Income inequality policy is the key to education policy
by David Atkins
Helen Ladd and Edward Fiske penned a fantastic op-ed in the New York Times two days ago for those who missed it. The whole thing is good reading, but here are the key grafs:
The correlation has been abundantly documented, notably by the famous Coleman Report in 1966. New research by Sean F. Reardon of Stanford University traces the achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families over the last 50 years and finds that it now far exceeds the gap between white and black students.
Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that more than 40 percent of the variation in average reading scores and 46 percent of the variation in average math scores across states is associated with variation in child poverty rates.
International research tells the same story. Results of the 2009 reading tests conducted by the Program for International Student Assessment show that, among 15-year-olds in the United States and the 13 countries whose students outperformed ours, students with lower economic and social status had far lower test scores than their more advantaged counterparts within every country. Can anyone credibly believe that the mediocre overall performance of American students on international tests is unrelated to the fact that one-fifth of American children live in poverty?
Yet federal education policy seems blind to all this.
Almost all social policy in this country comes down to the same issue: an over-financialized economy that is yielding all its benefits to the super-rich, which in turn has a distorting effect on every other aspect of society.
The political system is broken, too. But it's still largely the same system we had 50 years ago, and it was clearly broken prior to Citizens United.
The devil is rampant inequality driven by an ideology that respects neither labor nor human dignity, and the Reagan-era policies that put that ideology in place.
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