford to go to a fancy SAT prep course, but the poor kid can still buy a study guide at Barnes & Noble for $25 and study his or her butt off.</p>
<p>^^^Doc, maybe some of the parents don’t learn the language, but the students do. I once asked my Dd if her kids (90% Latino) had problems with the language and understanding the lessons, and she said “They all speak English, Mom.” When it comes to the second generation of immigrants from any country, the language comes quickly.</p>
<p>nevermind…</p>
<p>For those convinced that poor public schools don’t make any difference to the kids’ educations, would you want your child to have that experience? Why do so many people pay thousands of dollars to send their kids to good private schools when the publics are lacking if it makes no difference?<br>
Even at our well-to-do public schools in our million dollar community (average home price) parents still donate thousands of dollars a year to “improve” our schools through the foundation that they started to give kids things that the state can’t provide. Why would they do that if it makes no difference?
Money matters.</p>
<p>Floridadad55 - For sure there are people who are just smarter. And certainly when 2 people to are likely quite smart and successful get together and reproduce their kids will have a better chance of also being genetically smart and culturally successful. I am happy to grant you that. I think have misunderstood the gist of the thread, though, if you believe that people are arguing that “rich people are somehow treating everyone else unfairly.”
The discussion is more about structural changes to the economy and a shifting rubric of what it takes to succeed educationally in a modern, wired society. The discussion is about the barriers and challenges in moving up from the lower group even to the middle. Has the game changed in the last 20 years since many of us played it and is there anything that well meaning people can do on the local level to help mitigate the negative effects of those changes? </p>
<p>Some people are smarter and some people are slacker leaches. Those things alone don’t explain away the original question, however.</p>
<p>"^^^Doc, maybe some of the parents don’t learn the language, but the students do. I once asked my Dd if her kids (90% Latino) had problems with the language and understanding the lessons, and she said “They all speak English, Mom.” When it comes to the second generation of immigrants from any country, the language comes quickly. "</p>
<p>Don’t count on that. In my wife’s school there are students who came from Puerto Rico almost at birth who are in ESL classes.</p>
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<p>What are you talking about? This is so not what this thread is about. As someone who has participated from the start and read every single post, I resent this off-hand summary. </p>
<p>No one is talking, btw, about an intelligence gap (vis-a-vis your comment about how the child of two doctors is likely going to be smarter than the child of two ditch diggers). Not everyone has the same raw intelligence to start with, but those who do have a high raw intelligence and get a good start (with good schools and intellectually engaged parents) are likely to do better than those with similarly high raw intelligence who don’t have those advantages. Many disadvantaged bright kids are buying the study guides and doing quite well (my D’s best friend is one of these kids). There are some bright kids who don’t do that for a whole constellation of factors, and it doesn’t come down to a failure of motivation (maybe for some individuals but not for the group writ large). There are also people of average or below-average intelligence who could benefit from interventions to help them acquire basic skills. We have those at all income levels, but if you think an academically limited kid who is poor has the same advantages as one who’s rich, you’re mistaken. Even more than the bright kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, the kids with lesser academic gifts need interventions to help them acquire basic literacy skills. This, by the way, would help all of us.</p>
<p>Edit: And, btw, what saintfan said.</p>
<p>moonchild–money matters…to a point. Just trowing more money at a poor school, having programs to help, offering band, etc. is just that, throwing money at the school, you have to get the kids and their families INVOLVED in the programs and THAT is where the solution to the problem starts.</p>
<p>“All I said was, if you encourage the immigration of millions of poor, uneducated people, you will get…millions of poor, uneducated people.”</p>
<p>No, you specifically referred to <em>illegal</em> immigrants. I said that legal immigrants are usually poor and uneducated too, and now you’re dropping the illegal part.</p>
<p>Anyway, my point is, historically, you’re wrong. We’ve encouraged the immigrations of poor uneducated people, and got a bunch of lawyers and doctors two generations later. Irish, Jews, Poles, Italians…every single group since the Pilgrims was supposedly the group that was different from the earlier immigrants, that didn’t try to assimilate, that didn’t want to learn English, that was going to be the death of America with their lazy, disease-spreading, foreign-speaking ways. The Catholics owed allegiance to the Pope instead of the President, yada yada, the wheel goes round and round, and now their descendants repeat 300-year-old complains about the new huddled masses. There’s nothing new going on here, not even the reasons why this cycle is supposedly different from the last ones.</p>
<p>Hanna–we have NOT encouraged the legal immigration of poor, uneducated people, ever. If you do not have some talent that is “useful” to the country, it is VERY difficult to get legal residence in the US. Historically if you did not have the money to come here, you were not accepted without sponsorship of some “group”-church, business, etc. That has not changed at all. Most of the “poor” immigrants were not poor in their home countries. They had jobs, had livelihoods, etc. They were poor hear because they ran into signs around town that said things like “Irish need not apply” and were not able to find work when they got here.</p>
<p>I’m going to return to my basic example of online homework submission. So imagine a family has 2 kids in high school who are strivers and taking AP or IB classes. Both kids have papers to write, both kids have nightly problem sets done on “WebAssign” that must be completed online. Both kids have take home essays with 11 pm timestamp due dates. Int he more fortunate family each kid has individual access to a computer and a high bandwidth internet connection. Because they also need to turn in a hardcopy of their paper they have a printer which has full ink cartridges so they can both print and submit everything for full credit. Both kids can spend as much time as they need to do their assignments to the best of their ability. If you make the slightest shifts in that set of resources, the kids are time stressed, potentially unable to turn their homework in as required and likely not doing their best work. Their grades will suffer incrementally for each assignment that isn’t as good as it could have been. Their overall GPA may be several ticks lower than it would have been if they had had access to what are now the basic educational tools when they needed them. Back before everything was done online my kids’ middle school had graphing calculators for each student to use in the classroom, and families could check one out to take home. At $100 each, not every kid could afford a graphing calculator. Now the price tag of the basic tools has risen even more.</p>
<p>This is not the good old days where a kid with a tablet and pencil would study by lamplight and make it though medical or law school. </p>
<p>This is a cushy suburban example, but I’m sure the division is more stark in other settings.</p>
<p>Alright, I didn’t mean to drop the “illegal” part, but it doesn’t matter anyway.</p>
<p>This inquiry is about why the education gap is widening between rich and poor. I was pointing out that we have 11 million (this is a compromised number) of illegal immigrants who have no incentive to get an education, because they cannot lawfully get a job here, even if they have a PhD. So right there you’ve got millions of poor, uneducated people who are going to get counted in the gap statistics. Denying it won’t make it go away.</p>
<p>8% of children born here, are to illegal immigrants. So we’ve got a lot of children being raised by parents who are poor, uneducated, may not speak the language or understand our educational system.</p>
<p>If you want to argue that those two groups^ have the same chance to achieve the same education levels as kids born to rich, educated, English-speaking parents who have attended school here, be my guest. Show me some data. But anecdotes don’t count.</p>
<p>saintfan–then the kids do the online homework at school in the computer lab…or, the child with no computer access tells the teacher they don’t have internet at home and they make arrangements to deal with that on an individual basis…or the kid could sit in the back of the class and not say anything and flunk.</p>
<p>On a side note…I LOVE the online homework/submissions. I have noticed a HUGE reduction in the amount of paper that accumulates in my house.</p>