The most predictive stat for educational attainment is household income and parental educational attainment, so if you want to fix education, you need to fix income inequality.
I very seriously doubt this is true. It may have been at one time, but people in the middle class today are too busy making ends meet to have time for politics. Obama was a huge outlier in modern politics.
> ... so I'd wager most of them attended public school.
This is no guarantee either; suburban school districts are disproportionately wealthy relative to urban districts. And in every urban city center I’ve lived in, even middle class (white) people end up putting their kids in Catholic school (or something similar).
I'd still wager a majority went to public school, which are still government-run even if they are in nice suburbs.
The first non millionaire listed was ted cruse: https://www.opensecrets.org/personal-finances/net-worth?cid=... However, that looks like a multimillionaire to me.
There is weak correlation with income & a stronger correlation with parental educational attainment. If you club them up & say "most predictive stat"...not such a good idea. The marginal Rsqs are quite different.
> so if you want to fix education, you need to fix income inequality.
Heh heh. This doesn't follow. At all. Yes, high income inequality is recipe for all sorts of ill-will, and maybe education is affected as well. But maybe you should regress inequality with edu attainment & see what you get. You may be surprised.
Personally, I view it as an education problem first and foremost. I think the incoming inequality is a red herring, and people are focusing on the wrong problem.
Yes, fixing income inequality is required. Yes, fixing income inequality would improve education to a degree - but my contention is that people merely having money won't help the broken education system. Not everyone can go to private schools. Furthermore, "giving people money" in college tuition has been part of the problem in driving prices unrealistically high and reinforcing predatory systems.
In my view, focus on education first. More educated people make smart financial decisions. Educated people make better decisions about their life, risk assessment, and quality of life. Educated people raise better children. Educated people are more difficult to fool in blind party politics and do-nothing politicians/systems.
Luckily we can do both, education and inequality, but I don't think we can or should expect to ever fix income inequality without at least in tandem fixing education. We need capable humans, and education is the only way to do it; I think.
I grew up moderately well-to-do and attended public school in a lower- to middle-class area. Most people's parents were doing "okay"; some obviously weren't. What has stuck out to me is that the folks who I am least surprised to see having a rough time of it as adults, twelve or so years on, are the people I distinctly remember coming to school in way-past-their-prime clothes or not having money for lunch at school.
Which is to say that the idea that it's a "red herring" may be well-meaning but is pretty clearly not true. We know that parental income and stability (and they are interrelated) factor heavily into both educational success and generational affluence. Kids don't learn when they're hungry and they don't learn when they're afraid everybody else is judging them for being poor and having shitty clothes.
The schools in worse areas were getting about 30% more money from the district, per student, than the wealthier ones. This was to balance out the superior amount of parental funding in the richer neighborhoods.
Greater income inequality leads to less civil participation.
The Gini Coefficient and Democratic Index seem to line up quite nicely. Coincidence?
File under "believe but cannot yet prove", correlation != causation, blah, blah, blah.
Regardless, as you mentioned, we need to do both; but based on the research out there and my intuition, my inclination is that lacking income strikes lower on Maslow's hierarchy, and as such probably takes a certain degree of precedence as a prerequisite for benefiting from a stronger education system; and that some classes of money problems can be addressed in more sweeping, efficient way than improving education, which involves a great deal of training and waiting.
No one seriously considers this of course, but it does have obvious advantages, even for parents. No one has to worry about supporting their child or sending it to college, managing care while working two jobs, or any of that. The children are raised by professional child-rearers instead of amateurs. Nepotism would cease to be a serious concern. There'd be a real shot at actual meritocracy.
And obviously there are some disadvantages, but I hardly need to spell those out. Like many things it is not so much a solution as a tradeoff between sets of problems. As a society, we have chosen our current set of problems over the alternative.
(Which is strange, actually, because the outcomes are completely different for kids that go through most governments’ military academies. Maybe no government is held to a standard where it needs to take the civic education of wards seriously; but is motivated to train the members of its military regardless of extrinsic motivation?)
I think this is in large part due to the simultaneous existence of children raised in the traditional fashion, often by the politicians crafting the system for the wards. A generous imagination would suppose that when the entire society relies on the system and is itself a product of that system, there'd be higher incentive to make it effective.
