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Comment by kethinov | Hacker News Reader

My wife teaches in a high poverty school and it just mystifies us that so much of the public debate about how to deal with the achievement gap focuses on blame.

We want to blame people. Teachers, parents, administrators, we're all looking for a scapegoat and there's no consensus which group is to blame.

But it's not that simple. There aren't any bad guys for us to nail to the cross. The achievement gap is the result of stark socioeconomic inequality.

Kids in poverty are kids not learning. The only way to deal with the achievement gap is for us to be brave enough as a society to deal with that. Failing schools are a symptom of disease of poverty, not the disease itself.

I strongly recommend everyone read this article: http://www.salon.com/2013/08/25/i_taught_at_the_worst_school...

My wife didn't write it, but it strongly resembles her day to day experience where she teaches.

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1. When you are poor, school feels like you are trading pleasing an adult for the slim chance of getting out of poverty. It feels less like you are working in a real system with an honest chance and more like you are playing in someone's half psychotic maze. The adult world seems like a careless game where no one cares about anyone besides themselves once they've made it.

2. Many of those kids in poor schools are smarter than you think, and have a more realistic understanding of the real world than their wealthy counterparts. It's just the side no one likes talking about, because honestly, it's something society in general is ashamed of. We can build all this great stuff but we can't scale equality.

Look at the lives the parents have. Who do you think the kid is going to listen to and learn from the most? What someone says, or how reality is?

> Many of those kids in poor schools are smarter than you think,

When you say something like this it comes off as pretty antagonistic, unless you're about to explain out where specifically someone has said or implied anything about a students intelligence.

Then read it like a 12 year old girl would read the statement.

Not much hope for the rest of the world then given that in the UK (Wiki: In terms of global poverty criteria, the United Kingdom is a wealthy country, with virtually no people living on less than £4 a day. There is both significant income redistribution and income inequality; for instance, in 2008/09 income in the top and bottom fifth of households was £73,800 and £15,000, respectively, before taxes and benefits. After tax and benefits, household income disparities are significantly reduced (to £53,900 and £13,600 respectively)one third of kids fail to achieve a C grade in a very undemanding exam (GCSE) at least compared to its predecessors 'O-level/GCE'. Moreover 2000 stats from BBC say 1 in 5 people are functionally illiterate. Judging from the standard of written comments in UK newspapers I'm surprised it's even that high. Meanwhile in 2013 - 'England's young adults trail world in literacy and maths' [ http://www.bbc.com/news/education-24433320]. Poverty is the fundamental problem? I don't think so.

Let me add, I accept that there will be circumstances where family poverty will be a significant factor in educational attainment.

"...one third of kids fail to achieve a C grade in a very undemanding exam (GCSE) at least compared to its predecessors 'O-level/GCE'."

Might be worth pointing out that the GCE O level was only taken by around 30% to 60% of population depending on the policy of the Local Education Authority in which the child lived, the other half (roughly) took the CSE (Certificate of Secondary Education). A grade 1 CSE certificate was regarded as of a similar standard to a pass at GCE O level. So the figures were not that far away from one third not achieving a pass in the good old days when you think about it. These exams were/are taken at age 16.

It might also be worth pointing out that the change from GCE O level/CSE to GCSE took place in 1984. Therefore anyone under the age of (rougly) 47 would have taken GCSEs, and then if academically inclined, would have progressed to GCE A levels, which have remained the main public exam taken at 18 for University entrance. We seem to be managing OKish despite continuous negative commentary on the education system.

GCSEs themselves have changed significantly over the years (pre-National Curriculum, first 14-target NC then various reconfigurations of the NC based on subject after that, then the 2010 and 2012 changes, and now, in England, the 2017 changes).

The UK PISA scores are (currently) bang on the average for OECD nations, and a point or so higher than France in Mathematics and the national language. I'd invite all here to have a look at the PISA sample test questions for Maths, their format and content might surprise you.

