Equal Opportunity,Our Natural
虚拟机安装系统
resident Obama's cond Inaugural Address ud soaring language to reaffirm America's commitment to the dream of equality of opportunity: "We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody el, becau she is an American; she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own."股票休市
The gap between aspiration and reality could hardly be wider. Today, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country. Study after study has expod the myth that America is a land of opportunity. This is especially tragic: While Americans may differ on the desirability of equality of outcomes, there is near-universal connsus that inequality of opportunity is indefensible. The Pew Rearch Center has found that some 90 percent of Americans believe that the government should do everything it can to ensure equality of opportunity.
Perhaps a hundred years ago, America might have rightly claimed to have been the land of
opportunity, or at least a land where there was more opportunity than elwhere. But not for at least a quarter of a century. Horatio Alger-style rags-to-riches stories were not a deliberate hoax, but given how they've lulled us into a n of complacency, they might as well have been.
It's not that social mobility is impossible, but that the upwardly mobile American is becoming a statistical oddity. According to rearch from the Brookings Institution, only 58 percent of Americans born into the bottom fifth of income earners move out of that category, and just 6 percent born into the bottom fifth move into the top. Economic mobility in the United States is lower than in most of Europe and lower than in all of Scandinavia.
楚字取名
弧形闸门升旗手自我介绍Another way of looking at equality of opportunity is to ask to what extent the life chances of a child are dependent on the education and income of his parents. Is it just as likely that a child of poor or poorly educated parents gets a good education and ris to the middle class as someone born to middle-class parents with college degrees? Even in a m
ore egalitarian society, the answer would be no. But the life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in almost any other advanced country for which there is data.
How do we explain this? Some of it has to do with persistent discrimination. Latinos and African-Americans still get paid less than whites, and women still get paid less than men, even though they recently surpasd men in the number of advanced degrees they obtain. Though gender disparities in the workplace are less than they once were, there is still a glass ceiling: women are sorely underreprented in top corporate positions and constitute a minuscule fraction of C.E.O.'s.
Discrimination, however, is only a small part of the picture. Probably the most important reason for lack of equality of opportunity is education: both its quantity and quality. After World War II, Europe made a major effort to democratize its education systems. We did, too, with the G.I. Bill, which extended higher education to Americans across the economic spectrum.
prospectorBut then we changed, in veral ways. While racial gregation decread, economic gregation incread. After 1980, the poor grew poorer, the middle stagnated, and the top did better and better. Disparities widened between tho living in poor localities and tho living in rich suburbs - or rich enough to nd their kids to private schools. A result was a widening gap in educational performance - the achievement gap between rich and poor kids born in 2001 was 30 to 40 percent larger than it was for tho born 25 years earlier, the Stanford sociologist Sean F. Reardon found.
Of cour, there are other forces at play, some of which start even before birth. Children in affluent families get more exposure to reading and less exposure to environmental hazards. Their families can afford enriching experiences like music lessons and summer camp. They get better nutrition and health care, which enhance their learning, directly and indirectly.五彩绳的寓意
Unless current trends in education are reverd, the situation is likely to get even wor. In some cas it ems as if policy has actually been designed to reduce opportunity: go
幸福句子vernment support for many state schools has been steadily gutted over the last few decades - and especially in the last few years. Meanwhile, students are crushed by giant student loan debts that are almost impossible to discharge, even in bankruptcy. This is happening at the same time that a college education is more important than ever for getting a good job.
