Somebody lied: Education alone can’t dismantle white supremacy

Americans like to think that if individuals are educated in great schools, they can pull themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps and bring their families with them. No matter if obstacles such as bad policing, weak labor markets and discriminatory housing policies litter our path. We believe that a good education can propel us past those barriers, and we can surpass our parents’ social standing….

Source: adnor-sevenoaks.org/

But new research out of the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that we’re overselling our belief in schools….  The study’s author, Jessie Rothstein, and his colleagues at Berkeley found that the quality of K-12 schooling has little bearing on individuals’ ability to earn more than their parents. The study found that family structure (spousal earnings), access to a college education and the ability to parlay that education into a bigger paycheck play much larger roles.

There are reasons that poor folk are stuck with hope instead of real opportunities: Middle-class families are hoarding them.

Every college place or internship that goes to one of our kids because of a legacy bias or personal connection is one less available to others,” writes Brookings Institution researcher Richard Reeves in a discussion of social mobility in his book Dream Hoarders.