At present, I think that the experience in the UK seems to support the thesis in the OA that socio-economic factors are quite significant in educational achievement in the sense that poor (depending on your definition of poor) children don't do especially well on average. I shall dig around a bit more about this whole historical data thing as I feel an essay coming on...

Britain is still a class-bound society, with the basic unstated idea that a small percentage of the population will run things, and fill the high-skill jobs, especially those jobs which require academic excellence, and the rest are there for call centres, trades work, and manual labour. The reason why it's so difficult to get a lot of kids to pay attention at school is because they're well aware that they won't need trigonometry or literary analysis in the job that they're going to end up doing. Although they may well find that they do need the grades.

It's not so much poverty as a direct cause, but rather a culture which acts across all levels of society which is secondary to widespread poverty and what was in the past a basic economic reality of the need for a very large industrial and manual workforce. That cultural assumption (that a large percentage of the population can only ever do that kind of work) is now wrong, because of automation and globalization, but it has its own momentum, and an inertia which gives it a continued reality for someone living in amongst it and trying to make their way.

>especially those jobs which require academic excellence //

Let's be clear, most jobs don't require "academic excellence" they require abilities pertinent to the job. Primarily a first degree demonstrates intellectual capacity, motivation, and focus. Some positions require a particular academic attainment but it's a first-pass filter for demonstrating one has the capability to acquire and apply domain knowledge.

For example chemical engineers can have a first class honours degree but no knowledge of the financial world, their degree demonstrates they have the analytic abilities and mental capacities that make them valuable in the financial world.

>The reason why it's so difficult to get a lot of kids to pay attention at school is because they're well aware that they won't need trigonometry or literary analysis in the job that they're going to end up doing. //

I don't believe it's that at all. I don't believe that most children have an idea what they will do for work until late in to their adolescence - beyond when they'll have first come across trig and way beyond when they start literary analysis (which basically starts when you start reading books for yourself). How many athletes have to do a press-up [push-ups] in their career? Yet kids don't say "I want to be a football player I'm not doing press-ups".

IMO those same kids will be more than happy learning to make stuff out of wood, or learning about drawing, or learning to grow plants, or learning to make clothing despite not knowing if those skills will feature in their careers later. We treat all children as if they're academically inclined and I thing this is entirely wrong - yes basic literacy and numeracy are important. Yes the more academic subjects should be open to all those who wish to follow them. But also, those who don't want to sit and do book-work all day should have educational options too.

OT: Britain is always going to be a classed society with a monarchy.

> Let's be clear, most jobs don't require "academic excellence" they require abilities pertinent to the job.

I agree, perhaps I wasn't clear enough that I fundamentally disagree with the system I'm describing. The separation between academic and trade jobs was false even in the 19th century, and it is absurd in the modern economy.

> I don't believe it's that at all. I don't believe that most children have an idea what they will do for work until late in to their adolescence

They pick up implicit ideas from their environment and their parents. It is not as conscious as you are making it out to be.

> IMO those same kids will be more than happy learning to make stuff out of wood, or learning about drawing, or learning to grow plants, or learning to make clothing despite not knowing if those skills will feature in their careers later.

Yes, I agree, but the difference is these things feel more immediate than learning trigonometry, which seems like a very long-term investment which is unlikely to pay off, or literary criticism, which feels like a shibboleth for being able to pass for middle class.

I actually think we need to meld the practical and the academic much more - it's not about allowing the 'non-academic' to learn practical skills which will allow them to scrape through, it's about using design, electronics, programming etc to justify picking up useful academic skills which would otherwise seem remote, and also to teach practical skills and practical problem solving to students who would otherwise disappear off into the realms of the ivory tower.

I guess I find it hard because I liked learning trig, still enjoy maths and don't use any in my job. I never wanted to do any subjects at school because I thought they'd help my career - indeed I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up and I'm middle-aged [that is a problem mind you] - but rather because I enjoyed it. Same with cooking, I enjoy it. History and any subject requiring memorisation was always a turn off because I have a poor memory - maths/physics works because I can derive stuff I can't remember [or I could back then].

