The ‘achievement gap’ appears to be narrowing

September 05, 2016
Boston Globe

By Megan Scudellari

Around Massachusetts, wide-eyed kindergartners step into classrooms this week. For lots of youngsters, the start of school feels like a fresh new beginning, yet many from low-income households begin the year already playing catch-up with their more affluent peers.

From the 1970s to the 1990s, the so-called “achievement gap,” or disparity in academic skills, between rich and poor kids grew by an estimated 40 percent. The danger of an early achievement gap is that it persists through higher grades, with poorer children consistently lagging behind their more affluent peers.

But now, for the first time in decades, researchers have detected a reversal of that trend: Low-income children are entering kindergarten with stronger reading and math skills than before, moderately narrowing the achievement gap with students from higher-income households.

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Mentioned Publications

Academic achievement gaps between high- and low-income students born in the 1990s were much larger than among cohorts born two decades earlier. Racial/ethnic achievement gaps declined during the same period. To determine whether these two trends have continued in more recent cohorts, we examine trends in several dimensions of school readiness, including academic achievement, self-control, externalizing behavior, and a measure of students’ “approaches to learning” for cohorts born from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s. We use data from nationally-representative samples of kindergarteners (ages 5-6) in 1998 (n=20,220), 2006 (n=6,600), and 2010 (n=16,980) to estimate trends in racial/ethnic and income school readiness gaps. We find that readiness gaps narrowed modestly from 1998-2010, particularly between high- and low-income students and between white and Hispanic students.

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Daphna Bassok

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Jenna E. Finch

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RaeHyuck Lee

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Sean F. Reardon

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Jane Waldfogel

Using two nationally-representative datasets, this study compares early life experiences of kindergarteners in 1998 and 2010. We find that over this period, many forms of parental investments increased substantially including educational resources in the home and children’s involvement in enriching activities. Although these increases occurred among both low and high-income children, in many cases they were largest among the lowest-income children. Implications for early socioeconomic achievement gaps are discussed.

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