FOCUS DC News Wire 4/29/13

 

 

D.C. charter advocates make annual push for equal funds [FOCUS mentioned]

The Washington Post

By Emma Brown

April 27, 2013

 

The District sends more money per student to its traditional schools than to its charter schools, charter officials and advocates told the D.C. Council on Friday, renewing what has become an annual plea for equitable funding. The hearing before the council’s Education Committee came just days after the publication of a report, paid for by the pro-charter Walton Foundation, that found that charter schools in the District receive about $13,000 less per student than the city’s traditional schools. “We’re not here to ask for more money. We’re here to ask for uniform per-student funding,” said Robert Cane, executive director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools (FOCUS), who has lobbied city officials on the issue for more than a decade.

 

The long-simmering debate over school-funding equity has become an increasingly delicate and important issue for D.C. politicians as charter schools have grown. They now educate 43 percent of the city’s students. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) campaigned in 2010 on a platform of equal funding for charter schools. But D.C. Council member David A. Catania (I-At-Large), chairman of the newly constituted Education Committee, attacked the mayor’s fiscal 2014 budget proposal on Friday as “legally insufficient” because of continued discrepancies in funding for the two sectors. Gray administration officials pushed back, saying that the city’s attorney general and chief financial officer had certified the proposed budget as legally sound.

 

Abigail Smith, acting deputy mayor for education, said officials have taken steps to address inequitable funding, eliminating the tradition of sending large supplemental payments to the school system to fill its mid-year budget holes. Gray officials also have commissioned a study that will examine school funding and recommend changes to ensure fair funding. The funding gap is partly because of the city’s ambitious school renovation efforts, which are expected to cost more than $9,000 per student next year. Charter schools, meanwhile, receive $3,000 per student in a facilities allowance that they can use to make rent or mortgage payments. Extra money comes to the traditional school system from outside the per-pupil funding formula, a mechanism meant to ensure that both sectors are funded equally.

 

Other D.C. agencies pay for school system services such as lawyers and facilities maintenance, for example, saving the system tens of millions of dollars a year and an estimated $80 million next year, according to FOCUS. Charter schools have to pay for those services out of their per-pupil allocation. Also, charter schools are paid according to their actual audited enrollment. But traditional schools are funded based on projected enrollments, which tend to be overly optimistic. FOCUS estimates that the school system received $142 million between 2009 and 2013 for students it did not actually enroll.

For years, school system officials have maintained that the cushion helps them deal with an influx of students, many from charter schools, who come after enrollment counts are finalized in October. Unlike charter schools, traditional schools are legally obligated to serve all students — just one of many ways in which the two sectors operate under different rules.

“It’s not apples to apples,” said council member Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6), who warned that cutting all additional funding to the traditional schools would “wipe them out.”

 

Massive funding gulf between DC charters and traditional schools [FOCUS mentioned]

The Examiner

By Mark Lerner

April 29, 2013

 

The Washington Post's Emma Brown begins her recent article describing the funding disparity between DCPS and charter schoolsthis way: "The District sends more money per student to its traditional schools than to its charter schools, charter officials and advocates told the D.C. Council on Friday, renewing what has become an annual plea for equitable funding." This may be the understatement of the year. As FOCUS' Robert Cane explained in his remarks at the hearing, because charters are paid on the actual number of enrolled students and DCPS is reimbursed using an estimate the difference in public money going to the traditional schools from Fiscal Year 2009 to 2013 was just about $142 million.

 

In addition, the regular public schools receive supplemental cash outside of the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula that charters don't get. This pays for things like maintenance, attorney fees, and teacher retirement. The amount for the same years as above totaled over $324 million. The facility allotment has been another area where equity between the two systems is absent. For Mayor Gray's 2014 budget the variance is expected to grow to almost $7,000 a kids; $3,000 a child for charter, $9,613 for regular schools.

