The point here is that institutions must provide equal opportunity within their own functional scope. But simultaneously, institutions must also maintain enough filtering criteria to ensure they do not abandon their core function.

MIT best serves general social questions of equal opportunity by accepting individuals based on some standard quantifiable baseline filtering criteria, and tackling such vast social questions through open and honest inquiry & research.

As a side note, perhaps institutions that are closer to problems like social inequality are best suited to serve them.

It may be a stretch but I feel nature plays dice where certain events exploit advantages. It feels like something that is futile to balance against.

Perhaps understanding our tribalism and need to differentiate by color, sex, nationalism, etc. It feels like there are moving parts we are not discussing whether because of sensitivity or because we just don't fully understand.

At the same time, should also try to minimize the number of private schools, either through legislation or tax.

I guess it still won't work perfectly because teachers can simply go private by themselves. Meh. Whatever.

In supposed 'bad schools' - kids don't show up to class. There's not much in the way of clubs to join, nobody joins them. Kids are bullied for even contemplating doing well. They are bullied on the way to school. Pulled into gangs. Totally absent an role models at all. Parents absent, living in very poor conditions, often one parent missing or in jail. They might knew very few who actually graduated from anything including HS, let alone College. The thought never crossed their mind and they see no point to it. There is literal violence in class. Kids pay little attention when they are there.

The best school in the world can't 'fix' that.

A 'good school' has conscientious parents who make sure their kids get to school, they live in homes erring towards happy, have the material they needs, parents who care about them, parents who inquire at least a bit. Some friends with talent, enough critical mass in activities that good non-academic clubs exist. An overall workable situation wherein teachers can teach.

Some teachers are better than others, some schools better than others, but it's not really that.

I would really support this 'rotation of teachers' concept because I suggest absolutely nothing would change and people would realize what the underlying issues are.

FYI shipping kids from the ghetto, in smaller numbers, to 'decent schools' in the burbs actually seems to work, so long as the 'special kids' can avoid the extra violence they might face for being labelled as nerds by their peers in poor areas.

As for MIT and donors, there is obviously a good discussion to be had about equality, and frankly I think everyone is open to that discussion, but the extremists shutting down discussion need to be stopped.

> The best school in the world can't 'fix' that.

I find that puzzling. A good school will not have most of those problems. Doing well when the kids coming in is hard but doable.

"A good school will not have most of those problems."

Because a 'good school' is full of conscientious and prepared students, raised by conscientious and prepared parents with jobs and stability.

There is nothing a 'decent group of well meaning teachers' can do when 50% don't show up, 90% are literally years behind in reading and the curriculum, 50% are borderline illiterate, nobody pays attention or does any homework, students get violent in class, they are interested only in the most ridiculous artifacts of pop culture, even the students who might try are bullied, and there are zero role models in the lives of students, kids are neglected and abused and the students collectively could care one bit about learning.

There is no possibility for 'education' to happen on those circumstances.

Give them healthcare, parents stable jobs, 2 parents in stable relationship, stable family life, destroy the gangs somehow make them irrelevant, and watch grades magically rise without a single change to the school. We know this because when you take these kinds out of those stark situations and put them in regular suburban schools with teachers roughly the same credentials, they do reasonably well.

Inner city school teachers are not crap, they're basically 1/2 social workers 1/2 teachers, totally undervalued.

Some schools allowed students to beat these odds and decide to give themselves a chance by being in an environment where they could succeed academically. Lowell was such a school here in SF [0]. Sadly, it became a target of a certain crowd and has now switched to a "lottery" system to admit, so the bullies have as much chances of getting in as the victims. [1]

[0] https://youtu.be/DVMmT9k5rYk

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/education/article/sf-school-lottery-L...

  An area won't improve in one year because you switch teachers, and this problem is really socially whole. You don't just switch teachers, you need to inject money into the local economy, invest in public spaces (green areas, children's playgrounds, etc.). And of course, in education as well. 

  But you gotta start regardless. We can't just shrug, though I feel like this problem is so complex it really requires a complete re-structuration of the way America handles its social structure. 

