The Solution to Address Education Equity
Adequate financial support for students early in their learning journey, particularly the preschool level, can help us create a more equitable education system.
Published March 1, 2005
By Mary Crowley
Academy Contributor
This is the era in which no child is supposed to be left behind. As Jeanne Brooks-Bunn illustrated in her Nov. 15, 2004 talk at The New York Academy of Sciences (the academy), however, the trail of kids bringing up the rear is long, poor and unfairly weighted with students of color. Her talk drew on the themes of “School Readiness: Closing Racial and Ethnic Gaps,” the upcoming spring issue of the Future of Children (volume 15, no. 1), which was edited by Brooks-Gunn, Cecilia Elena Rouse, professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, and Sara McLanahan, professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton.
Recent education policy has focused on test score differences, and significant political capital is being spent to ensure that all kids stay at grade level. Yet, while the test score gap between white and nonwhite students has narrowed, it is still large when you look at 12th grade achievement in reading, according to the 2002 National Assessment of Educational Progress. While 42% of white students read at grade level, only 16% of black students and 22% of Hispanic students do, and there are similar gaps in other subjects, despite the high-profile No Child Left Behind Act.
The Differences that Matter
The problem is that policymakers are barking up the wrong tree, according to Brooks-Gunn, the Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Child Development at Teachers College and the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, and director of the National Center for Children and Families and the Institute for Child and Family Policy at Columbia. Her research suggests that policymakers should be thinking in terms of racial and ethnic gaps in school readiness, not in school achievement.
While most education research and public policy dollars are devoted to academic skills, a national sample of 3,500 kindergarten teachers, queried in the late 1990s, said that 46% of kids reach school missing the basic skills required to learn, such as impulse control and being able to follow directions and work with a group. Brooks-Gunn maintained that putting more resources towards very young children will pay bigger dividends in the long run than simply funding school programs.
Brooks-Gunn’s research shows that racial test-score gaps begin by age three to four, as soon as children can take vocabulary tests – and the gaps are large. On vocabulary tests, the difference between black and white 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds is a full standard deviation (with black kids falling 15 points below the mean of 100), while the differences in early reading and counting are 60% of a standard deviation, or 8 to 9 points.
“These differences matter,” said Brooks-Gunn. Researchers estimate that 50% of the test score gap seen at 12th grade already exists by age five. Not only are kids who score poorly as preschoolers less likely to graduate, they also are more likely to become teen mothers or engage in juvenile delinquency. “It’s a hard trajectory to change once you’re on it,” she insisted.
Poverty: A Black-and-White Issue
The unifying principle behind these discrepancies is poverty. Almost 18% of American kids – 12.9 million – are poor, according to the 2003 federal poverty threshold of living in a family with an annual income of $18,810 for a family of four. Because this is what Brooks-Gunn called an “impossibly low living standard,” the percentage of poor kids is actually much higher.
And, because blacks and Hispanics are two to three times more likely than whites to be poor, Brooks-Gunn said her work is about racial inequality as well as poverty. “The argument against looking at racial gaps is that we need to help all kids,” she said. “This is certainly true, but our group wants to highlight the fact that current policies are leaving a group behind. We do live in a divided society that does not meet America’s purported value of equity, and the stark differences between white and black children growing up in America must be addressed.”
The litany of travails faced by children in these economic circumstances is long and hard. Compared to children who aren’t poor, they are more likely to have a depressed mother, a teenage mother, a mother with no job or a job with low socioeconomic status (SES), or a mother who dropped out of high school. These children also are more likely to be born with low birth weight, be punished by spanking, and have three or more siblings. Thirty percent of poor or near-poor children have no books in their homes.
Links Between Socioeconomic Status and Achievement
Brooks-Gunn’s work with economist Greg Duncan, Edwina S. Tarry Professor of Education at Northwestern University, examined the links between SES and achievement. Persistent and deep poverty has a bigger effect than any other factor, even when controlling for maternal cognition, number of siblings and other family differences. They also found that early childhood poverty is more impairing than poverty in mid- or late-childhood. “Living in poverty dampens achievement by many routes, including less access to high quality child care, parenting differences and parental mental health differences,” said Brooks-Gunn.
What happens to test score gaps in young children when you control for parental income and education? The achievement gap is significantly reduced. The gap in picture vocabulary and IQ is cut in half, from about one standard deviation to one-half of one. The gap in school readiness skills (pre-reading and math skills at the beginning of kindergarten) drops from about three-fifths of a standard deviation to one-fifth or less of a standard deviation. “The huge difference that controlling for SES makes in terms of reducing the achievement gap suggests that interventions can make a difference,” argued Brooks-Gunn.
She has made several suggestions, starting with income supplements for the poor. Welfare reform studies show that programs that include supplemental income for mothers improved achievement test scores in children, while there was no effect if the reform simply meant, “mom goes back to work.” An annual gain of $1,000 translates into an achievement increase of almost one point. The problem with such a strategy is that the income gap between the average white and black families at the mean is $30,000 – too big a differential for society to easily make up. Alternatively, the earned-income tax credit is a “stealth program for helping poor kids,” according to Brooks-Gunn.
The Economics Support Early Education
On average, this tax break gives up to $4,200 to low-income, working families, and 19 million families claim it. In 1997, the earned-income tax credit raised single mothers’ incomes by an average of 9%, helping lift two million kids out of poverty.
“Parenting programs also make a difference,” said Brooks-Gunn. Research shows you can change parenting behavior to boost literacy in the home, so that there is more reading and language stimulation, and can reduce achievement gaps as well. Home intervention alone does not help with school readiness, however. What works is center-based intervention that includes a parenting component, such as literacy programs that feature reading with both parents and teachers.
Five studies of early childhood education found that weekly home visits coupled with early childhood intervention at daycare centers boosted IQ by 5 points at age 3 – a difference that was sustained through age 18. Early Head Start, which runs from pregnancy to age 3, features both home- and center-based intervention.
The bottom line, concluded Brooks-Gunn, is that the school readiness gap in pre-reading and math skills between black and white children could be narrowed significantly with high-quality early childhood education for all poor children. The kinds of programs she envisions don’t come cheap, of course. But she argues that the pay-off is enormous – and that economists back her up.
Nobel laureate Jim Heckman, the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago, maintains that the nation should invest the bulk of its education funds on preschoolers, because investment at that age pays a far greater return for both individuals and society than money spent on elementary or high school. As Brooks-Gunn noted, “It’s a huge step to have economists arguing for early education dollars.”
Also read: A New Report on the “Global STEM Paradox”