 

A new study by the Walton Foundation measured the gap between what DCPS has to spend each year per child compared to charters at $13,000 a pupil (I estimate it at about $18,000). But the important point to recognize is that there is a building consensus that the District spends over $29,000 every 12 months to educate a student. But education is a relative term. This morning we learn from Ms. Brown that DCPS will not offersummer school to those students who are too far away from their academic grade level in reading to realistically catch up. And for all of the millions of dollars in excess revenue DCPS receives over charters, and the almost $30,000 expended a term to teach, its standardized test scores combined for reading and math are below the 45 percent proficiency rate.

Something has to change.

 

 

More than 1,500 volunteers beautify area [Cesar Chavez PCS mentioned]

The Washington Examiner

By Kate Jacobson

April 27, 2013

 

Community members and volunteers joined forces to help improve the D.C. area on Saturday as part of the 12th annual Comcast Cares Day. The day -- sponsored by Comcast and the non-profit City Year Washington D.C. -- brought some 1,500 volunteers out on Saturday to all parts of the area to help clean up streams, beautify schools and collect clothing. The Greater Washington contingent was just part of the 70,000 volunteers worldwide who participate in the day of service. In D.C., Comcast employees and members of City Year worked with community members and students to beautify Neval Thomas Elementary School and Cesar Chavez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy near Benning. Volunteers were charged with painting murals, constructing benches and cleaning up the grounds of the school. Comcast also gave both schools a $12,500 grant.

 

In Maryland, crews cleaned up the Anacostia Watershed in Prince George's County. In Virginia, they built vegetable gardens and constructed benches in Alexandria. Jeff Franco, executive director of City Year Washington D.C., said his group and representatives of Comcast helped select sites that would benefit from the community's efforts. The nationwide non-profit City Year is focused on education issues and connects children to community service and helps them stay in school. This is the tenth year Comcast has partnered with the group for the event. Franco said the two schools near Benning were part of the D.C. Promise Neighborhood Initiative, which are neighborhoods dedicated to creating stronger educational environments in communities. The non-profit worked for six to eight weeks preparing the sites for volunteers.

 

He said seeing all the people come out on Saturday on their free time was humbling to him. "They're participating together to make this a better place," he said. "It's really the personification of [the saying] 'it takes a village.'" Comcast Corp. Executive Vice President David Cohen came down to Cesar Chavez Public Charter School and greeted volunteers as they stained newly constructed benches for the school. "I was profoundly humbled," he said of the slew of volunteers being put to work. "In order to be a successful company, you have to give to the community."

 

Linda Moore: Educating students to succeed in the global economy [Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School, Washington Yu Ying Public Charter School, Latin American Montessori Bilingual Public Charter School, Mundo Verde Bilingual Public Charter School and DC Bilingual Public Charter School mentioned]

The Washington Examiner

By Linda Moore

April 27, 2013

 

Fresh off our annual lottery -- which saw 1,000 applications for 30 open spots -- I found myself thinking about the skills students will need for success as adults. Years of experience working to improve conditions for children and families informed my answer to this. I also have weighed years of designing and providing professional development programs for educators and community leaders, and considerable study and global travel. For me, there are many components to success. These include the need to start teaching children life skills early; and to prepare them to be global citizens, with a dual focus on academic excellence and personal development. These are among the reasons behind my decision to create the Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School in the District's Brookland neighborhood.

 

Stokes teaches students to think, speak, read, write and learn in two languages: French and English, or Spanish and English. Our mission is to prepare our culturally diverse pre-K and elementary school students to be leaders, scholars and responsible global citizens who are committed to social justice -- community service also is a key part of our educational program. Research has indicated that, while there are many factors involved in student performance on standardized tests, including the Scholastic Aptitude Test, bilingual students may do better overall than their monolingual peers. A George Mason University study discovered that younger students who had enrolled in a second language immersion program outperformed those who did not in coursework, as well as on standardized tests, throughout their scholastic careers.

