Making College Admissions more Meritocratic

[Cutlass]

You could compare the number of Finnish students that want to come to America to study versus the number of American students that want to go to Finland to study.

There should be way more American students that want to go over there for a college education if the quality was similar or better since America has a much larger population.

And besides

Better at stuff related to academia=better undergrad research opportunities.

How many American high school students have the opportunity to become fluent in Finnish? Pretty close to none. How many Finnish high school students have the opportunity to become fluent in English? Probably nearly all of them.

 

[Arwon]

I'm sorry, we're talking about salt and pepper now? School resourcing is a salt and pepper shaker? Hmm.

Huh. I must be drunk.

Edit: Nope, still weird. We seem to be saying that no matter how unequal American schools are, different levels of achievement are the fault of lazy kids not plopping bums.

 

[Cutlass]

I'm sorry, we're talking about salt and pepper now? School resourcing is a salt and pepper shaker? Hmm.

Huh. I must be drunk.

Edit: Nope, still weird. We seem to be saying that no matter how unequal American schools are, different levels of achievement are the fault of lazy kids not plopping bums.

It's always more profitable to blame the victim than it is to stop victimizing them. After all, if they're kept in 'their place', they can't compete with you.

 

[Arwon]

But, bumplops!

 

[Cutlass]

But GW Bush, who never did an honest day's work in his life, yet was elected president twice.

 

[Arwon]

Yeah but any old millionaire can get crowned quadrennial god-king these days, just as long as slightly more than half the people think they would be okay to sit in a bar with. That's what meritocracy is all about.

 

[Cutlass]

Actually, only slightly more than half of the slightly less than half that bother to vote.

 

[Hitti-Litti]

Sorry about the wall of text :<

Before we go any farther, I'm curious. How old are you? You are trying to turn this into a much more rudimentary discussion than it is. When I went in with my GPA, I got way more job offers, and am earning a better wage, and have gotten my way into a PhD program not only due to my scores, but also my work history. My work history helped carry me into college, and carried me into my professional career. Just as the SAT shows you how well you can take the SAT, your GPA is only a measure of how well you can get through college. There is a lot more risk taking a 3.5 GPA student who has absolutely no work history than someone with a 3.0 GPA who's worked since he was a teenager and has strong work references. Do you understand this? Work experience is important. Work ethic is important. Being able to put this on paper goes a lot farther than any GPA mark. The same holds true for veterans with honorable discharges. GPA is only a small facet in getting a job in the real world.

I'm 17, so yeah, I can't know anything about this and I'm immature et cetera. 3.0 and 3.5 are just some arbitrary numbers, I'm sure that you would understand what I meant if you read my post again. But I'll try again: having to go to work while studying can lower the student's grades, thus possibly hampering his chances of being employed in the future. The one who doesn't have to work can still get a part time job if he wants to. Again, the most important thing here is that only the rich student has a choice: he gets to choose what he does just because his family is rich. Not a land of equal opportunities.

I had a choice as well. I chose to take that route on my own and it paid off in spades. Also, the choice is easier in European nations because your universities are not as good as ours. Cambridge and Oxford are really the only exceptions.

The fact that the way you did it worked out fine for you doesn't mean that it will work out fine for everyone. Once again, the main thing here is giving everyone the same choices what to do about their studies. With free education, even the guy from a poor family can focus on studying, while nowadays only people from rich families can afford that.

But it's my education bill. Mine. It would rude and disrespectful for me to except anything from others that I was not willing to do myself. Either way the bill still has to be paid.

Expecting some kind of empathy and solidarity from your fellow men is rude and disrespectful? Neat. Anyway, you're still going to pay your own education bill as long as you pay taxes, so if you think that paying for other people's education is too socialist, you can think that you're just paying for your own studies.

Because you are not a cog to society. You are an individual, with individual desires, and individual goals, and individual interests. It's immoral to impose your personal goals, desires, and ambitions upon the rest of society. If you are to take the route that society should pay for education, then society should be able to dictate how that money is spent and what degree path the students take.

