Source
American Educational Research Association (AERA)
Summary
This study was part of the National Institutes of Health’s NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, in which 814 children from low-, middle-, and high-income families were followed from birth through age 26 with frequent gold standard measurements of their developmental contexts and experiences from early childhood through adolescence, between 1991 and 2017.
The study is the first to directly document opportunities and opportunity gaps as they accrue across early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence in multiple key areas of child development.
The number of educational opportunities that children accrue at home, in early education and care, at school, in afterschool programs, and in their communities as they grow up are strongly linked to their educational attainment and earnings in early adulthood, according to new research. The results indicate that the large opportunity gaps between low- and high-income households from birth through the end of high school largely explain differences in educational and income achievement between students from different backgrounds.
“For the first time, we are able to directly measure how large opportunity gaps are and how seriously they impact outcomes of low- and high-income students,” said study co-author Eric Dearing, a professor at Boston College and executive director of the Mary E. Walsh Center for Thriving Children. “These gaps are very large and appear to be a primary explanation for large gaps in attainment for children born into low- versus high-income households.”
Key Takeaways
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- The opportunity gap was a more powerful predictor of educational attainment than early childhood poverty.
- About two thirds of children from low-income households experience no more than one opportunity between birth and high school. Most high-income youth experience six or more opportunities.
- Moving from zero to four opportunities increased the odds of low-income children graduating from a four-year college from about 10 percent to 50 percent and increased annual salaries by about $10,000 per year.
- Educational initiatives that tackle children’s lives inside and outside of the classroom offer uniquely powerful chances to narrow cumulative opportunity gaps.
- Beyond what schools are able to do, narrowing gaps in attainment will likely require comprehensive public policies that offer systemic changes to the children’s chances of educational opportunities.
[Related: ‘Opportunities,’ not poverty alone, predict later-life success for children]
[Related: Universal prekindergarten is coming to California — bumpy rollout and all]
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