Yeah, I don’t know. Most of the kids in the elite education system are alright, they didn’t build this world and generally believe in an equitable one. College campuses are pretty much the most liberal places in the United States. For every 1 rich kid buying their way in, there are 10 normal kids. It’s a big red herring to worry too much about a handful of admissions to eg USC. It’s hardly an elite institution anyway.

The big problem is the competition between the normal kids. Most people can’t relate to inequities in the funnel for normals in ways other than race and class. The fastest growing sectors of education—private, effectively segregated schools and test preparation—reflect this reality but I wouldn’t call it unfair or a fraud. Being a white parent and putting your kid into a school with no Asian kids, or being a middle income parent and putting your kid into a test prep program with no dirt poor kids—the reason these are bad is that they obscure actual outcomes based analysis of education in favor of useless retail indicators like test scores, income after graduation, racial composition and income levels that parents actually use to determine where to send their kids.

It takes an incredible amount of sophistication, on the part of parents and students, to make wise decisions in education. So much pressure to look at easily comparable but relatively meaningless things. I sympathize with the parents with no high school education who bought their daughter’s way into USC. They didn’t know any better and most of the supposed entrepreneurs/good ideas in Ed-tech reinforce the bad trends, not work against them.

Most of the programmers, product managers and businesspeople working at those companies are bought into that reductive retail system.

There is basically no one with “bad grades” working on Blockly at Google. It’ll really open your mind up and make you less cynical when you realize how ill equipped well meaning institutions are to actually address inequities in education.