Rich Kids Poor Kids: The Learning Gap Remains High

By the age of two, there is already a language disparity between rich and poor children, according to Anne Fernard from Stanford University. Dr Fernard measured language skill by showing the toddlers two images: a dog and a ball. She then named one of the images and recorded down the time the toddlers took to look at the correct image. At 18 months, toddlers from wealthier families can identify the correct object in 750 milliseconds—200 milliseconds faster than those from poorer families. This, says Dr Fernald, is a huge difference.

Betty Hart and Todd Risley of the University of Kansas found that by the age of three, children born into professional families had heard 30 million more words than those from a poorer background. Sending children to “pre-school” at the age of four might be too late to compensate for educational shortcomings at home.

A study done by Sean F. Reardon of Stanford University in 2011 showed the achievement gap between children born in different family socioeconomic characteristics. According to the study, the poorest students were about three to six years behind their wealthier peers in terms of learning. Not only that, the achievement gap has been growing wider for decades. The scores gap grew by 40 percent from the 1970s to the early 2000s.

The wider achievement gap could be a result of the widening spending gap between the rich and the poor on their children. Rich parents today are increasingly investing in their children’s education. A study co-authored by a CSU faculty member shows that this financial gap is widening due to rising income inequality.

According to the study, the widening spending gap was not because the lower-income families were spending less, but because the rich were spending much more. Upper-class parents in states where income inequality grew the most spent more on their children than parents in states where income inequality increased less. And the reason why rich parents were spending more as the income inequality rose, not only because they have more to spend, but, according to Daniel Schneider of the University of California-Berkeley, affluent parents might see rising income inequality as really making a winner-take-all economy and feel a strong push to give their kids every advantage they can.

"The inequality among parents is transferred to children, creating a wider gap for the next generation," said Orestes Pat Hastings, a CSU assistant professor of sociology.

Reference:

1. In the beginning was the word www.economist.com

2. The learning gap between rich and poor students hasn’t changed in decades, Sujata Gupta www.sciencenews.org

3. Gap between what the rich and poor spend on their kids is widening, Jeff Dodge https://phys.org