Society consists of individuals, society is no more than a group of individuals interacting. Thus, we're all cogs to society, and thus we're all allowed to impose our personal goals, desires and ambition upon the rest of society if other individuals are ok with it. That's democracy. Or maybe my English is rusty now after midnight and I completely misinterpreted you.

And the bolded part is pretty much how things are handled here. Society gets a chunk of my income via taxes and spends it however it wants. As schools are public, society determines what degree paths can be chosen and how many students can choose them.

So what are you going to do? Ban all the private schools and make them all public? Okay, fine. Do that. Then what are you going to do? Scatter the best teachers around? Force them to go to different districts? What? How are you going to make it "more equal." There are X number of teachers in America with a distribution of some sort according to their talents. There are amazing teachers, great teachers, good teachers, fair teachers, bad teachers, and terrible teachers. Are you going to somehow attempt to normalize their distribution and all of the funds in the system in your attempt to make everything equal? What does it matter? You hurt some to help others. You bring the best down to an equal common denominator. I don't think this is a productive route to take, and I also don't think it is very moral.

A more appropriate route to turn America's education system around is for the children to enter into the classroom and sit their butts down and pay attention to their lessons.

Educate more teachers? More teachers means more good teachers, and as every single good teacher can't go to a good school the good teachers will scatter all around the country. Having more teachers also eliminates the worst teachers as their jobs will be taken by better teachers.

And every single problem can't be repaired with "work harder and shut up" ethics. The whole world has evolved at a huge speed in the near future, and there is no reason why the education system shouldn't evolve too in order to meet the needs of the modern world.

I like this. I really like this. The entire argument about making the system more meritocratic is based entirely on socio-economic demographics. About how the rich have an unfair advantage against the poor. The poor living in a socio-economic status that prevents them from attaining the highest levels of education because the deck is stacked against them and results in a miserable life for them. But... I can't talk about socio-economic outcomes when you guys are criticizing our model and a more capitalist system to doing things? Well eeeeeeexcuuuuuuuuuuse me!

...well the problem is that the students who can get to the top universities is determined by those socio-economic demographics. And it's a bad thing, because using GDP, wealth of the student's family or any other monetary factor is an awful way of ranking countries, ranking students or ranking pretty much anything.

I agree that income isn't everything. So why did you guys make the entire argument based upon income in the first place! You say that you are happy without a lot of material possessions and a lower standard socio-economic standard of living than someone like myself who's earning roughly 3X what an average Fin is. But did you ever think that if you can be happy without all that crap that a family of four right at America's poverty line is happy in the same way you are? Did you ever think that for years while I was living under the poverty line that I felt just like you as well?

I gotta be honest folks, that was quite the gear shift.

You're missing the point. Even if I'm happy without a lot of material possessions, it's unfair if I'm not even given the possibility to pursue those material possessions. Living in humble conditions is ok, forcing someone to live in humble conditions by making it extremely hard to improve one's conditions isn't. "Bad" things are fine as long as they're one's own choice.

I imagine that Finland's great educational are a result of their culture. Not because of socio-economic conditions. They are obviously poorer than Americans, yet have higher educational achievement in high school.

I have free health care. Do you?

This indicates to me, that Finland, despite their economic inferiority to America, is able to plop their butts down in the chair and pay attention to their teachers, resulting in better results (but not necessarily accurately gauging opportunity).

Actually no, our school days are short and we don't get a lot of homework, and in some recently published study Finnish students ranked as one of the worst behaving students in the Western countries. We just have a education system that works. More hard work, aka plopping butts down in a chair, isn't always the best solution. Don't fix the symptoms, fix the problem.

 

[BuckeyeJim]

I'm sorry, we're talking about salt and pepper now? School resourcing is a salt and pepper shaker? Hmm.

Huh. I must be drunk.

Edit: Nope, still weird. We seem to be saying that no matter how unequal American schools are, different levels of achievement are the fault of lazy kids not plopping bums.

