"Their Advantages Are Large and Growing"

"Education is supposed to help level the playing field. Horace Mann called it the 'great equalizer.' Now it's closer to the great fortifier—compounding the advantages of class, since the affluent come better prepared and more able to pay. A few decades ago, the gap between rich and poor kids in finishing college was 39 percentage points. It's now 51 percentage points. Even poor kids with high test scores are slightly less likely to get degrees than rich kids with low scores. Putnam rightly calls this 'shocking.'"


Jason DeParle in The New York Times reviews Robert Putnam's Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis.