Education, wealth and school quality

[Igel]

8. There's scant good evidence wealth is primary.

We've done most of the money things. Smaller class size, new buildings, new technology, more teacher training, early childhood programs, free/reduced lunches, etc., etc.

Smaller class size is good for groups that need stricter classroom management. That's not AP calculus students. It is most elementary school students and kids who don't want to be in school or lack self-discipline in a school setting.

EC programs lose most of their results in 4th and 5th grade. The results are discernible with large groups when it comes to college attendance, but it's a statistically significant effect, not one that you'd probably notice without crunching a lot of numbers. For middle-class kids EC programs are expensive baby sitting.

All the other options are for kids at the extremes. Those who are chronically hungry, kids in really decrepit schools, etc. That's some schools, but not the general case.

The current mantra is stress. For kids in deep poverty there's stress from chronic problems--chronic hunger, homelessness, violence, dysfunction. It's a serious problem that needs rectifying asap. The stress effects are, sadly, fairly permanent and often irreversible by age 20. But the "really important" studies look at those kids and extrapolate, simply asserting that income = stress and then look at income versus "stress". All the latter studies do is replicate the income vs. academic achievement studies and label income "stress." If you actually *measure* stress from all causes you find that its level tends to stop changing much by the time you measure working poor. Stress by *cause* varies, but cortisol is cortisol and doesn't care about cause. There are exceptions, so it probably still matters, but not in such a simplisticly ideological way.

What's left is fairly well documented.

How parents interact with kids matters. Low SES parents use fewer words, less often, in simpler sentences and simpler narratives than higher SES kids that involve less negotiating and empowerment. The study's been done over and over, for kids of various ages. Hours worked doesn't matter. Unemployed and low SES yields low grade interactions with kids, overemployed and high SES yields higher-result interactions.

Parents' expectations matter. If you expect your kid to be outside playing with friends all summer, that's what happens. If you require that the kid be in a public library reading program, that's what happens. This leads to the next ...

Parental education matters. The kids see that education matters, they don't just hear that it does. Parents can help with schoolwork (or not). Parents model learning--reading, etc.--or not. Education informs interactional styles, as well. And alters expectations as to what the kid can (or can't) do. Educated parents expect their kids to learn year-round. Most learning happens at home, not in the classroom. The parents teach learning skills and study skills. Teachers are called to teach these, usually only when there's a kid failing, when parents don't or can't. By then it's often too late.

The result is that low SES kids aren't as ready to learn how to read. EC programs help, but not enough. Higher SES kids gain education "months" over the summer; they start school in the fall ahead of where they ended it in the spring. Lower SES kids lose months over the summer, and need to be reviewed to regain the months they lost. By grade 7 the EC benefits for low SES kids are swamped by the advantages of higher SES parents. When they get to high school, it's really decisive: the background knowledge of the two groups is rather wide. The higher SES kids have a range of possibilities they think are available to them. Lower SES kids less often think they have options. That's really frustrating.

Most of the benefits, though, don't come from just having more $ or a nice house. Some do: A more stable family, or a family in which losing a mother or father doesn't plunge the household into penury. Space to study. Access to a library. Most benefits are intangible: Use of the library, knowing how to study, being directed to appropriate educational activities.

If you're higher SES, even if you're not educated, your milieu, environment, can help your kid. You know people. They're exposed to more. Their friends have higher expectations, and their friends' parents do, too--assuming that the kid really hangs with those kids. But I've known low SES highly educated people who have all the same expectations and whose kids do better than average. Their milieu can drag them down: friends who frown on studying and excelling in school, more temptations to cut class and avoid studying, etc., can undo the benefits of an educated parent. So it's both best and worst when education and income line up with the appropriate peer group. (Most studies showing mixed classrooms have to features that make them come out ahead: they include social concerns as "academic", so "greater appreciation for diversity" is as important in a math class as math skills; or they use peer tutoring, so that those who 'get it' tutor those who don't and learn it even better. Or they average the high and low achievers' initial abilities, instead of just looking at how it affects high achievers in isolation.)

Then again, I've known low SES kids in bad areas who did really well. And high SES kids in good areas who really screwed up. That's not the way to bet--the outcomes are individual, but the trends are all statistical. I can discuss how 1000 kids are likely to do, but not how a concrete individual will do.

Notice that "SES" has become a bit altered in its meaning. It includes income. It includes wealth. It includes parental education. (And I stop just about there in my definition.) It usually includes geography these days--good neighborhood, bad neighborhood. I've seen family structure lumped in with SES. In some cases that really irk me, and probably, I suspect, just to get the right results, researchers have included *race* under SES, since middle-class African-American kids tend to have lower educational achievement rates than white middle-class families and that can still be attributed to "SES."

That's the long answer. My short answer is that I think wealth is secondary. It's external. Education and the more self-imposed elements of culture are primary for kids. (School is strictly tertiary.) But if you mess with the definition of SES enough, it's all SES--at that point, though, SES isn't primarily economics, so the point stands. The trick is that people shift definitions to yield quaint fallacies--now "SES" isn't mostly money, but in the next sentence it's assumed to be mostly money.