Education has long been embraced as one of the best ways to combat inequality. Yet, this faith in the power of education has begun to falter. There is mounting evidence that improving our education system won’t do much to fix inequality.

　　教育，长期以来一直被奉为消除不平等现象的最佳途径之一。然而，对教育的力量的这种信念已经开始动摇。越来越多的证据表明：改进教育体制对于解决不平等问题收效甚微。

　　Modern inequality isn’t driven by the gap between college-educated workers and high school grads. All the action is at the top of the income ladder, where the extremely rich have pulled away from everyone else.

　　现代社会的不平等现象并非是受过大学教育的工人和高中毕业生之间差距过大所致。问题的关键在收入阶梯的顶端, 那些最富裕阶层已经拉大了同其他所有人之间的差距。

　　Since 1979, wages for the top 1 percent in the United States have grown nine times faster than wages for the bottom 90 percent. That’s not a tale of the well-educated doing better than the less-well-educated. It’s about the super-rich out-earning everyone else—including college graduates, who haven’t gotten a raise in over a decade.

　　自1979年以来，美国最富裕的1%的人其收入增速要比底层90%的人高9倍。这并不是说受过良好教育的人比没有受过良好教育的人更出色，而是超级富豪的收入超过其他所有人——包括那些在10多年里从没涨过薪的大学毕业生。

　　So what doesn’t seem to work is a focus on improving education. Even if we could dramatically increase the number of college graduates, or greatly expand access to high-quality education, the United States would likely remain an extremely unequal place, a country where even college grads are being left behind.

　　强调改进教育似乎并不奏效。即使我们可以大幅度增加大学毕业生的数量，或者大大拓宽获得高质量教育的途径，美国可能仍将是一个极度不平等的地方，一个连大学毕业生都被抛在后面的国家。

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（编辑：何莹莹）