With the launch of a new semester, vacation seems far away as the kids activities rapidly take over the schedule - ballet, track, art, etc. The activities are great; the kids love them and are discovering and enriching their passions. But recently I was struck when picking up my daughter from ballet that every other child in her class was a middle to upper class, White child. (Full disclosure: my family is White or Caucasian, whichever you prefer). So I thought maybe ballet appeals to Caucasians more than other ethnicities, after all it was invented in France. But then as I observed the kids in my children's other activities, I realized that the "Whiteness" of the kids activities was especially striking. More than 90% of the kids in enrichment including science courses my kids are in are White. Now in some areas this would not be unusual. But we live in a diverse area. There is a large East Asian populations and an even larger Hispanic population. So where are all those kids who don't look just like mine? I wonder.
Certainly, there could be cultural issues. Anyone who has read Tiger Mom might see that some of our "chosen" activities not might fit the tiger mom model for acceptable kids activities. But even science? The science class is the most diverse with 2 out of the ten students who are of Indian descent. But the general lack of diversity, especially for Hispanics, I find striking. Maybe, too, it is a cultural thing but in our area it is just as likely that it is an income inequality issue. In 2011, Sean Reardon, a professor out of Stanford University, published a study he had done on the widening achievement gap between the upper 10% earners and lowest 10%. Part of his findings relate to the amount of money spent by families on extracurricular activities. He found that while both the top tenth and bottom tenth have. Increased the amount of money they spend on outside of school activities, the difference between the upper tier and lowest tier has widened significantly over the past 40 years. That's a lot of music lessons and summer camp. And the findings suggest that this, in addition to other factors, are contributing to the growing achievement gap.
I'm not going to stop sending my kids to these classes, but I wish they were more representative of my area. In my ideal world, all kids have equal opportunity to attend extracurricular activities with each other regardless of income or ethnicity so that so that all kids benefit from interacting with others who may appear unlike themselves but may share passions for music or art or... What do you think?