Sunday, January 06, 2008 | Opinion
New study: Money makes the grade—still

Report examines the relationship between social class and educational achievement

A teacher in the “Knowledge is Power Program” takes questions from students. CREDIT: Chris Hondros/Newsmakers/Getty Images

By Bob Zaslavsky

Last month, a report emerged from the London School of Economics and the University of Surrey, commissioned by the Sutton Trust research foundation with the unexciting title “Recent Changes in Intergenerational Mobility in the United Kingdom.” This report is rich in implications because its authors examine the relationship between social class and educational achievement.

The main social finding of the report is that between 1950 and 2000, an initial decline in intergenerational socio-economic mobility was followed by a long-term stagnation of class structure. Specifically, during the 12 years between 1958 and 1970, the number of individuals who moved up or down the social ladder decreased, thereby strengthening the dominance of the upper class. And over the next 30 years that trend was frozen in place, so that those who were on top in 1970 were still on top in 2000, and those who were down in 1970 stayed down through the end of the century. Therefore, the gap between rich and poor that widened in the ’60s became at least a semi-permanent feature of British social structure.

The report finds a similar pattern in our country: “The research also found that social mobility in the U.K. and the U.S. was lower than all other advanced nations for which there was comparable data during this period.”

I am not an economist, but what the researchers determined to be the impact of this social trend on educational achievement brings it within my principal métier.

The report’s major findings on upward mobility in educational achievement supplement its findings on upward mobility in social class: “Those from the poorest fifth of households but in the brightest group at age three drop from the 88th percentile on cognitive tests at age three to the 65th percentile at age five. Those from the richest households who are least able at age three move up from the 15th percentile to the 45th percentile by age five. If this trend were to continue, the children from affluent backgrounds who are doing poorly at age three would be likely to overtake the poorer but initially bright children in test scores by age seven.”

The upshot of these findings is that socialization trumps innate ability (whatever that may be) when it comes to making educational progress. In practical terms, this means that if you take two 3-year-olds, a rich but academically weak one and a poor but academically strong one, the gap between the two will have narrowed substantially by the time they start school. The rich one will improve academically and the poor one will deteriorate academically, so that by the time they reach the third grade, the rich child will have surpassed the poor one.

In addition—although this report does not take it that far—if one extrapolates from there, by the time that our imaginary children reach high school, they will have changed places academically: The rich child will perform as well academically at that level as the poor child had done as a toddler, and the gap between them will be as wide as it was at age three, but they will now be at opposite ends of the educational seesaw. This constitutes our insidious version of Twain’s “The Prince and the Pauper”.

The study also discovered that “a stark divide exists in the behavioural [sic] traits of children from low income compared with those from high income parents [using] indicators of externalizing behaviour (fighting, disobedience, temper tantrums, etc.) to form an index of bad behaviour.”

Although the authors do not draw any sweeping causal conclusions, the statistical correlations are so strong that they can say with some certainty that “parental background continues to exert a very significant influence on the academic progress of children.”

This is sadly true, but only in a sense. If the authors had drawn their conclusions more broadly, they would have come closer to the full extent of the dilemma.

“Parental background” is only one—granted, a very powerful one—of the components of the complex network that constitutes socio-economic milieu. Socioeconomic origin should not be destiny, but we have allowed ourselves to devolve into a country in which it looks as though it is.

Our version of “separate but equal” (which in practice means unequal) is “different but equal”—a circumstance that in practice has exacerbated cognitive inequality even more than ethnic segregation did.

We need to clean our legislative, educational, and domestic houses. We need to do it now. We need legislators, educators and parents to unite in demanding the same uniform high standards of academic achievement and behavior for all young people. If that happens, we could produce an average student who is, academically, more prince than pauper. SP

Columnist Bob Zaslavsky, a retired teacher, is author of the textbook, “The First Latin Course,” and may be reached through his website www.doczonline.com. He lives in Decatur.