Inequality Begins at Birth

[bemildred]

Over the past year, the lack of universal pre-kindergarten for American four-year-olds has become a national issue. In 2013, President Obama proposed to fund an ambitious new nationwide pre-kindergarten program through a new cigarette tax. That plan failed to gain support, but Bill de Blasio gave new urgency to the issue when he swept into the New York mayor’s office promising universal pre-K for all city children—which will begin in the fall. Even as these efforts are being made, however, new research is making it increasingly clear that educational disparities start much earlier.

The value of universal access to early education has long been recognized: it improves the life chances of disadvantaged children and is crucial to keeping a level playing field for all. The United States has fallen well short of this goal. In most of Europe there is universal, good-quality preschool for three- and four-year-olds. In America, recent data show that fewer than half of all three- and four-year olds are enrolled in some form of preschool. Head Start, the main federal program, provides preschool funding for only about two fifths of poor children in this group.

Moreover, America has the second highest child poverty rate out of the thirty-five nations measured by the United Nation Children’s Fund (only Romania is worse). Twenty-three percent of American kids are poor by international standards, compared to 10 percent in the UK and 7 or 8 percent in the Nordic countries. According to studies on the US population, the poorest children are those five and under—indeed, they are the poorest demographic group in the nation. Many of these kids live in deep poverty, with family income less than half of the poverty line. Poverty rates for black and Latino children are especially high.

Scholars have long documented that children who grow up poor face greater obstacles to social development and good health, obstacles that often remain with them the rest of their lives. They are more likely to have chronic diseases like asthma or attention deficit disorder, few of them graduate from high school, their wages are lower, and they often end up on welfare. Poor teenage women have more unwanted births.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/jun/26/inequality-begins-at-birth/

[Igel]

1. Poorly written article.

Long on advocacy, short on thinking.

Universal pre-school levels the playing field to a large extent by filling in some potholes. But a lot of families have no need for it (apart from day-care requirements) because their home life doesn't have those particular potholes. And in some cases, day-care levels by taking away early educational advantages from some kids. It's not a neutral decision: It helps some, is indifferent for others (but still expensive), and hurts a few.

It also stops being very useful by middle school. The difference is there for kids in "high quality pre-school" programs, but only if you have a large enough sample size to impart statistical significance to small differences. And it's important that it be "high quality intervention". That rules out a heck of a lot of currently existing programs.

A lot of the stress results are in need of clarification, as well. The most extreme effects are those kids whose families day in and day out have insufficient food, violence, disruption. When you expand the conclusions to "food insecurity," where "food insecure" means uncertainty in being able to buy sufficient food for at least one day in the last year, you've confused "I wasn't sure I'd have enough food for 11/29/13" with "there were 30 days last year when we went hungry all day." The first doesn't produce much childhood stress; the second is decimating. But on the basis of that some have done specious research.

For example, if you take a poor family the kids have a lot of stress. Or, more likely in ed research, they look at grades for poor families, take income as a proxy for blood cortisol levels, and promptly say they've grounded poor grades in blood serum cortisol levels. They haven't, but people want to believe it, so the research gets published. Then along comes another study that looks at self-reported stress levels or blood serum cortisol levels directly and they find that poor and middle-class kids perceive the same level of stress. Blood serum levels don't rise and fall *except* in response to perceived stress, so the proxy's trashed. Yet that proxy is still widely used by those who don't want to read articles on physiology and psychology.

Still things are unequal even before birth. In extreme cases developmental causes make for differences in post-natal outcomes. The linguistic data have been known since the '60s--if you're on welfare, you speak to your kid less and differently than if you're working class, and that's less than if you're middle class. It's standard to say this is income--but if you're impoverished middle class you're still "middle class" for this purpose. People tried to say it was time related, but middle class families held true in exposing their kids to more and higher quality linguistic stimuli than working class families even for the same number of hours worked, and if you were on welfare when the first studies were done you had a lot more free time than working class families. It's not money; it's not time. You can find correlations, but it's easy to find counterevidence that points to these being secondary factors or even not very important factors.

And so it goes. It's helpful here to point out that a few years ago some folk did some "critical thinking" research and pulled together a group of highly educated subjects. Research chemists, pharmaceutical researchers, history and English professors, independent researchers, well-published "fine arts" writers, a wide variety of men and women of different ages in different fields. These were clearly masters of critical thinking. Then they put together a questionnaire that asked the subjects to think critically about certain claims and evaluate certain sets of facts. The responses were stripped of identifying information, segmented by topic, and farmed out for evaluation by the consultants. A set of history professors not in the subject pool would evaluate the critical thinking displayed on the history topics. And so forth.

The findings said what some critics had said all along: If you don't know squat, you can't think critically. So the research biochemists were top-notch in biochemistry, but came in at a "critical thinking of a high-school student" for history or English. The English professors came in at a high-school level for science. The best correlation was that your highest level of critical thought relatively closely tracked your level of education in that field. If you are an English professor with a masters in history and no math since high school, you think critically like a history MA student and a high-school math student. Critical thinking techniques are crucially discipline dependent in many cases and depend radically on knowledge of the facts of the field.

Then again if you take a renowned astrophysicist not raised around young children and who's s a new father for the first time and ask him to think critically about how to care for a newborn, this should come as no surprise.

[bemildred]

2. Well, it's obvious, the kid needs more mass.

But seriously, I read that with interest, thanks.

I particularly like the critical thinking study, that sounds about right. Ideas are what we think with, and if you have a crude idea of a subject area, you are going to have crude ideas about it, and a crude understanding of how it works, and you will miss things that a more sophisticated thinker will not. We also tend to think that what we know applies far more widely than is actually the case.

[PatrickforO]

3. Your post reminds me of a woman named Ruby Payne, who

said that the main class difference in America is based on vocabulary, or lack thereof. Interesting work. If you're operating on an 800 word vocabulary it is nearly impossible to get ahead.