I'm personally all for fixing the education system, but the idea that this would fix (or even help) income equality is a fantasy. Denmark is often held up as a model of low-inequality, high-income-mobility, high-education-investment countries. But a recent study indicated that these policies' have zero effect on Danish income mobility and education-attainment mobility relative to the US! Their high levels of equality rely entirely on direct transfers. There's nothing wrong with this per se: despite the costs I'd bear, I wish our system was a little more redistributive, including education investment. But the theoretical positive-sum gains from broadening opportunity regardless of your background are simply not supported by the data. And this is in one of the most income-mobile countries (post-taxes and -transfers) in the world!
Ok, I haven't read the study too closely but I can't imagine how having a more educated population would be beneficial for the society. Also note that you can't really measure poverty by just percentage of income alone. The pool people in US are probably doing better than in Somalia. If nothing else, I can't imagine more education not raising the general standard.
1: We have very limited ability to change educational outcomes in this country and the differences between schools have little to do with external inputs (systematic differences in per pupil funding, teacher quality, etc). https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/my-r...
2: Years of schools have essentially no explanatory power at an international level (even in lesser developed countries that should have much more "low hanging fruit") Other research shows that without improving test scores, which are strongly influenced by genetics, education is basically worthless for economic development.
3: Poor people in the US, especially net of taxes and transfers, are quite wealthy by broader international standards. US poor vs Somalia? LOL that's not even a question. The poor in some of the more economically successful nordic/northern european countries might have somewhat higher material living conditions, but the differences are much more modest than you might expect and as compared to what you find in other developed countries (especially larger, less homogeneous, less cherry -picked countries), say, France, Italy, Spain, etc it's far from clear cut. The US also has significantly more diversity in multiple dimensions, especially as compared to an extremely (traditionally) homogeneous country like Denmark.
[1] http://voxeu.org/article/intergenerational-mobility-denmark-... [2] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/the-amer...