Batchelor: Mind the Gap
By Jacob Batchelor, Staff Columnist
Published on Thursday, February 16, 2012
Given that much of the Occupy movement has come in from the cold city streets around the world to organize indoors, many protestors have been asking: What now? Depending on your economic and political worldview, the Occupiers’ effect has ranged from marginal to substantial, positive to negative. Whatever your view, the Occupy movement, along with President Barack Obama’s latest budget request calling for financial regulation and tax reform, reflects an interest among many Americans and political leaders in reducing the ever-widening income gap in the American population.
The vast income disparity, however, is primarily the result rather than a cause of two of our society’s greatest ills: an increasingly uneducated populace and a lack of the social mobility on which the nation was originally built. Every politician, Occupier and everyday citizen truly supporting the notion of social mobility — one of America’s founding ideals and a main tenant of both parties’ platforms — must double down on reducing the income gap’s inseparable brother: disparity in educational achievement.
An article published in The New York Times last week brings to the public eye what educational research has long sought to demonstrate — the achievement gap between affluent and low-income students, based on indicators such as standardized tests and college completion, has grown by 40 to 50 percent in the last half century. The reasons for this increase are largely inextricable from income inequality. More affluent parents have higher recorded indices of parental involvement, a factor that one study conclusively links to higher grades among all racial categories. Wealthier parents can spend more money on early education, move to suburbs with better funded schools and speak with a more complex vocabulary to their children — all factors that help children excel in school.
On the other side, parents that earn lower incomes, especially those raising children on their own, have less time to spend on their children’s health and education in the critical developmental periods before they even enter school. In effect, these children simply learn less than their more affluent peers prior to formal schooling. As a result, they have a more difficult time catching up once they enter kindergarten. Researchers have found that poverty is positively correlated to “chronic stress,” which in turn negatively correlates to working memory, a system of our brain essential to learning and a reliable predictor of future achievement. Coming into the system with less background knowledge, a more limited vocabulary and a lower capacity to learn as a result of this stress, many children never catch up, regardless of the quality of their teachers.
The most depressing aspect of the interplay between the income and achievement gaps is that it creates a positive feedback loop. Public school funding is often tied in large part to local property taxes. Low-income districts in dire need of an effective, well-funded education system frequently receive the least funding. Affluent children, already benefiting from heavy parental involvement, will have the added benefit of high income taxes supporting their school. As The Times noted, since academic achievement is tied to future income, the already affluent will become wealthier and raise high-achieving children. The low-income children, by contrast, rarely have the chance to receive a comparable education to break out of their inherited poverty.
I agree with the Occupiers when they say our system is broken. But is it more important to start with the top or the bottom? The richest in our nation should not benefit from unfair tax advantages, but they shouldn’t be punished for being wealthy, either. The poorest in our nation should always have a safety net to fall back on, but we should not have a system that encourages them to live within it.
If we want social mobility in this nation, it is not enough to simply tax the rich or throw more money into entitlement programs. Whether locally, federally or at the state level, young students and professionals need to agitate for early education initiatives that aim to bridge this cycle by providing immersive pre-kindergarten education for low-income children. Only when we can break the achievement gap and bring even a semblance of equality to high and low-income area public schools can we truly say this country is one in which all are born with an equal chance in the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.
“Agitate” for early education initiatives that aim to bridge this cycle by providing immersive pre-kindegarten education for low-income children.“ "Only when we can blah-blah-blah high and low income area public schools blah-blah-blah can we truly say this country is one in which all are born with an equal chance in the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.” Every single study of the heralded and heavily funded and expanded and decades long “Head Start Program” for low income pre-kindergarten children has shown that 5 years, 10 years and forever later, that it had NO positive effect whatsoever in the children who had gone through the program. So the column prescription has been tried for decades and EVERYONE understands now that it didn’t work. If poor education is the problem, it is amazing that Jacob would propose something that has been tried and is a failure and buys into the failure of the public schools. The public, monopoly, union, government, Democratic Party schools are the failure and they are what have to be discarded if education is to flourish in this country once again. Allowing parents to choose where their children go to school is at least one great step in the process. I recommend the movie “Waiting for Superman” about poor inner city Washington, DC parents and their children who wait to get a lottery chance for their children to go to a good school in Washington, DC and then make it or don’t. The President and the Democratic Party in Congress voted to shut even that program down when they got control of the Congress and the Presidency in 2009, (the Republicans were supporting and defending the program) because the teacher unions didn’t like it and of course the Democratic Party loves everything the government does, no matter how big a failure, no matter how corrupt and no matter what it does to anyone. President Obama was going to shut it down even for those who were already in the program, but after outcries from the poor black parents and children in the program, he relented and allowed the program to shut down after everyone who is in it has graduated. Does that sound like progress? He’s a “Progressive.” Competition in schools works just like it does everywhere else. Competition in schools, between schools, in business, athletics all day long. I suggest that Jacob actually think about the problem and what has worked and hasn’t worked because his answer failed.
By Anonymous on Feb 16 | 12:00 pm
$7,000 million is the current budget for the “Head Start” program. Seven thousand million dollars for this year alone. One million children take part in the Head Start program and it has no positive effect at all, as measured by the government itself and every other organization that does this kind of assessment. It is exactly what the public schools are, a jobs program that throws away the public money to no good effect other than indoctrination of the children while it takes the children away from their parents. Public schools are now providing breakfast, lunch and dinner to public school students, not just during the school year, but all year long. “Free” cell phones and minutes, your mortgage forcibly renegotiated, “free” food, “free” housing, “free” healthcare, “free” education, quotas for jobs, quotas to get into college, preference by sex, government bailed out and supported industries, directed government venture capital to politically connected government approved “green” businesses. There is no authority for any of this in the United States Constitution. That means that it is a crime…not a program.
By Polly on Feb 16 | 4:57 pm