 

Learning additional languages improves one's ability to focus, plan and solve problems. Among other benefits, this means that such students are better able to move efficiently from one subject to another. The Center for Applied Linguistics has ascertained that the earlier we learn a foreign language, the greater the benefits. When students graduate, being fluent in a second language improves their career prospects. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a number of emerging occupations need workers who can speak and write in more than one language. A University of Florida study revealed that in large, linguistically diverse cities like Miami and San Antonio, the ability to speak a second language translates into more than $7,000 of increased annual income.

 

The economic importance of being bilingual is highlighted by the fact that, according to international executive search firm Korn/Ferry, 31 percent of CEOs speak at least two languages.

I believe that exposure to a new language and the skills it helps develop is a key reason that our students score 16 percentage points higher on D.C.'s standardized reading and math tests than their peers in the city's traditional public school system.

 

Preparing our students to be high achievers in secondary school requires a practical approach to learning. Our sixth-graders put their language and learning skills to good use by studying outside the United States -- in Panama for students learning in Spanish and Martinique for students learning in French -- studying other cultures and histories as well as using their language skills. Many Stokes alumni are enrolled in prestigious colleges. Others attend area high-performing charters, magnet and academically selective public schools and prestigious private schools on scholarship. Stokes recently announced a partnership with Washington Yu Ying Public Charter School, Latin American Montessori Bilingual Public Charter School, Mundo Verde Bilingual Public Charter School and DC Bilingual Public Charter School to create a language immersion middle and high school, which will offer Mandarin, as well as French and Spanish.

 

Students enrolled at the five founding schools will have a guaranteed place at the new D.C. International School. This will be the first public secondary school in the District to offer bilingual immersion.

I believe in teaching our children to become global citizens, and starting early, adding an additional language now -- and maybe more later.

 

3-Minute Interview: Author Mirta Meltzer [Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School mentioned]

The Washington Examiner

By Steve Contorno

April 27, 2013

 

Meltzer is an art teacher at Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School in the District and is originally from Argentina. She recently published her first children's book, "My Hands," which is written in both English and Spanish.

 

How did you come up with the idea for "My Hands"?

I started doing illustrations for children books a long time ago, and I decided to do my own book. It's based on a poem and is the story of a journey in life told by a mother to a child through her hands. I rewrote it for kids, and I did all the illustrations.

 

How difficult was it getting published?

I sent my project to different publishers and agents, and I didn't have any luck. It was going to be published in Spain five years ago, but the publisher went out of business. It was a dream come true when I decided to do it myself. The print and everything came out very, very nice. I did everything. You want the book in a certain way, and I'm very happy because it came exactly the way I want.

 

Why did you decide to write it in two languages?

A good way to learn a language is from the beginning when they are little. When you are little, it sticks to you forever, and you don't forget. It's very good for the child to learn the language with a story, and they learn the story and they practice the language.

 

What has the reception been like?

We have bilingual students [at Stokes], so it was very well-received. It's a very good tool for the school. The language is very simple, and the two versions are displayed side by side in a way to provide readers an easy opportunity to learn the two languages, so it would be valuable.

 

New Woodson High School falling into disrepair, critics say

WJLA

By Sam Ford

April 25, 2013

 

When the $100 million Woodson High School opened less than two years ago, alumni promised to ensure the school stayed pristine. But now, there's concern it's already falling into disrepair and students are paying the price.

Earlier this week the only way students in wheelchairs could get up and down stairs was to be carried because the one elevator in the school was out of service.

 

And school watchdog Mary Jackson thought the central office was taking too long making the repairs. Jackson has had four children and three grandchildren attend Woodson. "You cannot let this elevator break down one day because what's going to happen to the children?" Jackson says. "One elevator. When the school was built, we were promised three."

 

This is but one of many concerns Jackson has about maintaining the school that replaced the previous building. At the opening 19 months ago, Jackson was worried that it might not be taken care of. Jackson tells ABC7 the building has unrepaired leaks that have damaged the stage lights in the auditorium, warping floors and stairs.

 

"The children are not tearing it up," Jackson says. "The maintenance people are not coming to fix little things when they break and little things turn into be big things." The school system's response was that things break and things get repaired, what's the story?

