> If so, it's not a zero sum game - the 'averagely clever people who have received great tuition' and who go on to succeed might be a sign of the education system working, not its failure.
The failure is that mediocre students which come from an environment which helps them (good school, private tutors, stable home life) can be successful, while "naturally gifted" yet disadvantaged students don't.
The basic fact that parental income is still the best predictor of educational achievement should tell you everything you need to know.
I read a study that specifically addressed this by looking separately at adopted kids. I'll try to look for it and post a link when I'm at my computer.
> The failure is that mediocre students which come from an environment which helps them (good school, private tutors, stable home life) can be successful, while "naturally gifted" yet disadvantaged students don't.
I think you have rephrased what I said to again push the idea that it's a zero sum game. If mediocre students can be successful, given the right educational inputs (for some definition of 'successful' and 'mediocre'), isn't this a huge opportunity? Perhaps we should improve society as well as social justice by trying to promote mediocre students from poorer backgrounds to this same level of success, rather than by working on the problem of undiscovered genius.
> The basic fact that parental income is still the best predictor of educational achievement should tell you everything you need to know.
My whole point is that this does not tell you everything you need to know. If low-parental-income and high-parental-income students had exactly the same potential to succeed, the fact that parental income is a good predictor of achievement might be telling you either (or any combination) of two things: that wealthier students are achieving beyond what should be expected (and so we are ending up with incompetent people in very senior positions because they did not get them on merit), or that poorer students are achieving below where they should be (and so we are wasting the potential of talented people). These are really different problems! And probably have quite different solutions.
I certainly agree that talented students from disadvantaged backgrounds ought to be helped. But thinking parental income is the causal factor behind the observed correlation of student success with income may be mistaken.
Two other hypotheses are that the money itself is not important, but rather the familial transmission of certain cultural traits (which also often lead to high incomes), and/or that, similarly, the causal factor is genetic transmission of some cognitive or personality traits. Note that a factor being genetic does not mean it is immutable - for instance, there could be a genetic factor that leads to students doing poorly in school because they are intolerant of sitting still for hours in desks, which would become irrelevant if one stopped requiring them to sit still for hours.
A mistaken idea of the causal explanation for the correlation with income would lead to interventions that don't actually work.
The failure is that mediocre students which come from an environment which helps them (good school, private tutors, stable home life) can be successful, while "naturally gifted" yet disadvantaged students don't.
The basic fact that parental income is still the best predictor of educational achievement should tell you everything you need to know.