Poverty research is prone to blind spots, especially with respect to race and racism.

Amidst the intertwined pandemics of COVID-19 and racism, something unprecedented should be happening in research on poverty and children’s development. Scholars should be looking in the mirror and starting to see their blind spots regarding race and racism. Scholars of color (who are in the minority) have been aware of this for years. Others are only just starting to see how their own training hinged on certain models that are White and WEIRD (Western, educated, industrial, rich, Democratic). They are starting to see how their own mentors reinforced privilege by allowing access to pipelines of opportunities that looked like their own. They are beginning to understand how their own research about “others” (i.e., people from places, experiences, and histories unlike their own) hinges on theories, methods, and importantly, assumptions that excluded the realities, experiences, and expertise of the very people being studied, particularly with respect to race and racism.

Blind spots are hard to see; by definition, they are about omission. Yet blind spots – such as clinical color blindness, overlooking issues of race and racism, or consigning race to a static variable – contribute to the creation of future scholarship and science, and to the fostering of explanations that can be terribly misguided. Such blind spots are harder still to address. Training and education – our typical responses — are only as effective as accepting what is reflecting back from the mirror and our efforts to continually shift and re-shift those reflections.

“The lived experience of families in poverty intersects with experiences of race, immigration status, and the structures and systems that perpetuate injustice.”

Historically, the neglect of race and racism in research on poverty and child development has been shaped by denial and fear of race — as immutable – carrying the burden of explaining poverty. This neglect is shaped by over-application of models that reinforce notions that being poor is less a condition of society and more a condition of being a member of a lesser-than-non-White group, whether Black, Latino, or indigenous in the U.S. context. And scholars with good intentions unintentionally began practicing “assimilationist” racism, preferring to ignore the issue rather than face it head on. The recent publication of Lawrence Mead’s “Poverty and Culture” in a peer-reviewed journal showed that, 50 years after Senator Daniel Moynihan’s report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, all these blind spots are surprisingly alive and well in poverty research.

How can family and child development scholars build a dynamic and resilient world view and a professional architecture to directly address race and racism in their research? How can scholars disrupt the perpetuation of inaccurate ideologies, and recalibrate power imbalances to optimize discourse and guide policy?

First, scholarship of and for children and families should stay grounded in lived experience. Data, whether in the form of numbers or words, do not emerge free of history and context; history and context should be the starting point. The lived experience of families in poverty intersects with experiences of race, immigration status, and the structures and systems that perpetuate exclusion and racism. At the same time, lived experience is the daily routines, survival strategies and resistance to oppression that parents, caregivers, workers, educators, and children and youth engage in every day. Research on poverty should be enriched by greater integration of quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methods literatures on intersectionality; racial socialization and identity; experiences of and responses to discrimination; representation, racial composition, and intergroup relations in  the contexts of work, schools, and media, and funds of knowledge and traditions of socialization in racially, linguistically, and culturally diverse communities. This list can go on. These areas of research are robust and growing, each typically with both basic developmental and applied/intervention studies. Research on mainstream poverty needs to change and view these emerging areas as core, not neglected.

Photo: Maria Oswalt. Unsplash.

Second, as scholars, we can surround ourselves in authentic ways with others who are outside our inner disciplinary circles, ask for and be open to accepting authentic critiques, and strive toward richer research questions that may generate more powerful implications. Poverty scholarship can go deeper than controls for race, considering it a fixed and context-free characteristic. How can experiences of racism at household, neighborhood, structural, or policy levels be integrated into policy research on poverty and child development? Would our proposals for anti-poverty policy be more effective if they integrated attention to racial segregation and other disparities by race in opportunity and social mobility? We can be much bolder in straying from conventional silos and daring to cross disciplines and levels of analysis. Race and racism are inherent at all layers of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model, from macro-level structures to micro-level interactions. But because poverty researchers and race researchers largely do not overlap or collaborate, a number of novel questions are neglected. What would it mean to address structural sources of racism in tandem with other areas of anti-poverty policy? Can social movements change the linked and mutually reinforcing narratives around race and poverty?

Third, scholarship can and should start with understanding and questioning existing assumptions and pushing toward changing these defaults. Are we assuming that every child is born on a level playing field even though Black-White racial differences in household wealth are large and constrain the ability of Black families to respond to economic shocks? Are we naïve in assuming that enhancing income — the conventional realm of safety net policies – is enough to address intergenerational disparities of wealth, without concurrent efforts to adjust the many tax and transfer policies that disproportionately benefit the wealthy?

Fourth, we can diversify the poverty policy and scholarship research “workforce.” At any established public policy and social science, population, and developmental science research conference where poverty scholars convene, you witness a sea of White people, sometimes predominantly White male people. Contrast this with convenings focused on race, ethnicity, or immigration and child development: You see scholars who are closer to representing the diversity of the United States. A much more robustly diverse pipeline of scholars across disciplines is required. Fellowship programs recently initiated by the Russell Sage Foundation, and those set up years ago by the Foundation for Child Development, the American Psychological Association, and the National Institutes of Health, are important first steps toward diversifying the pipeline of scholars, but are only a start (and will fail as a singular source of interventions). If admissions to graduate training programs; hiring processes in research institutions and universities; and the topics of research valued in curricula, departments, and peer review do not change priorities, we will continue to see the artificial and ultimately harmful divide between research on poverty and race among both scholars and scholarship.

“Are we naïve in assuming that enhancing income — the conventional realm of safety net policies – is enough to address intergenerational disparities of wealth, without concurrent efforts to adjust the many tax and transfer policies that disproportionately benefit the wealthy?”