 

Jackson points to the Woodson natatorium which politicians brag about. But it has been sitting unused the past 19 months because the school system's hired no one to run and maintain it, she says.

 

D.C. summer school switches to invitation only

The Washington Post

By Emma Brown

April 28, 2013

 

Kay Frazier knows her grandson, a third-grader, struggles in reading. That’s why she has always signed him up for summer school in the District, figuring he needs the extra help. But this year, for the first time, D.C. public schools’ summer program is enrolling students by invitation only. And Frazier’s grandson wasn’t invited. School officials told Frazier that he is too far behind, she said.

 

The District’s summer program for elementary- and middle-school students used to be open to everyone on a first-come, first-served basis. Officials have reconfigured the program to target lagging readers, a strategy meant to maximize limited resources and reach students who are likely to benefit the most from the five-week program. But there’s a trade-off: The new summer program is not designed to meet the intensive needs of students who are most profoundly below grade level. That leaves out Frazier’s grandson and hundreds of other struggling D.C. children.

 

“Because of the numbers of struggling students that we have, from just below grade level to many years below grade level, there are always going to be students who need support who aren’t going to be able to get it from this program,” said Dan Gordon, the school system’s deputy chief for academic programming. “We’re not at the point where we can run summer school for everyone.”

 

Volumes of research have shown that summertime learning matters, especially for poor children. With less access to enriching out-of-school experiences, poor children tend to lose more academic ground than their middle-class peers during the languid summer months, exacerbating the achievement gap with every passing year. That so-called summer slide is part of a broader literacy problem in the District. Fewer than half of D.C. children are proficient in reading, according to standardized tests, and more than a third of all city residents are functionally illiterate, according to a 2007 report.

 

Some charter schools have lengthened their academic years or adopted year-round calendars to stop the summer slide. And several D.C. public schools run their own summer programs, paying for them out of the school budget or with the help of grants. But the school system doesn’t have the resources to offer summer help to every child who needs it, Gordon said. The school system’s central office is spending about $2.4 million this year — or about one-third of 1 percent of its $800 million budget — on summer programs for general-education students in kindergarten through 12th grade. In 2012, those programs served 3,750 students, according to budget documents submitted to the council.

Invitation-only admission helps concentrate those scarce resources on students who truly need extra help, Gordon said. Officials selected students who scored within a certain range on reading assessments, a tactic meant to identify those most likely to benefit from summer programs. Some struggling readers, particularly in middle school, were not invited because they scored too high. But many students were excluded because they scored too low. Those students are so far behind that they need more intensive help — such as one-on-one instruction — than the summer program is designed to provide, Gordon said.

 

For complete article, visit the link above.

 

D.C. tops nation in preschool spending

The Washington Examiner

By Rachel Baye

April 29, 2013

 

The District spent more on each of its preschool students than any state in the country last school year, according to a report released Monday. Schools receive $14,938 for each pre-kindergarten student, including $13,974 from the District and $964 from the federal government, according to the report by the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University. The next highest spender, New Jersey, spent $11,659 per student. Though the District's spending was a $638, or 4 percent, decrease per student over the 2010-2011 school year, it was still more than three times the national average of $3,841 per student.

 

Unlike any state and most cities, the District offers free public pre-kindergarten to all 3- and 4-year-old residents through a lottery system, with 11,267 enrolled. Last year, 92 percent of all 4-year-old residents and 69 percent of all 3-year-old residents enrolled in a District-funded preschool program, serving a higher portion of preschool-age students than any state, according to the report. "The goal of our early childhood programs is to support children in the full range of developmental domains, so that they can reach their full potential in kindergarten and beyond," said DC Public Schools spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz. "If a child can't successfully climb the ladder on a slide, that same child will have difficulty holding a pencil and writing her name."

 

Maryland and Virginia, like many states, offer state-funded pre-kindergarten only to children from low-income families. Each state spent slightly less per preschool student than the national average last year. Neither has plans to change, state education officials said. Charter schools serve almost half of the District's pre-kindergarten students, according to the NIEER report. Though a few hundred pre-kindergarten students were on waiting lists at charter schools last year, more seats will become available soon, with two of the charter schools opening in the fall offering pre-kindergarten, according to Public Charter School Board spokeswoman Audrey Williams.

 

Urban areas like the District are more likely to offer universal preschool, said NIEER Director Steven Barnett. "There is both higher demand and greater supply in urban areas," he said. The District also has a large low-income population and a large population whose first language is not English, both groups whose children benefit from the boost preschool provides. Though some cities have near-universal access to preschool, Barnett added, "higher [participation than in] D.C. would be difficult."

 

Quiet, critical school reform at D.C. Public Schools

The Washington Post

By Kaya Henderson

April 28, 2013

 

As D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) enters the second year of working toward the goals outlined in our strategic plan, “A Capital Commitment,” I often am asked whether the district is still leading the way in education reform. People must think that if we are not angering the community, clashing with unions, creating discord in our schools and making headlines, we must not be making change. When I began working for DCPS in 2007, the school district was broken, and we spent tense and contentious years fixing the most immediate problems.

 

We made many changes that were critical to improving our school district. But they were not the only changes needed to ensure that any parent would be proud to send his or her child to D.C. schools.

We need three elements in place to give students and families the education they deserve:

 

●We need great teachers, leaders and support staff. Talent matters.

●We need to give educators rigorous academic content, including academic interventions that support our struggling learners and advanced coursework to challenge those who are thriving.

●We need motivated students and engaged families who see our schools as exciting and vibrant places to learn.

 

Our work reflects these priorities, as does our budget for our upcoming school year. We are continuing our investment in human capital by maintaining our rigorous evaluation system and by providing our educators with more and better training to help them succeed.

 

We are investing heavily in improving our students’ literacy. Despite our hard work, fewer than half of our students are proficient readers. We are investing in staff to help our struggling readers, technology to bring more and richer content into the classroom and a strategy to ensure that students have the time and support they need to learn to read and write. We are creating a culture of literacy in our schools and, ultimately, throughout the city. And we are making a concerted effort to better engage our families and to make school fun for students. We took the input from our school consolidation meetings very seriously. Parents told us that they wanted children across the city to have equal access to enriching courses; that art, music and physical education were important; that all students should have access to foreign-language classes; and that library services in support of our literacy efforts should be a priority. These investments do not generate headlines. They do not create controversy. They do not fit neatly into the box of what others think of as school reform. But they will result in student achievement and in more families choosing DCPS. At this stage in our work, I do not believe that we need to create more friction to get better results. We will continue to invest in our educators, academic content and student and family engagement because we know that these efforts will pay off. Do not confuse a lack of controversy with a lack of urgency. We work daily to ensure that our students have the tools they need to be successful and that we have schools that make us proud. Given these investments and a little bit of time, I can’t wait to show the world what our students can do.

 

No Rich Child Left Behind

The New York Times

By Sean F. Reardon

April 27, 2013

 

Here’s a fact that may not surprise you: the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion. Whether you think it deeply unjust, lamentable but inevitable, or obvious and unproblematic, this is hardly news. It is true in most societies and has been true in the United States for at least as long as we have thought to ask the question and had sufficient data to verify the answer.

 

What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially. One way to see this is to look at the scores of rich and poor students on standardized math and reading tests over the last 50 years. When I did this using information from a dozen large national studies conducted between 1960 and 2010, I found that the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago. To make this trend concrete, consider two children, one from a family with income of $165,000 and one from a family with income of $15,000. These incomes are at the 90th and 10th percentiles of the income distribution nationally, meaning that 10 percent of children today grow up in families with incomes below $15,000 and 10 percent grow up in families with incomes above $165,000. In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race.

 

The same pattern is evident in other, more tangible, measures of educational success, like college completion. In a study similar to mine, Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski, economists at the University of Michigan, found that the proportion of students from upper-income families who earn a bachelor’s degree has increased by 18 percentage points over a 20-year period, while the completion rate of poor students has grown by only 4 points. In a more recent study, my graduate students and I found that 15 percent of high-income students from the high school class of 2004 enrolled in a highly selective college or university, while fewer than 5 percent of middle-income and 2 percent of low-income students did.

