205. Unstack the Odds--Families & Access, Part 1

Unstack the Odds: Help All Kids Access College—and Graduate!
by
Joe Rottenborn

Executive Director, Mahoning Valley College Access Program (MVCAP)

2. How may a child’s family background correlate with their access to college?

“Families matter when it comes to the academic success of children, and
the social class background of children matters. That much is given.”--Peter Sacks, Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007, p. 14.)

What accounts for this unequal access to higher education and graduation? Many observers begin by examining children’s experiences in the family—indeed, the family is often viewed as the child’s “first school.” A recent study that examinined the correlation between families and access stated the following:

“Using longitudinal data, we analyze disparities in family background and potentially influential investments parents make (or are constrained from making) early and late in the high school experience, and then how the patterns uncovered shape the likelihood of college attendance. Findings confirm expectations. Specifically, racial inequalities in class background shape disparities in cultural, monetary, and parental interactional investments, with strong consequences for high school attainment/achievement. Background inequalities, and their implications for early and later family investments and achievement/attainment, explain the entire black-white gap in the likelihood of college attendance.” (Camille Z. Charles, Vincent J. Roscigno, and Kimberly C. Torres, “Racial inequality and college attendance: The mediating role of parental investments,” in Social Science Research 36, 2007, p. 329.)

That same study also commented on the importance of financial and educational status of families for students; it concluded:

“This literature suggests that household socioeconomic status (SES)—usually measured as parental income and/or education—is critically important for achievement (Alexander et al., 1987; Lareau, 1989; Mehan, 1992; Parcel and Meneghan, 1994.) Lareau (1989) suggests that this effect is partially a function of less disposable income and time for working class parents to intervene in their children’s schooling. Middle- and upper-class parents, in contrast, can invest in household educational resources, can hire tutors, are more likely to utilize ‘proper’ English in the household, and have time to meet with teachers.” (Ibid., p. 331.)

Further, these authors emphasize the importance of “cultural capital”—according to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, those “cultural habits and . . . dispositions inherited from” the family—which can help children to succeed. (from Elliot B. Weininger and Annette Lareau, “Cultural Capital,” p. 1) http://www.brockport.edu/sociology/faculty/Cultural_Capital.pdf

Of this process, Charles, Roscigno, and Torres say the following: “Higher SES parents likewise can more easily transmit cultural capital to their children: ‘high brow’ European cultural attributes, typically held in high regard in the classroom and, therefore, conducive to educational success (Bourdieu, 1977; DiMaggio, 1982; Lamont and Lareau, 1988; Roscigno and Ainsworth Darnell, 1999.)” (Charles, et. al., p. 331.)

In his recent online profile of Ronald Ferguson, Director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard, reporter Michael Winerip observed the following about Ferguson’s findings:

“His research indicates that half the gap can be predicted by economics: even in a typical wealthy suburb, blacks are not as well-to-do; 79 percent are in the bottom 50 percent financially, while 73 percent of whites are in the top 50 percent. The other half of the gap, he has calculated, is that black parents on average are not as academically oriented in raising their children as whites. In a wealthy suburb he surveyed, 40 percent of blacks owned 100 or more books, compared with 80 percent of whites. In first grade, the percentage of black and white parents reading to their children daily was about the same; by fifth grade, 60 percent to 70 percent of whites still read daily to their children, compared with 30 percent to 40 percent of blacks.” (Michael Winerip, "Closing the Achievement Gap Without Widening a Racial One,” The New York Times, February 13, 2011)http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/education/14winerip.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hpw

As for the potentially-controversial topic of the effects of home environment, “ . . . Ferguson said that talking about racial differences in parenting is a social taboo and an obstacle that he often faces.” As he put it in a recent interview:
"People don't want to talk about it because they're afraid what is said will be misused," he said. "They're afraid that people will say it's their own fault, that members of low−achieving groups need to fix themselves. They're afraid that people will misuse information in bigoted ways. But if we can't have the conversation about things that we need to do differently, then we can't get around to actually doing them differently," he said. (Amelia Quinn, “Harvard lecturer spearheads movement to improve American education,” The Tufts Daily, March 2, 2011.) http://www.tuftsdaily.com/features/harvard-lecturer-spearheads-movement-to-improve-american-education-1.2502479

Ferguson’s view was then quoted to be as follows: "If we can give . . . the opportunities and help people from less advantaged backgrounds to spend more time in ways that contribute to their academic growth, in a few decades from now, we can get to a place where we're much more equal than we are now," he said. "But to do that, we've got to lay everything out on the table and work it through." (Ibid.)