New data on test scores of five-year olds suggest supporting parents to balance work and care, and providing subsidised preschool daycare, could help to limit the consequences of income inequality for children.

Previous research on income inequality has shown that differences in early cognitive development between children from high-income and low-income families are greater in the USA than in other countries. A new research project shows that a given level of income inequality is associated with larger gaps in how five-year-olds complete cognitive tests (language and literacy) in the USA than in the UK, Australia and Canada.

Three researchers, Bruce Bradbury, Jane Waldfogel and Elizabeth Washbrook, explored the role of five factors known to be related to child development in reinforcing income inequalities: the extent to which children in different income groups live with both parents, the likelihood that children attend daycare, the likelihood that children have an immigrant parent, the average hours worked by mothers, and the likelihood that a child’s mother was very young when she gave birth. For all these factors, higher-income families in USA have a greater advantage over lower-income families than do their higher-income counterparts in other countries.

This finding is consistent with the policy conclusions derived from other research: income inequality’s contribution to unequal child development can be reduced by helping parents to balance work and care, and by providing subsidised preschool daycare.

Using existing income inequality studies in the USA, the UK, Australia and Canada, the researchers compared five income groups across the four countries (using price adjustments to show all in US$):

Quintile 1 (Q1)            <$27K

Quintile 2 (Q2)            $27K-$44K

Quintile 3 (Q3)            $44K-$65K

Quintile 4 (Q4)            $65K-$96K

Quintile 5 (Q5)            > $96K

Previous work has shown that income itself is very important. A better income not only allows parents to invest more in their children (including living in a safer neighborhood), but also supports family stability and resilience to stress. Income inequality is greater in USA. Compared to all the other countries, a larger proportion of families in the USA are in the lowest income group. And compared to Australia and Canada, a larger proportion of families in the USA are in the highest income group.

But income is not the only factor that can drive inequality. Setting aside the fact that in USA a greater proportion of parents are in the very low and very high income groups, the difference in average cognitive test performance of children from the highest group (Q5) compared to the lowest group (Q1) is larger in the USA, though not very different from the UK. Strikingly, where the USA truly stands out is in how far the highest-income children (Q5) pull away from the middle-income group of children (Q3).

The researchers found that in the five areas, differences between the higher-income (Q5 and Q4) and middle-income (Q3) groups in the USA were significantly more pronounced than in other countries.

• Five-year-old children living with both biological parents

The difference in the proportion of five-year-olds living with both biological parents in Q4 and Q5 families versus Q3 families is considerably higher in the USA compared to the other countries.

Living with both biological parents is associated with better cognitive outcomes, so this factor may be contributing to the greater difference between average- and higher-income families in the USA.

• Attending center-based care before going to school

Q4 and Q5 parents in the USA are much more likely than Q3 parents to send children to preschool, compared to the other countries.

This is probably because preschool care is more subsidised in the other countries, so less exclusively available to the well-off. This disparity is likely to be linked to differences in average cognitive test scores.

• Proportion of children with an immigrant parent

Q4 and Q5 families in the USA are less likely than Q3 families to include an immigrant parent. In the other countries, Q4 and Q5 families are more likely to include an immigrant parent.

Having an immigrant parent is associated with additional difficulties associated with social integration. This finding suggests that higher-income children in the USA are less likely to be held back by such difficulties, on average.

• Average hours worked by mothers of five-year-olds

In the UK, Canada and Australia, mothers in higher-income families are likely to work considerably longer hours than middle-income mothers, which could be associated with lower cognitive scores for their five-year-olds. But in the USA, mothers in higher-income families work less, potentially combining the benefits of higher income and greater parental presence.

• Proportion of mothers under age 20 at childbirth

In the UK and Australia, very few mothers in either the middle- or high-income groups were less than 20 years old when their child was born. In the USA, however, the proportion of such mothers is considerably higher in the middle-income group. Having a young mother is known to be associated with lower cognitive performance at age five.

The research project didn’t look at some other potential factors that could be related to income inequality. For one, the cost of high-quality daycare is higher in the USA because the other countries provide more universal publicly funded care. That means access to high-quality daycare is more exclusive to higher-income groups in the USA. (This is offset, however, by substantial programmes, such as Head Start, for very low-income families in the USA.) Another key factor may be residential segregation: more segregation exacerbates income quality because it leads to more concentration of advantages and disadvantage between income groups in different neighborhoods.

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It is not true that schools are a weak force or actually cause inequality.

Governments have limited resources. When policy makers ask how to invest those resources to reduce inequality, schooling is one answer. We suggest that schooling has the capacity to reduce social inequality, even taking into account gross inequality in the home and school environments.

There is a huge debate about whether schooling has the potential to help us overcome the inequality we see in the United States, the United Kingdom and other societies. Some say that giving kids an equal opportunity to learn is a good way to equalize opportunity. Others say that because society is so unequal and schools are so unequal, kids who already have social and economic advantages would benefit more from school.

We believe that schooling can be a powerful tool for reducing inequality. It isn’t true that schools are a weak force. But the amount and quality of early schooling matters a lot.

Learning encompasses academic skills and social skills

We wondered whether experience in school increases or decreases equality among children in terms of academic skills but also as it relates to behavior regulation and ability to pay attention and get along with others. These skills are intrinsically valuable, but they also predict health, longevity and well-being, as well as how successful people will be in the labor market.

“The capacity for schooling to reduce inequality could be dramatically increased by investing in more and better schooling at every stage, particularly when kids are little.”

We reframed the question by examining the potential contrast between how much you would learn if you were in school versus how much you would learn if you weren’t.

How much you would learn depends on the quality of the learning environment you would experience in school or at home – the input –but it also depends upon your learning rate, which is the rate at which you gain skills. A key assumption, backed up by research, is that your capacity to gain from input increases the more you already know. A highly skilled person gains more from instruction than does a low-skilled person.

Research suggests that when children are young, socioeconomic differences in skill are small. So rich and poor kids have similar potential to gain from input at that age, giving us good reason to expect that schooling early in life should substantially reduce inequality. To understand why, we have to think about the quality of the learning environments children experience at home and at school. When disadvantaged children go from home to school, they experience a very significant improvement in input: the learning environment at school is much more favorable than the learning environment at home. In contrast, when better-off children go from home to school, the contrast in input is not as great: the learning environment at school is not so different from the learning environment at home. Since both children have, on average, similar capacities to benefit from input, schooling should reduce inequality.

Things change as kids get older. Since they get better input at home and at school than poor kids do, rich kids will tend to benefit more from future input. The skill differential between kids from high- and low-SES backgrounds becomes greater and greater, so the capacity of high-SES kids to benefit from input grows as well. As a result, the capacity of schools to reduce inequality decreases and actually reverses. This leads us to predict that, for older kids, an extra dose of schooling increases inequality.

Exploring inequality in four situations

We examined four instances to analyze schooling’s effect on inequality:

1. Universal prekindergarten: The evidence is overwhelming that kids from families with a lower socioeconomic (SES) status benefit more from prekindergarten than do more well-off kids.
2. Extending the school day: A study that randomly assigned kids to half- versus full-day kindergarten found that children from lower-SES families improve their literacy skills more in full-day kindergarten.
3. Summer recess versus year-round school: This research is decisive that kids acquire more academic skills when they’re in school than when they’re not, but the benefit of attending school is more pronounced for kids from lower-SES backgrounds.
4. Increasing the duration of mandatory schooling: Kids who would have dropped out sooner in the absence of laws requiring them to attend school until 16 years of age—and these are mostly kids from low-SES families—benefit from the better jobs and greater earnings that result from additional schooling. However, research indicates that the benefit of an extra year of schooling accrues more to high-SES kids. One main benefit is that if you stay in school an extra year, you are more likely to get a degree, which makes it more likely that you will get another degree, which leads to higher earnings. However, this benefit is far more pronounced for high-skill than low-skill adolescents. Unfortunately, by the time they reach adolescence, rich kids have significantly higher skills than do poor kids, on average, given the prevailing education system. Increasing the amount and quality of schooling early can reduce this kind of inequality.

Photo: Paula Funnell. Creative Commons.

