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The achievement gap is a middle class issue

November 30, 2011
Minnesota 2020
Achievement gap between upper and middle classes bigger than gap between middle class and working poor, says Reardon.
By 
Michael Diedrich

A recent study (PDF) by Sean Reardon of Stanford University finds that the achievement gap between the upper and middle classes is bigger than the gap between the middle class and the working poor. This should give pause to those who dismiss education reform as something that affects other people. If you're middle class, you're on the losing side of the achievement gap.

Defining the achievement gap in terms of income is trickier than defining it in terms of race. The black-white achievement gap, for example, is relatively easy to determine: Determine proficiency rates for students classified as black and for students classified as white, then subtract. Income, however, exists on a spectrum, not in demographically discrete groups.

The most commonplace approach to describing the income achievement gap is to artificially define two discrete groups, the poor and the non-poor. This is relatively easy to approximate using student eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch as an indicator of poverty. While convenient, this approach hides the variation in achievement between different income levels above the free/reduced-price line.

Reardon's study gets past this by using data from twelve different tests that collected information about family income levels. He looked at the gaps between students in the 90th, 50th, and 10th percentiles, and found that the gap between the 90th and 50th percentiles was in fact larger than the gap between the 50th and 10th percentiles. In other words, upper middle class children are outperforming “middle-middle class” children by a bigger margin than middle class children are outperforming the children of the working poor.

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