Data on Equal Educational Opportunity

While reasonable minds can (and do) differ on how best to legally operationalize the equal educational opportunity doctrine, if the doctrine is to stand for anything meaningful it has to at least mean that a child's educational "destiny" should be independent of the household income that a child happens to have been born into. Data, however, make painfully clear that on balance we fall short--far, far short--of this aspiration. Helping make these data "come alive" is an interactive graphic (in the New York Times) that allows users to "guess" at the relation between a child's chance at going to college and parental income levels. (After a user draws his/her own regression line onto the graph the user can then compare it with the actual regression line.) While depressing from a policy perspective it's a clever interactive graphic.