The kids of rich educated parents are doing a lot better than the kids of poor, poorly educated parents.

Source: "The Widening Academic Achievement Gap Between the Rich and the Poor: New Evidence and Possible Explanations," by Sean F. Reardon

Sean Readon's graph indicates that rich kids score an average deviation over poor kids in a whole raft of tests of educational achievements. His paper, cited above, indicates that while racial differences have been reduced over time, the income differences have increased. The graph also indicates that the difference is there for six year olds and persists as they get older.

 The gap appears to have grown at least partly because of an increase in the association between family income and children’s academic achievement for families above the median income level: a given difference in family incomes now corresponds to a 30 to 60 percent larger difference in achievement than it did for children born in the 1970s. Moreover, evidence from other studies suggests that this may be in part a result of increasing parental investment in children’s cognitive development. Finally, the growing income achievement gap does not appear to be a result of a growing achievement gap between children with highly and less-educated parents. Indeed, the relationship between parental education and children’s achievement has remained relatively stable during the last fifty years, whereas the relationship between income and achievement has grown sharply. Family income is now nearly as strong as parental education in predicting children’s achievement.

I am not sure why this phenomenon is taking place, but it is worrisome that kids of parents with little education and kids of poorer parents don't show the same educational performance as those of better educated and richer parents. There is probably a need to intervene early and then continuously to improve the learning of poor kids of less educated parents if we are not to throw away potentially valuable human resources for the future.

I have been posting on the growing income inequality in American society, but this figure from Sean Reardon's paper shows how the trend shows up in the lives of children.

I suspect that one element is that high income people live in high income communities in which they enjoy not only high average levels of adult education and high average levels of educational aspirations for their children, but also good schools from pre-school through secondary school and access to nannies.

If you assume that kids' educational aspirations are also strongly influenced by those of the other kids that they play and study with, a neighborhood with highly performing kids will tend to raise the level of all the kids. True?