The Socioeconomic Achievement Gap Hasn’t Budged in Half a Century. Now What?
By Katharine B. Stevens
ARTICLE
April 22, 2019
For over half a century, Americans have relied on public schooling as the nation’s core strategy for promoting social and economic mobility across generations, giving every child a fair start regardless of family income and zip code. But a groundbreaking new study has found that despite enormous public investment — now at over $700 billion annually — achievement gaps between wealthier and poorer children have remained unchanged over the past 50 years.
School achievement predicts important life outcomes, so the stakes are high. Yet for half a century, we’ve been focusing heavily on public schooling to the exclusion of other factors in children’s lives. And this new research underscores what seems increasingly clear: We’ve been expecting schools to accomplish something they cannot.
Led by economist Eric Hanushek and political scientist Paul Peterson, a team of researchers used longitudinal data from three well-regarded sources — the National Assessment of Education Progress, the Program for International Student Assessment, and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study to examine student achievement in mathematics and reading for 13- to 17-year olds born between 1954 and 2001. The researchers also constructed an index of socioeconomic status, based on indicators of parental education and home possessions, to investigate relative achievement for both the top and bottom deciles (10-90) and the top and bottom quartiles (25-75) of the SES distribution.
The study concluded that socioeconomic achievement gaps “have been wide and persistent for the last half century,” despite decades of extraordinary efforts to improve the education of economically disadvantaged children along with quadrupled public spending per student between 1960 and 2015, in constant dollars. Overall achievement of eighth graders increased somewhat — although SES gaps remained constant — but those across-the-board gains in eighth grade disappeared by the time students left for college and careers at the end of school: Achievement of 17-year-olds remained entirely flat.
As the authors summarize their findings:
Performance disparities are both large and extraordinarily persistent. The SES-achievement gap within the United States has remained essentially as large as in 1966 when James Coleman wrote his report on Equality of Educational Opportunity and the United States launched a national “war on poverty” in which compensatory education was the centerpiece. In terms of learning, students at the 90th percentile of the SES distribution are three or four years ahead of those at the 10th percentile by 8th grade. These SES-achievement gaps are amazingly large and unwavering.
The findings of this new research are in fact consistent with data we already have. In 2017, the ACT — the nation’s most widely used college admissions test — reported huge achievement gaps in college readiness between non-disadvantaged students and those with at least one of three “underserved” characteristics: from a low-income family, a racial minority, and with parents who did not attend college.
Among high school seniors who had none of the three “underserved” characteristics, 54% were assessed as strongly ready for college. Among students who had one of the three characteristics, half as many (26%) were assessed as strongly ready. Among students who had two of the characteristics, 15 percent had strong readiness. And among students with all three underserved characteristics, just 9% scored as strongly ready for college.
Indeed, less than a third of the students entering the public K-12 school system complete either a two- or four-year college degree by age 25, as Ray Domanico from the Manhattan Institute has pointed out.
So, now what? The researchers identify two areas for policymakers to target: raising teacher effectiveness and increasing focus on the quality of high schools. Robert Samuelson from the Washington Post recently offered an additional — if unlikely — suggestion: Since the federal government doesn’t seem to be helping much, it should get out of the K-12 business altogether. As he wrote, “The national strategy of controlling the country’s schools — through subsidies and regulatory requirements — has prevailed for half a century. It has failed…. We should let states and localities see whether they can make schools work better.”
Effective teachers, good high schools, and proper governance clearly matter. But there’s something even more important that we have been neglecting for decades. The “production function” for student achievement equals “family inputs + schools,” as Hanushek et al. explain. We’ve spent a half century targeting the “school” part of that equation on the theory that it’s easier to overcome family background via schooling than it is to improve family environments in the first place. But is that theory correct?
Published just after the War on Poverty was launched in 1965, the “Coleman Report” famously concluded that “schools bring little influence to bear on a child’s achievement that is independent of his background and general social context.” Thus, the report argued, “equality of educational opportunity through the schools” is not possible because “a strong independent effect of schools” does not exist.
We’ve ignored that conclusion for half a century. But this seems like a good time to revisit it. Indeed, research has shown a clear link between children’s home environments and academic success (thoughtfully examined here by Anna Egalite). And we don’t know nearly enough about what that link is, how it functions, and what — if anything — we can do about it.
The demographic categories emphasized in large-scale assessments of student achievement, such as family income, race, and parental education, are only rough proxies for home-related factors generally now believed to be essential drivers of children’s success. Those factors, like early health, parenting practices, and family stability, have not been adequately investigated and remain insufficiently understood. Why not shift some resources from school-focused research to start building knowledge on this crucial aspect of children’s lives?
Good schools of course matter to children’s success. But our relentless focus on schooling — rather than the non-school environments that most powerfully shape children’s outcomes — seems a bit like the proverbial guy searching for his lost keys under the street lamp because it was too dark in the bushes where he dropped them.
“Fixing” the schools — along with endless gathering of data on how they haven’t yet been fixed — may be more appealing than trying to address the achievement gap’s root causes. But a half century of history suggests that it won’t be sufficient to improve the life chances of the disadvantaged kids who need our help.
See Also
Report ~ September 21, 2020
Blog ~ February 4, 2019
Blog ~ April 14, 2021