It might be surprising that the rich are going to outlive you, but it’s probably not a surprise that they’ll also outlearn you. Access to high quality education in the United States is wedded tightly to income. It’s not just the amazing cost of college, but the long-standing relationship between housing prices and school district quality that gives the wealthy an enormous edge. Add in the option of high end private schools at every level and readily available educational resources, and you get a gulf that’s enormous. It’s also a gulf that desperately affects minority students.
A higher proportion of black and Hispanic children come from poor families. A new analysis of reading and math test score data from across the country confirms just how much socioeconomic conditions matter.
Children in the school districts with the highest concentrations of poverty score an average of more than four grade levels below children in the richest districts.
It’s also clear that the average value in a district isn’t a good measure, since it only pins a single point in a spectrum of performance that varies by income. Areas where there’s heavy racial segregation and income disparity show even greater ranges. The surprising result is that some of the biggest racial gaps were actually found in some of the wealthiest areas.
Why racial achievement gaps were so pronounced in affluent school districts is a puzzling question raised by the data. Part of the answer might be that in such communities, students and parents from wealthier families are constantly competing for ever more academic success. As parents hire tutors, enroll their children in robotics classes and push them to solve obscure math theorems, those children keep pulling away from those who can’t afford the enrichment.
With every opportunity in the world, and a high emphasis on academic performance, the students in these districts scored “off the scale,” pushing up the overall achievement levels at the school. However, these high scores can mask underlying problems in which schools don’t account for students without access to out of the classroom resources. For poorer students, working alongside their have-it-all peers can also be daunting.
The data was not uniformly grim. A few poor districts — like Bremen City, GA and Union City, NJ — posted higher-than-average scores. They suggest the possibility that strong schools could help children from low-income families succeed.
Which is certainly something to hope for, because right now people who maintain that race or income doesn’t matter when it comes to opportunity in America, need to go back to school.