Who knew? In the UK, where there is something called the "Government Equalities Office" dedicated to "Putting equality at the heart of government," they have a new report on the state of their inequality. It's even introduced by someone called the Minister for Women and Equality, the Right Honorable Harriet Harman. And you thought we were overrun with Bolsheviks.
Somehow, though, despite all this equality infrastructure, the UK still has a lot of inequality.
For example:
According to the report, these social class education gaps widen through childhood rather than narrowing - an indictment of the leveling capacity of the school system:
The evidence we examine confirms that social background really matters. There are significant differences in 'school readiness' before and when children reach school by parental income and mother's education. Children entering primary school in 2005-2006 whose mothers had degrees were assessed 6 months ahead of those who had no qualifications above Grade D at GCSE. In addition, every extra £100 per month in income when children were small was associated with a difference equivalent to a month's development. Rather than being fixed at birth, these differences widen through childhood. ... Children with a higher social class background who start with a low assessment of relative cognitive ability when young eventually overtake those with a lower social class background who were initially assessed as having high ability.
Cross posted from the Family Inequality blog.
Unuseful classroom behavior found to largest degree in poor children...
As to the difference in interaction between those who are higher (parents) and those lower (children), well, here, there's no remedy I can see of since what happens home will conflict directly with school. The child using home rules at school basically gets what she/he wants. Middle class teachers have no good choices re: poor children’s disinterest in behaving. Those children are only interested in avoiding strong punishment since they haven’t internalized discipline, not having been spoken with much. The schools will never use such punishment, nor should they.
Incentivizing those with less to have as few children as possible is the only reasonable public policy that I can think of for eventual parity. The problem is not located nor surmountable by schools or teachers , not completely at least.
Finally, Charlotte Mecklenburg schools is a relatively large school district. Basically, students who get free lunch...which is dominated by black, poor white, and ESL, score 30% lower than rest. I still maintain that the chief factor is discrepancy between home language and school language, but also that variable of classroom behavior and to a lesser extent attention 'stength' play important roles. (What else?!)
Middle-class ideas of disciplining children (no yelling or hitting; instead reasoning) result in children who can behave in classroom. Poor children in US have had stressed nervous systems since birth for different reasons, chiefly constant media inappropriate to young children. Ability to pay attention is worsened.
Years ago there was a woman who proposed Ebonics bridge program in schools. (NOT multiculturalism) She was right. If one speaks a variant of English (Appalachian; Black), then it costs too much mental energy to take in information from the other register. We who speak SAE can imagine how more difficult it would be for us to learn from someone speaking another American regionalism, or Indian English, for example. Things only get worse when reading instruction is begun; there is no way to make use of predictability if what you are reading can’t be predicted…if the text doesn’t ‘say’ what you say.
In UK people are more honest about class and more explicit. A five year old who speaks cockney is at a relative disadvantage cognitively vis a vis a five year old who speaks the Queen's English, cognitively so even there the language may be the variable. Similarly for parenting skills and brain development.