What happens when your kid needs a hug? You give them a hug. What happens when a ward of the state needs a hug? In the age of "me too", of awareness of abuse of the helpless by those with power, the person in charge of the children may not be allowed to give them a hug. Even if they are, they may have 30 kids. Hugs will therefore be less frequent per kid, because the adult doesn't have the time to do that plus take care of the 30 kids in all the other ways that are needed.
Kids need to be loved. Bureaucrats don't love. Even day care workers don't love in the way that parents love.
But this much is true: If all the children were raised as wards of the state, then the children involved would have average educational attainment and lifetime salary growth, by definition. That doesn't mean that the outcome would be good, though.
They were often abused, physically and verbally by both adults and other kids. They were also sexually abused.
Communists took a lot of kids to institutions too and it was crap too.
Gross.
> The heritability of conscientiousness facets and their relationship to IQ and academic achievement
https://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273.long
> Genetic research has shown that intelligence makes a major contribution to the heritability of educational achievement. However, we show that other broad domains of behavior such as personality and psychopathology also account for genetic influence on GCSE scores beyond that predicted by intelligence. Together with intelligence, these domains account for 75% of the heritability of GCSE scores. > The high heritability of educational achievement reflects many genetically influenced traits, not just intelligence
https://genepi.qimr.edu.au/contents/p/staff/CV448.pdf
> Our findings confirmed positive associations between IQ and the facets of Competence and Dutifulness (ranging 0.11–0.27), with academic achievement showing correlations of 0.27 and 0.15 with these same facets and 0.15 with Deliberation. All conscientiousness facets were influenced by genes (broad sense heritabilities ranging 0.18–0.49) and unique environment, but common environment was judged unimportant.
That being said... I’m no genetic expert but I’m pretty sure these papers are garbage. They keep referring to genetic influences but as far as I can tell, do not use any genome data. It’s true that twins share genes. That doesn’t mean that is the only thing they share. There’s incredible potential for confounding effects.
The difference and similarities between fraternal and identical twins and non twin siblings are a huge part of why twin studies are so powerful for discerning heritability. Fraternal and identical twins differ by genes but not environment so you can get a decent estimate of heritability from that alone.
If you want polygenic risk scores for academic achievement it’s an active area of research.
> Predicting educational achievement from DNA
https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2016107?fbclid=IwAR2Hv8Epg...
> A genome-wide polygenic score (GPS), derived from a 2013 genome-wide association study (N=127,000), explained 2% of the variance in total years of education (EduYears). In a follow-up study (N=329,000), a new EduYears GPS explains up to 4%. Here, we tested the association between this latest EduYears GPS and educational achievement scores at ages 7, 12 and 16 in an independent sample of 5825 UK individuals. We found that EduYears GPS explained greater amounts of variance in educational achievement over time, up to 9% at age 16, accounting for 15% of the heritable variance. This is the strongest GPS prediction to date for quantitative behavioral traits. Individuals in the highest and lowest GPS septiles differed by a whole school grade at age 16. Furthermore, EduYears GPS was associated with general cognitive ability (~3.5%) and family socioeconomic status (~7%). There was no evidence of an interaction between EduYears GPS and family socioeconomic status on educational achievement or on general cognitive ability. These results are a harbinger of future widespread use of GPS to predict genetic risk and resilience in the social and behavioral sciences.
Some evidence- since 1952, 5 presidents could be said to coming from the upper class (Kennedy, 2 bushes, Johnson, Trump) and 7 came from middle to lower class backgrounds.
I also saw an article (which I can't find right now) that while top private colleges were disproportionately represented in congress, the majority of members still did their undergrad at state schools or die not attain an undergrad degree.
About 23% of senators/house went to a private high school. General population has about 10% in private school
https://www.privateschoolreview.com/blog/where-did-the-115th...
https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/where-did-the-member...
In Sum: Education and Wealth Are Correlated But Causal Link May Be Weak
https://www.stlouisfed.org/.../emmonseducationandwealthsiuc-...
Ps, I absolutely hated middle school.