Oh, I see. You don't want to use metaphors, ever. Okay, so I'll just be completely blunt and direct that way you can stay on task.

There are poor people, middle class people, and rich people. You, and now Cutlass, are arguing that socio-economic inequality is the reason for inequality in academic results. You are arguing that if we take resources and distribute them equally (financial resources, and teaching resources), that it will increase results on the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum (and even the middle class). And all I am saying is, have at it. But don't be shocked when it doesn't change anything in a measurable, meaningful way. Spread loading resources and providing equal opportunity, or more equal opportunity (gotta keep that nuance factor in there to appease the debaters), isn't the primary motivator in the discrepancy of results. You can even apply this society wide and create a society where we all have the same resources, and play by the same rules, and you will see the same tendencies in the academic community unless you address the underlying reasons why people have a tendency to not pay attention and put in an honest effort in high school. You can scatter the entire teaching profession and equalize student per capita spending, equalize and increase teacher spending, normalize the quality of facilities, and your results will be marginal, if any. All you will do is end up shifting around good teachers and bad students, but you will have no impact on the environment that creates bad or good students, rich or poor.

Really though, the bottom line is that you have no argument to the salient and ever present and ever real fact that the best way to eliminate the education gap is for children to pay attention. This is where the largest source of the gap exists. It starts out when kids are young and only widens with the passage of time as children mature and enter young adulthood. And that is worrisome. When the majority of students in certain schools do not take education seriously it is impossible to gauge the actual opportunity that exists within that school in the first place. If all the students within a school in the Columbus Metro area, or if all the students at rural hokey Mt. Vernon all paid attention and made an honest effort at their academics than the divergence between these schools and New Albany would be marginal at best.

But if you insist on equal distribution of resources...

 

[El_Machinae]

Moderator Action: Arwon, Cutlass, please cut out the trolling
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[Lovebird]

Finland and the USA have very similar economic indicators. Sure, the USA does better in most (ie. per capita income), but not by enough for it to be statistically significant. For the purposes of this discussion, they are both well developed countries.

 

[Earthling]

It's truly hilarious how your own contrived example contradicts the overall point you are trying to make. You complain about how the students who are taken out of the poor neighborhood to go to the "rich New Albany" school now have better education and will be more successful, and you'd be jealous of a friend who gets to go to the "rich school" and be successful. And you claim the poor school remaining poor and not reformed will result in the same failures and bad results for the students there. Literally the opposite of the ideological point you're trying to make, that the students will fail regardless of the school because of faults of their own.

 

[Cutlass]

Oh, I see. You don't want to use metaphors, ever. Okay, so I'll just be completely blunt and direct that way you can stay on task.

There are poor people, middle class people, and rich people. You, and now Cutlass, are arguing that socio-economic inequality is the reason for inequality in academic results. You are arguing that if we take resources and distribute them equally (financial resources, and teaching resources), that it will increase results on the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum (and even the middle class). And all I am saying is, have at it. But don't be shocked when it doesn't change anything in a measurable, meaningful way. Spread loading resources and providing equal opportunity, or more equal opportunity (gotta keep that nuance factor in there to appease the debaters), isn't the primary motivator in the discrepancy of results. You can even apply this society wide and create a society where we all have the same resources, and play by the same rules, and you will see the same tendencies in the academic community unless you address the underlying reasons why people have a tendency to not pay attention and put in an honest effort in high school. You can scatter the entire teaching profession and equalize student per capita spending, equalize and increase teacher spending, normalize the quality of facilities, and your results will be marginal, if any. All you will do is end up shifting around good teachers and bad students, but you will have no impact on the environment that creates bad or good students, rich or poor.

Really though, the bottom line is that you have no argument to the salient and ever present and ever real fact that the best way to eliminate the education gap is for children to pay attention. This is where the largest source of the gap exists. It starts out when kids are young and only widens with the passage of time as children mature and enter young adulthood. And that is worrisome. When the majority of students in certain schools do not take education seriously it is impossible to gauge the actual opportunity that exists within that school in the first place. If all the students within a school in the Columbus Metro area, or if all the students at rural hokey Mt. Vernon all paid attention and made an honest effort at their academics than the divergence between these schools and New Albany would be marginal at best.

