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Re:Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich k... by adamnemecek on Monday October 24, 2016 @03:50PM (#12782214)
You replace teachers with tutors. You encourage study group work. You use better educational tools. In Mindstorms, Papert talks about how the computer is fundamentally the best educational tool. This reflects my experience but for some reason computers are barely used in education and if they are, they are used in all the wrong ways.

On some level, I think that if the kids need tutors, the system is broken.

Re:Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich k... by kbenson on Monday October 24, 2016 @04:15PM (#12782438)
What you describe only solves the problem of wealthy parents providing an advantage when the tutoring and/or computer system is perfect with respect to what is available otherwise. At any point where it could be improved wealthy families will be able to take advantage of that improvement for their children. This is a natural consequence of how we value our young and their future.

What you describe would be good to reduce the advantage of wealth on outcome, but it's also papering over how hard the problem is. The real problem is getting from here to there. It's akin to saying "well, just eliminate racism." Sure, that's a good idea, nobody should object to that. But it's not like we'll wake up a year from now and say "problem solved!". As a simple example of this, we probably can't make good computer tutors for kids without somewhat good AI. That's not exactly an easy problem to solve.