[Socioeconomic] Class Matters. Why Won’t We Admit It?

Parents Forum
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<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/opinion/the-unaddressed-link-between-poverty-and-education.html?_r=2&src=me&ref=general%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/opinion/the-unaddressed-link-between-poverty-and-education.html?_r=2&src=me&ref=general&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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The correlation has been abundantly documented, notably by the famous Coleman Report in 1966. New research by Sean F. Reardon of Stanford University traces the achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families over the last 50 years and finds that it now far exceeds the gap between white and black students.</p>

<p>Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that more than 40 percent of the variation in average reading scores and 46 percent of the variation in average math scores across states is associated with variation in child poverty rates.

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<p>Politics and political correctness, dtf. Politics and political correctness.</p>

<p>And money.</p>

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<p>Because its easier to just tell poor people to help themselves.</p>

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<p>Because we’re uncomfortable with the concept in the United States.</p>

<p>There are huge differences in resources and attitudes between people of different backgrounds in this country, but we don’t like to think about that.</p>

<p>Case in point: Five years ago this month, my daughter was accepted Early Decision to Cornell. At the time when she received her acceptance, I was in the hospital because I had just had surgery for a broken leg. When she called to tell me the news, my hospital roommate was clearly curious about the conversation, so I explained what had happened. My roommate was utterly mystified. Why, she asked, would anyone want to go to college in a distant state, when we have a perfectly good community college in our own county here in Maryland? And wasn’t my daughter just a little peculiar? Shouldn’t she be about ready to settle down with a young man rather than going to some strange part of the country to go to school?</p>

<p>Some fifty years earlier, my hospital roommate had dropped out of the same high school where my daughter was then completing an IB diploma. My roommate’s family, which was quite low on the socioeconomic scale, needed her income. It was necessary for all of the kids in that family to drop out of school and get full-time jobs as soon as they turned 16.</p>

<p>In the years since then, only about half of my roommate’s children and grandchildren had finished high school. A few had taken courses at the local community college, but no one had ever completed a degree. One grandson had recently dropped out of high school because he was failing math and science and realized that he would never graduate. The possibility that there might be supports available for students in academic difficulty – and that parents might be able to advocate for their children to help them get the needed supports – had never occurred to this family; kids who struggled simply dropped out so unobtrusively that the school system didn’t seem to notice. </p>

<p>Many Americans live in the world that this woman and her family live in. And I think that most of us who post on CC cannot understand their challenges, priorities, attitudes, and ways of coping because they are so very different from our own.</p>

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<p>The reasons for the gap have been documented. This study: [Meaningful</a> Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children.](<a href=“http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED387210&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED387210]Meaningful”>http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED387210&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED387210)</p>

<p>documents the differences in the number of words a young child hears as he develops.</p>

<p>In the US we like to pretend that everyone is the same and that the differences in outcomes are due to the “system”. We don’t like to blame the differences on the people themselves. So we pretend this particular difference is due to the school, the teacher, etc…</p>

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<p>Well said, Marian.</p>

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<p>Thank you, anothermom3.</p>

<p>I should add that my hospital roommate had worked for decades in an electronics factory and that, despite the lack of a high school diploma, was promoted to a supervisory position and later to a position as an inspector where she had considerable responsibility. She raised three children entirely on her own after losing her husband when her kids were quite young. She was proud of her achievements and had reason to be. I had a great deal of respect for her. And her family members, many of whom I met in the course of a three-day hospital stay, were wonderful people.</p>

<p>But the world they live in is very different from mine.</p>

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<p>I’m not sure who is not admitting it. Colleges that can afford to have, thus the break for low income, rural and first generation students.</p>

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<p>Marian that was a terrific post-thanks for sharing that.</p>

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<p>It’s quite simple, and Proudpatriot has pointed to the root of the answer. </p>