But if you insist on equal distribution of resources...

So what you are trying to say is that mitigating the core causes for the inequality won't address the inequality? I really don't see how that follows.

If one group has to expend a very large amount of greater effort to get the same results because that group has far more obstacles in their way, and you remove those obstacles, why won't their performance improve?

 

[BuckeyeJim]

But I'll try again: having to go to work while studying can lower the student's grades, thus possibly hampering his chances of being employed in the future. The one who doesn't have to work can still get a part time job if he wants to. Again, the most important thing here is that only the rich student has a choice: he gets to choose what he does just because his family is rich. Not a land of equal opportunities.

We're talking past one another. But real life, real life, is being able to only concentrate on doing one thing and pounding out 16 quality 4.0 credit hours per semester! Crap - happens. And your ability to work through that crappy stuff and overcome adversity is an important part of going through college. I am not bothered by rich kids who don't have the choice, because all they do is hurt themselves in the long run if they're only half applying themselves. Like I said, I have a leg up on my peers specifically because of that long work history. This goes back to my point about merit and getting into college. To me, the person who can get the same grade AND work, AND overcome all the crap that life can throw at you, is the person who merits attending that college as opposed to the person with money. And in my view this is how the vast majority of people get into college, any college. What do you think real life is like? What do you think happens when you become an adult? What happens when you get pregnant, or get a chick pregnant (don't your sex), what happens when your folks pass away? What happens when you have kids to take care of? What happens when the car breaks down, or you get sick, or break your arm? What happens when your house gets flooded, or the roof gets blown off your apartment? You, and many other people who don't work before they turn 22, are gonna have a huge wake up call when it comes to go to work and enter adulthood. Because there's actual bills to pay, and stuff around the house to fix up, and cars to repair. And he who is sheltered from cradle to age 22 will be woefully unprepared for it as opposed to someone who actually has to tackle life. This, of course, is why wealth isn't as generational as Arwon and Cutlass make it seem.

Once again, the main thing here is giving everyone the same choices what to do about their studies. With free education, even the guy from a poor family can focus on studying, while nowadays only people from rich families can afford that.

Poor people here can focus on studying too! :waves:

Expecting some kind of empathy and solidarity from your fellow men is rude and disrespectful? Neat.

It is when it is within my personal capacity to do it on my own. In real life, if you get into a position at work and begin delegating things to other people to make your life easier and smoother and less stressful, you will not be very well liked. I have no problem with going to ask for help with things that are outside of my capacity to handle. But this isn't one of them.

Society consists of individuals, society is no more than a group of individuals interacting. Thus, we're all cogs to society, and thus we're all allowed to impose our personal goals, desires and ambition upon the rest of society if other individuals are ok with it. That's democracy. Or maybe my English is rusty now after midnight and I completely misinterpreted you.

I won't make a wall of text here. And although I think this is slightly off, I just want to say that it is moral argument from my point of view. If society has no problem with it, and doesn't care how that money is spent, then I am perfectly fine with that policy position. But, at the same time, if society is paying for your education and should choose to stop supporting programs that they do not view as aiding in the development of society, they should have that right.

Educate more teachers? More teachers means more good teachers, and as every single good teacher can't go to a good school the good teachers will scatter all around the country. Having more teachers also eliminates the worst teachers as their jobs will be taken by better teachers.

First, educating more teachers do not mean that you will have better teachers. What you suggest does not seem very efficient, especially if you are paying to educate significant numbers of bad teachers and then cyclically displacing them.

And every single problem can't be repaired with "work harder and shut up" ethics. The whole world has evolved at a huge speed in the near future, and there is no reason why the education system shouldn't evolve too in order to meet the needs of the modern world.

