<p>Becasue there are plenty of achiever from so called “lower” class. Numerous who knew to rely only on themselves and nobody else. Also, look at immigrant community. Most of them started well below than “lower” class with couple hundred dollars in a pocket, no language, no friends, no family, clean slate, blnak page, period. These people are consistently sending their kids to Ivy’s / elite or any colleges. Look at Med. School admission statistics. Actually do not need to look at stats if you have visited any event at any Med. School. Yes, definitely not many blacks, but overhelming number of Asians who are accepted DESPITE their ORM status, which means that they have to have stats and other aspects of admission higher than everybody else. And then, meet their parents. Many parents do not speak good English, they definitely could not teach their kids. Some are not even driving for god sake. I personally admire these people. Nobody has any idea of huge obstacles these families had to overcome in very short period of time. All they had is their work ethic and self-reliance and absolutely nothing else.</p>
<p>Following up on scout59’s post, which puts the socio back into the socioeconomics, my experience is that the education level of the parents may be more important than their income level. Not all wealthy parents value education, and not all poor parents disdain it. And some low-income parents actively discourage their kids from education, for complex reasons. A friend of mine did her dissertation on the inadequacy of state and federal education policies in addressing the barriers that result from the culture of rural poor communities, in which families tend to survive through barter and barn-raising economics, and higher education is often seen as a threat to seduce their kids to the vile urban rat race. I’m greatly oversimplifying an 8-chapter-or-so thesis.</p>
<p>Anecdotally, I once had neighbors who were materially very successful, with a large house and numerous motor toys. I don’t know their education level, but I’m confident neither graduated from HYP. They made an excellent income in an Amway-like business. At a party at their house, I heard them discuss their recent tour-group trip to Italy, which was part of a business venture. The mom described it as “so boring, just a bunch of old buildings.” She couldn’t find anything interesting to do in Rome. They also had to spend two days in Florence. I asked if she enjoyed the Uffizi, and she didn’t know what it was. I explained that it was one of the world’s greatest art museums, and she said she thinks it was on the group’s schedule, but she chose to go shopping that day instead. I saw no books in the house, but the kids had every sort of motor toy available.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, among my acquaintance are some low-income families with kids at top universities and LACs. Some are back-to-the-landers, some work for barely-funded non-profits, but all the parents are highly educated (some with advanced degrees). </p>
<p>One area I believe needs drastic improvement in some school districts (like mine) is the identification of academically talented children. When my oldest was asked to test for the district’s gifted program, I immediately began researching the pros and cons of gifted magnet schools. I learned from various sources, including the director of our district’s program, that the correlation between income and IQ is very weak, yet the students attending the district’s gifted magnet school come disproportionately from the wealthier elementary schools. This is because the district does not test ALL students, only those who are recommended for testing by teachers, or requested to be tested by a parent. And then, for students who are admitted, transportation to the school is the responsibility of the parent. When I’ve whined about the unfairness of this to other parents and school staff (and both of my kids attended the gifted magnet school), the response from school staff is an acknowledgement of the problem but “not enough funding”, and parents generally say something along the lines of “it’s too bad but life isn’t fair.” Few seem bothered about lost potential – say, maybe the kid who would’ve found the treatment for your future Alzheimer’s wasn’t encouraged to pursue education.</p>
<p>But when I get sufficient riled up to complain again, I start to wonder if it even matters all that much who goes to the magnet school. Most of the kids from our local public high schools who have gone to Ivies or top-10 schools have not been alumni of the magnet school. I suspected, even when my kids were in attendance, that the primary purpose of the magnet was to prevent affluent parents from transferring their kids to privates.</p>
<p>Still, I worry about the lost potential nonetheless and know we’re not doing all we could as a society to make the most of our human resources.</p>
<p>"Still, I worry about the lost potential nonetheless and know we’re not doing all we could as a society to make the most of our human resources. "</p>
<p>-not enough, Agree. Not enough of promoting self-relience, personal responsibilities. These type of messages get drowned by massive amount of messages about others being responsible for your own failures. And it starts in very young age. This type of messages that immigrant families do not hear, hence their attitude is completely different. Nobody owes them anything, they believe that they can achieve only thru their own efforts. And that is why they do achieve. Outsiders cannot fix it. You can pour money and more, it will not make any difference. Another example of this is poor quality of k -12, the most expensive education system in a world. Money is by far not everything. Attitude and self-relience is.</p>
<p>For some kids, an unschooling approach works well too. Leave the kid alone with a lot of resources.</p>
<p>I was put in the slow track in the elementary grades. I spent a lot of time in the summers reading books from the library, bicycling around the neighborhood and playing with Legos. In middle-school, I had a teacher that gave me a bunch of puzzles to do and after that I worked on teaching myself math from books from the library and books that I bought from a teachers supply store. I taught myself algebra II, trig and calculus and other areas of math. I also had access to libraries in the Boston area (amazing that universities let anyone into libraries back then).</p>
<p>In some cases, letting kids learn about what they are interested in results in them working pretty hard in that area.</p>
<p>One area of class that I’ve seen in the past decade is where affluent parents say that kids should go into what they love the best. I recall my manager’s manager telling me this about eight years ago and I thought the exact opposite at the time. I thought that you make sure that they have the basics down and then point them in a particularly useful direction. At some point I later learned that you can’t get a kid to do what they don’t like to do. Well, you can but you may wind up with a lot of resentment and fights later on.</p>
<p>This is analogous to parents with less educating wanting their kids to achieve the best test scores while parents with higher education levels wanting their kids to learn the material well. The problem with test scores, especially around NCLB, is that schools will try to optimize the test scores without the students necessarily learning what they need to know.</p>
<p>I am not anti-military at all. For some kids it is the right choice right out of high school. For him, I think college first and then the Navy would have made more sense. He could have done ROTC or the guard while in college.</p>