 

These widening disparities are not confined to academic outcomes: new research by the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam and his colleagues shows that the rich-poor gaps in student participation in sports, extracurricular activities, volunteer work and church attendance have grown sharply as well. In San Francisco this week, more than 14,000 educators and education scholars have gathered for the annual meeting of theAmerican Educational Research Association. The theme this year is familiar: Can schools provide children a way out of poverty? We are still talking about this despite decades of clucking about the crisis in American education and wave after wave of school reform.Whatever we’ve been doing in our schools, it hasn’t reduced educational inequality between children from upper- and lower-income families.

 

Part of knowing what we should do about this is understanding how and why these educational disparities are growing. For the past few years, alongside other scholars, I have been digging into historical data to understand just that. The results of this research don’t always match received wisdom or playground folklore. The most potent development over the past three decades is that the test scores of children from high-income families have increased very rapidly. Before 1980, affluent students had little advantage over middle-class students in academic performance; most of the socioeconomic disparity in academics was between the middle class and the poor. But the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor. Just as the incomes of the affluent have grown much more rapidly than those of the middle class over the last few decades, so, too, have most of the gains in educational success accrued to the children of the rich.

 

Before we can figure out what’s happening here, let’s dispel a few myths. The income gap in academic achievement is not growing because the test scores of poor students are dropping or because our schools are in decline. In fact, average test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called Nation’s Report Card, have been rising — substantially in math and very slowly in reading — since the 1970s. The average 9-year-old today has math skills equal to those her parents had at age 11, a two-year improvement in a single generation. The gains are not as large in reading and they are not as large for older students, but there is no evidence that average test scores have declined over the last three decades for any age or economic group. The widening income disparity in academic achievement is not a result of widening racial gaps in achievement, either. The achievement gaps between blacks and whites, and Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites have been narrowing slowly over the last two decades, trends that actually keep the yawning gap between higher- and lower-income students from getting even wider. If we look at the test scores of white students only, we find the same growing gap between high- and low-income children as we see in the population as a whole.

 

It may seem counterintuitive, but schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students. We know this because children from rich and poor families score very differently on school readiness tests when they enter kindergarten, and this gap grows by less than 10 percent between kindergarten and high school. There is some evidence that achievement gaps between high- and low-income students actually narrow during the nine-month school year, but they widen again in the summer months. That isn’t to say that there aren’t important differences in quality between schools serving low- and high-income students — there certainly are — but they appear to do less to reinforce the trends than conventional wisdom would have us believe.

 

If not the usual suspects, what’s going on? It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school. My research suggests that one part of the explanation for this is rising income inequality. As you may have heard, the incomes of the rich have grown faster over the last 30 years than the incomes of the middle class and the poor. Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool and — in places like New York City, where 4-year-old children take tests to determine entry into gifted and talented programs — access to preschool test preparation tutors or the time to serve as tutors themselves.

 

But rising income inequality explains, at best, half of the increase in the rich-poor academic achievement gap. It’s not just that the rich have more money than they used to, it’s that they are using it differently. This is where things get really interesting. High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources — their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school — on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich. With a college degree insufficient to ensure a high-income job, or even a job as a barista, parents are now investing more time and money in their children’s cognitive development from the earliest ages. It may seem self-evident that parents with more resources are able to invest more — more of both money and of what Mr. Putnam calls “‘Goodnight Moon’ time” — in their children’s development. But even though middle-class and poor families are also increasing the time and money they invest in their children, they are not doing so as quickly or as deeply as the rich.

