Eve, a Colorado mother, suddenly found herself blushing when she received a legal settlement.
She drove to the office of Eric Dearing, with whom she worked as a family advocate for Head Start, and gave him the shirt. Even though the shirt wasn’t his style and he never wore it, he kept it in his closet. This was one of the few times he saw his family’s income soar through “pure luck.”
The change in Eve as she went from receiving help to giving gifts was evident. “She was so excited and so proud and suddenly full of hope,” says Dearing, now a professor at Boston University.
Moments like that are rare these days. Social mobility in the US stagnateincome inequality is widening. Moreover, people’s ability to advance in society appears to decline as they become more established with age. It challenges the idea that schools prepare students for a good life and could raise questions about whether the country is a mechanism for maintaining poverty.
The situation may be even worse, according to one researcher, whose recent study found that it’s not the money itself that matters to a student’s performance, but the number of supportive learning opportunities available to them. It turned out to be.
But rare or not, that experience with Eve remained in Dearing’s mind, as if it were fixed somewhere in his mind. Dearing wondered how important an increase in income is when a family is living in poverty. And why do the high-quality programs out there seem to have less of an impact on improving the academic performance of low-income students?
In total
Years later, Dearing attempted to address these questions. His answer? Some students simply have far fewer opportunities to grow.
that’s what new research, Published in the journal Educational Researcher, it suggests. The study aimed to explain how students gain access to opportunities over time and the relationship between how much their parents earned when they were young and how their lives turned out. The goal was to find out if it could be done. To do this, the researchers extracted federal data that tracked 814 students from birth until age 26. These students lived in 10 cities across the United States.
What did they find? It’s about the “opportunity gap.” For example, from birth to high school graduation, children from high-income families had six to seven times more learning opportunities than children from low-income families. Middle-income households had four times as many chances as low-income households.
According to the study’s authors, this means that household income is indirectly related to how far a student is in education or how much they earn in their mid-20s. What really matters is access to “educational opportunities” – how often children are in a supportive learning environment, such as quality childcare in early childhood, toys and puzzles that support learning, and a home with a caregiver. That’s what it means. in high-quality schools and after-school programs. So, while income helps, it is primarily because it leads to increased access to good learning opportunities.
Since the study is descriptive, Dearing points out, it cannot technically prove that accumulation of opportunity “caused” higher education attainment. But the story is consistent with their research, he added. The paper also did not consider what difference the timing of the learning opportunity, for example, whether it occurred in early childhood or high school, might make.
But from a researcher’s perspective, what matters is the cumulative effect of those opportunities over time.
Some children experience opportunities throughout their lives and, if they are lucky, opportunities to thrive in each of the environments in which they live and grow, such as at home, day care, and school. Dearing said it took place in one of those settings and in a very rich context. He added that it has huge implications for addressing the achievement gap between children raised in poor and high-income families.
Given this, Dearing says, it’s not surprising that aggressively strong programs like quality early childhood education have only a modest impact on children’s lives.
It is difficult to turn these insights into more opportunities for students to grow.
“Because the inequality is extreme, extreme measures will be taken to end it,” Dearing added. And by extreme, he means structural. Success in education requires quality instruction, but it’s not enough, he says. The key to changing students’ lives is maintaining quality. The sum is greater than the parts.
Results: Teachers alone cannot control all factors, although they are important. Dearing said the answer may lie more in support systems for students, pointing to support programs such as Boston College’s community school model and City Connect. These models claim that Supporting the “whole child” Build a network that can address needs outside of the classroom, for example, connecting families to a food bank when a child is hungry, or connecting them to a free eyewear clinic. In a sense, Dearing says, these models use schools as “hubs” for supportive learning environments, while allowing teachers to focus on the instructional component.
A land of opportunity?
Efforts to halt inequality may soon receive a political push: An overview of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign plan It argues that “economic opportunity,” including expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, will breathe new life into America’s middle class.
But in the meantime, the situation may get even tougher.
Since 1991, when the students in this study were born, inequality has increased in the country and wages have stagnated in some sectors. This may have accelerated or exaggerated the effects noted in the study. There’s a good chance we’re underestimating the size of today’s opportunity gap, Dearing says. If their children had been born 10 years later, he said, the students they studied might have seen an even wider gap between opportunities, even among middle-class and upper-income groups. says.
However, there have been some positive developments. Recently, the number of public kindergartens has increased, and the amount of earned income tax credits has also increased.
Additionally, there are still research questions to answer.
a previous research Dearing’s authors showed that early childhood “opportunities” can compensate for poverty and improve student achievement.
But Dearing says that if the study were done today, it would pay more attention to cultural differences that may enhance life outcomes for students living without money. For example, in some Black communities, the role of caregiver often extends beyond parents, with other family members such as grandmothers playing a larger role in children’s home lives and learning opportunities there. . But Dearing says researchers may be focusing too much on the role of the nuclear family, giving a somewhat misleading picture.
