Seattle Schools Community Forum: Education: The Great Leveler and the Great Divider

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Education: The Great Leveler and the Great Divider:

Education: The Great Leveler and the Great Divider

Big Education Ape: David Brooks, All-American: A Reader | radical eyes for equity - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2017/07/david-brooks-all-american-reader.html

David Brooks had an tense (and some would say awkward) column in the New York Times last week.  It was called, How We Are Ruining America.  

Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making sure the children of other classes have limited chances to join their ranks.

He talks mostly about what means gives to upper-middle class families especially in terms of time and access.  He did have one interesting stat:

Since 1996, education expenditures among the affluent have increased by almost 300 percent, while education spending among every other group is basically flat.

He is does bounce around a bit with his terms- which is confusing - saying things are worse for the middle class but making that sound like almost no one who went to college fits in that category.  Instead he calls out the "upper middle" class.

But his central premise is one that I recognize and have written about before AND it puts forth an even bigger question:

It’s when we turn to the next task — excluding other people’s children from the same opportunities — that things become morally dicey. Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution recently published a book called “Dream Hoarders” detailing some of the structural ways the well educated rig the system.

I was braced by Reeves’s book, but after speaking with him a few times about it, I’ve come to think the structural barriers he emphasizes are less important than the informal social barriers that segregate the lower 80 percent.

But I don't think it's a 80-20 percentage divide.  I think there is more likely a 60-25-15 divide.  Meaning, the 60% of people who have not gone to college, the 25% who did but not to Ivy League schools and the 15% who have the most Seattle Schools Community Forum: Education: The Great Leveler and the Great Divider: