The large achievement gap between white and minority students is generally viewed as a failure of the U.S. education system. Policymakers almost universally conclude that this gap must result from ineffective school policy and practice: low expectations, unqualified teachers, badly designed curriculum, large classes, undisciplined school climates, unfocused leadership, or a combination of these.
Many well-intentioned people blame the achievement gap on “failing schools” because common sense tells them that it could not be otherwise. The amount of money a family has—or the color of a child's skin—should not determine how well that child learns to read. If teachers know how to teach and schools permit no distractions, all students should be able to learn.
This commonsense perspective, however, is misleading. For although income and skin pigment don't directly cause low achievement, the characteristics that in general define social-class differences inevitably influence learning. Here are some examples.
Child Rearing Practices
Parents from different social classes often have different child rearing habits, disciplinary philosophies, ways of communicating expectations, and even styles of reading to children. These differences do not hold true in every family, but they influence the average tendencies of families from different classes.
Social-class patterns in child rearing make sense when you think about them. If upper-middle-class parents have jobs in which they collaborate with fellow employees and resolve problems, they are more likely to show their young children how to figure out answers for themselves. Parents whose jobs require them to follow routines are less likely to encourage creative problem solving in their children. Therefore, youngsters raised by parents who are professionals will generally have a more inquisitive, active approach to learning than will youngsters raised by working-class parents.
Thirty-five years ago, Kohn (1969) found that parents whose occupations required creativity and decision making were less likely to punish their children for actions in which the children's intentions were desirable, even if matters did not work out as intended. Parents who were closely supervised at work were more likely to base punishment on their children's actions, regardless of the children's intentions.
More recently, two researchers visited homes of families from different social classes to record conversations between parents and toddlers (Hart & Risley, 1995). On average, professional parents spoke more than 2,000 words per hour to their children, working-class parents spoke about 1,300, and welfare mothers spoke about 600. At 4 years old, children of professionals had vocabularies that were nearly 50 percent larger than those of working-class children and twice as large as those of welfare children.
The researchers also tracked how often parents verbally encouraged or reprimanded their children. Toddlers of professionals received an average of six encouragements per reprimand. Working-class children got two. For welfare children, the ratio was reversed: They received an average of one encouragement for every two scoldings. It seems reasonable to expect that when these children eventually go to school, their teachers will not be able to fully offset such differences in early interactions. Students whose parents have encouraged initiative from an early age are more likely to take responsibility for their own learning.
Health Needs
Many social and economic manifestations of social class also have implications for learning. Among these are differences in health.
For example, vision problems have an obvious effect on school success. Poor children have twice the average rate of severe vision impairment (Starfield, 1997). One reason for this higher rate of vision problems may be inadequate prenatal development resulting from mothers' poor medical care and nutrition. Visual deficits may also arise because low-income children are more likely to watch too much television, an activity that does not develop hand-eye coordination and depth perception. Forty-two percent of black 4th graders watch six hours or more of television a day, compared with 13 percent of white 4th graders (National Center for Education Statistics, 2003, Table 117).
Typical vision screening in school only asks students to read charts for nearsightedness. Most students are never tested for farsightedness or for difficulty with tracking, problems that are most likely to affect academic performance. Even when testing leads to optometric referrals, low-income children are less likely to follow up. When they get prescriptions for lenses, they less frequently obtain them or wear them to school (Gould & Gould, 2003).
Vision problems make it difficult to read from a book or see the chalkboard. The disproportionate assignment of low-income black students to special education may partly reflect a failure to correct their vision. When students have puzzling difficulties learning to read, the explanation is often no more complex than their inability to see well.
Differences in dental care have a similar impact: Untreated cavities are nearly three times as prevalent among poor children as among middle-class children (U.S. General Accounting Office [U.S. GAO], 2000, Figure 1). Students with toothaches, even minor ones, will tend to pay less attention in class and to be more distracted during tests than will students with healthy teeth.
Low-income children have dangerously high blood lead levels—at five times the rate of middle-class children's—diminishing their cognitive ability (U.S. GAO, 1999). Although lead-based paint was banned from residential construction in 1978, low-income children more often live in buildings constructed prior to that date and in buildings that are not repainted often enough to prevent old layers of paint from flaking.
Low-income children, particularly those who live in densely populated city neighborhoods, are also more likely to contract asthma. The asthma rate is substantially higher for urban than for rural children, for those on welfare than for nonwelfare families, for children from single-parent families than for those from two-parent families, and for poor than for nonpoor families (Forrest, Starfield, Riley, & Kang, 1997). The disease is provoked in part by breathing fumes from the low-grade heating oil often used in low-income housing and from diesel trucks and buses. Excessive dust and allergic reactions to mold, cockroaches, and secondhand smoke also provoke it.
Asthma keeps children up at night; even if they make it to school the next day, they are likely to be tired and inattentive. Many children with asthma refrain from exercise and so are less physically fit. Drowsy and more irritable, they also have more behavioral problems. Middle-class children typically get treatment for asthma symptoms; low-income children often do not. Lower-class children with asthma are about 80 percent more likely than middle-class children with asthma to miss more than seven days of school a year because of the disease (Halfon & Newacheck, 1993).