<p>Children from lower income families have on average less well-educated parents. More well-educated parents tend to give their children more of the early-childhood enrichment opportunities that voluminous research shows is critical to academic success throughout life. </p>

<p>IMO, as the income gap in the country increases, this will tend to exacerbate the problem; but OTOH, the increasing availability of higher education for people with lower incomes may pull the other way.</p>

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<p>Some of us at CC came out of that kind of an environment. So we understand the challenges quite well.</p>

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<p>It would be great to have your insights on what might be the most effective things to do to enable students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds to reach their potential.</p>

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<p>Parents who see education as a way up influence their kids more than anything else IMO.
My grandmother had a high school education & my grandfather only attended through 8th grade, but they saw that their daughter went to college ( she didn’t graduate)
My own parents had complex issues and emotionally supported my brother far more than my sister or I. He was the only one to graduate from college. ( I didn’t even graduate from bigh school)
However, both my H & I saw education as the way to a better life for our kids & a major reason was because the schools our kids attended were socio-economically diverse and that line of thinking was modeled to us by other parents.
I have seen studies that show limited improvement to high poverty schools no matter how much money you throw at them & it seems by having schools with a better socioeconomic mix you can improve the system for less money & more successfully.</p>

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<p>Affluent peers. My mother bought a cheap house in a school district that was well-off. I was rather amazed at what other families had when I was invited to other kids’ homes. The assumption on college was where; not if. I did not understand the college process but got pulled along by what other kids did and talked about. </p>

<p>A good branch library. We had a library within walking distance (1 mile) and we all made liberal use of it. I read a lot of fiction and non-fiction.</p>

<p>Work and the lack of child labor laws. I had my first job at 11 though it wasn’t for many hours - it was doing yardwork and work around a house. My first regular job was at 14 and I’ve been working ever since. Jobs provide order, discipline and you learn about organizations outside of school. You also learn how a business is run.</p>

<p>BTW, I’m not the best example of someone that went to college. My first year at BC was a lot of fun but my GPA was probably around 2.5. I was working 15-18 hours a week in a part-time job and spending a lot of time in the computer lab learning far more than I learned in my classes.</p>

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<p>Many kids hardly get to see their parents though so their influences are peers, teachers and others in the workplace.</p>

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<p>I have sat on my kids’ schools School Site Councils at each level (elementary, middle, and high schools, public schools) in a district that is generally wealthy but with ~10% population of kids who qualify for the free and reduced-price lunch program. The same problem always comes up, every year. The schools receive Title X funding to provide services for disadvantaged kids, based on the number of students who qualify for free and reduced-price lunches. But then the administration is forbidden from identifying who the socio-economically disadvantaged kids are because it would violate confidentiality! So the schools are legally prohibited from actually targeting the funds toward the kids who could most directly benefit from them. Instead, they end up directing the aid toward kids who have failing grades (regardless of the reason for the failure). That in itself a worthy goal, but perhaps not the best use of money that should be targeted toward alleviating poverty-related failure.</p>

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<p>Is availability of higher education increasing for lower income people? While some top schools have generous financial aid programs, these enroll only a small percentage of students (overall, and even smaller for those from lower income families) compared to the community colleges and mid-level state universities, whose fees are increasing, financial aid being cut, and course availability decreasing under budget pressure.</p>

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<p>The availability of higher education is greater for those low income people who are qualified for it. The issue is that since the problem starts in the toddler years there are many who never get to be qualified for higher education. We need to attack the problem at the root but that would require us acknowledging that at least part of the problem is caused by the parents themselves.</p>

<p>I don’t mean to cast blame as in finger wagging, it’s all your fault type of blame. However, we need to acknowledge that many of the people who are living in poverty simply do not have the tools to give their kids what they need to obtain a good education. We need to concentrate our dollars on the sort of programs that help very young children develop the language skills they need and less on intervening once the kids are already 3 years behind their peers.</p>

