Achievement gap between upper and middle classes bigger than gap between middle class and working poor, says Reardon.
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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