  I don't think the USA is going to solve these problems without a complete 180 degrees change in how you view the world, and that won't happen until the empire has completely collapsed. In that regard, I have quite a grim view of the future of America.

It's doable. Make it online and free. The HTTP protocol doesn't care about your social background.

I absolutely can't understand why would any country require its citizens to pay for education in state-funded schools and universities. Educated people are the best and the biggest national asset. Anything that creates a barrier (monetary or not) to education harms the country directly.

The universities were at the bleeding edge of new networked IT solutions even into the 1980s. As low-cost portable devices became available that could display high-quality real-time video on demand, it was clear that such a solution would soon be faster, cheaper and better than passively sitting in a lecture hall. And little, if anything, happened on the University side for years and years.

The occasional academician might try something, but it was spotty at best. A few years ago, there were professors who were still banning laptops from lecture rooms. Faculty Senates stuck their collective heads in the sand. They couldn’t figure out a business case where they could make money in a video future, so they ignored it. Meanwhile, students got a slower, worse, more expensive education than they could and should have.

We should be in the third or fourth generation of online university courses by now. Professionally produced and vetted lectures, hyperlinks to past and supplemental materials synced to video, diverse actors presenting material that engage various population of students more effectively. Objective measures of student learning improvements to support process quality improvements. From service courses through grad seminars. The best courses offered to not one university, but all universities (potentially). Simulators of lab equipments so students get training on the newest equipment, and aren’t learning outdated inefficient lab practices. Online networking with mentors in the real world. Effective controls on cheating on exams. These all should be mature, fully deployed technologies by now. And they aren’t.

That is the mortal sin of Higher Education in the 21st Century. They just didn’t care. I consider a lot of the political turmoil on campuses as just a smokescreen by academic leadership to distract the digital native students from asking the inconvenient questions of why is education so…clunky.

Rant mode off.

I do too, and I don't think it's "worse" in quality than what they teach in university.

There’s disagreement as to whether the gap is 30 million words, but it seems quite likely to be well into the millions. https://www.edutopia.org/article/new-research-ignites-debate...

It’s hard.

The real question which needs to be answered is where do institutions need to draw the line for equal opportunity? Do institutional services need to be a zero sum game? Can we offer the same services to everyone — education, healthcare, UBI — where providing services to certain individuals is not at the expense of other individuals?

Don't give them any ideas!

Could it ever begin before conception? Could it ever begin before birth? At 6 months of age? At 1, 2, or 3 years of age? Is it 100% “on them” at 12, 16, 18, or 21?

That really depends on what you are referring to by "our society." If you're talking about the US, many would dispute that characterization.

It's a subjective, unquantified statement. It cannot possibly be called a fact.

In any case the proof is in the pudding: children in the US who are born poor are highly likely to die poor, and we are significantly worse in that respect than other Western countries.

The lottery came back and you are moving from a school in Florida to Alaska.

I think you’re on to something. 10 years ago, what you describe would have been entirely infeasible what with forcing teachers to move places they don’t want to go. Now, with KhanAcademy, you can have top-notch teaching on virtually any subject anywhere.

That’s not to say e-learning is a suitable replacement but as a supplement, it should certainly be able to bridge much of the gap.

You confuse equal opportunity with equal circumstances. All we can do is give people equal opportunity under law, so that nobody is restricted from opportunity from a legal perspective. Trying to solve the problem of equal circumstances will always result in the violation of human rights. We should do our best to give people the tools and education they need to succeed so that these other factors do not influence their life as much, and they can overcome the obstacles that they've been presented with.

The problem is we sent kids to school in the first place and ask them to follow a system designed for the average student but not the most typical.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/268/510

I read this as sarcasm, but I re-read it and am not so sure?

I hope you're will to pay for that in blood because there will be war over it.

We get that there's no such thing as a perfectly level playing field, but we're not going to allow children to be raised by the state to achieve what will be frankly in all likelihood not much of a gain in that regard, and a loss of basic freedom, and that's before the obvious risk of totalitarianism.

If you're worried about the state reading your emails, or net neutrality, you should naturally be 100x more concerned about what the state wants your child to believe.

While I am actually in support of good basic public education, I suggest the issue is important enough so that it should be at 'arms length' from the politicians, much like the Central Bank, but with more public input.

