A recent analysis conducted by Sean F. Reardon for the Russell Sage Foundation book entitled Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children's Life Chances deserves serious attention by anyone interested in either education or the 2012 presidential. Reardon's report (perhaps because he is not an economist) is accessible, evenhanded, does not make absurd projections, and does not assume that co-occurrence equals causation.
In a nutshell Dr. Reardon uses nineteen national testing databases to address the following question:
As the income gap between high- and low-income families has widened, has the achievement gap between children in high- and low-income families also widened?
This is relevant to the presidential campaign because, as anyone with a pulse knows, a huge amount of energy has been expended debating the implications of the ever growing income disparity between the rich and the poor. So far the discussion has centered on such earth shaking questions as whether or not Warren Buffet should pay more taxes while completely ignoring the phenomenon's impact upon the current state of education. And therein resides the importance of Reardon's report in which he demonstrates how interrelated educational opportunity and wealth have become over the past few decades.
Educators have known, at least since the Coleman Report, that parental education and income are powerfully related to educational achievement. They, and just about everyone else in the country have also known that disparity in wealth has been increasing alarmingly in the US for the past half century. However what most people have been unaware are the following findings from the Reardon Report (and I quote):
- Family investment patterns have changed differentially during the last half-century, so that high-income families now invest relatively more time and resources in their children's cognitive development than do lower-income families;
- Income has [accordingly] grown more strongly correlated with other socioeconomic characteristics of families, meaning that high-income families increasingly have greater socioeconomic and social resources that may benefit their children;
- Increasing income segregation has led to greater differentiation in school quality and schooling opportunities between the rich and the poor; and
- The gap appears to have grown at least partly because of an increase in the association between family income and children's academic achievement for families above the median income level.
The report goes on to cite other research that shows that families' spending on children increased substantially from 1972 to 2007, particularly among high-income and college-educated families, which authors such as Annette Lareau (and even yours truly in Too Simple To Fail: A Case for Educational Change) argue that middle- and upper-class parents have come to engage much more commonly in what Lareau aptly terms "concerted cultivation" or "the deliberate organization of childhood around intellectual and socio-emotional development."
I could go on, but the report itself deserves to be read and widely discussed. The only faults I can find with it are idiosyncratically related to my personal concerns over the validity of standardized commercial tests (probably an irrelevant objection here since such test scores comprise the only data available for important analyses such as this) and the somewhat sentimental regret that Dr. Reardon did not cite Betty Hart and Todd Risley who, based upon their landmark observational study (Meaningful Differences in Everyday Experience of Young American Children) concluded almost two decades ago that in an average year the total parental communication to professional-class children was a mind boggling 11 million words as compared to 6 million for working-class and 3 million for the welfare families.
What is truly mind boggling about Reardon's report, however, is that Hart and Risley's gap is being widened by our ever increasing income gap. So again, please read his report and, more importantly, support policies (public or private) that have the potential to arrest the progressive disappearance of educational opportunities available to our poor.