Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion NYT opinion: No (rich) child left behind

There used to be a big educational gap between poor children and everyone else. And not just because they were in failing schools; poor kids showed up at school less prepared than the other kids, and the gap widened over the years.

Now, according to Sean Reardon, there is also a gap between the middle class and the elite. American society is increasingly stratified, he says, because elite parents are investing so much in the cognitive enrichment of their kids.

But is that really the right explanation? The rich pulling away from the middle class is also exactly what we would see if test-taking ability has a substantial inherited component, and the American economy is increasingly selecting for people who are very, very good at taking tests. The latter is undoubtedly true, and there's some fairly strong evidence for the former, in the form of studies of adopted kids. Such studies tend to show that adopted kids bear a much stronger resemblance to their biological parents in terms of lots of things, from weight to income to test scores, than they do to their adoptive parents. Once you've hit a fairly basic parenting threshhold--food, health care, touching and talking to your kid, and not physically or sexually abusing them--the incremental benefits of more intensive parenting seem at best small, at worst unclear.

I have no doubt that Reardon is right, and wealthy parents are investing more in their kids because they can. But how do we know that this, rather than the fact of having parents who are great at taking tests, makes the difference. If you take a newly married graduate of the Naval Academy with strong SAT scores, do their kids show up at kindergarten meaningfully less prepared than the children of a hedge fund manager who makes many times more?

Maybe the answer is "yes". But maybe the answer is that as we have increasingly selected for academic ability, education has become less of a springboard to success, than a barrier to it. All the people who are really good at school are marrying the other people who are really good at school, having children who are really, really good at school . . . and paying lip service to the idea that somehow, we should make all the other kids really good at school too, while reinforcing a selection mechanism that advantages their kids over all the others.