I haven't written any reviews in a while, but this book transformed my world view so I think it deserves a review. For a little while now, I've talked about politics with people, and I keep hearing about the importance of investing in education, and spending more money on education. And something about this argument just sounded overly simplistic to me. If children weren't getting a good enough education, was it simply because we hadn't thrown enough money at the schools? Because it seemed to me that if a child doesn't have the support and encouragement of his/her parents, pushing them to study, helping them with homework, and setting a good example, then the most expensive school in the world won't transform their home life.
This book acknowledges that the problem is much more complex than simply investing money in schools. But I did not realize nearly the depth of the problem. The book contains a series of what are called "scissor charts," where it shows the difference in trends between upper class families and lower class families. It shows how children from upper class families are much more likely to participate in extracurriculars, to have informal mentors guiding them down the right path, to apply to college ... gosh, I could go on and on and on.
The main point is that there is a marked difference in the opportunities available to children of different social classes. And while one could certainly argue that no one deserves to have success handed to them, 95% of Americans agree that every person should be given an equal opportunity to work hard and earn their way to success, and poor people don't have nearly the same opportunities to get ahead that rich people do. The author demonstrates this not only by citing statistics, but also by telling the personal stories of many young adults from different social classes, showing qualitatively the different environments that these children grew up in.
I was highlighting this book all over the place. Here are a couple of the passage I highlighted:
"Strikingly, Reardon's analysis also suggests that schools themselves aren't creating the opportunity gap: the gap is already large by the time children enter kindergarten and, he reports, does not grow appreciably as children progress through school. Reviewing the evidence, James Heckman writes, 'The gaps in cognitive achievement by level of maternal education that we observe at age eighteen -- powerful predictors of who goes to college and who does not-- are mostly present at age six, when children enter school. Schooling -- unequal as it is in America -- plays only a minor role in alleviating or creating test score gaps."
"Although school quality and resources are unequal between top and bottom socioeconomic schools, once we account for nonschool factors (such as family structure, economic insecurity, parental engagement, and even TV watching), school quality and school resources themselves seem to contribute relatively little to class gaps in test scores and other measures of cognitive and socioeconomic skills."
"'The social composition of the student body is more highly related to achievement, independent of the student's own social background, than is any other school factor,' James Coleman, the first researcher to demonstrate this powerful fact, has written."
"Many studies have shown that parental engagement -- everything from asking about homework to attending PTA meetings -- is associated with higher academic performance, better socioemotional skills, and other facets of student behavior, such as less use of alcohol and drugs."
"Controlling for many other characteristics of the child, her family, and her schooling, a child whose parents attend church regularly is 40 to 50 percent more likely to go on to college than a matched child of nonattenders."
The book closes with a list of suggestions on how to narrow this opportunity gap, with ideas such as increased access to long-acting reversible contraceptives, more government investment in pre-K programs, more options for workplace flexibility to allow parents to stay at home with their child during his/her first year, and a "talent transfer intiative," in which top teachers are paid extra money to transfer to a struggling inner city school.
What I love most about this book: previously, when I would discuss education issues with friends, I would rely largely on theorizing and personal opinion. But now, after having read this book, I can reach much more solid conclusions, because I have been armed with an entire book's worth of research and statistics on the matter.
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Mandrake
An excellent, readable book that documents the decline in US social mobility
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 3, 2015