Quality early childhood education is an investment in better futures

If we can increase the amount and quality of schooling when children are young, we can delay the skill divergence that will lead to inequality later. We know that well-off kids are exposed to a better environment at home and at school; if we have more schooling and better schooling, then schooling’s capacity to reduce inequality will be preserved further in the course of life. If you start early, you don’t see as much skill divergence.

Investing substantially in early childhood education increases the benefits of later investments and enhances skills later on. We still have to invest down the road, but the benefits of the later investment are enhanced by early investments.

According to our model, schools could be doing a lot more to reduce inequality by equalizing the education that poorer and better-off children receive.

Schooling’s capacity to reduce inequality could be dramatically increased by investing in more and better schooling at every stage, particularly when kids are young. Putting kids in school or school-like environments when they’re young, coupled with longer school days and longer school years, would tend to reduce inequality.

The most counterintuitive conclusion from our research is that even though rich kids get better schooling than poor kids, schooling is equalizing. Why? Because the inequality in out-of-school environments is far greater than inequality in school environments. In other words, even though schools are unequal, spending more time in them decreases inequality. That’s a shocker, but I’m convinced it’s true. Imagine what we could do if we could actually equalize schooling!

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Inequality in access to ”well-child” check-ups, exercise and healthy eating are related to parents’ education and are widest in early years, when it matters most for child health.

Preschool children in the US on average receive about 1,000 more hours of vital care if their parents have a college education. This inequality occurs during the first four years of their lives – the most critical period for children’s development, when parents can have a huge impact.

This finding, from a recent US study of parenting by Evrim Altintas, highlights rising inequality since the 1990s in the amount of time parents spend on developmentally important childcare activities. In particular, college-educated mothers and fathers spend more time with their children on such vital activities.

Similarly, recent research by Kate Prickett and Jennifer Augustine shows that young US children with college-educated mothers are more likely than those with less-educated mothers to attend ”well-child” check-ups, eat well, use a car seat and exercise. They are also less likely to be exposed to secondhand smoke, and they typically watch less television.

“Differences in parental education have had, over the last 20 years, an increasing impact on child development, in particular in the vital early years. This is contributing to an intergenerational transmission of parental advantages and disadvantages.”

Parental education leads to inequality in “well-child” health checks

This education-driven disparity in parenting is generally greatest in early childhood, when children’s health needs are most complex and can have the greatest long-term impact. For example, disparities in “well-child” checkups were most pronounced in infancy, when it is important to identify hearing difficulties and when most immunizations are given. Likewise, disparities by parents’ education in children’s physical activity were greatest when children were five years old; children this age start becoming more sedentary at school, and their level of physical activity is strongly correlated with whether they later develop childhood obesity.

The Altintas study examined time US parents spent in activities vital for child development between 1965 and 2013. Such activities include reading to children, helping with homework, attending children’s events and being involved in activities related to children’s education. These are vital for children’s thinking capacities and language development as well as for their emotional well-being. In the 1970s, there was no significant difference in the time high- and low-educated parents’ spent on this kind of childcare. But a gap emerged in the early 1990s, peaked in the early 2000s and remains wide.

Gap is true for fathers and mothers

Moreover, education influences both mothers’ and fathers’ involvement in developmental activities. In a separate study, Altintas found that highly educated fathers spend more time on developmental childcare than their less-educated peers, even after controlling for their spouses’ education. Similarly, Prickett’s study found that fathers’ education was associated with a higher likelihood that children were, for example, eating better and watching less television, regardless of the mothers’ education level. It is well-documented that highly educated men and women are more likely to marry one another now than in the past. This situation likely compounds the socioeconomic inequalities in children’s health and wellbeing because resources are even more concentrated among higher-educated parents.

The good news is that all parents are investing more time in their children. The problem lies in the growing gap between different categories of parents and, in particular, between the better and less educated. Many factors come into play. Educated parents typically are better off, so they can outsource activities such as cleaning and focus their time on activities that are more crucial to child development. Educated parents can also often offer more to children in some one-to-one activities. For example, a college-educated mother may be able to help more with homework or university applications than a mother without those school experiences.

Another issue is whether children live with their fathers. Because of higher rates of marriage and fewer breakups among people with more education, well-educated fathers are more likely to live with their children. Unsurprisingly, fathers who live with their children have more time to spend with them. They work together with mothers to make sure their families can follow through on healthy behaviors, such as getting to medical visits, giving their children a developmental advantage.

