It’s officially back-to-school season in America! As kids all across the country hit the books again, we have our eye on the uptick in prices for essentials like lunch boxes, notebooks, scissors, crayons, and more. But what’s really on our minds is the way the education system has, as a whole, become a major player in exacerbating inequality in America over the years.
Horace Mann, the 19th century education reformer, famously called education “…the great equalizer of the conditions of men.” Education is a major part of the American Dream sold to us all from a young age. The traditional recipe for financial success goes: if you go to school, study hard, and get a college degree, all Americans—no matter where they started in life—have the chance to have a decent career and improve their economic situation.
But unfortunately, the reality in America today is that schooling has, for all intents and purposes, become a great unequalizer in America. As the gap between the rich and everyone else in America has widened over the years, social mobility has declined. Low-income children are having a harder time rising up the socioeconomic ladder but also, critically, children from wealthy families are by and large maintaining their positions of privilege. There are many reasons for this, but schooling is at the heart of it. Wealthy families have used their outsized resources to invest in the educational futures of their children, and poor and middle-class families simply haven’t been able to keep up. And while we do not begrudge parents who want to ensure every opportunity possible is available to their children, we take issue with the fact when the rooms they are in become so exclusive that it leads to worse economic inequality far after graduation day.
For this week’s Closer Look, we want to highlight the state of educational inequality in America today. We’ll compare rich and poor children’s educational experiences and outcomes at every critical point in their childhood: the early years, preschool, primary and secondary school, and finally college. We’ll then discuss how the growing economic gap between the rich and the rest has worked to fan the flames on educational inequality, and conclude by offering some thoughts about what we can do about it.
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Short on time? Here’s what you need to know
- As the gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else in America has widened over the years, social mobility has declined. There are many reasons for this, but inequalities in schooling are at the heart of it.
- Rich kids have a head start in their education even before they formally start school. Wealthy parents support their children’s cognitive and noncognitive development in their crucial early years by reading to them more, speaking to them more, and giving them enriching learning experiences outside the home. Wealthy children are also more likely to attend preschool.
- Wealthy families have the means to send their children to the top private and public schools in the country, which are well-resourced. They are also more able to spend big on their children’s extracurricular activities. This all works to catapult wealthy kids to college, especially the most elite ones.
- As economic inequality has risen over the last few decades, the rich have used their increasingly massive resources to invest more and more in their children’s education. This has translated into larger educational achievement gaps over time between rich and poor students.
- Our mission to raise taxes on the rich and raise wages for workers would go a long way in addressing educational inequality. It’s also important for us as people of wealth to spread awareness of this issue.
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Educational Inequality in America
Rich kids have a head start in their education even before they find their seat in a classroom. In their early months and years, wealthy parents who have the time and resources are better able to support their kids’ cognitive and noncognitive skills development. This matters enormously as experts stress that the first five years of a child’s life are the most essential for brain development; abilities like motivation, collaboration, grit, problem-solving, self-esteem, and more are cultivated during these years, which set children up to become successful later in life in school and work.
College-educated parents have been shown to read to their children more than their high school-educated counterparts. They are more likely to give their kids enriching learning experiences outside the home by taking them to places like art galleries, libraries, plays, concerts, and museums. They also, quite literally, speak to their children more: by age four, children from professional families will have heard 32 million more words than children from families on government assistance.
The disparities are prominent in preschools as well. To start, children from high-income families are more likely to attend preschool in the first place, which matters given the importance of preschool for children’s long-term development. Tuition at the most elite preschools can run over $70,000 a year. It should come as no surprise then that, by age five, even before they start formal schooling, children from the top 10% of households score higher than other kids on reading, math, and science literacy tests. By virtually any metric imaginable, rich kids are more ready for school than their less well-off classmates.
Naturally, wealthy families have the means to send their children to the nation’s top private schools—or to live in districts with high property taxes that finance excellent public schools. They enjoy small student/teacher ratios and state-of-the-art facilities like libraries, science laboratories, gyms, athletic fields, and more. Some even have high-tech weather stations.
Outside of school hours, wealthy parents are also able to spend big on extracurricular enrichment activities. Nothing is off limits: sports teams, science and math camps, music lessons, art lessons, ballet lessons, you name it. This is also especially the case for private tutoring, especially for college-admission tests like the SAT and ACT.
