There is a lot to discuss and debate about the stubborn relationship between personal wealth and educational attainment. As many commentators have noted, disparities of income have been widening over the past generation or two. In fact, the middle class may be in peril, according to some sources.
The educational gap is obviously aggravated by the financial downturn of recent years, but it's a bigger deal than that. It's also related to deeper problems, only some of which can be mitigated by a stronger economy.
There is plenty to ponder in a recent article by Sabrina Tavernise in the New York Times.
Students from poor backgrounds don't merely have poverty to overcome, but a host of cultural attitudes and habits that don't lend themselves to academic success. Middle and upper class parents, for instance, are more likely to spend time with their kids in activities that build good educational behavior, the article points out. Then there is the whole matter of single parenthood (also correlated to income and education). Single moms and dads have a tougher time training children, notwithstanding a number of notable triumphs. Two active parents double the odds of success, in a sense.
One could argue that community colleges are incapable of bending the curve by themselves in the face of such overwhelming obstacles. However, perhaps a better way to look at it is that we should be realistic when it comes to quick fixes on graduation rates and other presumed metrics of student success.
From the NYT article:
One reason for the growing gap in achievement, researchers say, could be that wealthy parents invest more time and money than ever before in their children (in weekend sports, ballet, music lessons, math tutors, and in overall involvement in their children’s schools), while lower-income families, which are now more likely than ever to be headed by a single parent, are increasingly stretched for time and resources. This has been particularly true as more parents try to position their children for college, which has become ever more essential for success in today’s economy.
A study by Sabino Kornrich, a researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Juan March Institute in Madrid, and Frank F. Furstenberg, scheduled to appear in the journal Demography this year, found that in 1972, Americans at the upper end of the income spectrum were spending five times as much per child as low-income families. By 2007 that gap had grown to nine to one; spending by upper-income families more than doubled, while spending by low-income families grew by 20 percent.
And:
The gap is also growing in college. The University of Michigan study, by Susan M. Dynarski and Martha J. Bailey, looked at two generations of students, those born from 1961 to 1964 and those born from 1979 to 1982. By 1989, about one-third of the high-income students in the first generation had finished college; by 2007, more than half of the second generation had done so. By contrast, only 9 percent of the low-income students in the second generation had completed college by 2007, up only slightly from a 5 percent college completion rate by the first generation in 1989.
Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute whose book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, was published recently, describes income inequality as “more of a symptom than a cause,” as reported in the piece. “When the economy recovers, you’ll still see all these problems persisting for reasons that have nothing to do with money and everything to do with culture,” he said.
Over the years Dr. Murray has had his share of critics, too, but all teachers know that culture, however defined, determines much about whether a given student succeeds.
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