I'm not arguing with you, there's a great book called Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol. However, your above statement is pretty fucked, not in premise, but in trying to communicate what you meant.

Otherwise, what your saying is that people with money buy grades.

People with money move to healthier school districts and vote for school levies, etc, not just to better educate their children, but because they understand that it raises their own property value, etc...

But there are plenty of kids in chicago who don't have money, but who do well in school. They get siphoned off and put into magnet schools, but they're still present. The top two highest scoring high schools in IL are Chicago Public Schools. Alot of people are surprised to find that out, I sure was, knowing the standard of education in the North Shore suburbs of chicago, where i was raised, and where I had also taught.

Money helps, but you can't buy good parenting skills, and in the end, a good parent is what makes a decent contributing member of society, regardless of demographic.

personally I think all the problem here is that gpa/standard test scores may be predictive (in that they correlate with 'success') but that is because the system has been set up in order to produce these 'successes'. I mean, look at IQ.. what does that mean? IQ is not intelligence even though people refer to it that way. the IQ test was developed in order to predict ability to do well in school essentially. So one more step removed, i.e. standardized testing and we have no real idea what it taps into. If you didnt take certain courses in high school, then it is a rather safe bet to say you will not perform well on the SATs (at least in math).

However, GPAs are problematic as well.. with the rapid grade inflation in high schools and colleges (you should see the "A" high school students I get as freshman in college- A my ass)

As mentioned previously, I think measuring this stuff is impractical because what we seem to value (defined functionally in terms of who gets rewarded, who gets jobs etc) is inconsistent with what we say we value about education (i.e. critical thinking, creativeness etc)..

Anyhow, Im not as cynical as POD mainly I think because Im teaching at the college level- but Im almost there, college has become vocational...

Such a sad, true point. You see, we don't have much choice. A fairly intelligent child can earn an A in my class by basically showing up. That's not my choice. It's either that or 80% of my students fail. The administration won't have that. "What are you doing to those kids?" Uh, challenging them. "Well stop. That's entirely too many F's." If teaching at a school made up of majority lower-middle class students won't make you cynical, nothing will.

which then leads colleges to depend on standardize testing to evaluate all these "A" students..which then leads the high schools to teach to the test.. the cycle continues.. the problem is high school and college is not about education now. its about preparation.. preparation toward being a working stiff..

You should see the A's they hand out on Military bases satellite campuses. These people i worked with got degrees with 4.0's and would do almost no work.