Building an Economy that Works for Everyone

It’s tough for a kid to catch up when they start out behind

Following up yesterday’s post about the the big payoffs for intensive early learning programs, here’s another piece of the puzzle from Kevin Drum, excerpted from Mother Jones:

child vocabulary parental educationThe chart on the right compares four big English-speaking countries on a single measure: vocabulary test scores of five-year-olds. You’d expect that children of highly educated parents would do well and children of poorly educated parents would do badly. And you’d be right. On average, the children of poorly educated parents have both genetic and environmental disadvantages, so it’s no surprise that they do worse than average.

But in the United States they do a lot worse. The Pew chart is normalized so that children of middle-educated parents score in the 50th percentile and other children are compared to that standard. In Canada, the least-advantaged kids manage to score at the 37th percentile. In the United States they score at only the 27th percentile.

Now, it’s pretty unlikely that Canadian kids with low-educated parents are genetically unluckier than American kids with low-educated parents. Genes may account for some of the overall difference between rich and poor kids, but not for the difference between Canada and the U.S. That has a lot more to do with how we raise our kids and what kind of attention we give them at early ages. On that score, the United States does wretchedly. We simply don’t give our poorest kids a fair start in life.

Read more from Mother Jones »

  • Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

More To Read

May 2, 2024

Baby Bonds: A Step Toward Racial and Economic Equity

The Washington Future Fund would bring this innovative, anti-racist policy to the Evergreen State

May 1, 2024

Laws Targeting LGBTQ Youth Aren’t Just Bad for Kids – They’re Bad For The Economy

The harm done by anti-LGBTQ laws expands so much further than queer children and teens

April 26, 2024

What is WA Cares and Why Does It Matter for Washingtonians?

We need to defend this important policy from billionaires looking to save a buck