Picture a first-generation immigrant family in America where the parents are older, don't speak English very well, and spend almost all their time working multiple jobs to pay bills and provide food and shelter for their kids. They then push their kids to do well in school because they know it's practically too late for themselves, but that their kids will be much better off than they were if they succeed in school.
Anecdotally, I knew several such families growing up.
Education doesn't fall out of the sky.
But you can be in a great school district with parents who think education is pointless, and in a shit school district with parents who think (know) it's one of the only ways out, and the former will underperform the latter all things being equal.
And this isn't as simple as "dump more money on shitty schools and they'll become great." There are plenty of examples of poor areas with higher per-capita student spending than more well-off areas, and the schools burning giant piles are money are still worse.
Those schools aren't necessarily shittier...they are filled with kids that don't want to learn (and their parents increasingly blame the teachers for their failure).
Interesting hill to die on, but you do you.
At the same school, several of her students have received large scholarships, including full four year rides to university. This is rare, of course, but does correlate very clearly with parents being involved in their children's education, encouraging them, and not having an anti-achievement peer group.
But that's a little too nuanced for your straw man.
Middle class kids (and above) get good education handed to them on a silver platter while poor kids will have to fight tooth and nail to scrape their own education together.
It's not impossible but if you were that determined you could learn even better in a good school so the relative downside for poverty still persists. What you are setting yourself up for is not becoming poor. That's good but it is clearly not fair.
but at the school level what can they do?
Lots, actually, but it's very resource constrained, so once again, the relationship between money-poor schools and bad students plays out.
There are a variety of diversion programs that have been tried and shown great success with problem kids, but that requires staffing so that disruptors get more teacher attention than they otherwise would in a class of 35. Having competent, active counselling services in schools does a lot, too.
With that said, it's not my wife's experience (as an inner city high school teacher) that disruptors are the problem. They're a problem, but there are lots of ways to handle them, individually or in groups.
The way kids get shafted in poor schools is high teacher:student ratios that reduce or eliminate any individual attention a kid might receive, coupled with poor facilities and supplies. You rightly identify parental involvement as a key factor in school success, but the flip side is that kids lacking parental involvement are denied any individual attention in schools that are simply overcrowded and understaffed. And the kind of attention I'm talking about isn't substitute parenting, it's just following up with kids on assignments and attendance.
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/illinois/...
99.9% minority students, 94% economically disadvantaged. Testing scores are horrible...across the board. 2.8% percentile for their SAT scores...26% of the students took an AP exam and 3% those that took them scored acceptable (3). This brings up a lot of questions...like why is a school that can barely graduate kids (54%) focused on having 1 out of every 4 seniors take an AP exam?
Given that, it's less surprising to me that the bottom tier public schools in these areas wind up so much shittier than the average public school.
I'm thinking either it is externally visible or the factor is "solvable" for every student, meaning a school with bad students will receive more policies/measures to boost their performance as everyone is suffering from the same underlying problems. Of course this assumes that poorly performing schools get support at all.
Some school districts are now having a measure of success with having ONE school but tracking the kids into "accelerated" or "regular" programs and elevating the resources for both.
There was a whole podcast about it: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/podcasts/nice-white-paren...
This happened as a result of a large-enough number of well-to-do parents no longer being able to get their kids into very desirable and academically rigorous city-wide schools, so they effectively "took over" a neighborhood public/charter school by participating VERY HEAVILY in the PTA, the school's funding, and getting deeply involved with the ALL the kids, teachers and administration.
From what I can tell, it required a very uncomfortable and ongoing dialog about race and class. Not every school in every big city can do this, IMHO, but AFAICT it lead to better outcomes for all the students, including the at-risk students.
However now my values have shifted drastically. Ironically i would consider myself very lucky. Not wealthy by any means, but far better off than the average American household. Which then perhaps would put my children (which i'm not having, lol) in the position of being "children of well-off families".. maybe.