Re your final paragraph - I support that idea though I'm not entirely sure it will be effective. Yes, for some they'll see - "right, if I learn about fluid flows I can move from domestic plumbing [say] to designing optimised mains water fixtures" or "if I learn biology I can help ensure water resources don't negatively impact river ecosystems", but most won't be that inspired, just as most couldn't care less to learn about who signed the Magna Carta just because you told them it influenced the entire legal system from then on. I'm all for child-led learning and have done some flexi-schooling with my eldest child to that end. That said it seems a better basis to move forward on then the current pedagogy - notify parliament and let's make it happen!!

> "right, if I learn about fluid flows I can move from domestic plumbing [say] to designing optimised mains water fixtures" or "if I learn biology I can help ensure water resources don't negatively impact river ecosystems",

Hah, I was thinking a bit more 'I have ordered a 5x10x7cm electric motor for my model car project, the materials are 2cm wide, so what dimensions do I need to make the casing so that everything will fit'. Or, 'I want to make this computer animation bounce, how do I use maths to tell the computer what I want'.

> notify parliament and let's make it happen!!

We shall inform our MPs, and anticipate legislation being brought forward in the Spring.

Drafting legislation is hard, give them until Autumn!

>I don't believe that most children have an idea what they will do for work until late in to their adolescence

Don't most kids look at what their parents do for a living and assume they will be doing that? I know I did, and it certainly affected my perception of the usefulness of school. Why bust ass to make good grades if my future is most likely in something that involves none of the skills I'm being taught?

Coming from a lower-middle-class background, the concept that some people actually enjoy their jobs was always foreign to me. My impression was that a job was some stupid thing that adults have to do to put a roof over their heads. So what I was being asked to do in school was to sacrifice my free time and work really hard now so I can continue sacrificing my free time and continue working really hard in the future. Since sacrificing my time and working really hard were going to be a big part of my future regardless of how well I did at school, I saw no reason not to blow school off and enjoy my life while I could.

I pulled my head out of my ass later on, but hopefully my experience can shed light on why many students who stand to benefit the most from school fail to see the point of it.

It is not necessarily about using trigonometry, but rather a basic level of maths or English that is missing, with functional innumeracy and illiteracy.

It is multi-factoral for sure, but there is also a culture of being fine with saying "I can't do maths", and having people responding with "Yeah, I cannot do maths at all".

The exams I took had trig & literary analysis, but, then the lowest possible grade I could get was a C. The bottom set could get a D or C if they got pretty much everything in the exam right, and being sat next to someone taking those exams, I can assure you there is no trigonometry or analysis of passages in there.

I was just looking at a recent paper, you're right the foundation paper is pretty good in that sense:

http://filestore.aqa.org.uk/subjects/AQA-43651F-QP-NOV13.PDF

There is still some geometry which I think is a bit futile (questions 12 and 13, particularly memorizing the terminology about 'alternating angles' and so on), and perhaps a bit too much emphasis on specific ways of representing data (the pictogram and the stem and leaf chart).

But in general the emphasis on calculating costs, amounts, sizes, areas, percentages etc is, as you say, about functional numeracy.

Could you explain why some people failing to get a C grade should be a problem? One of the reasons to have an exam is to allow employers and universities to differentiate better and worse students. There is always going to be a range in ability, so this in itself is no problem, as long as a C grade doesn't mean the student is terrible. In some courses it is common to divide the students using percentiles and to arbitrarily assign grades.

Earning five GCSEs at grade C or better is an extremely low threshold, roughly equivalent in difficulty to passing the GED. The exams are not graded on a curve but are competency-based, so falling short of that standard does indeed mean that the student is terrible. Young people without those grades are more than twice as likely to be unemployed, and have very limited opportunities for further education or training.

A C grade at GCSE mathematics is usually considered a minimal passing grade.