Fifth, we can be louder and more active in our universities as we pursue or engage in external funding, in our roles as peer reviewers and editors, and as participants and leaders of professional organizations. Scholars who have profited from existing systems can and should demand more change toward inclusion. This opportunity to lead brings together the substance, messages, and models, explicit and implicit, conveyed by our research. This is an opportunity to step away from privilege and question how the public profile and output of your work is framed through an anti-racist lens. This is also an opportunity to create mechanisms – publishing avenues, grants, forums for speaking engagements — that were previously closed.

Addressing race and racism in research on poverty and children’s development is going to be hard. However, the rewards will be full and rich, and will ultimately increase the impact of developmentally informed anti-poverty policies and practices. Our work will otherwise stagnate if we continue with siloed and segregated approaches, dipping into the same tools and perspectives that have shaped poverty research to date. That is, if we do not actively strive for change now, anti-racist poverty policy will not make progress. With such progress, we will be better positioned to overcome inequality in race and income, instead of chaotically reacting to public health and economic shocks like those triggered by COVID-19.

Author’s Note: We apologize for misconstrual in our use of the term “blind spot” and “color blind” that, while appeared effective at the time we composed our commentary, are also Ableist terms and can be harmful.

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Evidence shows large-scale, public preschool programs lead to better education, health, economic and social outcomes for children, families and countries.

Universal, public education should begin with preschool at age 4. Five decades of high-quality research into early childhood education overwhelmingly support such a policy shift. Indeed, the arguments, based on large numbers of studies, are stronger even than those that propelled the US expansion and universalization of access to kindergarten at age 5, after the Second World War.

Evidence from neuroscience, medicine, developmental psychology and economics demonstrates that large-scale, public preschool programs lead to better education, health, economic and social outcomes for children, families and countries. This is particularly true for disadvantaged children. However, these programs are also cost-effective for middle-income groups – US evidence indicates that the economic benefits typically outweigh the costs of providing these educational opportunities, by between three and seven to one.

US experience shows that differences in academic performance, between those who received preschool education and those who did not, gradually fade out later in students’ school careers. However, major benefits from early education can survive long-term. Even after test-score differences decline to zero, people who received high-quality early education do better in terms of high-school graduation, years of education completed, earnings, reduced crime and teen pregnancy. “Fade-out” may also be diminished by improving the quality of elementary education, particularly in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

“Stimulating and supportive interactions around effective curricula are the vital ingredients, requiring classroom-based coaching and mentoring of teachers.”

Universal provision of public education at 4 is a question not only of cost effectiveness, but also of equity: in many countries the well-off already enjoy access to such education, while it is denied to many of the less well-off. For example, in the United States, 90 percent of families in the top 20 percent of income distribution are already purchasing preschool education for their children. In contrast, among families in the lowest 40 percent of income distribution, fewer than 60 per cent of children are enrolled in preschool education. Some US states, such as Oklahoma and Georgia, have offered universal pre-kindergarten education for the last 15 years, whereas about 10 states still have no publicly funded preschool education. So access is determined not only by a family’s resources, but also by where children live. The US is in the bottom third of the OECD for preschool enrollment in education.

Too many children in the US and elsewhere start school inadequately prepared to succeed. Gaps in cognitive, linguistic, social, and emotional skills due to unequal opportunities become evident well before children enter kindergarten. The resulting achievement gap widens in the US as children progress through school, despite strong efforts at remediation. The long-term consequences include high rates of school failure, grade repetition, inappropriate special education placements, and dropout; involvement in risky behaviors and crime; and even a higher risk of adult chronic diseases such as hypertension, heart disease, obesity and diabetes. These problems are not limited to the poor: many children who fail a grade and drop out are from middle-income families. The costs of remediation, social dependency, poor health, and lost productivity are very high for individuals and for governments.

The quality of teaching and support for teachers are vital for achieving the benefits of preschool education. In large-scale US studies, only a minority of preschool programs provided excellent quality, and levels of instructional support were especially low. The evidence continues to grow that interactions with teachers who combine stimulation and support are the foundation for positive effects on children. Such interactions build children’s higher-order thinking skills as well as their knowledge of specific content (such as early math and language skills), and at the same time are warm, responsive and elicit elaborated conversation. It’s important to focus on structural elements of quality, such as group size, teacher-student ratio, and teacher qualifications, because they help increase the likelihood of such interactions, but structural elements alone don’t ensure that these stimulating and supportive interactions will occur.

Teaching can be an isolating activity. The science of adult learning shows us that we learn best through direct observation, support and feedback. Evidence suggests that coaching and mentoring on how to implement content-rich and engaging curricula, based on observation in the classroom, can yield important benefits for children by raising the quality of their interactions with teachers.

Beyond coaching and mentoring in support of instruction and curricula, what other factors can strengthen the boost that children get from preschool education? There is evidence that a second year of preschool shows additional benefits to children. However, we need more work to consider how a second year can build on children’s growth in a first year of preschool to boost learning and development even more. In addition, comprehensive support services for families can strengthen outcomes, but the most recent research indicates that such services should focus on evidence-based practices. For example, a recent US review of a large number of studies indicates that the positive effects of preschool education can be augmented when a parenting education component is added, but only when this component gives parents the opportunity to see modeling of positive interactions or to practice such interactions. Such effects do not occur when programs simply give parents information.

Individual children’s growth and development is the basis for a country’s development. I would contend, given the strong evidence, that supporting quality in universal preschool education is the key to sustainable and productive citizens and societies.

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