[Vision2020] Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Say

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>


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February 9, 2012
Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Say By SABRINA
TAVERNISE<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/t/sabrina_tavernise/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

WASHINGTON — Education was historically considered a great equalizer in
American society, capable of lifting less advantaged children and improving
their chances for success as adults. But a body of recently published
scholarship suggests that the achievement gap between rich and poor
children is widening, a development that threatens to dilute education’s
leveling effects.

It is a well-known fact that children from affluent families tend to do
better in school. Yet the income divide has received far less attention
from policy makers and government officials than gaps in student
accomplishment by race.

Now, in analyses of long-term data published in recent months, researchers
are finding that while the achievement gap between white and black students
has narrowed significantly over the past few decades, the gap between rich
and poor students has grown substantially during the same period.

“We have moved from a society in the 1950s and 1960s, in which race was
more consequential than family income, to one today in which family income
appears more determinative of educational success than race,” said Sean F.
Reardon, a Stanford University sociologist. Professor Reardon is the author
of a study that found that the gap in standardized test scores between
affluent and low-income students had
grown<http://cepa.stanford.edu/content/widening-academic-achievement-gap-between-rich-and-poor-new-evidence-and-possible-explanations>by
about 40 percent since the 1960s, and is now double the testing gap
between blacks and whites.

In another study, by researchers from the University of
Michigan<http://www.nber.org/papers/w17633.pdf>,
the imbalance between rich and poor children in college completion — the
single most important predictor of success in the work force — has grown by
about 50 percent since the late 1980s.

The changes are tectonic, a result of social and economic processes
unfolding over many decades. The data from most of these studies end in
2007 and 2008, before the recession’s full impact was felt. Researchers
said that based on experiences during past recessions, the recent downturn
was likely to have aggravated the trend.

“With income declines more severe in the lower brackets, there’s a good
chance the recession may have widened the gap,” Professor Reardon said. In
the study he led, researchers analyzed 12 sets of standardized test scores
starting in 1960 and ending in 2007. He compared children from families in
the 90th percentile of income — the equivalent of around $160,000 in 2008,
when the study was conducted — and children from the 10th percentile,
$17,500 in 2008. By the end of that period, the achievement gap by income
had grown by 40 percent, he said, while the gap between white and black
students, regardless of income, had shrunk substantially.

Both studies were first published last fall in a book of research, “Whither
Opportunity?” <https://www.russellsage.org/publications/whither-opportunity>compiled
by the Russell Sage Foundation, a research center for social
sciences, and the Spencer Foundation, which focuses on education. Their
conclusions, while familiar to a small core of social sciences scholars,
are now catching the attention of a broader audience, in part because income
inequality<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/income/income_inequality/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>has
been a central theme this election season.

The connection between income inequality among parents and the social
mobility of their children has been a focus of President Obama as well as
some of the Republican presidential candidates.

One reason for the growing gap in achievement, researchers say, could be
that wealthy parents invest more time and money than ever before in their
children (in weekend sports, ballet, music lessons, math tutors, and in
overall involvement in their children’s schools), while lower-income
families, which are now more likely than ever to be headed by a single
parent, are increasingly stretched for time and resources. This has been
particularly true as more parents try to position their children for
college, which has become ever more essential for success in today’s
economy.

A study<http://www.march.es/Recursos_Web/Ceacs/Paginas_personales/PInvestigacion/skornrich110.pdf>by
Sabino Kornrich, a researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies at
the
Juan March Institute in Madrid, and Frank F. Furstenberg, scheduled to
appear in the journal Demography this year, found that in 1972, Americans
at the upper end of the income spectrum were spending five times as much
per child as low-income families. By 2007 that gap had grown to nine to
one; spending by upper-income families more than doubled, while spending by
low-income families grew by 20 percent.

“The pattern of privileged families today is intensive cultivation,” said
Dr. Furstenberg, a professor of sociology at the University of
Pennsylvania.

The gap is also growing in college. The University of Michigan study, by
Susan M. Dynarski and Martha J. Bailey, looked at two generations of
students, those born from 1961 to 1964 and those born from 1979 to 1982. By
1989, about one-third of the high-income students in the first generation
had finished college; by 2007, more than half of the second generation had
done so. By contrast, only 9 percent of the low-income students in the
second generation had completed college by 2007, up only slightly from a 5
percent college completion rate by the first generation in 1989.

James J. Heckman, an economist at the University of Chicago, argues that
parenting matters as much as, if not more than, income in forming a child’s
cognitive ability and personality, particularly in the years before
children start school.

“Early life conditions and how children are stimulated play a very
important role,” he said. “The danger is we will revert back to the mindset
of the war on poverty, when poverty was just a matter of income, and giving
families more would improve the prospects of their children. If people
conclude that, it’s a mistake.”

Meredith Phillips, an associate professor of public policy and sociology at
the University of California, Los Angeles, used survey data to show that
affluent children spend 1,300 more hours than low-income children before
age 6 in places other than their homes, their day care centers, or schools
(anywhere from museums to shopping malls). By the time high-income children
start school, they have spent about 400 hours more than poor children in
literacy activities, she found.

Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute whose book,
“Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” was published Jan.
31, described income inequality as “more of a symptom than a cause.”

The growing gap between the better educated and the less educated, he
argued, has formed a kind of cultural divide that has its roots in natural
social forces, like the tendency of educated people to marry other educated
people, as well as in the social policies of the 1960s, like welfare and
other government programs, which he contended provided incentives for
staying single.

“When the economy recovers, you’ll still see all these problems persisting
for reasons that have nothing to do with money and everything to do with
culture,” he said.

There are no easy answers, in part because the problem is so complex, said
Douglas J. Besharov, a fellow at the Atlantic Council. Blaming the problem
on the richest of the rich ignores an equally important driver, he said:
two-earner household wealth, which has lifted the upper middle class ever
further from less educated Americans, who tend to be single parents.

The problem is a puzzle, he said. “No one has the slightest idea what will
work. The cupboard is bare.”


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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