Kristoff Post

For the reading of Kristof I decided to respond in the form of quotes.

1. "A child born in the bottom quintile of incomes in the United States has only a 4 percent chance of rising to the top quintile, according to a Pew study"(Kristof). 

 The statistics in this quote astounded me because of the following fact that there is only a 4% chance in the US compared to the 12% chance in Britain. Also, Kristof goes on to explain that "parents’ incomes correlate to their adult children’s incomes roughly as heights do".  It's weird to think, on a personal level, if my success is only thanks to the work my grandparents and parents put in when they were younger. If I do something great and becpme successful is it actually thanks to the effort I Put in? I know that what I do makes a difference in my life right now, being a young adult, but what about when I was younger?

2. "... in the United States, too often the best predictor of where we end up is where we start"(Kristof). 

I feel like this is something that we all know deep down. As students, or teachers, or anyone else, we can guess where people will end up just by looking at them and making judgements. For example, no one expects the daughter of a high school drop out teen mom to become a doctor or an engineer. Don't say it's not true because even if that exact though doesn't cross your mind, it's subconscious. Why is it that way? How is it considered a miraculous success story when someone overcomes an obstacle such as nontraditional parents, when it shouldn't necessarily have an impact in the first place?

3. "Sean Reardon of Stanford University has calculated that the race gap in student test scores has diminished, but that the class gap has widened"(Kristof).

In my opinion this is an even bigger problem than it may originally seem, because it seems that the wage gap is only becoming wider as time progresses. I feel like once a family has money, it will only keep adding to its fortune, while a poor or middle class family is almost stuck in that position. Now this problem is entering the education system, and I can assume that it's because of the resources accessible to students of different economic classes. Without the grades to make it into college, it's almost guaranteed that the lower class students will remain in the lower class, even though they may have tried their best during school.