 

The economists Richard J. Murnane and Greg J. Duncan report that from 1972 to 2006 high-income families increased the amount they spent on enrichment activities for their children by 150 percent, while the spending of low-income families grew by 57 percent over the same time period. Likewise, the amount of time parents spend with their children has grown twice as fast since 1975 among college-educated parents as it has among less-educated parents. The economists Garey Ramey and Valerie A. Ramey of the University of California, San Diego, call this escalation of early childhood investment “the rug rat race,” a phrase that nicely captures the growing perception that early childhood experiences are central to winning a lifelong educational and economic competition. It’s not clear what we should do about all this. Partly that’s because much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits: we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich.

 

We’re also slow to understand what’s happening, I think, because the nature of the problem — a growing educational gap between the rich and the middle class — is unfamiliar. After all, for much of the last 50 years our national conversation about educational inequality has focused almost exclusively on strategies for reducing inequalities between the educational successes of the poor and the middle class, and it has relied on programs aimed at the poor, like Head Start and Title I. We’ve barely given a thought to what the rich were doing. With the exception of our continuing discussion about whether the rising costs of higher education are pricing the middle class out of college, we don’t have much practice talking about what economists call “upper-tail inequality” in education, much less success at reducing it. Meanwhile, not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile. We need to start talking about this. Strangely, the rapid growth in the rich-poor educational gap provides a ray of hope: if the relationship between family income and educational success can change this rapidly, then it is not an immutable, inevitable pattern. What changed once can change again. Policy choices matter more than we have recently been taught to think.

 

So how can we move toward a society in which educational success is not so strongly linked to family background? Maybe we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children’s educational opportunities from the day they are born. Investments in early-childhood education pay very high societal dividends. That means investing in developing high-quality child care and preschool that is available to poor and middle-class children. It also means recruiting and training a cadre of skilled preschool teachers and child care providers. These are not new ideas, but we have to stop talking about how expensive and difficult they are to implement and just get on with it.

 

But we need to do much more than expand and improve preschool and child care. There is a lot of discussion these days about investing in teachers and “improving teacher quality,” but improving the quality of our parenting and of our children’s earliest environments may be even more important. Let’s invest in parents so they can better invest in their children.This means finding ways of helping parents become better teachers themselves. This might include strategies to support working families so that they can read to their children more often.. It also means expanding programs like the Nurse-Family Partnership that have proved to be effective at helping single parents educate their children; but we also need to pay for research to develop new resources for single parents.

 

It might also mean greater business and government support for maternity and paternity leave and day care so that the middle class and the poor can get some of the educational benefits that the early academic intervention of the rich provides their children. Fundamentally, it means rethinking our still-persistent notion that educational problems should be solved by schools alone.The more we do to ensure that all children have similar cognitively stimulating early childhood experiences, the less we will have to worry about failing schools. This in turn will enable us to let our schools focus on teaching the skills — how to solve complex problems, how to think critically and how to collaborate — essential to a growing economy and a lively democracy.

 

The income gap in academic achievement is not growing because the test scores of poor students are dropping or because our schools are in decline. In fact, average test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called Nation’s Report Card, have been rising — substantially in math and very slowly in reading — since the 1970s. The average 9-year-old today has math skills equal to those her parents had at age 11, a two-year improvement in a single generation. The gains are not as large in reading and they are not as large for older students, but there is no evidence that average test scores have declined over the last three decades for any age or economic group. The widening income disparity in academic achievement is not a result of widening racial gaps in achievement, either. The achievement gaps between blacks and whites, and Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites have been narrowing slowly over the last two decades, trends that actually keep the yawning gap between higher- and lower-income students from getting even wider. If we look at the test scores of white students only, we find the same growing gap between high- and low-income children as we see in the population as a whole.

 

It may seem counterintuitive, but schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students. We know this because children from rich and poor families score very differently on school readiness tests when they enter kindergarten, and this gap grows by less than 10 percent between kindergarten and high school. There is some evidence that achievement gaps between high- and low-income students actually narrow during the nine-month school year, but they widen again in the summer months. That isn’t to say that there aren’t important differences in quality between schools serving low- and high-income students — there certainly are — but they appear to do less to reinforce the trends than conventional wisdom would have us believe. If not the usual suspects, what’s going on? It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.

