The Academic Achievement Gap is Widening

The socioeconomic status of a child’s parents has always been one of the strongest
predictors of the child’s academic achievement and educational attainment… Students in the bottom quintile of family socioeconomic status score more than a standard deviation below those in the top quintile on standardized tests of math and reading when they enter kindergarten… These differences do not appear to narrow as children progress through school” writes Sean F. Reardon in The Widening Academic Achievement Gap Between the Rich and the Poor: New Evidence and Possible Explanations on cepa.stanford.edu. (adapted excepts following)

An ironic consequence of the regularity of this pattern is that we tend to think of the
relationship between socioeconomic status and children’s academic achievement as a sociological necessity, rather than as the product of a set of social conditions, policy choices, and educational practices. As a result, much of the scholarly research on the socioeconomic achievement gradient has focused largely on trying to understand the mechanisms through which socioeconomic differences among families—in income, parental educational attainment, family structure, neighborhood conditions, school quality, and parental preferences, investments, and choices— lead to differences in children’s academic and educational success. The bulk of this prior research has been based primarily on cross-sectional or single-cohort longitudinal studies. This research is less concerned with documenting the size of socioeconoc achievement gradients than with investigating the mechanisms that produce them.

As a result, we know little about the trends in socioeconomic achievement gaps over a lengthy period of time. We do not know, for example, if socioeconomic gaps are larger or smaller now than they were fifty years ago, or even twenty-five years ago.

Indeed, the achievement gap between children from high- and lowincome families is roughly 30 to 40 percent larger among children born in 2001 than among those born twenty-five years earlier. In fact, it appears that the income achievement gap has been growing for at least fifty years, though the data are less certain for cohorts of children born before 1970.

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In addition to the key finding that the income achievement gap appears to have widened substantially, there are a number of other important findings.
First, the income achievement gap (defined here as the income difference between a child from a family at the 90th percentile of the family income distribution and a child from a family at the 10th percentile) is now nearly twice as large as the black-white achievement gap. Fifty years ago, in contrast, the black-white gap was one and a half to two times as large as the income gap.

Second, the income achievement gap is large when children enter kindergarten and does not appear to grow (or narrow) appreciably as children progress through  school.

Third, although rising income inequality may play a role in the growing income achievement gap, it does not appear to be the dominant between family income and children’s academic achievement for families above the median income level: a given difference in family incomes now corresponds to a 30 to 60 percent larger difference in achievement than it did for children born in the 1970s. Moreover, evidence from other studies suggests that this may be in part a result of increasing parental nvestment in children’s cognitive development.

Finally, the growing income achievement gap does not appear to be a result of a growing achievement gap between children with highly and less-educated parents. Indeed, the relationship between parental education and children’s achievement has remained relatively stable during the last fifty years, whereas the relationship between income and achievement has grown sharply. Family income is now nearly as strong as parental education in predicting children’s achievement.

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