Yes…
However, my point is that people often ascribe such value on kids’ education more to the visible aspect of race and ethnicity, rather than the fact that immigration has filtered or selected immigrants from many Asian countries to be high educational attainment, which tends to affect value placed on their kids’ education.
Note that this selection effect of immigration also goes the other way for some ethnic groups stereotyped as low performing.
What is the underlying agenda of this paper?
^ No child moves ahead.
From the article: “Part of the answer might be that in such communities, students and parents from wealthier families are constantly competing for ever more academic success. As parents hire tutors, enroll their children in robotics classes and push them to solve obscure math problems, those children keep pulling away from those who can’t afford the enrichment.”
It seems to me that the NYT agenda here is to greatly oversimplify the problem. I don’t see wealth as a primary driver of student performance. I am sure that the wealth gap contributes, but I also know a lot of wealthy parents who don’t do anything to supplement their kids, or even challenge them to take even one Honors or AP course, because they “don’t want to push them too hard,” but then they will spend endless money on travel sports and fancy vacations. They just don’t make their kids education a priority.
It seems to me that it would be easy to get at the answer by looking at what parents of higher performing students do differently than parents of low performing students in the same district, when you control for wealth and IQ. I think they would find a few common themes that are not very expensive to do, but take time and effort on the part of the parents, would explain a huge amount of the difference.
The more successful kids:
@Much2learn From my view:
Lower class parents are nearly 100% hands off when it comes to anything school related.
Middle class parents put a lot of money and time into sports, period. My theory is short-term glory of sports success (my kid won the summer championship!) is more pleasurable versus the long-game, delayed gratification of academic success (my kid became a lawyer in 2024!).
Wealthy parents put a lot of money and time into sports…and into living in premier district (or private schools), musical lessons, tutors, summer programs. Big picture planning and grooming.
They may have their hands full with immediate survival needs (e.g. working two jobs to earn enough money to pay the bills) to pay much attention to longer term matters.
Of course, they have the money to put it into all of these things…
How many lower class parents are actually working two jobs, endless hours? I see unemployment being a bigger issue than too many hours.
The study highlights a persistent racial achievement gap even when family income is normalized. So what accounrs for the gap? Culture?
Excluding the asian data (which must be millions of data points, since the dataset involved 200 million test results and included California school districts) prevents a complete examination of the issue.
The professor of victim studies in education has an answer for you:
“In some communities where both blacks and whites or Hispanics and whites came from similar socioeconomic backgrounds, academic gaps persisted. Mr. Reardon said that educators in these schools may subliminally – or consciously in some cases – track white students into gifted courses while assigning black and Hispanic students to less rigorous courses.”
@gmtplus7 “The study highlights a persistent racial achievement gap even when family income is normalized. So what accounrs for the gap? Culture?”
I think that when you control for how students answer questions about those 7 items in post #43, the impacts of wealth and race will be much smaller. Not zero, but less. Clearly, there is racism, and an education-focused parent can do more with more money rather than less, however a lot of what education-focused parents do is more about what they know and do, and less about money.
@ccdd14 “educators in these schools may subliminally – or consciously in some cases – track white students into gifted courses while assigning black and Hispanic students to less rigorous courses.”
I am sure this happens. Students near the cutoff get mis-bucketed into the wrong track often in all races, and I have no doubt that it happens disproportionately to URM students. However, involved, education-focused parents are much more likely to engage with the school and work to get it fixed, if that happens to their kid.
Again, there are clearly race and wealth impacts, but the issue is much more complex.
I understand that URM and lower SES parents are at a disadvantage, but there is a lot that they can do to make their kids successful. I do not like the message these articles keep sending that if poor parents can’t afford expensive tutors or $10k summer programs, their kids are doomed to fail, so why try? Many of these families understand the effort and work involved in succeeding in sports, succeeding in academics is not much different.
The authors hightlight the following point at the beginning of the article:
But they then go on to mention many irrelevant things.
The above point clearly indicates that parental involment at home from birth to elementary shool is the most important factor for the kids who go get ahead. Richer parents don’t pay for tutors, enroll kids in robotics class, push them to solve obscure math problems when the kids are in preschools and elementary schools.
There are some advantage for the kids who are born in richer families. But wealth is not the sole factor that influences education. The “middle class” kids in some poor countries are poorer than most kids in the poor families in the US. Their parents’ income is less than $2,000, $3,000 per year and they don’t eat three full meals each day. However, they are not totally shut out in education.
Fwiw, I live in one of the districts in the upper-right hand section. Parents here spend lots on their children, probably more than many can easily afford even on a family income that tops 100k, on academics, sports, music lessons, you name it… This begins with a decision to spend a premium on housing and continues with competitive preschool admissions, pressure to get into gifted programs and higher academic tracks in middle school and above, and to make cuts for sports teams.
Families are driven by intrinsic values, but also by college admissions and merit/athletic scholarship eligibility, and barriers to entrance set by potential employers.
When students enter public schools, it can be difficult for those whose families have not been able to provide supplemental lessons and opportunities to keep up.
Even if a well-funded public library has free programs, children access these programs only if there is an adult who can bring them and take them home. And, these (and other opportunities) are all geared towards children without special needs.
Some of this spending on children who do not have special needs indeed seems driven by fear that children will become marginalized if parents slack off, as expressed in the recent article by Neil Gabler, also referenced in another thread. Spending on special needs children (who indeed exist in these communities) is an additional issue that can get very complicated.
I am not sure that the situation of supplementary private investment in children that I see in our community is sustainable over the long run if admissions become increasingly capricious, college costs continue to rise, post-grad outcome remains uncertain and unpredictable, and family income/job security does not keep pace.
This could be the biggest over generalization I’ve ever read on this forum.
“Period”? That makes it sound like that is the only thing middle class parents spend their money of for their kids…and that is pure poppycock.
We are as middle class as they come…and we never spent a lot of money on sports…because our kids weren’t interested a lot in sports…like many other middle,class kids.