Typically, a student who can interpret and answer simple ratio and proportion questions will reach a C grade.

I would expect a student who scores lower than a C grade to have some significant difficulty in answering this type of question:

"Here is an ingredient list for 2 cakes; write an ingredient list for 5 cakes."

As you might understand, students below this level are excluded from almost every skilled career.

In my experience, there are very few students who are intellectually incapable of reaching this level, but there are many (37% of all students in the UK) who don't reach this level because they don't have appropriate educational opportunities.

Universal access to good education is not a solved problem.

Some children have the capability to pass a GCSE at grade C or higher, but fail to do so because eg they are child carers for disabled parents or because they had a terrible teacher or etc.

Those children are being failed.

The numbers of children who cannot (not just do not) attain grade C in English and math are a rough proxy for rates of innumeracy and illiteracy. The UK has worryingly high levels of innumeracy and illiteracy.

Here's the English national curriculum.

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-curriculu...

Here's the maths national curriculum. Key stages 3 and 4 cover the GCSE exam.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curricul...

This sounds reasonable for 16 year old children, but don't forget that this work covers clever children who will easily achieve A.

You can get a rough idea of what a grade C means by comparing it to the new numerical grading system to be introduced in 2017. In that system grades range from 1 (low) to 9 (best) (with U still meaning failed). A 4 is expected to be equivalent to a current C.

http://www.aqa.org.uk/supporting-education/policy/gcse-and-a...

> But there are a couple of indicators to help us with this matching. Firstly, a grade four is going to be set at the level of a current grade C. What this means practically is that the same proportion of students who would achieve at least a grade C now will achieve at least a grade four under the new system. We also understand that a grade seven is going to be set at the level of the current A. That means we’ve now got grades four, five, and six to cover C and B… and grade seven, eight and nine to cover A and A. And if we look a bit more at this very top level – where three grades now allow for greater differentiation – we might expect the top half of the current A* students to achieve a nine grade in the new world.

It's great that there is more differentiation between very high attaining students but it's a pretty low bar.

>it's a pretty low bar.

Whether the scale puts a C on 4 out of 10 or 7 out of 10 doesn't really tell us anything about the ability if we don't know how the grading is done.

That is just such an artificial and competitive way of doing things. If I teach somebody something, I want them to understand it completely. If I teach 10 people something, I similarly want all 10 of them to understand it - I want them all to get an A. I can artificially jack up the difficulty and cause some people to struggle, but why on earth would I want to do that? To make it easier for corporations to select employees? Fuck that noise. I agree that in a high achievement academic environment raising the difficulty has value in that it teaches you how to strive and succeed, and that is important to know. But knowing how to do your taxes, order enough wood for the winter, keep your business in the black? Everyone should be getting As in that. Shrugging our shoulders at the people failing to keep up and saying "eh. bell curve" is treating people as disposable and not worth our efforts.

I happily stipulate that grading to a curve doesn't, in itself, imply that. But the reality is that some students are not mastering the core material, and we should not be okay with that.

>The achievement gap is the result of stark socioeconomic inequality.

The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker came out in 2002 and showed why this thinking is flawed. The achievement gap is significantly caused by genetic differences, and the correlation to income is not totally causation. The term used by geneticists "heritability" gives the proportion of differences between people (within a population), on some trait, that is caused by genetic differences. The traits that will determine your success at school, like personality and IQ are significantly heritable.

Here's a recent study from the UK that looked at identical (monozygotic) and fraternal (dizygotic) twins and gave heritability estimates for different school subjects: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273

Article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131211185323.ht...

>The researchers found that for compulsory core subjects (English, Mathematics and Science), genetic differences between students explain on average 58% of the differences between GCSE scores. In contrast, 29% of the differences in core subject grades are due to shared environment -- such as schools, neighbourhoods or families which twins share. The remaining differences in GCSE scores were explained by non-shared environment, unique to each individual.