 

My research suggests that one part of the explanation for this is rising income inequality. As you may have heard, the incomes of the rich have grown faster over the last 30 years than the incomes of the middle class and the poor. Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool and — in places like New York City, where 4-year-old children take tests to determine entry into gifted and talented programs — access to preschool test preparation tutors or the time to serve as tutors themselves. But rising income inequality explains, at best, half of the increase in the rich-poor academic achievement gap. It’s not just that the rich have more money than they used to, it’s that they are using it differently. This is where things get really interesting. High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources — their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school — on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich.

 

With a college degree insufficient to ensure a high-income job, or even a job as a barista, parents are now investing more time and money in their children’s cognitive development from the earliest ages. It may seem self-evident that parents with more resources are able to invest more — more of both money and of what Mr. Putnam calls “‘Goodnight Moon’ time” — in their children’s development. But even though middle-class and poor families are also increasing the time and money they invest in their children, they are not doing so as quickly or as deeply as the rich.

 

The economists Richard J. Murnane and Greg J. Duncan report that from 1972 to 2006 high-income families increased the amount they spent on enrichment activities for their children by 150 percent, while the spending of low-income families grew by 57 percent over the same time period. Likewise, the amount of time parents spend with their children has grown twice as fast since 1975 among college-educated parents as it has among less-educated parents. The economists Garey Ramey and Valerie A. Ramey of the University of California, San Diego, call this escalation of early childhood investment “the rug rat race,” a phrase that nicely captures the growing perception that early childhood experiences are central to winning a lifelong educational and economic competition.

 

It’s not clear what we should do about all this. Partly that’s because much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits: we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich.

 

We’re also slow to understand what’s happening, I think, because the nature of the problem — a growing educational gap between the rich and the middle class — is unfamiliar. After all, for much of the last 50 years our national conversation about educational inequality has focused almost exclusively on strategies for reducing inequalities between the educational successes of the poor and the middle class, and it has relied on programs aimed at the poor, like Head Start and Title I.

 

We’ve barely given a thought to what the rich were doing. With the exception of our continuing discussion about whether the rising costs of higher education are pricing the middle class out of college, we don’t have much practice talking about what economists call “upper-tail inequality” in education, much less success at reducing it.

 

Meanwhile, not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile.

 

We need to start talking about this. Strangely, the rapid growth in the rich-poor educational gap provides a ray of hope: if the relationship between family income and educational success can change this rapidly, then it is not an immutable, inevitable pattern. What changed once can change again. Policy choices matter more than we have recently been taught to think.

 

So how can we move toward a society in which educational success is not so strongly linked to family background? Maybe we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children’s educational opportunities from the day they are born. Investments in early-childhood education pay very high societal dividends. That means investing in developing high-quality child care and preschool that is available to poor and middle-class children. It also means recruiting and training a cadre of skilled preschool teachers and child care providers. These are not new ideas, but we have to stop talking about how expensive and difficult they are to implement and just get on with it.

 

But we need to do much more than expand and improve preschool and child care. There is a lot of discussion these days about investing in teachers and “improving teacher quality,” but improving the quality of our parenting and of our children’s earliest environments may be even more important. Let’s invest in parents so they can better invest in their children.

 

This means finding ways of helping parents become better teachers themselves. This might include strategies to support working families so that they can read to their children more often.. It also means expanding programs like the Nurse-Family Partnership that have proved to be effective at helping single parents educate their children; but we also need to pay for research to develop new resources for single parents.

 

It might also mean greater business and government support for maternity and paternity leave and day care so that the middle class and the poor can get some of the educational benefits that the early academic intervention of the rich provides their children. Fundamentally, it means rethinking our still-persistent notion that educational problems should be solved by schools alone.

 

The more we do to ensure that all children have similar cognitively stimulating early childhood experiences, the less we will have to worry about failing schools. This in turn will enable us to let our schools focus on teaching the skills — how to solve complex problems, how to think critically and how to collaborate — essential to a growing economy and a lively