Marc Tucker has some focused suggestions for those who truly want to use education to bridge income gaps and increase social mobility.
This week on Top Performers: public schools were once the engines of social and economic mobility in the U.S., but that is no longer the case. In fact, the very design of our education system is in many ways contributing to the nation’s growing income inequality.
An excerpt from the blog post:
We Americans have long thought of our public education system as the great equalizer, the route out of poverty for new immigrants, the poor and the ambitious. That was true for a long time, but it isn’t true anymore. Now, poverty is a better predictor of school achievement in the United States than in all but seven of the 34 countries surveyed by the OECD in 2012. Among those countries are Greece, Chile and the Slovak Republic.
It is also true that, whereas the distribution of income in the United States in the 1970s was among the most equal in the industrialized world, it is now the least equal. The juxtaposition of these facts raises an interesting question: If it was once true that education was the great equalizer, could it be true that the design of our education system is now contributing to income inequality? Let me count the ways.
Tucker summarizes complex interactions such as the supply and demand of skilled workers, school funding, privilege, the economy, social mobility, and income inequality.
You can read the full blog at:
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2015/02/inequality_and_education.html