>Overall, science grades (such as Biology, Chemistry, Physics) were found to be more heritable than Humanities grades (such as Media Studies, Art, Music) -- 58% vs 42%, respectively.

There's a big difference between variations in ability within a group which probably have a large genetic component and differences between different populations, say a poor area and a rich area or different races which appear predominantly non genetic and probably to a large extent cultural.

It's surprising to hear that heritability can be so significant for individuals but races somehow never diverged in those same traits, while they did diverge in other heritable traits like skin color and height.

You've pointed to a study that found a link between individual's grades and genetic differences in one country. But it's a big leap to go from there, and explain why a particular school would have bad grade averages, especially schools in different countries - unless you're making the argument that schools are composed of people from large groups of genetically similar people, and these people are necessarily very distinct from people at schools that have better grade averages. Intuitively, that seems unlikely to me; the society would have to be extremely stratified, geographically and genetically, with very little intermixing.

> Intuitively, that seems unlikely to me; the society would have to be extremely stratified, geographically and genetically, with very little intermixing.

That sounds right to me. Gated communities, luxury buildings vs slums, FiDi vs. Outer Sunset -- communities are incredibly stratified.

This is like new-school phrenology. Maybe 23andme can start a line of charter schools for the genetically blessed.

There are two extremes.

1) Teachers drastically effect student outcomes. In this case teachers deserve blame for poor student outcomes, and we should focus our efforts on finding and rewarding the best teachers.

2) Teachers don't matter and don't deserve the blame. In this case we should focus on spending as little money on teachers as possible - just find the cheapest warm body for the front of the classroom and focus our efforts on stuff that does matter.

Which is it?

[edit: Upon rereading it sounds like I'm arguing that we must live at one extreme. I actually just mean we need to live on some linear combination of these extremes. The key point is that we can't live at the distant endpoint (teachers don't deserve blame, teachers should be rewarded).]

Why don't we find and reward the best teachers while promoting socioeconomic integration in school systems? (As suggested by the article.) It's a little disingenuous to think that we have to go to one of those two extremes in order to have positive outcomes.

I didn't say we had to go to any extreme, I'm simply pointing out that the universe lives somewhere on a line between them. If you argue that teachers don't deserve the blame you are also arguing that teachers don't matter.

The achievement gap is maybe ~25% due to socioeconomic factors, if you're being generous. Take everyone out of poverty, you're still going to have an achievement gap that's already mostly (~70%) due to IQ and one's Conscientiousness. Instead of throwing even more money at the socioeconomic problem (seriously that's been the 'solution' for years and has had many implementations in many forms) why don't we try something different, like making sure pregnant mothers are consuming enough iodine, or novel research into cheaply manufacturable nootropics?

The cheapest and safest "nootropic" there is is exercise.

Students dramastically improved their grades in several schools once they were made into exercising with a heart rate monitor (higher heart rate - higher grade) every day:

http://www.amazon.com/Spark-Revolutionary-Science-Exercise-B...

I love dramastically as a portmanteau neologism, but I guess you meant dramatically AND/XOR drastically.

Hehe, I was in a rush while writing that post, it wasn't intentional. I'm not sure which word I intended to write (probably a little bit of both). :)

That being said - it's a fun new word that's actually pretty accurate in this situation. The improvements were drastic, and how drastic they were shocked a lot of people (the drama).

Nope. If I have to put my energy and resources into feeding and caring for myself and my family, then my "IQ" - my ability and experience in engaging with abstract data - suffers.

Yes, there will still be an achievement gap - that the achievement gap currently reflects socioeconomic factors is unfair.

Throwing more money at a problem to try and fix it in the way that makes sense in a very surface level way isn't smart when the stuff you want to fund has been shown to be minimally effective.

Not sure what you mean, unless you are saying food and shelter is minimally effective?

Do many poor children in America also feed and care for their families? I think it's still parents doing that. Of course some children may not have secure access to food and care, but they don't commonly provide it for their families on top of that.

