Inequality in Education - It's Not About the Schools

Sean F. Reardon, a professor of education and sociology at Stanford, has a provocative and well-thought out piece on the New York Times website on the impact income inequality is having on education.  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/no-rich-child-left-behind/?ref=opinion  The gist of the article is that the two main culprits in growing educational inequality in America are growing income inequality and a disparity in the ways that the upper class allocates its resources to foster early cognitive development compared to the middle- and lower-class.  Noteworthy is Reardon's conclusion that the quality of American schools has little to do with the widening education gap.  He writes,

The income gap in academic achievement is not growing because the test scores of poor students are dropping or because our schools are in decline.  In fact, average test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called Nation's Report Card, have been rising - substantially in math and very slowly in reading - since the 1970's.  The average 9-year-old today has math skills equal to those her parents had at age 11, a two-year improvement in a single generation.

One positive note from the article is that "the widening income disparity in academic achievement is not a result of widening racial gaps in achievement..."  While it is a small silver lining, it is an indication that the educational policies that have been pursued since Brown v. Board of Education have worked to reduce gaps in achievement between historically disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities.  Put succinctly, "[i]f we look at the test scores of white students only, we find the same growing gap between high- and low-income children as we wee in the population as a whole."

Reardon points to one factor that largely explains the growing income gap in academic achievement:  the time and resources high-income families spend on activities to prepare children for kindergarten.  "The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed than middle class students.  The difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school."  Reardon reports that educational success has become important even for rich families, so they "are increasingly focusing their resources - their money, time, and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school - on their children's cognitive development and educational success."  Research demonstrates that high-income families have increased the amount of resources they spend of enrichment activities significantly more than low-income families since the early 1970's (150% increase v. 57% increase).  In addition, college-educated parents have been spending increasingly more time with their children than those without degrees since the mid-1970's.

Striking is the fact that the achievement gap is tied to cognitive development that occurs prior to a child even setting foot into school.  Certainly, the public schools can bear no blame for this phenomenon.  In Reardon's words, "much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits:  we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich."

Reardon poses a number of possible fixes that can help reduce the income achievement gap that focus on enabling low- and middle-income families to emulate or copy the behavior of high-income families.  He writes, "[m]aybe we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children's educational opportunities from the day they are born."  He proposes specific means of doing this:

1. Invest "in developing high-quality child care and preschool that is available to poor and middle-class children;
2. Invest in parents to improve "the quality of our parenting and our teacher's earliest environments;" and
3. Increased support for maternity/paternity leaves.

Ultimately, Reardon demonstrates that we need to rethink "our still-persistent notion that educational problems should be solved by schools alone."  This is a powerful message that all should embrace.  The surest way to reduce income inequality and the size of the welfare rolls is to prepare children for success so they can land a competitive job in the marketplace and never land on welfare in the first place.  This involves giving middle- and low-income parents adequate resources so that they can spend the time and effort necessary (and be taught how) to prepare their children for entering school.  As the proverb goes, teach a man to fish ...

One final note - for an interesting and harrowing read about American day care see this recent New Republic article. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112892/hell-american-day-care 

Oscar Gamble's Afro

I have been in a seasonal affective-type funk that has left me bereft of words for months.  Thankfully the sun shines again and the thermometer has pushed north of sixty degrees.  This time of year for me means baseball and baseball takes me back to the days of my youth, days when I couldn't wait to scrounge up a quarter to run to the Stop-N-Go store and pick up a pack of baseball cards.  The Brewers were just getting good, my parents just let me ride my bike to the store alone, and the faces on the cards were larger than life, residents of an earthly Valhalla, gods battling for the supremacy of a child's universe.  Oh yeah, and being a curly, unruly-haired kid subject to taunts of "Shirley Temple" from the straight-haired fascist machine, one such hero to me for no other reason than his astonishing coif was Oscar Gamble.



Bask in the glory of this magnificent gravity defying, Man-rebuking, self-confident celebration of kinky hair.