Schools, relative poverty, and social mobility

Interesting New Yorker article by John Cassidy looks at where the method by which the poverty rate is measured comes from (if you haven't heard this before, it's rather interesting), some concerns folks on both left and right have with the way we currently calculate poverty, and whether other measures--including measures of relative poverty--might be better. All relevant to education, particularly since poverty plays a role in some funding formulas.

But this is what got me:

Research by Tom Hertz, an economist at American University, shows that a child whose parents are in the bottom fifth of the income distribution has only a six-per-cent chance of attaining an average yearly income in the top fifth. Most people who start out relatively poor stay relatively poor.

Now, there are a lot of factors that contribute to this--health care, housing policy, differences in parental support, lack of access to social networks, just to name a few--but the fact remains that the quality of education our public school systems provide to low-income students is often dramatically lower than that provided to more affluent students, and these disparities in educational opportunity seriously undermine social mobility.