Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion The Rich-Poor Divide Starts With Kindergarten

I'll point out that the SAT uses a definition of "low income" that is perhaps overly broad for accurately assessing the impact of poverty on achievement: they define "low income" as having a family income less than $30,000/year, and that limits its usefulness. It may be a relatively good proxy threshold for the presence or absence of a parent with a college degree, but it wouldn't be a good line to choose as definition of poverty, or as a proxy to demarcate the presence or absence of a functionally literate parent with a high school diploma: that line would fall closer to about $15,000 or $16,000 dollars/year, which happens to be right around the Federal poverty threshold for a family of three in 2006.

In 2006, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, nearly 25% of black families had family incomes below $15,000, with only a little less than 12% of white families and a little more than 16% of Hispanic families falling into that range. 6.6% of black families made less than $5000/year, triple the rate for whites and nearly double the rate for Hispanics. The bulk of whites and Hispanics who had family incomes below $30,000/year had incomes above $15,000/year, while most blacks who had family incomes below $30,000/year had incomes below $15,000/year. It is worth noting that the median income of all black families in 2006 barely crossed the $30,000 "low income" threshold, at $31,969. Because of the fact that whites and Hispanics together make up a much greater share of the population than blacks, the scores of the "low income" group are drawn primarily from the scores of white and Hispanic children whose families are making between $15,000 and $30,000, and this leads to the impression that the lower scores of blacks are not adequately accounted for by their low income, when in fact the question of income has not been adequately addressed by the data collection and analysis methods.