"Income achievement gap" almost double black-white achievement gap

Photograph by Kriss Szkurlatowski

In a dramatic illustration of the impact of income inequality on how children do in school, the achievement gap between children from high and low income families is far higher than the achievement gap between blackness and white students, a pathbreaking research report from Stanford Academy has shown.

The report by Sean Reardon, a Stanford professor of education and sociology, shows that the income achievement gap—the difference in the average standardized scores betwixt children from families at the tenth percentile of income distribution and children at the 90th percentile—is now "about twice as large equally the black-white accomplishment gap."

A half century agone, the situation was just the reverse. The blackness-white gap was one and a half times as large every bit the income achievement gap as divers in the report, Reardon found.

In an interview with EdSource, he said he did non expect to come up with the findings he describes in his paper. The gap in achievement between rich and poor children, he said, "is quite dramatic and quite consequential." At the aforementioned time, he cautioned, "we don't actually know why it has happened."

Still, he said, the accomplishment gap between rich and poor children presents a "big trouble that has to be attacked on many fronts."

For about a half century a major focus of pedagogy reform in the The states, has been on trying to shut the achievement gap betwixt blackness and white students and, more recently, Latino students besides.

Abundant inquiry has shown compellingly the loftier correlation betwixt the income level of a educatee's family and test scores. Merely Reardon's report for the first time looks at the accomplishment gap between rich and poor children, how that gap compares to the achievement gap between black and white children, and how the gap has evolved over time.

Another notable finding was that the income achievement gap doesn't narrow, or widen, during the entire fourth dimension children are in school. To Reardon, this suggests that "a large function of the processes that are responsible for this are things that happen in early on childhood before kids go into kindergarten."

While children at the bottom of the income scale are not doing worse academically than similar kids did decades ago—and in fact are doing ameliorate based on their test scores—the wider income achievement gap is a result of children at the top cease of the income scale doing far better, he said.

When you expect at poor fourth graders today they are doing meliorate than poor quaternary graders 30 years agone. But rich 4th graders are doing much, much better than rich 4th graders (over the same time catamenia).  Most of the growth has been because  kids at the high cease of the family income distribution level have pulled abroad from eye income kids, not because kids at the low finish have fallen away from center income kids.

The widening gaps, Reardon pointed out, are also non "confounded past race." In other words, the income achievement gap is not caused by having large numbers of black or Latino children concentrated at the low terminate of the income scale. "The achievement gap betwixt rich and poor whites has gotten bigger over time," he said.

Reardon cautioned confronting concluding that income levels on their own are responsible for the accomplishment gap. "We don't fully understand the mechanisms that contribute to the gap as there are other factors associated with loftier incomes such equally parental education," he said.

According to Reardon, the reasons the income achievement gap has grown include the following:

• The income gap betwixt the richest and poorest families has grown over the by twoscore years;
• High income families invest more than time and resources into promoting their children's "cognitive development" than lower income families;
• High income families increasingly "have greater socioeconomic and social resources that may benefit their children;"
• Income inequality has led to more than residential segregation by income level rather than race, which in turns ways that high income children have access to higher quality schools and other resources.

He said policy solutions would include high quality pre-school and support for low income families so they can provide "cognitively stimulating environments for kids." Reardon also said pedagogy funds should be targeted more than at schools serving depression income children.

In general, he said, educators need to exist thinking about nigh "policies that reduce inequality, policies that tin can pull the kids at the bottom of the income distribution upward."

Reardon'due south study titled "The Widening Achievement Gap Between the Rich and the Poor: New Prove and Possible Explanations" was published in September 2022 in Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children'south Life Chances, edited past Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane  (Russell Sage Foundation).

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Source: https://edsource.org/2011/income-achievement-gap-twice-as-large-as-black-white-achievement-gap/3257