Originally Posted by kcab
I have not read the whole article (or this whole thread) yet, but can I just suggest that an increasing achievement gap suggests to me a problem with school curricula and/or pedagogy? The wealthier and/or better-educated parents are able to act outside of the school system to make sure their kids get taught what they should know, but poorer/less educated parents are less able to take corrective action.

I mean, I think a lot of tutoring has sprung up in response to the failings of school systems. Schools not teaching math facts anymore? OK, let's send the kids to Kumon or Sylvan or teach them at home.

At least, that's my off-the-cuff response after skimming the first page

I wish someone would collect data on tutoring and correlate it with which school students attend.

What a great point!


Bostonian, I think that the argument to be made re: Jewish and Asian immigrant parents revolves not around MONEY... but around educational attainment of the parents.

Immigrants who have poor educational attainment themselves tend to raise children who go on to also have fairly poor educational attainment, regardless of income.

Immigrants who have (on average) fairly high levels of educational attainment (such as modern Asian parents, or Jewish ones of the past) parent those children differently.

Yes-- and it shows in terms of outcomes.

But adoption studies? The problem is that there just aren't quite enough of those subjects to make a good study group, and records are probably not complete enough to go back and look at what happens to children who are adopted into high/low educational attainment families versus high/low SES ones... too bad, that.

The problem is that adoptions TEND to be into high SES and high EdAtt families, and that trend has only accelerated in the years since WWII.

Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.