Daniel Willingham--Science & Education
Hypothesis non fingo
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New York Times with part of the story on income and education

2/10/2012

 
An article in yesterday’s New York Times covered some recent research on the increasing education achievement gap between rich and poor. It’s worth a read, but it misses a couple of important points.      

     Regarding reasons for the gap, the article dwells on one hypothesis, commonly called the investment theory: richer families have more money to invest in their kids. (The article might have mentioned that richer families not only have more financial capital, but more human capital and social capital.) The article does not mention at all another major theory of the economics of educational achievement; stress theory. Kids (and parents) who live in poverty live under systemic stress. A great deal of research in the last ten years has shown that this stress has direct cognitive consequences for kids, and also affects how parents treat their kids. (Any parent knows that you’re not at your best when you’re stressed.) An open-access review article on this research can be found here.

      Another important point the article misses concerns what might be done. It ends with a gloomy quote from an expert: “No one has the slightest idea what will work. The cupboard is bare.”

     I think there is more reason for optimism, because other countries are doing a better job with this problem than we are. The OECD analyzes the PISA results by reported family SES. In virtually every country, high SES kids outperform low SES kids. But in some countries, the gap is smaller, and that’s it’s not just countries that have smaller income gaps.

      Economic inequality within a country is often measured with a statistic called the Gini coefficient which varies from 0 (everyone has the same net worth) to 1 (one person has all the money, and the other has nothing). Rich children score better than poor children in countries with large Gini coefficients (like the US) and the rich outscore the poor in countries with lower Gini coefficients (like Norway). Being poor predicts lower scores everywhere, but the disparity of wealth means more in the US than it does in other countries. What’s significant is that the relationship between income and test performance is stronger in the US than it is in most countries. (The US has the 3rd strongest relationship between income and student performance in Science and 10th highest for math, in the 2006 PISA results).

         Some countries, (e.g., Hong Kong), despite an enormous disparity between rich and poor, manage to even the playing field when the kids are at school. The US does a particularly poor job at this task; wealthy kids enjoy a huge advantage over poor kids. People generally argue that the US is different than Hong Kong, we’re a large, heteroogenous country, and so forth. All true, but the defeatist attitude won’t get us anywhere. We need more systematic study of how those countries solve the problem.

Paul Hoss
2/11/2012 11:41:50 pm

To say the cupboard is bare in the US is a bit of an understatement. It's more like, the cupboard has been ravaged. Blacks in America still live in the shadow of slavery, perpetrated over the first two and half centuries of our existence. While there are no African Americans living with direct ties to slavery, a number have grandparents and great-grandparents who can still recall this North American holocaust, where by law they were considered to be only a percent, a fraction, of a human being. I believe much of their "toxic" stress can be linked to generations of discrimination and brainwashing, where they were conditioned over centuries to believe they were inferior and accepted this heinous fate via reinforcement; reinforcement over time from their white peers.

Even today, their higher incidence and predisposition for high blood pressure has been associated with the uncertainty of their existence.

This experience is absent from the Hong Kongs and Norways of the world. Although other countries have defined income gaps, the disadvantaged from the other parts of the world have one advantage over African Americans - relative similarity of appearance. Even Koreans in Japan, one of the most discriminated populations on the planet, bear a congruous resemblance to their Asian cousins; not so with African Americans.

Daniel Willingham link
2/12/2012 02:33:12 am

@Paul: it varies a bit from study to study, but typically the effect of race is present, but much smaller than the effect of SES. (That is, when you statistically control for SES, differences in educational achievement among American kids mostly goes away, but doesn't disappear altogether.)

Corey link
2/12/2012 10:06:08 am

Good points, but I'm curious as to why you're attributing the success of low-income students in Hong Kong to what happens inside schools. Based on those data, isn't it possible that Hong Kong culture, family structure, social policy, etc. are at least as responsible (by raising the investment in, and/or decreasing the stress of, kids) for the outcome as are schools?

Daniel Willingham link
2/13/2012 11:20:49 am

@Corey: what makes you think I'm attributing the success to schools? I never said that, and I don't think schools alone are likely to be the answer.

Corey link
2/14/2012 08:37:34 am

"Some countries, (e.g., Hong Kong), despite an enormous disparity between rich and poor, manage to even the playing field when the kids are at school"

I interpreted that as arguing that the gap between rich and poor in Hong Kong was lower because all students received equally high quality schooling. I take it you actually meant that students' *performance* in school is more equal because of any number of factors?


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