Massachusetts, home to America's best schools and best-educated workforce, has seen income inequality soar. Why? The poor are losing an academic arms race with the rich.
"Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of the conditions of men -- the balance wheel of the social machinery."
Horace Mann, pioneering American educator, 1848
Horace Mann, pioneering American educator, 1848
"In America, education is still the great equalizer."
Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, 2011
Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, 2011
BOSTON - When Puritan settlers established America's first public school here in 1635, they planted the seed of a national ideal: that education should serve as the country's "great equalizer."
Americans came to believe over time that education could ensure that all children of any class had a shot at success. And if any state should be able to make that belief a reality, it was Massachusetts.
The Bay State is home to America's oldest school, Boston Latin, and its oldest college, Harvard. It was the first state to appoint an education secretary, Horace Mann, who penned the "equalizer" motto in 1848. Today, Massachusetts has the country's greatest concentration of elite private colleges, and its students place first in nationwide Department of Education rankings.
Yet over the past 20 years, America's best-educated state also has experienced the country's second-biggest increase in income inequality, according to a Reuters analysis of U.S. Census data. As the gap between rich and poor widens in the world's richest nation, America's best-educated state is among those leading the way.
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