Not everyone. Of course there will always be issues with certain children: depression, other chemical imbalances, victims of abuse, autism, etc. These are all very real issues that will obviously impact the ability of young people to sit and learn. But the majority can. And if the majority did, a good portion of those problems above can solve themselves. I am curious, you are a student currently in Finland. What has your classroom experience been like? What are the attitudes of the students? Do they sit their butts down and learn? Or do your teachers spend half of the instruction time just trying to get kids to behave? I can tell you what my experience was like...

well the problem is that the students who can get to the top universities is determined by those socio-economic demographics.[/qiuote]

They do not get in based on socio-economic demographics. They get in based on merit. Do you understand how excessively exclusive the Ivy League in America is? These schools want the best students. Poor or rich. There's no hegemony here.

it's unfair if I'm not even given the possibility to pursue those material possessions.

Nobody in America is being denied the possibility to pursue those material possessions! If this thread is about Harvard versus Ohio State, then we're not talking about possessions. We're talking about the most elite people on earth versus the power players of a nation. And really HL (can I call you HL?), the ability to get those material possessions is as simple as sitting down in your chair and paying attention to your teachers when you progress through school. If you put in an honest effort at this level you will have no problem getting into a higher level school, or a vocational school, and earn enough money to buy material possessions.

I have free health care. Do you?

It's free to me!

Actually no, our school days are short and we don't get a lot of homework, and in some recently published study Finnish students ranked as one of the worst behaving students in the Western countries. We just have a education system that works. More hard work, aka plopping butts down in a chair, isn't always the best solution. Don't fix the symptoms, fix the problem.

This is weird. Then how on earth do you end up with the best education system on earth?

 

[Lovebird]

For those who don't want to read a huge wall of text, what Jim is saying is that poor people are poor because they're stupid and lazy.

Moderator Action: This is trolling; please do not deride someone else's argument. Discuss it.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[BuckeyeJim]

It's truly hilarious how your own contrived example contradicts the overall point you are trying to make. You complain about how the students who are taken out of the poor neighborhood to go to the "rich New Albany" school now have better education and will be more successful, and you'd be jealous of a friend who gets to go to the "rich school" and be successful. And you claim the poor school remaining poor and not reformed will result in the same failures and bad results for the students there. Literally the opposite of the ideological point you're trying to make, that the students will fail regardless of the school because of faults of their own.

No, I am not saying that. What I am saying is that if you shift the students of Mt. Vernon around, to some worse schools, and to some better schools, that the original Mt. Vernon students will not have better or worse results depending on where they are redistributed to. When I talk about having disdain, I'm talking about the aesthetic value that New Albany's gorgeous Virginia plantation style school has, versus the mundane aesthetic value of Mt. Vernon. The educational resources are really quite similar. So yeah, you misunderstood me,

So what you are trying to say is that mitigating the core causes for the inequality won't address the inequality? I really don't see how that follows.

If one group has to expend a very large amount of greater effort to get the same results because that group has far more obstacles in their way, and you remove those obstacles, why won't their performance improve?

Socio-economic results are not academic achievement results. Just because you forcefully remove socio-economic inequality doesn't mean that you will change anything within the school environment. There's no justification to believe that it will, because material possessions and money doesn't alter quality of character or a mental point of view.

If you remove certain obstacles you may improve results, but it is no gaurantee. I think the problem is that you, Arwon, and Hitti-Litti are overblowing socio-economic obstacles, and underplaying more significant obstacles. The biggest obstacle in academic achievement rests in the home and what people impart upon their children. I had obstacles, but I had good parents who kept me on task and focused on the big picture. Many of my peers did not, and thus, many of them ended up dropping out. Eliminating socio-economic inequality will not alter the factors that produce those drop-outs.

If you really think this'll work, have at it. You tell me how much money, and how much time you need to fix the problems associated with academic achievement. I'll give you the time and the money. Doesn't bother me none. But once your time limit runs out and you haven't changed squat it becomes Jim's turn.

