How do you define “merit”? Do you think merit can be bought?

Who is more meritorious? Someone who grew up with one poorly-educated parent and no financial support, learning in a bad school, and still managed to get to the top of their class — but didn’t ace the exam?

Or someone who went to the best grade schools, and had access to a tutor for the exam?

Right now, “merit” is defined by how well you score on this single, sudden-death exam — so you can easily buy merit by getting a tutor for the tests, and all the well-to-do parents of NYC kids I know do exactly that.

shouldn’t the focus be on the junior schools to help bring them up to standard?

That’s not happening either.

Consider that in America, schools are generally funded by property taxes, so that schools in poorer districts get less money per student than schools in richer districts.

For example, New York State spends over $25K per student for students not in large cities, but less than $18K per student in New York City. More, it’s a lot more expensive to operate in New York City than upstate.

Now I live in the Netherlands, and, like most countries in the EU, we spend more per student in the poorer neighborhoods. I saw an interview with teachers in the Bijlmer, the poorest area of Amsterdam, and one was saying, “There’s a huge amount of competition to get a teaching position in this school, because this is a place you can really make a difference in children’s lives.”

It made me happy, but it made me really sad for New York City, because you’d have to be some sort of saint or masochist to want to teach in a lower-income NYC school that isn’t a magnet school.