Only 28 percent of first graders who score in the top quartile come from families with below-average incomes, reports “Achievement Trap,” a study by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and Civic Enterprises. Only a third of the early achievers come from families poor enough to qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch. By fifth grade, nearly half of high-scoring, lower-income first graders have slipped out of the top quartile in reading. These students continue to slip out of the top group through middle and high school.
More than 90 percent of lower-income achievers go on to college, but they’re less likely than their higher-income classmates to go to selective colleges and only 59 percent graduate compared to a 77 percent graduation rate for higher-income students.
Oddly enough, the study blames No Child Left Behind for focusing on low achievers even though the data predates NCLB. Still, it’s worthwhile to consider how to sustain the strong starters. Do these kids go to low-expectations schools that don’t challenge them? Is their education more likely to be disrupted by frequent moves? Perhaps their parents can help them with the basics but can’t provide as much help as they move through school? When they get to college, do they falter because they’re trying to work too many hours? The report isn’t designed to answer those questions.
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“Still, it’s worthwhile to consider how to sustain the strong starters. Do these kids go to low-expectations schools that don’t challenge them? Is their education more likely to be disrupted by frequent moves? Perhaps their parents can help them with the basics but can’t provide as much help as they move through school? When they get to college, do they falter because they’re trying to work too many hours?”
Based on six years of observations I don’t think it is the school.
The lower income kids move frequently. They tend to have very high levels of drama in their homes on a daily basis. Their parents often have a high school education or below, and cannot help them beyond about the fourth grade level. Often, the parents have jobs as waitresses, retail clerks, grocery clerks, day laborers, etc. They cannot take time off without losing pay or risking being fired. The parents often have very high stress levels, and the frantic anxiety of the parents becomes toxic to the kids. The kids do not get enough attention, and they start to act out or let their grades slide in order to make a bid for more attention. That increases the stress, and things spiral. Sometimes the parents resort to alcohol or drugs to decompress. It can be very ugly within these families.
As a teacher who sees the child for only a small fraction of the week, it is difficult to know where to start to help. Working with the kid is NOT enough. Parenting classes help a lot, as do constant home visits. The parents often have no support network of their own. Unfortunately, that can also mean that the teacher is left with no personal life. That is a direct path to burnout.
Later, many of the kids start working with work permits at the age of fourteen. In college, they are usually on their own. Trying to scrape money together for food, rent, fun, classes, and books is very hard. The adult models they have seen were often highly stressed parents who resorted to drama, drugs, alcohol, gang life, etc. The pattern then repeats itself when these kids have kids.
I don’t have relevant experience, but Chris’s reply sounds very realistic. Both Joanne’s blog and Chris’s reply, however, seem to include an “isn’t it awful” flavor. I don’t mean to criticize or belittle this perspective, but I think there is also a good case to be made for more detachment. In the real world it is not a reasonable expectation that any school, or any teacher, could totally compensate for a poor quality home environment. Success should not be measured by that standard. It seems to me that the results of the study, as summarized in the blog, are exactly what we would expect. Of course students from poorer families, on average, will not remain competitive with students from better endowed families. The home is important.
A more relevant question, it seems to me, would be, are the schools succeeding in compensating to some degree for the effects of an impoverished home environment? And an even more important question is, are there ways to make this compensation even better?
“Parenting classes help a lot”…that’s very interesting. Do you find that the effect is sustainable, or does it last only as long as the classes? Also, does this effect depend on exceptionally-good instructors for the parenting classes, or can it be achieved with relatively ordinary instructors? (as it would have to be if such classes were offered on a very large scale)
Just a statistical thought:
One group of students cannot improve against their peers if another group of students don’t slide down against their peers.
For every situation where we laud a student, parent, teacher, or school for improving a student’s test score, keep in mind that other students are regressing.
I’m not advocating that poor kids should be the ones to lose their rank amongst other children in their grade. However, it is important to remember that norm-referenced tests compare quantities of knowledge without identifying the actually knowledge a child has.
Notice that the report is discussing kids who score in the top quartile in tests, and whose family incomes are below the median. Half of all US families have incomes below the median. That is to say, these kids are not necessarily poor, unless half of the families in the US count as poor.
These high-achieving kids are exactly the ones who are hurt by NCLB. Since they can already pass the standardized tests, the teachers have no incentive to work with them. High-achieving kids in more prosperous schools have demanding parents who put pressure on the schools to offer enrichment for the high-achieving students. Lower income parents of high achievers are less likely to have the time and knowhow to badger their school systems.
Let’s not forget that children, like adults, differ from one another in basic ability. It seems to me that a lot of these studies and recommendations make the implicit assumption that all students have the same capacity to achieve. What if that’s just not so? I don’t think that anyone doubts that athletic capacity is inherited to some extent. Is there any reason to suppose intellectual capacity is not inherited as well?
