Education, Poverty and Culture
Rachel Levy takes issuewith this post by Matt Yglesias. Here’s Matt:
Basically, kids seem to benefit from picking up certain bourgeois modes of behavior. Bourgeois kids generally pick them up from their parents. Poor kids can pick them up from their peers, but only if they go to a school with a relatively low concentration of poverty. Poor kids in a high-poverty school can also receive explicit instruction in bourgeois conduct. That’s the essence of the ‘No Excuses’ model, but it doesn’t make sense in a bourgeois context.
In response, Rachel writes:
I read the above as: All these poor kids have to do is "pick up" "bourgeois modes of behavior" by attending school with middle to upper class kids, you know, since poor kids don’t pick up acceptable modes of behavior from their parents. Oh, but that’s not really possible right now, so we’ll just have to "make it work" by putting poor kids in