Which brings us to the college years. Children from high-income families are more likely to attend college and earn an undergraduate degree in the first place. But they are especially more likely to attend the country’s most elite colleges, like the eight Ivy League schools or MIT, Duke, Stanford, and the University of Chicago. Children from families in the top 1% of earners are twice as likely to get accepted to these sorts of schools compared to low- or middle-class students—even when they have the same SAT/ACT scores. Sometimes, these schools enroll the same number of students from the top 0.1% of households (i.e. families that earn over $2 million) as they do from the bottom 20% in total. Researchers have found that this skew towards wealth at elite colleges is driven by “legacy” admissions practices for the children of school alumni; higher non-academic ratings for high-income students; and more athletic recruitment for wealthy students.
This all makes a difference, of course, when kids graduate college and enter the “real world.” The college premium is alive and well: workers with college degrees earn about 37% more than those with only a high school diploma. But graduates from elite colleges can expect far, far more. They are much more likely to be in the top 0.1% of earners and hold positions of influence in government, the arts, academia, and in business.
Economic inequality exacerbates educational inequality
As economic inequality has risen over the last few decades, the rich have used their increasingly massive resources to invest more and more in their children’s education. Since the early 1980s, the gap between what rich parents spend on their children’s education compared to their low- and middle-income counterparts has exploded. And since the 1970s, the gap on extracurricular spending between high-income households and low-income households has tripled.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that educational outcome gaps have also risen over the years. Between the mid-1970s and 2001, the educational achievement gap on standardized test scores in reading and math grew in size by 40 to 50% between high- and low-income children. The gap between rich and poor students in the US today is actually more than the gap between white and Black students when schools were segregated in the mid 20th century. It’s also worth noting that the gap in college completion between rich and poor Americans has increased over the years too.
Other studies also provide insight into the harmful effects of inequality on educational achievement for low-income students particularly. One study found that low-income boys living in areas with high levels of economic inequality are more likely to drop out of high school than their counterparts living in areas with lower levels of inequality. Another found that low-income students performed worse in math and science when they attended more economically diverse schools. Reasons for this are debated and complex, but it’s definitely worth keeping in mind as inequality continues to rise.
Conclusion
We recognize that education reform is not one of our issue areas at Patriotic Millionaires, nor are we education policy experts. Educational inequality is a complex problem—particularly in our current age of extreme inequality—and it will necessarily involve experts from a variety of disciplines to fully address.
That said, we feel that our mission to raise wages for workers and tax the rich would go a long way in addressing the problem. Raising wages and strengthening other benefits for workers will allow all parents—not just those with immense resources—to spend more time with their kids and invest more in their children and communities. This, coupled with reforming the tax system, will also go a long way in reducing extreme inequalities of resources that we currently see, which in turn breed inequalities of opportunity.
Another thing that we can do is raise awareness of educational inequality more generally, and particularly our place in it as people of wealth. It’s easy to equate prestigious educational institutions that a number of us have attended with wealth, privilege,and status because that is partly what they have become. Rather than being a sole reflection on educational achievement and accolades, students who attend these schools can become markers for the ways in which the ultra-rich can buy access to these kinds of spaces. In Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School, Shamus Khan documents his experience teaching at St. Paul’s School, an elite boarding school in New Hampshire. He found that most St. Paul’s students, who largely come from financially privileged backgrounds, saw their school as a meritocracy. They also justified their admission to the school through the personal merits they believed they possessed, which they believe they alone were responsible for developing through their own hard work. In fact, only racial and ethnic minority students recognized the role that larger structural inequalities played in filling the school with so many students from privileged backgrounds.
Khan’s findings are troubling. If we’re going to work to level the playing field, then we need everybody to see that the playing field is uneven in the first place. There is nothing inherently wrong with doing well for yourself, but as we said in our Closer Look about the myth of the self-made millionaire in May, it’s also important to recognize and acknowledge that for many of today’s super-rich, some privileges they were born with also play a role in their success. And this is especially the case for those who go on to hold positions of power and influence in society, with the greatest ability to affect change.
We believe that the American Dream can be a reality again in America and that education can and should be a critical tool in making that happen. There is so much potential to untap in our youth, particularly from disadvantaged backgrounds, and we really believe future generations have the ability to correct our nation’s past sins and get us all on a better, more sustainable path. But the only way we’re going to do it is if we take steps to reduce America’s extreme inequalities of income and wealth, and sooner rather than later.
