Navigating the Obstacle Course: Recognizing Barriers to Educational Success for Low-Income Students
"All children can learn" is a popular cliché, a way to criticize schools and teachers who fail the impossible task of getting typically middle-class outcomes from typical lower-class children. Of course, all children can learn, and those in better schools with better teachers learn more.
Yet, as poverty and education advocates now recognize, differences in the quality of teachers and schools can’t themselves explain much of the achievement gap. The reality is that socioeconomic disadvantage plays a significant role in whether students learn. Understanding the day-to-day consequences of that disadvantage – in large and small ways – is an important part of any successful attempt to reduce the achievement gap.
Consider two groups of children, both attending equally high-quality schools with good teachers; the group with greater socioeconomic disadvantages will have lower average achievement than the more fortunate group.
Why is this?
Start with health differences. Children who can't see well can't read well, and lower-class children, on average, have poorer vision, partly because of prenatal conditions. They are also less likely to get corrective lenses when needed.
Then consider the environment in which children live. Low-income children run a higher risk of lead poisoning and poor nutrition and thus experience more iron deficiency anemia, which results in impeded cognitive ability. They also have more exposure to environmental toxins, pollution, and smoke, and thus more asthma than their middle and upper class peers. Asthmatic children who've been awake at night, wheezing, are more drowsy and less attentive in class. With inferior pediatric care, these children are more frequently absent from school because of untreated minor illnesses, including asthmatic symptoms.
Housing matters, too. Low-income families face a lack of adequate housing, and families without stable housing are more likely to be mobile. This affects not only students who are themselves moving frequently, but also the learning of all children in low-income communities. Teachers are forced to repeat lessons for newcomers, and classes themselves are more frequently reconstituted with the constant influx and departure of students.
Lower-class children are also more likely to have unstable family situations. Their parents typically have low-wage jobs and are more frequently laid off, causing family stress and more arbitrary discipline. Parent job loss also is associated with adolescents who are more likely to exhibit delinquency, drug use, decreased optimism about the future, and depression.
Compounding these challenges may be the quality of sources of support outside the home. The neighborhoods where these children attend school and play have more crime and drugs and fewer positive adult role models with professional careers.
Without valuable interaction with well-educated adults, these students are deprived of key tools in the classroom. Lower-class children are not read to aloud or exposed to complex language and large vocabularies as frequently or consistently as middle class children. Even if they are read to, lower-class children often still struggle to keep up with their wealthier peers. When reading to young children, more highly educated parents are more likely to ask children questions that require critical thinking as opposed to less educated parents who are more likely to ask recall questions.
Of course these differences do not express themselves consistently or in the case of every family, but they do influence the average tendencies of families from different social classes.
Social class differences in child-rearing practices may sound alarming or oversimplified, but they make sense when you think about them. If upper-middle-class parents have jobs where they are expected to collaborate and solve new problems, they are more likely to instruct their children in a collaborative tone. Lower-class parents with jobs that require them to perform routine tasks, follow orders, and never question authority are more likely to instruct children more authoritatively. This results in children raised by college-educated parents, on average, having more inquisitive attitudes toward material presented by teachers than children raised by working class parents. The achievement gap only increases as children progress into higher grades where critical thinking becomes more important relative to memorization or the application of formal algorithms.
Given these conditions, efforts to raise disadvantaged children's achievement must include narrowing socioeconomic inequalities as well as school improvement. Disadvantaged children require high quality early childhood experiences with exposure to more educated adults, in-school health clinics providing routine and preventive health care that support good school attendance, and high-quality after-school and summer programs providing cultural, organizational, artistic, and athletic experiences that more affluent children take for granted.
No matter how competent the teacher, the average academic achievement of lower-class children will inevitably fall behind that of their middle-class peers if all of the other impediments to learning that characterize lower-class life are allowed to fester unabated. Each of these differences make only a small contribution to the achievement gap, but cumulatively, they explain much of it.
Richard Rothstein is a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and was the national education columnist at The New York Times from 1999 to 2002.
This commentary was originally published by Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity. It is reprinted here with permission.
