One of the readings last week pertained to educational inequality as a result of income inequality and proposed integrating low income students in middle/upper income schools to make education more equal. This video highlights the impact of income inequality in terms of lower level education: the U.S. currently has a 28% dropout rate, dropouts are 8 times more likely to go to jail compared to non-dropouts, and dropouts earn roughly $20,000 less per year compared with non-dropouts.
As a result of these lower levels of achievement, the video states that on average $240,000 [much of this is tax payer money] per dropout goes towards medicare/medicaid, welfare, and the criminal justice system. It seems apparent that reducing dropout rates would save the Government (at both the Federal and State level, I'm assuming) quite a bit of money.
While the video makes its own suggestions as to what the U.S. should do to make our education system more equal, the method proposed in our text--beginning at page 290 specifically-- addresses the problem more thoroughly by simply bringing the schools that have lower levels of achievement [and a student body who's average family income is also lower] into schools that are already successful and have a majority of middle income and upper income students. According to Kahlenberg: "A handful of cities and metropolitan areas have been trying out a different form of choice--one that operates inside the world of public schools and points explicitly toward economic integration. The results are worthy of far more attention than they have received" (293).
The prevalence of costly private schools may be a hindrance to including lower income students in higher income private schools; however, even if only the public schools were integrated such that lower, middle, and upper income students all were nearly equally represented in all schools, I'm guessing the average quality of our lower income education system would still increases dramatically.
