Thoughts on Educational Justice: Can Poor Students be Privileged?

Excerpt

Education was dubbed “the great equalizer” by Horace Mann, the nineteenth-century educator and the nation's first superintendent of schools in the USA. However, recent data challenge this notion by suggesting that income inequality increases educational disparity. Dr. Anthony Abraham Jack, an assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, established that even when poor students attend prestigious schools in the USA, they still face significant inequality. His widely acclaimed debut book, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students, covers all the pertinent topics in great detail (Jack, 2019). The book was translated into Chinese two years after its English edition and received a high score of 8.1 on Douban, the most famous book review website in China. As a Chinese reader and researcher, this book prompted me to contemplate the relevant issues concerning education in China. In the following sections, I will first outline the book’s primary contributions and then delve into more detail on how this book sheds light on China’s underdeveloped educational equity system, which has not received proper attention. …