February 17, 2012

Education was historically considered the great equalizer in American society, capable of lifting less advantaged children and improving their chances for success as adults. It is the engine of a thriving democracy. A body of recently published scholarship suggests that the achievement gap between rich and poor children is widening, a development that threatens to dilute education’s leveling effects and American democracy. It is a well-known fact that children from affluent families tend to do better in school. Now, in analyses of long-term data published in recent months, researchers are finding that the gap between rich and poor students has grown substantially. A Stanford University study has found that the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students has grown by about 40 percent since the 1960s. In another study, by researchers from the University of Michigan, the imbalance between rich and poor children in college completion — the single most important predictor of success in the work force — has grown by about 50 percent since the late 1980s. The changes are tectonic, a result of social and economic processes unfolding over many decades. And, the data from most of these studies end in 2007 and 2008, before the recession’s full impact was felt. Researchers said that based on experiences during past recessions, the recent downturn was likely to have aggravated the trend. A study by researchers at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Juan March Institute in Madrid, scheduled to appear in the journal Demography, 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 only 20 percent. The gap is also growing in college. The University of Michigan study 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. Greatest country in the world, right? Banana republic here we come.