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School Opportunity or Economic Inequality?

IamThunderbolt

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Didn't see a current thread where this would fit:

Better Schools Won’t Fix America

"The scientific literature on this subject is robust, and the consensus overwhelming. The lower your parents’ income, the lower your likely level of educational attainment. Period. But instead of focusing on ways to increase household income, educationists in both political parties talk about extending ladders of opportunity to poor children, most recently in the form of charter schools. For many children, though—especially those raised in the racially segregated poverty endemic to much of the United States—the opportunity to attend a good public school isn’t nearly enough to overcome the effects of limited family income."

Educationism appeals to the wealthy and powerful because it tells us what we want to hear: that we can help restore shared prosperity without sharing our wealth or power. As Anand Giridharadas explains in his book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, narratives like this one let the wealthy feel good about ourselves. By distracting from the true causes of economic inequality, they also defend America’s grossly unequal status quo. . . . We have confused a symptom—educational inequality—with the underlying disease: economic inequality. Schooling may boost the prospects of individual workers, but it doesn’t change the core problem, which is that the bottom 90 percent is divvying up a shrinking share of the national wealth. Fixing that problem will require wealthy people to not merely give more, but take less.
 
Good article. We've been dancing around this issue for three generations now, and it is a big distraction from the simple fact that trickle down is a giant scam.
 
Also related:

Summary
The American Dream promises that individual talent will be rewarded, regardless of where one comes from or who one’s parents are. But the reality of what transpires along America’s K-12-to-career pipeline reveals a sorting of America’s most talented youth by affluence—not merit. Among the affluent, a kindergartner with test scores in the bottom half has a 7 in 10 chance of reaching high SES among his or her peers as a young adult, while a disadvantaged kindergartner with top-half test scores only has a 3 in 10 chance.

https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/schooled2lose/




https://youtu.be/nZes0kcuwCM
 


Between the lines: These factors, combined with legislative policies that have consistently favored business owners over workers, eroded unions and reduced employees ability to demand higher wages.

The Tax Cut and Jobs Act— i.e., the Trump tax cut — exacerbated these issues, slashing the share of US taxes that companies paid to its lowest level in at least half a century and provided companies even more capital for buybacks, dividends and executive compensation.

"Perhaps the fallacy of the tax plan to begin with was companies were not starved for capital coming into this," Mark Hackett, chief of investment research at Nationwide, tells Axios. "They were starved for growth opportunities."

The end result is money that would previously have been split between businesses, workers and the government for projects like schools, health care and infrastructure is instead sitting in corporate accounts earning little to no return.
 
And Jeff Bezos says he is going to pour his excess billions into space travel, because he can't think of any other problems that could possibly be solved with that money.
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Ironically, this massive transfer of wealth to the already-wealthy, and corresponding decline of the middle-class and the American Dream in many areas, is one of the main causes of the working-class anger that helped to elect Trump (the other main reason is America's changing demographics and culture and the fears of many middle and lower-class whites that they're losing their dominant grip on the country.) What Trump and the GOP have done, and very successfully, is to transfer the target of the resentment and anger of these folks from the people they should be mad at, and move it to immigrants, minorities, white liberal professionals, etc. It's not immigrants or minorities or college professors who have automated factories and outsourced jobs, it's the very business class that Trump and the swamp creatures he's appointed to high office symbolize. Yet, his base loves him. Go figure.
 
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