The irony here, with all due respect to the fine work of our sociologists who tell us how doomed kids from bad backgrounds and uneducated parents are, is that we have somehow turned public schools inside out. What used to be considered “the engine of social mobility” (see Fareed Zakaria in the new Time magazine), the incubator of productive and successful citizens (and parents), the school is now treated as some kind of barometer of caste and class. Instead of a place to liberate one from ones background, to become better (at parenting and citizenship), school has become a mirror for reflecting that background back on students… we created public schools in large part to get kids away from bad homes and bad parents and onerous social and economic circumstance and stigma…. we seem unable to teach kids unless their parents are educated saints and poverty is solved.”
Peter Meyer of the Fordham Institute, declaring what really should be obvious to every school reformer worthy of their title.
Americans across the ideological spectrum are unhappy with the lack of relative upward mobility out of the bottom. When given the actual percentage of people stuck in the bottom, 53 percent of Americans, and half of conservatives, deemed it a “major problem.” Living up to our values therefore requires policymakers also to focus on increasing upward relative mobility from the bottom…
Where to look to encourage more upward relative mobility? Begin with the fact that just 16 percent of those who start at the bottom but graduate from college remain stuck at the bottom, compared with 45 percent of those who fail to get a college degree. There is a legitimate debate about whether pushing academically marginal students into college will give them the same benefits that current college graduates receive, but there are surely financially constrained students who would enroll — or who would stay enrolled — if they could afford to.
Scott Winship, in National Review, pointing out the importance of helping all kids get some form of higher education. It starts with providing every child with a rigorous, college preparatory curricula.
There’s no doubt that implementing standards well will cost a lot of money. But every aspect of schooling—paying salaries, figuring out how to allocate time, providing effective professional development and so on—costs money. Spending patterns might have to change. Perhaps, God forbid, revenues will have to increase. What [California state superintendent Tom] Torlakson is really saying is that it’s an unfunded and unreasonable mandate to ask the state to actually educate kids so that they will have a shot at postsecondary success. Others might argue that the cost of not educating students well far exceeds the cost of doing so.
Education Sector’s Richard Lee Colvin rightfully chastising the Golden State’s educational status quo for sliding back on a key part of systemic reform.