Widening wealth gap in education

Posted by on September 09, 2013

50 years later, what bars social mobility

The resources that the affluent devote to their children are driving a gap between the academic outcomes of well-to-do children and everyone else, writes Sarah Garland in The Atlantic Monthly. That widening divide means kids born poor and kids born rich are increasingly likely to stay that way. When Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech a half-century ago, blacks lagged whites in school by more than three years. At the time, those in the 10th percentile of income lagged affluent children by a year. Fifty years on, social class is the chief determiner of opportunity in America. The country is far from fulfilling King’s dream that race no longer limit opportunity, but parental income is more and more significant. According to a 2011 study from Stanford, the test-score gap between children of the poor (10th percentile of income) and children of the wealthy (90th percentile) has expanded by 40 percent and is 50 percent larger than the black-white achievement gap — a reversal of 50 years ago. Middle-class children are also losing ground. The test-score gap between middle-income (50th percentile) and poor children has stayed steady; the gap between affluent kids and middle-class kids is expanding. And though more poor and middle-income children are completing college, this is outstripped by the growth in college graduates among the wealthiest.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/08/when-class-became-more-important-to-a-childs-education-than-race/279064/