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[quote=Anonymous]Malcolm Gladwell addressed this in his Revisionist History Podcast.  In [url=http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/04-carlos-doesnt-remember/][b]Ep 4 - Carlos Doesn't Remember[/b][/url], Gladwell describes something most Americans don't think about, but take for granted as one of the best things about America:

MG: Carlos is a smart kid. He’s gotten a scholarship to a really good private school. He’s excelling. It’s not hard to imagine that, one day, he’ll to a college of his choice. He’s going places. This is what civilized societies are supposed to do, to provide opportunities for people to make the most of their ability. So that, if you’re born poor, you can move up; if you work hard, you can improve your lot. There’s even a term for this, capitalization. A society’s capitalization rate is the percentage of people in any group who are able to reach their potential, capitalize on their potential. I think the capitalization rate is one of the single best ways we have to capture how successful and just a society is. If I know that number, I think I have a better handle on how well a country’s doing than if I know its GDP or its growth rate or its per capita income. And right from the beginning, Americans have told themselves that they’re really good at capitalization, really good at social mobility, any kid can grow up to be president. That’s what’s supposed to set America apart from everywhere else.

He goes on to look at all the factors that make the path to realizing Carlos' potential pretty rocky and broken.  Most are a pretty lost cause by the time they reach 8th grade.  If you want to generalize the reasons, the primary is that survival supersedes education in many different ways.

Another that he doesn't talk about in this episode is that public policy puts education at bottom in most places, even though human capital is a lower cost investment than safety net programs we pay for adults who can't support themselves.  It's an opportunity to raise the country's rate of capitalization, but we miss it again and again and then complain about "takers."

[url=http://www.ruraledu.org/articles.php?id=3297][b]This report on rural education[/b][/url] (where a surprising number of kids are minority) points out how little we actually care about social mobility, though we pay it lots of lip service.[/quote]

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