The more shining examples of STEM professionals we can place in our nation's classrooms, the better off students will be.
While standardized tests create a bias toward financially better off students, they do not predict success at Hampshire, which requires and rewards active inquiry, independent thinking, and creativity -- the kind of rigorous excellence that can't be measured by a standardized test.
Indeed, there's nothing new or shocking about a certain breed of better-off student being offered incentives – in the form of cash (usually per result), gigs/ festivals, even, it's rumoured, cars or holidays, to pass important exams or, more commonly, get better grades.
The income achievement gap was just as glaring with poor children: "roughly two years of learning behind the average better-off student of the same age".
Helene Brandon "West Jesmond is popular with better-off students, so plenty of drinking holes and restaurants.
Instead, government schools get caught up in a "spiral of decline" if their better-off students are poached.
While some low-income high school students suffer because their mothers or fathers are absent or struggling to pay for the basics, quite a few better-off students have parents who are too invested in college admissions.
Better-off students can borrow money they don't need to study, park it in a high-interest savings account and comfortably repay the loan after graduation.Worse, because they are so expensive for the government, loans are heavily rationed.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the Westminster corridor, the Lords EU internal market sub-committee, inquiring into youth unemployment, has been hearing fresh tales of failings in careers guidance, with poorer young people – lacking the parental contacts available to better-off students – at a particular disadvantage.
Their analysis leads them to a fairly provocative conclusion: compared to their peer groups in other countries, our better-off students actually perform worse than our low-income students -- and maybe they should be the focus of education policy.
Research from the National Association of Summer Learning (NASL) showed that "students from less-affluent backgrounds, when in an unstructured environment, typically read fewer words and engage with less challenging online material than do more economically better-off students, even if they have the same access to technology".
