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Education and equality

PARA 1

In spite of the family's dwindling role in the education of the young, family background is still the most important factor in educational achievement today. As the authors of the Cole­man report discovered, the variation in test scores among children in the same school is far greater than the range between average chil­dren at different schools. Numerous studies have documented the rule that the higher the family's social standing, the higher a child's level of education. Compared with the influ­ence of different family backgrounds, the school itself appears to have little effect on how well students perform and how long they stay in school. The Coleman report found three as­pects of family background to be especially im­portant: the educational level of the parents, the family's income, and the interest the par­ents take in their children's education. By in­vestigating these clues, perhaps we can discover why social class is of such overwhelming impor­tance in education.

PARA 2

There is much evidence to show that the atti­tudes and values children bring to school out­weigh those they learn in school. In Class and Conformity, for example, Melvin Kohn con­cluded that middle-class families tend to reward self-reliance and creativity, while most working- class families are more interested in obedience and respect . These middle-class values at home give strong support to academic achievement in school. Of course, success in school is not entirely limited to middle-class children. Everyone knows at least one child from a poor family who studied hard and became a doctor or law­yer. Joseph Kahl wondered whether or not these "achievers" had parents who had given them special encouragement. In a study of working- class parents whose sons were good students, Kahl discovered that these parents tended to be dissatisfied with their own jobs and anxious to have their sons do better than they had. They were more likely than other working-class par­ents to stress education as the means of getting ahead, and they took a strong interest in their sons' progress in school and rewarded them when they did well.

Clearly, working-class parents can do much to motivate their children to study and encour­age them to strive for advanced degrees. Mid­dle-class children, however, already live in an environment that encourages reading and other school-related activities; they use correct gram­mar and develop proper manners; and they play with children who share the same values and interests. Children who come from working- class backgrounds or who live in slum neigh­borhoods grow up in an environment that does not usually encourage getting good grades and going to college. Their parents must therefore expend much more effort, enforce much stricter discipline, and have much greater moti­vation themselves to give them the same kind of support for educational goals as a middle-class family in a middle-class neighborhood.

PARA 3

Al­though the number of students attending col­lege has risen spectacularly, the opportunity to get a college education is not more evenly dis­tributed than in the past. Wealthier families still send their children to better schools, and for longer periods, than poorer families. A study that followed the careers of 9000 Wisconsin high-school students established that high-school graduates who come from less affluent backgrounds are (1) less likely to enter college immediately after high school, (2) much less likely to go to prestigious colleges, (3) more likely to drop out of college, and (4) less likely to return to college if they do drop out. On average, upper-middle-class children receive four more years of schooling than lower-class children.

Obviously, wealthy families can afford to send their children to private schools and to support them while they go through college. In spite of the ideal of educa­tional equality, children's social origins deeply affect the amount and the quality of the educa­tion they receive. Class variations in the envi­ronment at home, the parents' attitude toward learning, and the amount of money invested in education all make it considerably more likely that children from privileged backgrounds will do well in school and acquire the credentials they need to get a good job. Besides these eco­nomic resources, well-to-do parents provide their children with "symbolic capital," which can also bring them financial dividends. They introduce their sons and daughters to such cul­tural experiences as classical music, art muse­ums, and the theater – all socializing institu­tions that can give them social advantages over the children of working-class parents. In short, the influence of social background is so strong that most children start adult life at about the same class level as their parents. However, the family is not entirely responsible for the per­petuation of class differences. The educational system itself also tends to give children unequal treatment.

PARA 4

Education is not a "great equalizer," the Cole­man report paradoxically suggests, because the schools are homogeneous: they treat their students uniformly, or too equally. Future musi­cians are required to undergo the same training as future engineers; talented artists must study math in the same class as talented mathemati­cians. In other words, when unequal individuals are treated alike, people with special' interests and special disabilities are bound to be over­looked.

In recent years the school system has made a number of adjustments based on the principle that the equal treatment of unequals is unjust. The Head Start program, which trained pre­school children in the skills they would need to do first-grade work, was perhaps the broadest effort to eliminate the handicap of being black, Hispanic, poor, or in other ways "culturally disadvantaged."

Changed Lives, the landmark study of Head Start programs, proved that early childhood ed­ucation can have a lasting effect on students' achievement. The researchers followed two groups of black children from low-income fami­lies in Michigan, for nearly 20 years. They found that the group with preschool edu­cation had significantly higher rates of high-school graduation and employment and lower rates of arrest and teenage pregnancy than the group that had not participated in such pro­grams. Even so, a report from the public schools in Montgomery County, Maryland, in­dicates that Head Start programs alone cannot solve the problems that many poor minority-group children have in school. In comparison with middle-class white students, children from preschool educational programs still tend to have more academic difficulties and to score lower on standard achievement tests. The educational system also tries to adjust to individual differences by providing bilingual instruction and by making special arrangements for deaf and crippled children. These efforts to deal with "exceptional" students treat only the more visible – and more publicized – tip of the iceberg of individual differences in ability and temperament. Because every child is excep­tional in some way, the school's attempts to deal with unique individuals have so far been rather crude and ineffective.