Indeed. That is why I am so militant about the quality of secondary schools in poor neighborhoods, where the kids are trapped. It is to me the great civil rights issue of our time. Pity the victims don't rise up. They should. I see the nation going in a very bad direction, given this growing income inequality, and educational inequality, and family stability inequality. We have the top 20% doing spendidly, with educational opportunities second to none on this planet, and then the rest, where things are going downhill. It is very disturbing.
Torie, I'd advise you read J.D. Vance's new book. It focuses on poor, rural whites, but many of the themes apply to all "underclasses" of America.
You could bus a child from the ghetto across town to the finest public school in the city every day. But that doesn't fix the fact that the child is going home to a household where no one can help him with his homework because no one made it past high school, where his mother just had a fight with her boyfriend so they're spending all night throwing stuff in garbage bags and leaving before he gets home and tries to hit her again, and where there is no food in the house other than Doritos and soda. You can't blame any of that on the big bad teacher's unions and all those people living "high on the hog" with their obscene $60,000 per year salaries.
One of the teachers Vance spoke to said, "We're supposed to be shepherds to these kids, but they're being raised by wolves."
