There is evidence that poverty,
in terms of family resources,
has a powerful influence
on children’s ability
to respond to educational opportunities
in several ways:
• the absence of learning habits
and experiences at home;
• a lack of access to computers;
• a lack of a sense of self-esteem through
appropriate interactions with parents;
• poor housing;
• an unhealthy diet;
• possible mental health issues within
the family;
• domestic violence;
• the stress associated with low pay
or unemployment.
(Eden, 2013)
In one of his chapters, Prof. Sean F. Reardon,
Director, Stanford Interdisciplinary Doctoral
Training Program in Quantitative Education Pol-
icy Analysis, examined as the income gap be-
tween high- and low-income families widened
the achievement gap between children in high-
and low-income families also widened. 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 corre-
sponds to a 30 to 60 percent larger difference
in achievement than it did for children born in
the 1970s. Assembling information on trends in
the relationship between socioeconomic status
and academic achievement requires examina-
tion of multiple sources of data. The studies
conducted by Prof. Sean F. Reardon collected
from nineteen nationally representative stud-
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ies, including studies conducted by the National
Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the Long-
Term Trend and Main National Assessment of
Educational Progress (NAEP) studies, U.S. com-
ponents of international studies, and other
studies with information on both family back-
ground and standardized-test scores. Although
these studies vary in a number of ways, each
of them provides data on the math or reading
skills, or both, of nationally representative sam-
ples of students, together with some data on
students’ family socioeconomic characteristics,
such as family income, parental education, and
parental occupation. Reardon’s study looks in
depth at the correlation between income and
standardized test performance, finding that be-
tween 1960 and 2007, the gap in standardized
test scores between affluent and low-income
students had grown by nearly 40 percent, which
suggests that income is tightly related to aca-
demic performance (Reardon, 2011).
Low-income is defined by the U.S. Census Bu-
reau as earning $45,000 or less per household.
Nearly 150 million Americans fall into this cate-
gory. Perhaps most problematic, as Re