Children without regular medical care are also more likely to contract other illnesses—some serious, others minor—that keep them out of school. Despite federal programs that make medical care available to low-income children, gaps between access and use remain. Many families do not enroll in such programs because they don't know of the programs' availability, are intimidated by the process, or are unaware of the importance of medical care. Even when enrolled, they are less likely to use the services to which they are entitled.
Mobility Rates
The growing shortage of affordable, adequate housing for low-income families also affects achievement. Urban rents have risen faster than working-class incomes have, forcing many families to move frequently because they fall behind in rent payments. Family breakups and bouts of unemployment also contribute to low-income children's high mobility rates. In some schools in minority neighborhoods, mobility rates are above 100 percent: For every seat in the school, two children were enrolled at some time during the year (Bruno & Isken, 1996; Kerbow, 1996).
A 1994 report found that 30 percent of the poorest students had attended at least three different schools by 3rd grade, whereas only 10 percent of middle-class students had done so. Black students were more than twice as likely as white students to change schools this often (U.S. GAO). High mobility depresses achievement not only for the students who move—each move means readjusting to teachers, classmates, and curriculum—but also for other students in high-mobility schools. Teachers with ever-changing classrooms are more likely to review old material than introduce new material, and they are less able to adjust instruction to the individual needs of students they barely know.
Financial Assets
Differences in long-term economic security are also important predictors of student achievement. Most analysts overlook these differences and use only annual income to indicate economic status. But when we recognize that black families who earned a low income in one specific year are likely to have been poor for longer than white families who earned a similar income that year, it helps explain why black students, on average, score lower than white students with the same family incomes.
White families are also likely to own more assets that support children's achievement than are black families at the same current income level. Median black family income is now about 64 percent of median white family income, but black family net worth is only 12 percent of white family net worth (Mishel, Bernstein, & Boushey, 2003, Tables 1.4 and 4.6). So white middle-class families are more likely than black middle-class families to have adequate and spacious housing, even when their annual incomes are similar, not only because whites suffer no discrimination in real estate markets but also because white middle-class parents are more likely to have received capital contributions from their own parents—for a down payment on a first home, for example. Black middle-class parents are more likely to be the first generation in their families to have middle-class status, and their own parents are less likely to have been able to help financially. As with all these examples, not all middle-class whites get first-time down payments from their parents, and not all middle-class blacks fail to get them. But on average, more whites than blacks with similar incomes benefit from this practice, and this contributes to average differences in neighborhood resources and in housing quality that add to the test score gap.
Asset differences also influence how much families save for college educations. A student's awareness that his or her family has resources for college can influence whether or not that student believes that college attendance is within reach. Comparing black and white middle-class students whose families have similar current incomes, it would be reasonable to expect the white students to be more confident about affording college and thus more dedicated to working hard in school.
Making Progress
To make significant progress in narrowing the achievement gap, we must pursue three tracks simultaneously.
Certainly, schools need to raise the quality of instruction. Better schools are important, and better school practices can probably narrow the gap. School reform, however, is not enough.
We must also invest resources to expand the definition of schooling to include crucial out-of-school hours in which families and communities are now the sole—and disparate—influences. Because the gap is already huge among 3-year-olds, this investment should probably concentrate initially on early childhood programs for infants and toddlers that provide the kind of intellectual environment that middle-class children typically experience. This goal probably requires professional caregivers and low child-adult ratios.
Another essential out-of-school focus is giving low-income students after-school and summer experiences similar to those that most middle-class students take for granted. These experiences should not consist only of remedial programs that provide added drill in math and reading. The advantage that middle-class children gain after school and in the summer comes mostly from the self-confidence they acquire and the awareness they develop of the world outside their homes and immediate communities as they participate in organized athletics, dance, drama, museum visits, recreational reading, and other activities that develop their inquisitiveness, creativity, self-discipline, and organizational skills. After-school and summer programs will narrow the achievement gap only if they duplicate such enriched experiences.
Finally, the federal and state governments need to develop social and economic policies that enable children to attend school more equally ready to learn. These policies include offering health services for low-income children and families, providing stable housing for working families with children, taking aggressive action against discrimination, and boosting the incomes of working parents employed in low-wage occupations.
Although many characteristics of social class are impervious to short-term change, many others would respond to achievable policy reforms. For example, establishing optometric clinics in schools to improve the vision of low-income students may raise their test scores more than spending the same money on instructional improvement. Likewise, schools could provide dental clinics at a cost that is comparable to what schools typically spend on less effective reforms. If the United States truly intends to raise the achievement of low-income students, however, we need to make a more expansive commitment and provide a full array of health services. We should also evaluate whether increasing low-income families' access to stable housing raises student achievement.
To date, there have been few experiments to test the relative benefits of these alternative strategies, partly because people are so wedded to the notion that school reform alone is sufficient. But we could easily design experiments of this sort, and we should make them a priority.
For nearly half a century, economists, sociologists, and educators have been aware of the association of social and economic disadvantage with student achievement gaps. Most, however, have avoided the obvious implication of this understanding: Raising the achievement of low-income children requires ameliorating the social and economic conditions of their lives, not just reforming schools.