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<p>We do admit it. On a federal level, there are the TRIO programs. Designed for Middle, High, and College students, these programs seek to identify students with potential and give them the academic support they need to achieve it. All students participating in these programs need to be low income and first generation (a handful can be either/or, but most need to be both). State systems of community colleges exist to create educational access to many who can’t do the 4 year/state school/full-time/board there experience. </p>

<p>Why don’t we talk about it more? I don’t know. Talking money makes people uncomfortable, especially people who have a lot of it.</p>

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<p>I agree that early childhood education is very necessary. I wish that their were parenting programs required as part of WIC or Medicaid. That is not to say that a poor parent CANT parent, but that once people understand why it is important to read adn talk to very young children, it will happen. We tend to raise our children the way that we were raised, so cultural norms continue. Aheard a story on NPR last yer that children in higher income brackets heard thousands more words by the time they were two, permanently creating language abilities neuropathways. It isn’t that the lower income mothers didn’t want the same thing, but they were never encouraged to just talk to their babies in order to expose them to words. Things like family dinner talk and being around groups conversing made a difference. </p>

<p>I saw firsthand how class, and more importantly, economic stability, hurts kids. My son’s elementary school was in South Berkeley, and it had a high percentage of free/reduced lunch kids. As a group, those kids missed more days, transferred in and out of schools more often and were unable to complete homework. The single biggest factor for success that was implemented at the school was affordable after school enrochment care. The kids had a place to relax, do sports and had mentoring for homework. Since it was sliding scale, my own child participated, as did other middle and even upperclass kids. It didn’t solve all the ills, and test scores were still uneven, but it made a more level playing field. It wasn’t that the parents didn’t want their kids to succeed, but there is only so much time and money in a day.</p>

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<p>There is a poverty mindset. For some, it’s having a government funded baby. For others, nobody in their family went to college, so they’ll get a job at Walmart or a factory after high school. Some choose the military. Others don’t think they can afford college, so just give up. Getting kids and parents out of the mindset is difficult.</p>

<p>My area is lower middle class, with some better off and some worse off. I talk to a lot of my D’s friends, who run the gamut of children of welfare recipients to children of the wealthy, but most in-between. I used to ask them what they wanted to do. Now I ask how they want to live.</p>

<p>What kind of house, car, etc. It makes them realize they have choices. Such a simple concept, but hard to fathom if nobody ever points it out. I tell them to look around our small town, from shacks to mansions. What house would you like? Then: here’s how much money you need to live like that, here are some types of jobs where you can earn that much; here’s what education you need; here are schools that you can get into and afford. </p>

<p>Many don’t have the information and don’t know how to get it. Their parents don’t know how to help them either. And some don’t want their kids to do better than they do. </p>

<p>One mother wouldn’t let her son take dual enrollment classes, even though every other honors kid signed up. The state pays $300 each for 2 classes a semester, leaving about $300 for the parents to pay. They have the money. Her reasoning, “I had to suffer with those teachers, and you do to.” He could have had almost a semester done for $600. The sad thing is he’ll probably end up at that same community college for three times the price next year. </p>

<p>Here’s another. A kid wants to be a Nuclear Engineer. He has a 31 on the ACT. Before Thanksgiving, I found him a few schools that would give him at least full tuition. His parents saved enough for most of room and board. He just needs to meet the December 1st deadline. On December 3, he told me he’s enlisting in the Navy for the college money. His father doesn’t believe that colleges will give him any money. Now those college options are off the table. </p>

<p>I have some that have taken my advice. One was going to drop out of high school because “it sucks and doesn’t matter anyway.” I told him go to the early college and look at some of their programs. He did. He will graduate with a high school diploma and an Associates in May. He also has a $45,000 dollar job offer. </p>

<p>I believe kids and parents need to be shown what is possible, not just told to help yourself, or be pitied and coddled because they’re poor. What some folks take for granted is a massive undertaking for others.</p>