Policy options to reduce inequality

What can be done to improve the prospects of children with less-educated parents? The evidence suggests that we need to invest more in education generally, so that the benefits can cascade to children via better-educated parents, particularly in the early years. Alternatively, more programs should be targeted educating parents about the needs of young children, both developmentally and for good health. Such education should begin before birth because what happens during pregnancy is vital to children’s long-term prospects. Policies should focus on parents and would-be parents to make sure that they understand the effects of certain parenting practices.

Programs could also enlist skilled professionals to work with children in the early years to help fill the parental gaps. Despite the fact that parents, regardless of education level, spend more time in developmentally crucial activities with their children than ever, our studies show that the education gap in parenting is larger than ever. And the gaps in parenting behaviors that affect children’s health are greatest at times when it matters most for children’s health. Support for parents, therefore, should target low-income, less -educated parents.

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Disadvantages are accumulated by generations living in poor areas that prevent social mobility and perpetuate racial inequality, finds latest research.

Policy makers are drawn to quick fixes, with clear wins. But transforming the lives of disadvantaged people requires a different approach. Research demonstrates that disadvantages experienced over time linger to affect the opportunities of family members over multiple generations. Children’s life chances are affected not just by their current circumstances, but by the experiences and opportunities of their parents and grandparents. Effective policies must disrupt a multigenerational pattern of disadvantage in a way that can withstand fluctuations and shifts in policy and political mood.

We have studied the historical effects of poverty, using a survey that has followed thousands of American families since 1968. Like other researchers before us, we found that the test scores of children are lower when they grow up in neighborhoods with high levels of poverty. But they are much lower if both the child and his or her parents were raised in high-poverty environments, even when compared with other children from families that look identical except for these neighborhood conditions.

“We cannot rely on policies that change a family’s, or a community’s, circumstances over merely a short time. The focus must be on more durable urban policies.”

How is multigenerational disadvantage passed down? Parents raised in poor neighborhoods tend to get less education and go to lower-quality schools. They have fewer economic opportunities when they reach early adulthood and are more likely to have physical and mental health problems. The consequences of growing up in a poor neighborhood don’t disappear when people reach adulthood and start to have their own children. Rather, they affect their capacity to raise their own children, the resources they have available for parenting, and the residential environments in which they form their own households. Through all of these pathways and many others, the effects of a childhood in a disadvantaged neighborhood persist over time and hurt the life chances of the next generation.

This picture is particularly worrying for African Americans, compared with white families. In about half of African American families, we found that both children and their parents were raised in poor neighborhoods. This was true for just 7 percent of white families. This reality has major implications for racial inequality. A big part of the reason that African American families have been more likely than whites to experience downward economic mobility is that even middle-class black families live in communities with lower-quality schools, fewer economic opportunities, and higher rates of poverty. This type of neighborhood disadvantage is commonly passed on across generations of African American families.

The multigenerational nature of neighborhood inequality means that we can’t rely on short-term, piecemeal policies. The focus must move to durable urban policies.

Most communities in America take for granted the types of durable investments that allow them to grow and thrive. The US has seen massive and sustained investment in some neighborhoods through, for example, the direct provision of mortgages that have been restricted to certain segments of the population, and massive tax incentives, such as the home mortgage interest deduction, which disproportionately benefits the wealthiest homeowners in the most affluent communities. However, this type of federal investment has never been extended to low-income communities of color.

Meanwhile, countless examples of programs, intended to confront urban disadvantage, have been diluted or abandoned before they had any chance to achieve transformative change. One recent example is the “Moving to Opportunities” program, a US experiment whereby families in public housing received vouchers allowing them to be reassigned to low-poverty neighborhoods. In some ways, the families’ lives changed considerably. Parents’ mental health improved dramatically, levels of obesity dropped, and parents reported greater overall wellbeing. But outcomes for the children were much more mixed. More than a decade after the experiment began, these families were usually back in neighborhoods that looked very much like the ones from which they had come. The policy took them out of a poor neighborhood, but it was insufficient to sustain a long-term change in their residential environments.

An alternative model of housing assistance comes from the Gautreaux Project, a mobility program that began in the 1970s. It was a US housing-desegregation project, whereby the US Supreme Court ordered the Chicago Housing Authority to provide scattered-site housing for public housing residents living in isolated public housing projects in concentrated areas of poverty. The program brought families into neighborhoods all across Chicago’s suburbs, where many of the families have remained generations later. Their children achieved greater success in school and in the labor force than did children in the communities they left behind.

The lesson of these two programs and of our research is that tackling the long-term impact of neighborhood disadvantage requires sustained investments in communities or a sustained change of environment. Social mobility programs should focus on helping families make moves that bring them into a diverse set of communities and should then support them in those new neighborhoods. That can be done by playing a more active role in finding new apartments for families and devoting more resources to housing counseling and other supports for families after they move. We have models of programs that have done this successfully, and it can be done again. But it requires a long-term commitment to confronting neighborhood inequality that has been missing from US social policy.

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As education expands, inequality of opportunity stubbornly persists, according to latest research.

Many people imagine that an easy way to make educational opportunities fairer for everyone is to expand the number of available places in schools, colleges and universities. The policy sounds like an uncontroversial ”win-win”for all.

Disadvantaged students should gain access without taking places usually enjoyed by the privileged, so the system becomes fairer. Across the western world, for example, the recent massive growth in higher education is often defended on this basis. Many take comfort in thinking that educational expansion has reduced inequality of educational opportunity between social classes.

Sadly, these hopes have proved to be groundless. As the French say: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” Indeed, far from equalizing opportunity, expansion can actually increase inequality. That’s not just a quirky outcome in a single country. It’s true pretty much everywhere.

In a recent paper with my colleague Eyal Bar Haim, I analysed what happened across 24 European countries to children who were born between the 1950s and the 1970s. On average (across the 24 countries), educational expansion failed to reduce inequality of educational opportunity.

What explains this strange paradox? First, let’s get one point absolutely straight. Usually, when the capacity of universities increases, access for students from poorer communities does indeed improve.

However, the biggest beneficiaries are groups whose children are geared up for higher education – the affluent classes. They are likely to have the financial resources to pay tuition fees and other costs, as well as to forgo employment for education.

They are also better endowed with the cultural resources that help a student to do well, such as educated parents who can help children with schoolwork and guide them towards better academic progress. Educated parents can also serve as role models who shape children’s ambitions and motivations.

“Educationally, it is as if everyone is climbing a down escalator, but the poorer classes can never climb fast enough to catch up with the affluent.”

There is one important exception to this rule.

Once the affluent classes have all the education they could possibly want – be it primary, secondary or higher education – then the poorer classes at last can expect to get a bigger slice of the pie.

But, as the well-off reach what Raftery and Hout call their “saturation” point, there is a cruel twist to the story. The pie begins to taste a little stale. Everyone is getting a fairer share, but employers, for example, become less impressed. Expansion of one education level to the point where everyone gains good access results in its devaluation.

So, for example, once everyone gained primary education, it no longer offered much advantage in the job market. The same is increasingly becoming true of secondary education in developed countries and may eventually apply also to higher education.

It’s as if everyone is climbing a down escalator, but the poorer classes can never climb fast enough to catch up with the affluent. Despite all the activity and movement, class stratification in education remains largely unchanged.

One further development, coinciding with educational expansion, also conspires against fairness. The growth of higher education is often associated with an increasing distinction between upper-tier and lower-tier programs and institutions.

These days, many people can gain admission into an American two-year college, but very few are selected for Harvard. Prestigious universities maintain their place in the educational market by enhancing their distinction.

So they put in place more stringent selection procedures for admissions. The affluent are more likely to meet these criteria because, as I’ve said, they have the resources to do so. Meanwhile, less-prestigious institutions have an economic interest in attracting as many students as possible, so they keep their selection criteria to a minimum.

Typically, the two tiers pull away from each other. Employers recognise the difference, selecting and rewarding graduates accordingly.

What, then, is an effective method for reducing inequality in educational opportunity? We should recognise that inequality of educational opportunity is primarily a reflection of economic and cultural inequalities between families in the different social classes.

We cannot tackle the problem without taking measures to reduce class inequalities in economic and cultural resources.

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