Education vs. Environment Gap - which came first?

A wise man once said "you don't have thoughts if you don't blog." A wiser man said "if you don't post, you don't have a blog."

We often talk about an academic achievement gap in our nation. Higher socioeconomic students are outperforming their lower "class" counterparts significantly. These lower classes tend to be composed more highly of minorities, especially Black Americans and Hispanic Americans. Because of this, many, including organizations like Teach for America, believe there is a racial or ethnic achievement gap. This gap, they believe, reproduces the inequities that led to the differences in achievement and so the cycle continues. TFA and other similar organizations then think that the solution to this problem is to "fix" or reform education by a variety of means - increasing teacher quality and preparation, creating structure and procedures in schools, extending the day or school year, create highly rigorous standards-based curricula, to name a few. However, I present a different angle to review - these students' environments.

While I have not done an extensive literature review and I am not even going to cite particular studies, it has been well noted that there are other things correlated to academic achievement, other than race, schools, and poverty. Single parent families, a mother's lower level of education, fewer numbers of books in the home, availability of and participation in extracurricular activities, and more all negatively correlate with academic achievement. Why don't we focus on some of these issues? Minority students in wealthy suburban schools still do not achieve as highly as their white counterparts, even when controlling for socioeconomic status. But they also tend to be from an environment that is less "supportive" of achievement (as listed above).

The CDC reports that one-third of females become pregnant before the age of 20. 81% of them are unmarried. There you go, two factors already - mother's level of education and parental marital status. And how about economies-of-scale? If a mother and father divorce (or were never even married), they now must have two of everything - homes, cars, even blenders. This leaves fewer resources for their children. The combined income of a two-parent home (or income from one parent and care-taking from the other) provide for significant increases in financial capabilities.

And now my favorite topic of all - out of school experiences. Even though suburban students and city students attend school for approximately the same number of hours a year, suburban students typically have access to a lot more outside of school. From athletics and arts to tutoring and camp, these students are involved with enriching, fulfilling, stimulating, supportive activities that promote social, cognitive, physical, and emotional development. While some urban schools try to recreate those settings, they cannot come close to the scope and scale that are available in the suburban communities. Children spend 6:50 a day, 182 days a year in school, or 14% of their year. Even if they spend 40% sleeping, what are they doing the other 46% of the time? How can we create communities that build programs for their youth that engage them during that extra 7.5 hours on school days and 15 hours on non-school days? How can we use assets that already exist within the community to do this so that we don't create extra burdens on schools, taxpayers, and already burned out community leaders? (Beware, I plan to write about this often...)

This is clearly a very quick, brief, and dirty pontification of environmental factors that influence student achievement. But hopefully it has sparked thought and interest into looking beyond the schools to solve social inequities.