 

[Hitti-Litti]

We're talking past one another. But real life, real life, is being able to only concentrate on doing one thing and pounding out 16 quality 4.0 credit hours per semester! Crap - happens. And your ability to work through that crappy stuff and overcome adversity is an important part of going through college. I am not bothered by rich kids who don't have the choice, because all they do is hurt themselves in the long run if they're only half applying themselves. Like I said, I have a leg up on my peers specifically because of that long work history. This goes back to my point about merit and getting into college. To me, the person who can get the same grade AND work, AND overcome all the crap that life can throw at you, is the person who merits attending that college as opposed to the person with money. And in my view this is how the vast majority of people get into college, any college. What do you think real life is like? What do you think happens when you become an adult? What happens when you get pregnant, or get a chick pregnant (don't your sex), what happens when your folks pass away? What happens when you have kids to take care of? What happens when the car breaks down, or you get sick, or break your arm? What happens when your house gets flooded, or the roof gets blown off your apartment? You, and many other people who don't work before they turn 22, are gonna have a huge wake up call when it comes to go to work and enter adulthood. Because there's actual bills to pay, and stuff around the house to fix up, and cars to repair. And he who is sheltered from cradle to age 22 will be woefully unprepared for it as opposed to someone who actually has to tackle life. This, of course, is why wealth isn't as generational as Arwon and Cutlass make it seem.

Well of course the one who both works and studies and gets good results is better than the one with good results with full focus on only studying. As I've said before, it's all about having a choice. Forcing people to do things, such as go to work while studying, has never brought good results. People have to do things because they want to, not because society forces them to.

And for your information, my summer job starts in two weeks. Youngsters here do work, we get work experience. We work because we want to, not because we have to in order to get educated. That's the way good results are made.

Poor people here can focus on studying too! :waves:

...but not as well as those who only have to worry about studying, aka the ones with money. It's easier to study than work and study at the same time.

It is when it is within my personal capacity to do it on my own. In real life, if you get into a position at work and begin delegating things to other people to make your life easier and smoother and less stressful, you will not be very well liked. I have no problem with going to ask for help with things that are outside of my capacity to handle. But this isn't one of them.

Well your taxes would be financing other people's studies, think of your free education as some kind of a payback for that.

First, educating more teachers do not mean that you will have better teachers. What you suggest does not seem very efficient, especially if you are paying to educate significant numbers of bad teachers and then cyclically displacing them.

Yes it means. For example, if there are 1 000 teachers, and 100 of them are good, 2 000 teachers means that there are 200 good teachers. Many would-be good teachers are currently studying to some other profession, by educating more teachers you could harness those talents to the good of the nation. Good teachers won't get fired, thus eliminating bad teachers. And it has worked here.

Not everyone. Of course there will always be issues with certain children: depression, other chemical imbalances, victims of abuse, autism, etc. These are all very real issues that will obviously impact the ability of young people to sit and learn. But the majority can. And if the majority did, a good portion of those problems above can solve themselves.

Nope. Motivation is the #1 factor that produces good results. Motivation is the thing that makes people work and study hard and achieve good results. If the students aren't motivated for some reason, there is no use of telling them to sit down and listen. So to make the results better, school has to be more motivating. Tons of homework is depressing, it doesn't make the student want to study more.

I am curious, you are a student currently in Finland. What has your classroom experience been like? What are the attitudes of the students? Do they sit their butts down and learn? Or do your teachers spend half of the instruction time just trying to get kids to behave? I can tell you what my experience was like...

Depends on the course and the teacher. Attitudes vary a lot: some really want to study and get good grades, others are in school just because they want to get through it. Most of the time there's some kind of chit chat and fuzz going on, people talking to each other, someone is playing Angry Birds on their mobile... I'm not sure whether that counts as sitting and learning.

They do not get in based on socio-economic demographics. They get in based on merit. Do you understand how excessively exclusive the Ivy League in America is? These schools want the best students. Poor or rich. There's no hegemony here.

As it has been said many times in this thread, merit is easier to gain if one can afford going to a good high school and/or getting a tutor. So rich students have an advantage.

