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The rug rat race
Our resident socialist sent in this column by a Stanford professor of education and sociology. In it, he states that the academic achievement and income gap between middle class and rich kids is growing, and that the increasing disparity is largely due to increased focus by rich parents on their children's cognitive and educational development. Here is the key paragraph.
It may seem counterintuitive, but schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students. We know this because children from rich and poor families score very differently on school readiness tests when they enter kindergarten, and this gap grows by less than 10 percent between kindergarten and high school. There is some evidence that achievement gaps between high- and low-income students actually narrow during the nine-month school year, but they widen again in the summer months.
It thus follows, according to the professor, that society should "ensure that all children have similar cognitively stimulating early childhood experiences" (by means of more government programs like Head Start and so on).
There is, however, a flaw in the professor's logic. Just because on average schools are not reducing the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students, it doesn't follow that schools can not reduce this disparity. In fact, there are hundreds - perhaps thousands - of schools that are doing precisely this - the KIPP schools for example, and the Success Academies, and these schools are more than willing to share their methods.
Yes, it would be nice if low-income parents could and would prepare their children for school as well as high-income students and, given that they can't or won't, it would be nice if the government could step in and do it for them. But government intervention has turned out to be very difficult and very expensive, and there are very few examples of effective compensatory programs around. Since experience suggests that it would be easier and much less expensive and much more doable for schools to overcome the deficits of low-income students, it seems to me that this is the logical first line of attack. H/T D/D/J
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