Study: Parents Make a Good Education Possible

This study makes a very important point that is ignored by the political establishment. How you are raised determines how well you do academically. Good parents mean a good education:

Whether low-income, urban students attend a public or private high school matters less to their academic success than whether their parents take part in their education, earn enough money to offer enriching experiences and have high aspirations for their kids, a study from an education advocacy group suggests.
The findings, to be released Wednesday by the Center on Education Policy (CEP), examine 12 years of data on more than 1,000 young people and find that they didn't get much of an advantage by attending private schools.

Though the SAT scores of students in private schools were higher than the scores of their public-school peers, their overall performance in math, reading, science and history was no better. They were no more likely to go to college or be more satisfied with their job at age 26 — they weren't even more likely to be civic-minded as adults.