Nobody in America is being denied the possibility to pursue those material possessions! If this thread is about Harvard versus Ohio State, then we're not talking about possessions. We're talking about the most elite people on earth versus the power players of a nation. And really HL (can I call you HL?), the ability to get those material possessions is as simple as sitting down in your chair and paying attention to your teachers when you progress through school. If you put in an honest effort at this level you will have no problem getting into a higher level school, or a vocational school, and earn enough money to buy material possessions.

I admit I exaggerated a bit, of course everyone has the possibility. It's just that for some the possibility is minimal, because they have only a little money, and that makes it a lot harder for them to achieve great things. I covered the issue of "sit down and learn" earlier in this post so I'll leave it be. And yeah, feel free to call me HL. :>

This is weird. Then how on earth do you end up with the best education system on earth?

Lots of money dedicated to education, same level of teaching to everyone, educated teachers etc..

 

[Arwon]

Oh, I see. You don't want to use metaphors, ever. Okay, so I'll just be completely blunt and direct that way you can stay on task.

There are poor people, middle class people, and rich people. You, and now Cutlass, are arguing that socio-economic inequality is the reason for inequality in academic results. You are arguing that if we take resources and distribute them equally (financial resources, and teaching resources), that it will increase results on the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum (and even the middle class). And all I am saying is, have at it. But don't be shocked when it doesn't change anything in a measurable, meaningful way. Spread loading resources and providing equal opportunity, or more equal opportunity (gotta keep that nuance factor in there to appease the debaters), isn't the primary motivator in the discrepancy of results. You can even apply this society wide and create a society where we all have the same resources, and play by the same rules, and you will see the same tendencies in the academic community unless you address the underlying reasons why people have a tendency to not pay attention and put in an honest effort in high school. You can scatter the entire teaching profession and equalize student per capita spending, equalize and increase teacher spending, normalize the quality of facilities, and your results will be marginal, if any. All you will do is end up shifting around good teachers and bad students, but you will have no impact on the environment that creates bad or good students, rich or poor.

Really though, the bottom line is that you have no argument to the salient and ever present and ever real fact that the best way to eliminate the education gap is for children to pay attention. This is where the largest source of the gap exists. It starts out when kids are young and only widens with the passage of time as children mature and enter young adulthood. And that is worrisome. When the majority of students in certain schools do not take education seriously it is impossible to gauge the actual opportunity that exists within that school in the first place. If all the students within a school in the Columbus Metro area, or if all the students at rural hokey Mt. Vernon all paid attention and made an honest effort at their academics than the divergence between these schools and New Albany would be marginal at best.

But if you insist on equal distribution of resources...

See this bolded bit is why I've framed your argument as "American poor kids are uniquely stupid and lazy". How convenient that it can all be blamed on the children of low-income earners, rather than the crappy schools they send their kids to due to malapportionment of funding, teaching talent, between rich and poor school districts. How lovely that "you won't get perfect equality of results" is an argument against any type of reform to the resourcing of schools. Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecies.

So tell me, can you show me any evidence that high attendance is the biggest key variable in future life success in children?

And how do you do the bolded thing, get more of that much vaunted bum-plopping, aside from wishing really hard? And what's the point of ensuring high attendance at schools which are rotten due to the grossly unequal disparity between rich and poor school districts? Making crap schools less crap would clearly contribute - education will seem much less futile of the schools aren't terrible.

 

[innonimatu]

Yeah but any old millionaire can get crowned quadrennial god-king these days, just as long as slightly more than half the people think they would be okay to sit in a bar with. That's what meritocracy is all about.

No, that's idiocracy - the idiots electing someone to rape them.

 

[Cutlass]

Not to mention that it doesn't at all address reasons that those children may have a much more difficult time paying attention. Reasons that can be mitigated through public policy.

Simply put, maybe the kids aren't paying attention. But there are a lot more factors interfering with their attention than most people other kids face. So they have less to pay attention to, because the schools suck, and they have more interference with their attention. Policies designed to address both those issues are possible.