If society is showing symptoms of rot and great inequality then it is a statement about the society as a whole. It is everyone's shared failure.
Despite how things may seem, it is not at all necessary to live in the kind of society that we live in now. There is a difference between squandered opportunity and opportunity that was never there in the first place.
All children in America should have the same opportunity.
I object vehemently to this statement. It simply isn't true beyond a small minority of the population.
Immigrants? Urban poor? Black communities? Other marginalized demographics?
The American dream is founded upon the basic assumption that the above statement is true. With this assumption, the American dream becomes a tale of industriousness and responsibility. Without it, the American dream is about being set up to fail while under a thin veneer of equality.
The disparity in the level of education amongst Americans is shocking. While a public school in a wealthy neighborhood may produce perfectly competent students, poor neighborhoods show a very different tale. The reasons are as numerous as they are controversial - but one thing is clear, if you wind up as a child in one of these schools, your odds sink through the floor, regardless of how hard you work (if you have indeed been taught that hard work is useful, or even how to work hard, or your community won't punish you for working hard in school, or your home life is stable enough to make academic achievement possible... etc etc).
I was incredibly lucky to have gone through a competent public school system in an area of relative wealth - but I won't let my experience cloud the knowledge that in an astonishingly large segment of the population things are not at all so rosy.
To be clear, this isn't to assign blame, but rather a statement that "every child has the chance to succeed" is not at all true.