How economic class can affect children’s education

I've been reading Catherine Gewertz' post in Education Week and reminds of my Doctoral thesis I'd written a few years ago precisely about the impact of the family income in the learning process. The conclusions were almost the same but the difference is that our study was conducted in our mother country and now this study has been made in the United States.

The study conducted by Joshua S. Wyner, John M. Br idgeland & John J. Di Iulio, Jr. under the title of Achieventrap (pdf) analyses data of 3.4 million k-12 children in American schools. They've found that children who come from households with incomes below the national median had score in the top quartile on nationally normed tests. They start school with weaker academic skills and are less likely to flourish over the years in school than their peers from better income families.

Civic Enterprises LLC, a Washington-based research and public-policy group, and the Lansdowne, Va.-based Jack Kent Cooke Foundation establishes that higher-achieving children from lower-income families enter school with a disadvantage that shows up in their national test scores. More than 70 percent of 1st graders who score in the top quartile are from higher-income families, and fewer than three in 10 are from lower-income families.

In the ensuing years Catherine writes, the higher-achieving lower-income children are more likely to lose ground, 44 percent fall out of the top quartile in reading between the 1st and 5th grades, compared with 31 percent of high achievers whose family income is above the national median ($48,200 in 2006). They are also more likely to drop out of high school or not graduate on time than those from economically better economically positioned families. The difference persists through college and graduate school, with lower-income students less likely to attend the most selective colleges or to graduate.

However, the report does offer some optimistic notes. "Of the higher-achieving students, it says, 93 percent of those from lower-income families, and 97 percent of those from higher-income families, graduate from high school in four years. Those rates are much better than the 70 percent of all students on average that researchers estimate get their diplomas on time. But the data still show too many 'unrelenting inequities' that harm the prospects of capable children from lower-income families."

They -the authors, even say that Asian students perform better than Africa-American kids (not mention of Hispanic students) but Hewertz brings into discussion to Michelle M. Fine, a professor of social psychology and urban education at the City University of New York who says: "Something is clearly working for those lower-income Asian kids that isn’t working for the lower-income black kids".