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I'm with you (just to be clear): the educational system is perfectly fine in the US. The problem is that the educational system in the US is designed to be fine for the subset of kids who come from families that 1) speak English, 2) are educated themselves, 3) hold full time employment.

Whenever these debates about the US education system arise it's important to clarify that when people who complain about the system do so, they're really complaining that the lack of a social safety net is keeping the doors open in public schools for kids whose families (and themselves) don't see value in formal education, can't maintain daily attendance for various reasons, may not have internet access at home, don't have food safety, may have health and developmental issues, and may not even have one parent caring for them.

I don't care whether science shows a differentiation in IQ between racial groups, because that is so much less important than addressing how well a kid will be able to learn when they are being raised in poverty by a single parent without a college education who doesn't speak English natively and may not even be in the country legally. That is the problem.




> The problem is that the educational system in the US is designed to be fine for the subset of kids who come from families that 1) speak English, 2) are educated themselves, 3) hold full time employment.

I think that, to the contrary, the US educational system goes to great lengths to accommodate students for whom English is a second language. Second, I can scarcely think of a way the US education is designed for the children of educated parents. Obviously they do better than children of uneducated parents, but it is hard to even imagine the system where this would not be true; certainly it’s not true anywhere else in the world. Finally, I think that regarding the full time employment of the parents, literally the opposite is true: it’s designed with the opposite assumption. For example, elementary school is not 10 hours long, as it would have been if it assumed that both parents are occupied for 8 hours every day.




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