Sat and act biased for low income students

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But the larger inequality is between the children of the merely rich and those below them. As class differences have grown more extreme, and a college degree has become more crucial to achieving a middle-class lifestyle or better, it has bred competition among parents anxious about their children’s futures. “People are kind of jockeying to get into the school district that they think is going to be most beneficial for their kid,” said Ann Owens, a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, who studies inequality in education. “A lot of this is driven by rising income inequality. When people have more money to spend on stuff, they’re spending it on moving to an affluent neighborhood, or buying their kids test prep and tutors and all these things they think will help them.”

Research shows that the more funding schools get, the better students do. Instead of schools being financed with varying amounts of money based on property taxes, most states now spend the same amount per student, or more for students in low-income schools. The bigger disparities are now among states. But as differences in school funding have shrunk, differences in other resources in children’s lives have grown. Children are increasingly likely to live and attend schools in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty or affluence. Since the mid-1990s, neighborhoods have become more segregated by income — but only for families raising children, Professor Owens found. As school districts become more segregated, achievement gaps grow larger, she found. Schools in poor neighborhoods have been shown to have a harder time attracting and retaining the best teachers. Also, these schools’ financial needs are greater — they may need to spend money on getting students to grade level or repairing buildings, while richer schools can spend it on things like arts teachers or field trips. Rich parents are more likely to have the time and connections to be highly involved in their schools — volunteering in classrooms, lobbying on behalf of the school and raising money through school foundations. The goals and experiences of the people in their neighborhood rub off on children, too. Friendships that cut across class have a bigger effect on children’s outcomes than school quality, previous research by Professor Chetty and colleagues found. Segregated neighborhoods make these friendships harder to find. Differences in academic performance by race have shrunk in the last 50 years, Professor Reardon has shown. But Black and Hispanic families are disproportionately likely to live in poor neighborhoods, even compared with white families who earn similar incomes, and their children are more likely to attend high-poverty schools. White families are more likely to live in affluent districts and to choose mostly white schools. Yet it is income segregation, not race, that is the driver of achievement gaps, research shows. “Black, Hispanic, Native American kids attend lower-income schools,” Professor Owens said. “It’s not that sitting next to a white kid is magical. It’s money in schools.”

The differences among schools are less important than what happens outside of school, a variety of research suggests — what children do in the evenings and on summer breaks, their parents’ vocabularies, and the level of stress in their home lives. Although the heritability of cognitive ability appears to play some role on an individual level, there is also a lot of evidence that environment matters. “K-12 schools only manage 10 percent of children’s time, and they do it pretty equitably,” said Nate G. Hilger, author of “The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis” and an economist. “The other 90 percent of nonschool time — early childhood, after school, summer, private extracurriculars, counseling, tutoring, coaching, therapy, health management — masks all the most important inequality of opportunity.” It starts early: High-income children are more likely to have attended preschool. Before kindergarten, the average cognitive scores for the children of the highest-earning families are 60 percent above the scores of the lowest earners. The early advantage continues: Children who attend high-quality preschools have been shown to have higher chances of taking the SAT and going to college. Parents have embraced what researchers call intensive parenting — the idea that parents should immerse children in constant learning. Half a century ago, rich and poor parents spent about the same amount of time with their children. Now high-income parents spend more one-on-one time with them, doing activities like reading — what Robert Putnam, the political scientist who wrote “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis,” calls “‘Goodnight Moon’ time.” The share of money rich parents spend on their children is also increasing — especially in places where inequality is worse. Test prep for the SATs is just one example of what researchers call “shadow education.” Throughout children’s lives, parents who can afford it pay for extracurricular and cultural activities to enrich their children’s education outside school. Poor families have more stressors, like food insecurity and frequent moves, that have been shown to have long-term effects on children’s academic performance. They also affect parents. “Parents, regardless of race, nationality, income, they have big dreams for their kids, they want them to do well in school,” Professor Reardon said. “But if you’re worried about whether there’s food on the table and the heat’s on in winter, it’s very hard to make sure you set aside an hour before bedtime to read to your kids.”

By the time rich children take the SAT, researchers speculate, experiences like bedtime reading, museum visits and science summer camps may contribute to their scores: “They’ve gone to better schools, they’ve read more novels, they’ve learned more math,” said Jesse Rothstein, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley. If the SAT is, in a sense, a wealth test, education research suggests that is a symptom of the problem, not the cause. Other parts of college applications, like essays and letters of recommendation, are also influenced by socioeconomic background. And data suggests that children with high SAT scores are more prepared for demanding college coursework, and more likely to have high earnings or prestigious jobs in adulthood. The solution, researchers say, is addressing achievement gaps much earlier, through things like universal pre-K, increased funding for schools in low-income neighborhoods, and reduced residential segregation. It could benefit all parents and students, even wealthier ones. Parenting in highly unequal societies is intense and competitive, driven by fear of the increasing risk that children will be worse off than their parents. Parenting in places with less income inequality and more public investment in families is more playful and relaxed, research shows. When the risk of falling is smaller, a college admissions test becomes less fraught.