Despite disparity, Conn. not the hardest place to move up economic ladder

A report out this week by researchers at Harvard and U.C. Berkeley examines the ability of people to move up the economic ladder in metro areas around the country. They found striking differences in upward mobility based on where in the country people live. This map from the study illustrates the regional differences. The red spots are where it’s hardest to move up, and the lighter areas are where that kind of mobility is easier.

There’s a New York Times interactive map and article on the study here.

Interestingly, although Connecticut has one of the greatest economic disparities in the country, as you can see on that map, it’s not one of the hardest places to move up the economic ladder. The study found that in the Bridgeport area (the one area of Connecticut included in the study) the chance that someone in the bottom fifth of the economic ladder could rise to the top fifth is about eight percent. Compare that to Atlanta, which is just four percent. The study says Bridgeport kids who grow up in the first percentile in income, just $2,000 a year, will end up, on average, in the 35th percentile.

Coming up shortly on WSHU’s State of Disparity, we’ll take a look at efforts to help young people who are having trouble even reaching the bottom rung of the economic ladder.

NY Times: “No rich child left behind”

In a commentary on the New York Times’ fascinating online series on inequality, “The Great Divide,” Stanford professor Sean Reardon argues that much of the educational achievement gap in the U.S. comes not simply from a difference between the quality of rich and poor schools. He says the biggest difference is how much rich families are spending on the academic development of their kids.

Reardon says test scores for the poorest students aren’t dropping. Test scores for the richest students have risen dramatically. “Before 1980,” he writes, “affluent students had little advantage over middle-class students in academic performance; most of the socioeconomic disparity in academics was between the middle class and the poor. But the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor.”

He says it boils down to this: “The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.”

And he says it’s not just that the rich have more money than they used to. It’s how they use it:

“High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources — their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school — on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich.”

In several earlier stories, we’ve focused on arguments educators are making on what schools can do to close the achievement gap, like this story on early childhood literacy, this one on Brookside Elementary School in Norwalk and this one on half-day kindergarten. Reardon argues here that “improving the quality of our parenting and of four children’s earliest environments may be even more important.” And he points to programs and policies like maternity and paternity leave that he says could lead to that goal.

Read Reardon’s full story here.

Greenwich, as a model of equality in schools

In a recent article in the New York Times, Adam Davidson the creator of NPR and This American Life’s “Planet Money” podcast and blog, described the economic diversity in Greenwich. While the town is mostly known for it’s remarkable wealth, it also has a sizable population of working class people. Nearly 4 percent live below the federal poverty line. Although it’s a town with expensive housing, the draw for many is the schools. And, Davidson writes, studies have shown that low income students ido better in wealthy schools than in poor ones. He writes about Greenwich High School:

“Around 13 percent of the school’s students receive free or discounted lunches, a commonly used proxy for low income. And more than three-quarters of those students scored at or above proficiency on the most recent statewide 10th-grade performance tests. At nearby Stamford High School, where nearly 70 percent of students are on the lunch program, almost half the students failed to meet proficiency levels.”

Davidson spoke with Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, who says about 10 percent of all students in the country are in districts that have some kind of economic-integration policy.

“The remarkable thing about economic integration, Kahlenberg says, is that it seems to improve outcomes for the poor without diminishing educational attainment among the rich. Christopher Winters, headmaster of Greenwich High School, says that the greater diversity of the population makes for a better educational experience for all students. The low-income population has nearly doubled in the past seven years at Greenwich High, and no parent, he said, has complained.”

You can read Davidson’s full article here. And here’s our earlier coverage of an effort to create a mixed income community in New Haven.