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College’s ‘party pathway’ maintains inequality

April 6, 2013 by

Seeking the “college experience,” young women in “party dorms” — especially those from working-class families — are distracted from their academic goals by social pressures, according to Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality.  Elizabeth-A.-Armstrong, a University of Michigan sociology professor, and Laura T. Hamilton, of the University of California at Merced, followed 53 women for five years after they first moved into a dorm at a middle-tier public university.

Even ambitious students were tempted by the “party pathway,”  which included a Greek party scene and an array of easy majors, researchers found.

. . . Taylor and Emma had strong academic records entering college and both aspired to be dentists. At the end of the study, Taylor was in dental school while Emma was working as a dental assistant—a job that does not require a college degree. Their fates diverged when Emma made it into an elite sorority and Taylor opted into a more studious sorority—a move supported by her college-savvy parents. Without highly educated parents like Taylor’s, Emma needed academic and social supports not offered at this school to succeed.

“College did not act as a pathway to upward mobility for most,” Armstrong said.

“Party schools” cater to “the social and educational needs of affluent, full-freight students,” write Hamilton and Armstrong.  For students who can’t afford five or six years to earn a soft degree — or no degree at all — the “college experience” is too costly.

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Students overboard

February 26, 2013 by

Photo: Here in Philly the district is closing nearly 30 schools, sending some kids to other dangerous schools to save $$$. Meanwhile a few miles away it's laptops for every kid. This could work for other cities' schools, too.

Philadelphia is closing nearly 30 schools, sending some students to dangerous schools to save money, writes cartoonist Signe Wilkinson. “Meanwhile a few miles away it’s laptops for every kid.”

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Is higher ed creating inequality?

July 10, 2012 by

Has higher education become an engine of inequality? 

More colleges are awarding credits for competence rather than class time.

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‘Broader, Bolder’ is ‘narrow, niggling, naive’

March 9, 2012 by

Low achievement by low-income students isn’t caused by poverty, argues Paul Peterson in Education Next.  He’s responding to a speech by Helen Ladd to the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management calling for fighting poverty and income inequality rather than trying to change schools.

Education reform policies “are not likely to contribute much in the future —to raising overall student achievement or to reducing [gaps in] achievement,” said Ladd, an advocate of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. Instead, policy makers should adopt “macro-economic policies designed to reduce unemployment, cash assistance programs for poor families, tax credits for low wage workers, or or an all-out assault ‘war on poverty.’”

Family income correlates with reading and math scores, but research hasn’t found a causal link, Peterson writes. It’s possible that “parents who make a better living also . . . do a better job of raising their children.”

In a 2011 Brookings Institution report, increasing a poor family’s income by 50 percent lifted math achievement by 20 percent of a standard deviation,” but that drops to 6.4 percent after adjusting for “race, mother’s and father’s education, single or two-parent family, smoking during pregnancy, and so forth.”  It’s more than twice as important for achievement to have a mother with a high school diploma instead of a mother who dropped out.

Drawing on a study by Stanford education professor Sean Reardon, Ladd says that the gap in reading achievement between students from families in the lowest and highest income deciles is larger for those born in 2001 than for those born in the early 1940s. She suspects it is because those living in poor families today have “poor health, limited access to home environments with rich language and experiences, low birth weight, limited access to high-quality pre-school opportunities, less participation in many activities in the summer and after school that middle class families take for granted, and more movement in and out of schools because of the way that the housing market operates.”

But her trend data hardly support that conclusion. Those born to poor families in 2000 had much better access to medical and preschool facilities than those born in 1940. Medicaid, food stamps, Head Start, summer programs, housing subsidies, and the other components of Johnson’s War on Poverty did not become available until 1965. Why didn’t those broad, bold strokes reduce the achievement gap?

What has changed for the worse is family structure, Peterson writes. More children are growing up in single-parent families, which doubles the risk that a child will drop out of high school.

Ladd proposes spending more on preschool, after-school programs, school-based health clinics and social services. These programs “have never been shown to have more than modest effects on student achievement,” Peterson writes. She also wants high-quality schools with good teachers for needy students — with no way to judge quality. “In sum, the Broader, Bolder platform is narrow, niggling, naïve, and negligible. . . . They promise little hope of stemming the rising number of single-parent families, a major contributor to both child poverty and low levels of student performance. “

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Inequalities

November 3, 2011 by

While protesters complain about the top 1 percent, a harsher inequality — the gap between college graduates and non-graduates — is dividing the country, writes David Brooks in the New York Times. 

Over the past several decades, the economic benefits of education have steadily risen. In 1979, the average college graduate made 38 percent more than the average high school graduate, according to the Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke. Now the average college graduate makes more than 75 percent more.

Moreover, college graduates have become good at passing down advantages to their children. If you are born with parents who are college graduates, your odds of getting through college are excellent. If you are born to high school grads, your odds are terrible.

It’s not just income, writes Brooks, cribbing from Can the Middle Class Be Saved? in The Atlantic.  College graduates have a widening edge in family stability, health habits, maybe even friendship networks.

In the 1970s, high school and college grads had very similar family structures. Today, college grads are much more likely to get married, they are much less likely to get divorced and they are much, much less likely to have a child out of wedlock.

 The “stagnant human capital” and “stagnant social mobility” of the bottom 50 percent is the real problem, Brooks argues.

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U.S. is average — except in inequality

December 11, 2010 by

The U.S. education system is ahead of the pack in one category — inequality — notes Education Trust in its analysis of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results.

Compared to other developed countries, the United States has the fifth largest gap between low-income students and their more affluent classmates. In reading, for example, students attending our high-poverty high schools performed 24 percent below those from higher income schools.

. . . Many of the countries at the top of the performance rankings – Canada, Finland, and Korea, for example – rank noticeably at the bottom of the list measuring the size of socioeconomic-status (SES) gaps.

Low-SES students in the U.S. don’t do as well as similar students in other countries, such as New Zealand.

U.S. students who are white and Asian students perform about as well in reading, math, and science as the average student in high-performing countries like Canada and Japan, Education Trust reports. But our Latino students are at the same level as Turkey and Dubai, while black students are on a par with students in Serbia and Bulgaria.

The recent ACT report, which looked at whether students can meet the new Common Core Standards, also found massive achievement gaps. In reading, 47 percent of white eleventh-graders reach the standard, compared with 19 percent of Hispanic and 11 percent of blacks. In algebra, 41 percent of white high school juniors, 21 percent of Hispanics and 11 percent of blacks are meet the standard.

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Inequality in Hamburg

December 20, 2009 by

By the age of 10, most German children are tracked into a college-prep or vocational program.  “A child from a privileged background is four times as likely to reach a Gymnasium, the main route to university, as one with similar grades from a working-class family,” reports The Economist. To reduce inequality, Hamburg is delaying tracking and eliminating school choice.

Propelled by the Greens, Hamburg’s government wants to extend primary school, where children of all abilities learn together, from four years to six. “Social distance is diminished when children learn longer together,” says Christa Goetsch, Hamburg’s (Green) education minister. The reform would end parents’ right to pick their high school, because pushy middle-class parents advance their children at the expense of others. Less controversially, Hamburg’s half-dozen types of high school are to be melded into two, Gymnasien and “neighbourhood schools,” both of which will offer the Abitur, the exam needed to enter university.

Middle-class parents “worry that children will be held back by schoolmates destined to be social and economic laggards and by teachers who cater to their weaknesses,” reports The Economist.

Via Education Gadfly.

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