It's more blurry than you'd think. 15 year old kids who are blowing off school so that they can make some money to ensure that their 5 year old sibling has enough to eat? That's definitely a thing. I have no idea how prevalent, but not unheard of.

My own wife's school work suffered because she had to spend her evenings raising her younger siblings while her parents were at work. Same with my niece, whose has one disabled parent and one in the software development field. She gets to act as part nurse, part nanny, and part student. Guess which one suffers.

Money doesn't help nearly as much as time, until you have enough money to hire someone else (or not work).

Agreed. Many students are looking after their siblings if not working, or taking grandma to doctors appointments etc. One of my current students missed our meeting this week because he had to bring his grandma to medical appointments and couldn't work much over break because he is working at a call center. A lot of my children-of-immigrant students have to go to doctor's appointments/government appointments (say with welfare worker or social worker or parole officer) to translate because their parents don't speak English and translation is not otherwise available.

Getting a job as a young teen to feed the family is pretty rare overall. Being the parent for one's little siblings because the parent has a second/third job to feed the family is far more common.

Actually it's also pretty uncommon for poor folks to have even a first job.

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2012.pdf

... Except you are factually wrong. The highest predictor of academic success, is the academic success of ones parents. The next highest predictor is the socio-economic status of ones parents (or guardians). This is true the world over, but the research was pioneered in the U.S... It's interesting because other countries have taken the U.S research and started applying policies to fix it.. but the US is still caught up on treating it as a "Schools" problem...

So.. if you levelled the socio-economic part, you'd start a positive cycle of generations improving, rather than the negative cycle of things getting worse.

>The highest predictor of academic success, is the academic success of ones parents. The next highest predictor is the socio-economic status of ones parents (or guardians).

Of course they are, but the confounding factor is genes shared between the parents and children. What do adoption studies say about those 2 variables?

... As I alluded to with the "(or guardians)". Genes have no major correlation. I'm sure there are obvious exceptions with learning disabilities etc. If a higher class family adopted a lower class child, the childs academic achievement would improve.

Conversely if you have super intelligent biological parents... but are raised in a low-socio and low-education level family... your academic results are poor.

In summary: Genes have nothing to do with it.

If you are actually interested in good education policy you should read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_R._House

I read the article you linked to but didn't find it convincing. It seems to be saying, "I was a teacher who failed to have much effect on poor students. Therefore, teachers cannot have much effect on poor students".

We seem to disagree about how much impact a teacher can have on poor students, but I wonder if there is an experiment we can agree on which will settle the matter.

For example, imagine there are 400 schools which have two math teachers, and that the students are assigned to one of the two teachers at random. Now imagine that each year we give an award to one (out of the two) teachers whose students performed best. If teachers have no impact on student outcomes, we would expect that random chance means after 3 years about 50 teachers have won the award three times. But if we find that 125 teachers have won the award three times wouldn't that suggest that teachers have significant impact on student outcomes?

The only way to do that experiment in a properly controlled environment would be to have the entire student body come from identical socioeconomic backgrounds. The lesson of the article I linked is that the more poverty a child experiences, the less effect a teacher will have on their lives. You can choose to ignore that reality all you want, but it doesn't stop it from being true.

Human beings don't have the capability to solve poverty. Sure, depending on how you measure it, poverty sometimes decreases and sometimes increases, but without being able to tease out the exact causes of these fluctuations there are no levers to pull. Those who claim to be experts in these matters have so far failed to created profound, lasting economic prosperity.

You'd do better to blame it on gravity, we know how to defy that.

Besides which, if we go to some place like Africa where those students are in far deeper poverty, they sit there listening attentively to their teachers. So I don't think your theory pans out. It's not poverty itself that is the problem (especially not in a country where every child gets a textbook), but a culture that is associated with poverty.

And culture is such an impossible problem to solve, right about now you and I should be hoping that it was still the economic problem you originally claimed. We at least have a slim chance of figuring that out.

