Only in America: Four years into life, poor kids are already an entire year behind
Wealthy parents aren't just able to send their kids to top pre-schools—they can also purchase the latest learning technology and ensure their children experience as many museums, concerts and other cultural experiences as possible. Low-income parents, on the other hand, don't have that opportunity. Instead, they're often left to face the reality of sending their kids to schools without having had the chance to provide an edifying experience at home.
That might sound foreboding if not hyperbolic, but it's a serious and widespread problem in the United States, where poor kids enter school already a year behind the kids of wealthier parents. That deficit is among the largest in the developed world, and it can be extraordinarily difficult to narrow later in life.
This is one of the key takeaways from a new book about how United States is failing its children. The book, called Too Many Children Left Behind, is written by Columbia University professor Jane Waldfogel, a long-time researcher of poverty and inequality. And it will force almost anyone to reflect on the impact of unchecked inequality on children.
Waldfogel says the massive achievement gap in the United States is a blemish for a country that aspires to be the greatest in the world. In her book, she shows that achievement gap is pronounced to a startling degree in the first years of life.
I spoke with Waldfogel to learn more about how the early years of a child's life can impact the rest of it, what role school plays in perpetuating inequality, and why the United States isn't doing a great job of creating an equal playing field for its children. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Let's start with a provocative question you ask early on in your book: Is the American Dream a reality for everyone, or only for some? Do you have an answer now?
The American Dream is based on the belief in equal opportunity, the idea that everyone starts from the same starting point regardless of where they’re born or their family background. If there are systematic differences in children’s capabilities, starting even early on in childhood, then that’s going to impede achieving the American Dream. So it just seemed important to us to look at that.
There’s so much work showing greater inequality in the United States among adults, among adolescents, even among school age children, but it’s not clear where that inequality comes from. If you had asked us at the start of the project, we would have said that children probably arrive at school somewhat unequally prepared because of the difference in their experiences in early childhood, but that the achievement gaps were also largely due to schooling. We would have guessed that about half the inequality that you see in young adults or adults more generally would be there at school entry, but that at least half of it would develop as children move through school—because of all the things we know about schools and unequal experiences at schools.
The big surprise for us was to find that more than half of the inequality was already there at school entry. The schools are not as much to blame as we had expected. And that’s not true elsewhere. The United States really stands out, Only in America: Four years into life, poor kids are already an entire year behind - The Washington Post:
