When Eve, a Colorado mother, received a legal settlement, she suddenly felt blushing.
She drove to the office of Eric Dearing, who worked with her as a family advocate at Head Start, and gave her a T-shirt. Although the shirt was not his style and he never wore it, he kept it in the closet. That was one of the few times he saw a family, by “pure luck,” get an increase in their income.
The change in Eva, when she went from receiving help to giving gifts, was palpable. “I was very excited and proud and suddenly full of hope,” says Dearing, who is now a professor at Boston College.
Moments like that are rare these days. Social mobility in the US is stagnantwith an increase in income inequality. Furthermore, people's ability to move up in the world appears to decline with age, as their status is established. It may cast doubt on the idea that schools prepare students for a good life and raise questions about whether the country is a machine that sustains poverty.
This may be getting worse, according to one researcher, whose recent study found that what matters for student outcomes is not so much the money itself, but the number of learning opportunities a person receives.
But weird or not, that experience with Eve stayed with Dearing like it was stuck somewhere in his brain. How much does it matter for families to earn income if they have been living in poverty? Dearing asked. And why do all the high-quality programs out there seem to do so little to improve the educational achievement of students from low-income backgrounds?
It adds up
Years later, Dearing attempted to address these questions. Your answer? Some students simply receive far fewer opportunities to thrive.
that's what a new study, published in the journal Educational Researcher, suggests. The study aimed to find out how access to opportunities accumulated over time for students and whether they explain the link between how much money their parents earned (when the students were in early childhood) and how their lives turned out. To do this, researchers obtained federal data that followed 814 students from birth to age 26. Those students lived in 10 cities across the United States.
What did they find? These are “opportunity gaps.” For example, from birth to the end of high school, children from high-income families had six to seven times more opportunities to learn than those from low-income families. Middle-income families were four times more likely than low-income families.
According to one study author, that means family income is indirectly related to the extent to which a student continues his education or how much money he earns in his twenties. What really matters is access to “educational opportunities,” or how often they are in supportive learning environments, whether in high-quality child care when they are young, in a home that has toys, puzzles, etc. and caregivers to support learning, or in high-quality school and out-of-school programs. So income helps, but mainly because it leads to greater access to good learning opportunities.
The study was descriptive, Dearing notes, so it technically can't prove that opportunity accumulation “caused” higher educational achievement. But that story is consistent with his research, he adds. The article also did not discuss how the timing of learning opportunities (for example, whether they occurred in early childhood or high school) could make a difference.
But from the researchers' perspective, what matters is the cumulative effect of those possibilities over time.
Some children experience opportunities throughout their lives, in each of the environments in which they live and grow (at home, in daycare, at school) and other children, if they are lucky, experience the opportunity to be in a very enriching context in one of those environments, says Dearing. And that has huge implications for resolving achievement gaps between children who grow up in poverty and children who grow up in higher-income families, he adds.
Given this, it should be no surprise that positively powerful programs like high-quality preschool make only a small dent in the development of these children's lives, Dearing says.
Translating this knowledge into more opportunities for students to thrive is difficult.
“Inequality is extreme, so extreme measures are going to be taken to end it,” adds Dearing. And by extreme it means structural. Success in education requires high-quality instruction, but that alone is not enough, he says. What matters when it comes to changing students' lives is sustained quality. The sum is greater than the parts.
One consequence: Teachers alone, while crucial, cannot control all the factors here. The answer may lie rather in support systems for students, Dearing says, pointing to the community school model and support programs like City Connects at Boston College. These models claim support the “whole child” by building a network that can help with needs outside the classroom, such as connecting families to food banks when a child may be hungry or to a free eyeglass clinic. In a sense, these models use schools as “hubs” for supportive learning environments while allowing teachers to focus on the educational component, Dearing says.
The land of opportunities?
Efforts to curb inequality could also soon get a political boost: Democratic candidate Kamala Harris' presidential campaign has outlined a plan seeks “economic opportunities,” including expansions of earned income tax credits, which it claims will breathe new life into the American middle class.
But in the meantime, circumstances may become tougher.
Since 1991, when the students followed by the study were born, the country has experienced growing inequality and, in some sectors, stagnant wages. This may have accelerated or exaggerated the effects seen in the study. We may very well have underestimated how large the opportunity gaps are today, Dearing says. If the children had been born a decade later, the students they studied may have had a wider chasm between opportunities, even between middle-class and high-income families, he says.
However, there have also been some positive developments. Today there are more public preschools and there has been an increase in the earned income tax credit, he says.
What's more, there are still research questions to answer.
TO previous study written by Dearing showed that “opportunities” in early childhood could compensate for poverty, raising students' educational achievement.
But if the research were conducted today, Dearing says it would pay more attention to cultural differences that could improve students' life outcomes in the absence of money. For example, in some black communities, caregiver roles often extend beyond parents, with other family members, such as grandmothers, playing an important role in children's home lives and opportunities for learning they have there. But researchers have focused too much on the roles of the “nuclear family” and therefore may have a slightly misleading picture, Dearing says.