We need to get rid of this notion that there's really such a thing as 'perfectly equal' anyhow. Comparative Value. People value different things. Instead, take the approach of 'if there's a will there's a way' i.e. every kid gets access to good, basic, core schooling, and if a kid is motivated and has basic talents, they should have access to basic higher education.

Finally, most of the needle has nothing to do with quality of education, which most kids have access to, it's the quality of their home life. I'll bet material improvements in minimum wage and some kind of basic 'healthcare for all' would yield materially better results for kids than any specific changes to schooling, other than the cost of higher ed.

Edit: thee are enough examples of great public schools i.e. Norway, S. Korea, Canada, we don't need to get all theoretical about it. Work on 'all the issues' and the kids will be mostly ok.

Thinking about ways to equalize education with kids frim different economic level. I came upon this idea.

There are many benefits and many drawbacks. No matter how taboo this topic it feels like the natural evolution of putting the children first, equalizing poverty backgrounds, equalizing pay, increasing workforce durations, spending power.

Why would you allow untrained professionals to raise our most valuable resource?

From my research, the sociological numbers bear this out, good homes make better well-adjusted successful and able children who generally go on to make another generation of well-adjusted and successful children.

Broken families, single parents homes, have lower success rates.

If you want to create an environment where our most valuable resource is given the best shot, then we should be teaching about marriage, man+woman partnership, fidelity and faithfulness. We don't have any known better models for raising them — and it isn't even close.

I'm so sorry your parents didn't show love to you.

I would start by saying that anyone who would even use that kind of language is living in a totally different dimension of reality than I, and so first, I'd have to bridge that gap.

Our children are not 'resources' and while teaching certainly requires a degree of professional demeanour, raising children has nothing to do with 'professionalism' per say.

For gosh sake ... life is about life (!) - the whole gosh darn point of 'the economy' is so that families can be families and communities, not the other way around, i.e. that they can be turned into 'proletariat resource factories'.

We live, we have our communities, our culture, our institutions, our faith, our celebrations, our hopes, our fears, our failures, our conquests, our rituals. The economy can be a part of that. Stopping really bad acting (i.e. abuse) is always good. The state has a role even in education, obviously.

But the language you are using is the same type of culturally secular language that totalitarian systems adopted and resulted in dramatic failure.

If you want to see what that looks like, visit non-Moscow Russia, the parts that were designed in built in the latter part of the 20th century. Or better yet, Poland, because they will not romanticize that era in a perverse way and give you an earful.

The 'best' schools in the world, in Finland, if one could describe their approach it would be 'Communitarian' more than anything. Yes, they have standard European views on equality and somewhat higher taxation, but they are not 'top down secular equality socialists'. Instead, they value teachers as a culture. They value reading, education, intellectualism, they work as local communities. We would consider them 'somewhat progressive' in many ways, but they are not what we would call 'woke'. Their method of education is not anything special, it's downright ancient if anything. They are not what we would nominally call 'capitalist' either, they have a blended communitarian + regulated free-market + socialization in certain sectors and definitely national strategic cooperation between state, established families/wealth, industry.

They are a great example, there are others, though ideas and rhetoric are always good, there's no need to roll back to 100 year old ideas that have been essentially discredited.

I’ve seen both serious Marxist arguments for it and serious capitalist arguments for it (and also serious critiques of each of those camps that the other camp ultimately leads to that end!), among others, so while I don't think it is a good idea, it is not one I dismiss out of hand as a joke when I see it.

This seems dystopian...

Except for the parents powerful / wealthy enough to opt out of this system for one with more resources, who will, just as we do today.

Who is going to die on a hill to pass legislation banning private schooling and forcing a state monopoly on raising children? We would need generations of culture shift before many people could even debate the idea without involuntarily shuddering in horror.

(It does seem, as another commenter pointed out, that this isn't necessarily the only end result of state involvement in child-raising. In particular, it seems to me you can draw a qualitative difference between greater state education as a way to expand the experiences of children growing up and as a way to constrain those experiences.)

BTW these "schools" were still around when their current leader's father (Trudeau) was in office.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57592243