Reply to Affirmative action has failed

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This isn't a failure of affirmative action, but of our education system as a whole.  Poor, URM kids go to crappy schools, which set them back from the very beginning.  If all American children went to comparatively high quality schools, I would bet money that URM would have higher representation and AA would not even be necessary.[/quote]

It's not entirely a school problem. The parents of these children also have a role here. There is only so much a school can do if the family / parent figures are not supporting the child. [/quote]
+1 schools are only reflective of the students (ergo, the parents) who attend them. You can try all you want, but teaching students who come from homes where education is an afterthought is HARD. [/quote]

The educational level of the parents is key.  The studies have shown an absolute absence of long-term (i.e., into high school) impact of programs like Head Start for underprivileged kids.  The children do better initially, but the effect goes away as soon as the program ends.  I say one study (from Harvard, I think?) that looked at a range of programs, and the only program that worked was one that had focused intervention into the homes of disadvantaged students beginning at a very early age, and continuing on through high school, with mentors assigned to individual students and their parents. The problem was that it is incredibly expensive and there simply isn't the manpower to implement it on any kind of scale. The studies on the "word gap" between underprivileged and middle class kids have been extensively covered. Pouring money into the schools isn't going to fix the problem, when so much of the work that goes into preparing a kid for academic success happens between birth and 5 years of age.  [/quote]

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