Have you ever wondered, kethinov, why it is that we think education is something that can be solved the same way that we solved the problem of "how do we make millions of cars"? We send children to a big institutional building 5 days a week for the 8-to-4 shift, where workers try to pour factoids into their head in assembly-line style, then QA comes around and rejects those with defects for rework. And at the end of the line, a conveyor belt cranks out something that has no spirit, no inspiration, and nothing unique about it? Maybe the same sorts of systems that crank out mass produced retail products is a bad system for teaching our children.

Just because some cultures living in poverty still place a strong emphasis on educational attainment doesn't mean that poverty plays no role in the achievement gap. Poverty produces cultures that are hostile to education. Not 100% of the time obviously. There are exceptions. But those exceptions prove the rule.

I don't think we're incapable of solving poverty. We've been steadily eroding it piecemeal for centuries. There are new, innovative policy proposals being thrown out all the time to erode it further, of which my personal favorite is a universal basic income, or citizens dividend. That would completely end poverty. All we need is the political will. The way I see it, if it happened for Social Security, it can happen for that some day.

I think that what most people identify as wanting to blame someone for something can also be looked at as people wanting them to be responsible for something - not responsible in the 'you did this, go to jail' sense, but rather the 'take hold of this, be in control of it and improve the scene' sense.

Its one thing to blame someone for something - this is just a base, banal version of wishing they'd be more responsible for that thing. Alas, the tone of the discourse often degrades to the lower levels of human interaction, when really there is an undercurrent to the discussion that is just as valid.

So finding fault in others, assigning blame - these are all just frustrated attempts to recognize that people do need to take responsibility for their lives, their actions. Its hard for teachers to be blamed for the state of poor education when they're not allowed to be responsible for it - when they have standards pushed upon them by fabian government kafka-lovin' "employees" who have never taught anyone a thing in their lives.

Alas, however, there is another factor here, and that is the poor need to be responsible for their lives. They need to take control - however they can - and lift themselves up. If it requires help, then so be it - but you can't help someone who isn't willing to help themselves, and thats the first step. Calling for the poor to 'accept the blame' is one thing; asking the poor to be more responsible for their lives, another thing entirely. The same result is desired - its the degree of help, versus hostility, that makes the difference whether someone is willing to accept the claim, however.

Individual poor families might have the possibility of 'pulling themselves up by the bootstraps', on an ad hoc basis. But that'll never work as a general policy to deal with the problem. Even if you could get them all to try, the existing opportunities which make it possible for individuals to climb up, would immediately be swamped. We can't all work three fulltime jobs to save up enough money to buy a food stand, or whatever.

I think you're wrong about that - or if it were the case, how would our modern world even be possible? Only a few of us can do big things and change our lives? Clearly there are enough examples of people who did not have the universe on their side making big changes regardless, to negate this perspective - I know far more people who started with nothing and built their prosperous lives through hard work than those who just inherited it by luck or fortune.

Its therefore important to point out that there is a further responsibility in the equation, beyond just 'blame the poor', and that is 'make the rich more responsible for the poor', too. Its not a single equation, but rather a set of them .. linked together in order to function. And when these links are made and functional, we have a healthy society which boosts the standards of living for all of its citizens. There are enough examples of this to warrant optimism that in fact we can improve our own lives by improving the lives of others, and to ignore the desire to just be defeated by entropy, which is the natural state of the universe.

If I understand its message correctly, /Waiting for Superman/ argues it isn't poor communities causing poor students, but poor schools failing communities. Demonstrated by the charter programs in poor areas exceeding test scores in the best areas.

> Kids in poverty are kids not learning.

I would be a bit slow to just point to poverty as the only cause. There is no debate on whether poverty stunts education.

Consider all the other countries with more acute levels where the children, when provided with opportunities, grab for them.

One such would be the increasing percentage of money allocation to functions that are not core to teaching, such as administration, etc...

Another would be the attempt to force uniformity in curriculum down the throats to a deeply suspicious audience...

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