Meritocracy is a lot like how Winston Churchill described democracy: the worst of all systems, until you consider the alternatives. What’s your alternative? Hereditary aristocracy?
Considering the biggest predictor of academic success is wealth, it's difficult to square admissions to top schools as a "meritocracy". The root of the problem here is the vast wealth inequality, and the way schools are funded via property taxes — something with a lot of problems and bias on its own.
One way to address some of this is to properly fund all public schools so academic success isn't largely a tossup of where one's parents could afford to live. Trying to correct for this at the admissions level is a divisive and bandaid solution.
> the biggest predictor of academic success is wealth
Perhaps the better way to think of wealth is as a proxy for intelligent, conscientious parents who care about educating their children. That is, the same qualities that make someone more likely to become wealthy are also qualities that promote academic success, not that wealth causes academic success.
> properly fund all public schools
Some of the worst-performing public schools in the nation are funded quite well, and the US nears the top per-student spending around the world[0], well above the OECD average. There is no amount of funding that can supplant parents who value education and a culture that values education.
>Perhaps the better way to think of wealth is as a proxy for intelligent, conscientious parents who care about educating their children.
That just doesn't line up with reality. In the U.S. the vast majority of wealth accumulation is in the form of homeownership [1] — Which has a stark and undeniable racial divide of which we're still seeing consequences today. Specifically racist zoning laws and redlining by banks that refused to give loans to PoC.
A lot of these laws are still being enforced today (i.e. 5,000sqft minimum lot sizes and huge setbacks requiring the purchase of lots of unproductive land that less wealthy people can afford).
Now, during the course of these discussions someone usually brings up a 'model minority' that's succeeding academically, and I'll agree that there's a cultural aspect to this as well. However, if they also own their homes disproportionately to other minorities, they're benefiting from an inequitable system that's still in place.
I'm not trying to reduce anyone's academic success and hard work down to a matter of money, there are lots of successful people despite their obstacles. But we can't pretend the system is setup to reward everyone solely on merit.
The US has a notoriously terrible social safety net compared to peer countries. The "worst-performing public schools" are using their money to provide food, transportation, healthcare, and counseling services in addition to academics.
There's a lot more to this issue than school funding, but teaching as a profession should pay for a solid middle class life to attract the best talent. Could we at least agree on that?
