206. Unstack the Odds--Families & Access, Part 2

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?

Observers on whether a child’s family background affects access are not confined to those typically viewed as being on the left of the political spectrum. In his online posting of August 29, 2010, “For black children, daunting divides in achievement and family life,” conservative Washington Post op-ed columnist George Will highlighted the importance of families on many facets of children’s lives.

Citing the Educational Testing Service (ETS) report The Black-White Achievement Gap: When Progress Stopped, by Paul E. Barton and Richard J. Coley, Will states: “Only 35 percent of black children live with two parents, which partly explains why, while only 24 percent of white eighth-graders watch four or more hours of television on an average day, 59 percent of their black peers do.”

Will also observes that “Black children also are disproportionately handicapped by this class-based disparity: By age 4, the average child in a professional family hears about 20 million more words than the average child in a working-class family and about 35 million more than the average child in a welfare family — a child often alone with a mother who is a high-school dropout.”

The columnist again cites the ETS report on overcoming the achievement gap: “It is very hard to imagine progress resuming in reducing the education attainment and achievement gap without turning these family trends around — i.e., increasing marriage rates, and getting fathers back into the business of nurturing children.”

He ends his column by pointing out the observation of ETS researchers Barton and Coley in their work America’s Smallest School: The Family. Will indicates they “. . . estimated that about 90 percent of the difference in schools’ proficiencies can be explained by five factors: the number of days students are absent from school, the number of hours students spend watching television, the number of pages read for homework, the quantity and quality of reading material in the students’ homes — and, much the most important, the presence of two parents in the home.”

Is George Will correct that a student’s chances in life--today, in the United States of American--are all but determined by the family into which he or she was born? (George Will, “For black children, daunting divides in achievement and family life,” August 29, 2010.) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/27/AR2010082703805.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns