Attention Economy


Saturday, March 13, 2021

Wealth, Merit, and Access to High Quality Education

Elite schools breed entitlement, entrench inequality—and then pretend to be engines of social change.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/private-schools-are-indefensible/618078/
“We have become a country with vanishingly few paths out of poverty, or even out of the working class. We’ve allowed the majority of our public schools to founder, while expensive private schools play an outsize role in determining who gets to claim a coveted spot in the winners’ circle. Many schools for the richest American kids have gates and security guards; the message is you are precious to us. Many schools for the poorest kids have metal detectors and police officers; the message is you are a threat to us.
Public-school education—the specific force that has helped generations of Americans transcend the circumstances of their birth—is profoundly, perhaps irreparably, broken. In my own state of California, only half of public-school students are at grade level in reading, and even fewer are in math. When a crisis goes on long enough, it no longer seems like a crisis. It is merely a fact”. 

The Case for Meritocracy
Does the white upper class feel exhausted and oppressed by meritocracy?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/opinion/sunday/white-fragility-meritocracy.html
Ross Douthat notes:
“And wouldn’t it be especially appealing if — and here I’m afraid I’m going to be very cynical — in the course of relaxing the demands of whiteness you could, just coincidentally, make your own family’s position a little bit more secure?
For instance: Once you dismiss the SAT as just a tool of white supremacy, then it gets easier for elite schools to justify excluding the Asian-American students whose standardized-test scores keep climbing while white scores stay relatively flat. Or again: If you induce inner-city charter schools to disavow their previous stress on hard work and discipline and meritocratic ambition, because those are racist, too — well, then their minority graduates might become less competitive with your own kids in the college-admissions race as well”. 

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