Suppose it is. Then coupled with the observation that earning capacity is related to intellectual ability, it should come as no surprise that lower income children may be underrepresented in the top quartile of achievers.
I hope no one objects to the proposition that schools should attempt to educate each student to his full potential. These kind of studies undermine that goal by placing blaming the schools for what could well be a natural consequence of the distribution of ability among the students.
Steve’s comment is beside the point. Let’s assume arguendo that lower-income kids are dumber than upper-income kids on average, as he suggests. That doesn’t explain why the lower-income kids who aren’t dumb start getting dumb after first grade.
My take on it is that schools fail most high-achieving students, but those from wealthier families receive education and enrichment at home that is not available to lower income students. Well-to-do parents prevent their above average students from regressing towards the means, despite the mediocre education the kids get at their public school. Poor parents don’t have the time, money or resources to make up for what the school fails to provide, and their children regress towards the mean.
That doesn’t explain why the lower-income kids who aren’t dumb start getting dumb after first grade.
One possible explanation is that the first grade achievement test they’re given is either not heavily g-loaded or not capable of discriminating with respect to cognitive ability.
It seems that all subsequent performance falls out exactly how IQ tests would predict they would.
I’d take this new “study” a bit more seriously if the first grade test were something heavily g-loaded and independent of prior academic preparedness, like raven’s progressive matrices. But as it is, this first grade test seems to be an anomoly. The study falls apart without it.
KDeRosa says that the first grade test is not the right test, and if we ignore it we can conclude that the lower income kids are just dumber.
Take a look at Appendix C. It compares first graders to fifth graders, and it compares high school freshmen to high school seniors. Also take a look at Appendix D, which examines how high school graduates do in college.
KDeRosa’s claim is not supported by the report’s data. Instead, the report shows low income kidssteadily falling behind. From first grade to fifth grade, from eighth grade to twelfth grade, from college entrance to college graduation, from college graduation to graduate school graduation, in every case the low-income students slip out of the top group.
If we suppose a difference in ability, which manifests itself as a difference in the rate at which material is learned, wouldn’t we expect it to show up as a progressively wider difference on standard measures as the groups get older?
KDeRosa points out that earlier tests may not be sensitive to relatively smaller differences in the younger students. Measured later, the differences have grown to a measureable scale.
Does this difference occur in Catholic and military schools, where discipline is enforced?
Steve, I can see how students of lower ability fall further and further behind students of higher ability. What I don’t see you explaining is how students who appear to be of high ability start falling behind.
This study shows low-income students who in eighth grade were in the top quarter falling out of that high-achieving group by twelfth grade. They’re falling behind high-income students who they previously were ahead of. This is not a progressively widening difference; it’s a progressively narrowing difference, as the high-income kids catch up to the low-income kids and pass them.
Fang, it could be the effect of smarter students hiding their talent for social reasons.
Fang,
As with all social research, identifying all the factors is extraordinarily difficult, but let me suggest a couple.
Head Start is available to low-income families. I’ve read that it provides a measurable boost to student scores in the first couple of grades, but that the effect dissipates as the students get older. It is possible that this effect can account for some of the elevated scores of poor children in the first couple of school years. As the effect of Head Start diminishes, other factors, like basic intelligence, come to dominate.
As for the apparent “wall” a lot of poor kids hit in high school, I don’t think we can afford to ignore the effect of culture. As kids get older, they become more sensitive to their peers and less responsive to their parents. And let’s face it, in Black and Hispanic popular culture, there is a strong bias against academic achievement. Among Asian and, I think, Eastern European, immigrants, there is a stronger cultural bias toward good education. Hence the preponderance of Asians among the high achieving students. I grant you, there is a significant gang culture among some Asian groups, but I don’t think it’s nearly as extensive as among Blacks and Hispanics.
What I don’t see you explaining is how students who appear to be of high ability start falling behind.
I offered one possible explanation for the first grade anomoly: the first grade test was less g-loaded than the 5th, 8th, and 12th grade tests. Thus, the top quartile in first grade may not actually be “high achieveers” with respect to cognitive ability. The 1st grade test could be measuring things that most families (or pre-schools) teach their kids before entering school, like numbers, letters, colors, and shapes.
This study shows low-income students who in eighth grade were in the top quarter falling out of that high-achieving group by twelfth grade.
This is not entirely correct. The data shows that less high-income kids have both a higher persistence rate and a higher improvement rate. But the improvement rates are very small, so few kids are moving up the ladder; most are falling off. This is consistent with the differnces in IQ that we know exist. And, we also know that other factors do come into play, like peer effect, parental support, etc, which are probably having a small effect at the margin.