[rusty-rust]

I think your argument is engaging in “what aboutism” and detracts from the issue this article is trying to address.

The problem they are trying to address is that true meritocracy only exists in a perfect system, that is to say that you can not fairly compare individuals across different environments. More concretely one of the problems it is trying to account for the situations where wealth or post code privilege gives students an advantage over other students.

There are often situations where students just performed better on a standardized test because they could afford a couch or had better teachers and not because they are “smarter” or more capable.

[rhino369]

There is also a question of how to define "merit." Standardized tests aren't that meaningful or accurate. It's a good way to roughly separate people out, but it shouldn't be considered merit. Especially since people spend a bunch of time learning strategies for it, further reducing its predictive ability.

[MagnumOpus]

> There are often situations where students just performed better on a standardized test because they could afford a couch or had better teachers and not because they are “smarter” or more capable

The solution is to make sure that students have good teachers and a couch (??) to become more capable, and not to waste limited elite teaching resource on less-capable students.

[afarrell]

No university can boil the ocean.

In order to make sure that students have good teachers, one challenge is making it possible for people from impoverished communities to be able to get high-quality schooling so that they can either become teachers or earn money that can go back into those communities.

[intended]

Impoverished regions are always going to have lower than average outcomes.

If you could afford enough teachers, with good training, on a impoverished region tax base, it would be revolutionary.