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<div class="timestamp">February 9, 2012</div>
<h1>Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Say</h1>
<span><h6 class="byline">By <a rel="author" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/t/sabrina_tavernise/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More Articles by Sabrina Tavernise" class="meta-per">SABRINA TAVERNISE</a></h6>
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<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
“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 title="The study" href="http://cepa.stanford.edu/content/widening-academic-achievement-gap-between-rich-and-poor-new-evidence-and-possible-explanations">a study that found that the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students had grown</a> by about 40 percent since the 1960s, and is now double the testing gap between blacks and whites. </p>
<p>
In <a title="The study (PDF)" href="http://www.nber.org/papers/w17633.pdf">another study, by researchers from the University of Michigan</a>,
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
“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. </p>
<p>
Both studies were first published last fall in a book of research, <a title="More about this book, including link to first chapter (on PDF)" href="https://www.russellsage.org/publications/whither-opportunity">“Whither Opportunity?”</a>
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 <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/income/income_inequality/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier" title="More articles about income inequality." class="meta-classifier">income inequality</a> has been a central theme this election season. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
<a title="The study (PDF)" href="http://www.march.es/Recursos_Web/Ceacs/Paginas_personales/PInvestigacion/skornrich110.pdf">A study</a>
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.
</p>
<p>
“The pattern of privileged families today is intensive cultivation,”
said Dr. Furstenberg, a professor of sociology at the University of
Pennsylvania. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
“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.” </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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.” </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
“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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
The problem is a puzzle, he said. “No one has the slightest idea what will work. The cupboard is bare.” </p>
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