My view however is that this isn't wealthy. Instead this is where the middleclass should be. I don't make enough to retire early (though i could probably extreme FIRE, but that doesn't sound enjoyable to me). I'm not by my definition wealthy, just safe, satisfied, happy. No fancy cars or homes, just a stable honest and predictable living. These are traits that, in my mind, America should strive to bring to all people.
Unfortunately i've not seen this spread. I've only seen it decrease. People far more and more on the edge of collapse, with no safety net in their bank, no budget for emergency expenses, no possibility of retirement.
Relative to the current state of America i am wealthy. To me that is very, very sad.
Job loss is the only big worry, and even in that situation it wouldn't be difficult to find a similar job with similar pay. I know that is a comfort that not everyone(or most people) has. Knowing that this seems to be "as good as it gets" when compared to the majority of Americans is what makes me very, very sad.
Point being, I think people are more aware of the unattained wealth above them than the levels they've already surpassed. (Myself included). The comment you replied to strikes me in the same way, though not nearly as blatant!
Fast forward... I own a house in a rural area and have a family. I'll likely never have that cabin in the mountains, and I'll never be free of having to support my family. That's my fault though..I took the path of least resistance and ended up where I'm at - I didn't take the path towards what I dreamed about having as a kid.
Regardless, perhaps make it a goal to do this when you retire. It will give you something to work toward and possibly quell some of your regret.
If it's on your mind this much, and I'm no expert here, you might want to talk about it with a professional. You can't let this stuff bottle up and eat away at you from the inside.
Possibly because the parents parents didn't value education and by the time the parents came to value education they were already stuck in the cycle of poverty.
If you took the vast majority of babies and had be adopt them (this is of course kid napping which I wouldn't agree to) they would grow up to be more successful than if they remain with their parents. Of course successful is in the eye of the judge, some of their parents in 40 years would be glad for my help and some would think their baby would be better off with them.
The above applies to most of the people reading this as well. (a few of you have admitted you don't want kids because you would be a bad parent, and a few more could be good parents to your own kids but bad for adopted kids - but overall these groups are a minority)
Some people value education independently of their parents.
You go on to make a point about a head start being beneficial, and I'm absolutely not disagreeing with that.
By becoming trained in their fields it meant they had a better opportunity to earn, but that was limited by the lateness to which they started their careers. When my siblings and I arrived we could be encouraged into education from the earliest possible opportunity.
People are usually forced to emigrate somewhere else because of the conditions or their home country. Those who are down to emigrate to a foreign country (especially if their original country is not a warzone or is not that bad - implying they're really trying hard to improve their life) probably have some other characteristics that can be useful for achieving success.
The debate then moves on how much of those characteristics are genetic and how much are due to the bad environment per se (or maybe the good environment their families where able to setup in a bad environment) - on which I think we don't yet have a scientific answer.
Because they're busy trying to pay the bills? That hard work pays off in allowing their kids to focus on growing their brains.
Investing your optimism in the next generation is just the immigrant way.
Conversely, we have kids today, who for whatever reason have the opportunity to get an education but are sidetracked by entertainment and other things that can derail their long term prospects despite more being available to them. (Contrast with kids in third world counties who walk miles to the nearest school, pay for books from their meager earnings, take jobs to pay for their siblings’ education, etc) yet these privileged kids can’t be arsed.
r/antiwork is a response to rampant capitalism rewarding parasitic billionaires, not some idea that people don't want to do "anything meaningful" with their lives.
Have a nice rest of your day.
I think that's the question, and usually that's because they were born in the wrong place, at the wrong time or under the wrong regime. When their kids are born, it's a different perhaps better time, so better starting conditions, and they now have a chance to succeed. The anomaly is corrected.
But those are anomalies, it's exceptional. I think the issue is when you take two people born in the same town, at the same time, and both work equally hard, except one has the parents to give them a head start in everything and the other doesn't. Maybe one will eventually make an average salary in a local company, while the other will have his own company.