The other day, Kul Chandra Gautam came by the newspaper to meet with our editorial board. You’ve likely never heard of him, but he has the kind of resume that would inspire anyone who believes in the human spirit’s ability to rise above circumstances.

Born in a tiny village in a remote part of Nepal, with no roads, no telephone, no electricity and no school, he somehow ended up at Dartmouth and Princeton, then eventually became a senior official with the 

If you were to guess which public school systems perform best, the ones that provide computers or tablets for their students and spend a lot of time online — like Australia, Denmark or Sweden — or the ones that use technology modestly, such as Singapore or South Korea, what would be your answer?

Anyone following debates at the Utah Legislature the last couple of years might chose the high-tech schools. That would be wrong.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and 

Fifty years after Lyndon Johnson first declared it, the American war on poverty seems to be dominated by two extremes.

On one side are those who see the war as a success because public spending has led to the poor having relatively decent living conditions. What we need, they would say, is much more federal spending.

Which, even if it were a good idea (it’s not), wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in an ISIS compound of getting through Congress.

On the other side is the private sector, which has set up a thriving payday lending industry that is quick to tout its ability to loan poor people just enough to make it to their next meager paycheck. If they can’t repay the loan at interest rates of 500 percent or more, they can always borrow more.

Surely, there must be a third way.

Of course there is.

“I felt bad that we couldn’t give them the verdict that they wanted. But legally, we couldn’t do that.” – Juror B37, to Anderson Cooper of CNN.

The six women who served on the jury that acquitted George Zimmerman had one thing in common. They each received a summons calling them to jury duty.

Because Catholic schools are religious schools, the city wouldn’t allow any direct vouchers to students. So a group of private philanthropists stepped in and offered to cover a portion of private school tuition for eligible students for three years. The students had to qualify as low-income and either be entering first grade or be in grade 1-4. Then they were placed in a lottery from which scholarship winners were chosen.

The researchers followed the scholarship winners and the losers, comparing the two through the years. By 2011, those students all were at least 21 years old. Of the African American students who attended private schools, college enrollment was 24 percent higher than among those who didn’t.

That’s pretty clear evidence that politicians everywhere ought to begin looking seriously at voucher programs to help disadvantaged students have a chance in life.

The study found no similar improvements among any other racial group. Hispanic students saw a slight increase in college enrollment among voucher recipients, but it was statistically insignificant.

Plenty of theories exist as to why the outcome was most dramatic among African Americans. At the least, however, winning a voucher did not harm the education of any student, and it also saved public money.

Tuition in New York City’s Catholic schools was estimated to be $1,728. That was 72 percent of the total cost per pupil of $2,400 at these schools. The total cost at public schools, meanwhile, was more than $5,000 per student.

The voucher provided $1,400 in tuition, which means poor families had to make up the rest. Despite this, 77 percent of the recipients were able to do so at least part of the time.

Despite the study, keepers of the public school monopoly continue to refuse to give an inch toward the proponents of allowing poor people real education choices. National School Boards Association executive director Anne L. Bryant told CNN the study didn’t account for how much parents get involved with their students.

The type of parent who would enroll a child in a voucher program probably is the kind who would be most involved in helping that student, she said.

Clearly, she hadn’t read the study. Researchers compared the voucher recipients with those who had applied for, and not received, vouchers in a random lottery. They also compared it to those who received, but didn’t accept, the voucher.

The real story here is that African American students with, as Bryant called them, dedicated parents, were significantly less able to get their students into college as long as they were relegated to public schools. That is an inexcusable betrayal of people who want better for their kids.

Rich kids get all the advantages. Poor kids have to take what the state offers them.

Utah rejected a voucher system because of intense pressure from public school advocates. It’s time to rethink that decision, especially as budgetary pressures continue to mount on an overcrowded school system.

Clearly, vouchers don’t offer a quick fix to declining educational performance, and they may not help everyone. However they ought to be available, alongside public charter schools, as choices for concerned parents. There is no discernable downside. 

I could not have been more wrong. At Christmas, I was lucky to get a morsel more than was owed for the actual service, and it generally came wrapped in a complaint or two about the way I did my job.

My parents and friends assured me this was to be expected. The rich did not get that way by being overly generous, they said.

As it turns out, that was a well-meaning but milder form of the sort of prejudice that fuels the “Occupy” movement, anarchists and other groups anxious to tear down the more fortunate. People with less can feel empowered by a sense of moral superiority over those who have more, but, as I’ve learned later in life, it’s a false pride. It’s every bit as damaging as the character flaws the poor accuse the wealthy of possessing.

But wait, you say, hasn’t study after study shown that poor people give more generously than the rich?

Yes, they have. In recent days, the Chronicle of Philanthropy released a study of charitable giving based on the itemized deductions on tax forms in 2008. The results were clear. Households earning between $50,000 and $75,000 per year gave an average of 7.6 percent of their discretionary income to charity nationwide. Those making more than $100,000 gave only 4.2 percent.

That’s similar to a study by McClatchy Newspapers in 2009 showing the poor giving 4.3 percent to charity compared to 2.1 percent from the rich. Methodologies and definitions obviously differed between the two studies, but the message was the same. The more you make, the less you share.

However, there was an interesting twist to the Chronicle of Philanthropy study. It found that wealthy people who live in zip codes with people less fortunate than themselves give a larger percentage to charity than those who live among the wealthy.

We are all human beings, after all, with the same motivations and desires. Rich people are not jerks — not necessarily, anyway. Some of them just act that way because they don’t know better.

Paul Piff, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, has studied this phenomenon. He observed that the rich do indeed tend to be more rude and uncaring as a natural part of their behavior. When he placed them in a situation with someone of lesser means, the wealthy would avoid eye contact, check their cell phones and look otherwise disengaged, while the poorer people were smiling, nodding and happy to communicate.

However, his research also found that poor people began to act liked just like the rich as they perceived they had achieved a higher status.

On the other hand, people who work for philanthropic organizations say the rich can become suddenly generous when made aware of suffering around them. I’ve personally known some extremely generous wealthy people.

 John Wesley may have said it best way back in the 18th century: “One great reason why the rich in general have so little sympathy for the poor is because they so seldom visit them. Hence it is that, according to the common observation, one part of the world does not know what the other suffers.”

We can change this, but only by removing the borders between those two worlds. In philanthropy, as in politics, class divisions tend to reinforce prejudices and give everyone a stronger foothold on ignorance.

Human interaction is an antidote that can work wonders.

If I had known this years ago in that Country Club neighborhood, I would have invited my customers to ride around on my bicycle for a while.

This is interesting stuff, but the angle a lot folks are missing has to do with the major outlier among the 50 states — Utah.

In the Beehive State, residents were found to have given 10.6 percent of their discretionary income to charity. Mississippi was way behind in second place with 7.2 percent.

While wealthy people in Utah still give less than those of modest means, the differences are not as stark. In Utah, people earning $200,000 and more gave 8.8 percent, compared with 11.6 percent for those in the $50,000 to $99,999 range.

Yes, most of that money likely goes to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some reporting in recent weeks has been critical of the church for how it uses its funds, but charity comes in many forms, including spiritual. The Mormon Church relies mostly on volunteer leadership, so salaries are not a big factor.

The church's charity for the poor goes to non-Mormons as well as church members.

And if you know anything about church members (I am one), you understand that many of them give much more in personal service and time than they would ever claim on a tax form.

With so much attention on the church right now because of Mitt Romney’s campaign, this is a relevant topic. Contrary to how it is often portrayed, church contributions are voluntary — no one compares donations to earnings or attempts to enforce tithing. Church members are asked at the end of the year to meet with their bishop and declare whether their donations constitute a full tithe.

If they don’t want to have this meeting, that is their choice.

In Utah, it’s hard to tell whether a Republican-Democrat divide exists. Salt Lake City residents, who tend to be Democrats and non-Mormon, gave at an 8 percent clip.

I'm guessing most charitable people would rather not call attention to their giving. But if the nation is intent on studying Mormons and how they live, this is an aspect that ought to be included.

As for that spin — well, conservatives and religious folks nationwide seem to be saying they walk the walk, while liberals talk about the needs of the poor but are in reality stone-hearted.

Liberals, on the other hand, say the difference lies in basic philosophies. They say they are willing to pay higher taxes so the government can conduct charity more effectively.

Those arguments aren’t heard much in Utah.