Scope of Paper

Why do wealthy kids usually do better in school than poor kids? Willingham applies cognitive science in evaluating the effect of family wealth on a student’s human capital, social capital, and the knock-on implications for stress levels and learning.

The findings are based on trends, and the author points out that it’s important to avoid stereotyping when conducting research into socioeconomic status:

We should keep in the forefront of our minds that the trends discussed here are exactly that – trends. There are harsh, inconsistent parents with stressed-out children in high-SES homes, and sensitive, consistent parents with well-prepared children in low-SES homes. Obviously, making assumptions about kids and their home lives based on parents’ income or occupation is nothing more than stereotyping.

Key Findings

  • On average, kids from wealthy families do significantly better at school than kids from poor families.
  • Students from families with low socioeconomic status are exposed to chronic stress, which inhibits brain development and cognitive processing. It also hinders formation of memories, and therefore learning.
  • Teachers can alleviate some of the disadvantage faced by low-SES students by providing a calm and supportive learning environment.

More Detail

The background to socioeconomic status

On average, kids from wealthy families do significantly better at school than kids from poor families. This trend is true regardless of the proxy used to identify performance. Wealthier students are better performing in reading, writing, and can process more information via working memory.

Disadvantaged children face challenges that fall into two main categories: the lack of access to better learning opportunities; and being subject to chronic stress, which is destructive to learning.

While money is a route to opportunity, there are other types of capital that wealthier children benefit from: Human capital – skills and knowledge gained by personal experience, and social capital – having beneficial connections in social networks (including those with high human capital that can be passed on).

Financial, human, and social capital are interconnected and often reinforce and increase each other. It requires financial capital to study and university, for example, and doing so increases human capital while providing opportunity to also increase social capital.

We can broadly group these terms into the composite measure of socioeconomic status. Family investment and stress models are the two main lenses through which the effects of socioeconomic status (SES) on student outcomes are researched.

Family investment

Beyond the obvious consequences of lack of access to money, being born into low-SES affects the outcomes of students in subtle and compounding ways.

Disadvantage begins before birth, with low-SES mothers being more likely to give birth to underweight babies, an identified risk factor for impaired cognitive development. Low-SES babies are also more likely to suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome.

Once born, low-SES babies have overall poorer health, which has a lasting impact on educational outcomes, in particular by leading to higher rate of absence. This has a particularly bad impact on low-SES students because they benefit from being in school more than their wealthier peers.

Students from low-SES backgrounds are more likely to live in substandard housing, further exposing them to physical health problems. They’re also more likely to share a bedroom and live in more crowded, noisy conditions, which reduces ability to concentrate and impacts cognition.

Low-SES students are also less exposed to social and human capital than high-SES students, receiving less attention, being talked to less, and being read to less at home.

Their parents are more likely to work longer hours and therefore be physically present less frequently. All of these factors lead to a gap developing in level of cognition between high- and low-SES children. This process starts from infancy and continues throughout education.

Stress theories

Low-SES families suffer more stress than mid- or high-SES families. This is mainly due to the circumstances of the family investment gap experienced by low-SES families.

Among other factors, low-SES families are more likely to experience stress related to either going hungry, or being uncertain that they’ll have enough food in the coming month.

Chronic stress affects students from low-SES backgrounds in two ways: firstly, chronic stress has long-term negative consequences on brain development and cognitive performance. Secondly, chronic stress leads to harsher and more inconsistent parenting.

This combination of being stressed and being exposed to others with chronic stress leads to changes in both the anatomy of the brain, as well as the ways in which the brain deals with stress. The effects of stress are most pronounced in young children, and can have long-lasting impacts on the way the brain develops emotionally.

There is also evidence that stressful episodes affect children’s cognitive abilities, by blocking the formation of new memories (a key aspect of learning taught material). Longer term, the suffering of chronic stress as a child leads to reduced working memory capacity as an adult.

Again, these factors lead to a widening of the attainment gap between low- and high-SES students. Whereas low-SES students are continually exposed to stress, which is compounded at home, typically high-SES parents buffer the impacts of their children’s stressful experiences, reducing the longer-term effect.

Implications for teachers

There is a difficult balance faced by teachers: to recognise the challenges faced by students from low-SES backgrounds, but not to use them as a reason to lower expectations for attainment or behaviour. High-expectations are not an additional source of stress if coupled with high levels of support.

Knowing that a child’s neighbourhood might be noisy, crowded, and threatening makes the creation of a serene, joyful classroom all the more important.

Teachers must offer low-SES students the environment they are missing at home. They must pass on both human and social capital by demonstrating academic knowledge and modelling interactions with others. This must be delivered in a calm and controlled environment, and taught both implicitly and explicitly.

Providing children with a supportive and consistent learning environment in the classroom can lower levels of stress hormones and make cognition possible for all students, regardless of their background or the challenges they face.

Conclusion

Students from low-SES backgrounds face many challenges in terms of financial, human and social capital, and are disadvantaged by both family investments and exposure to chronic stress.

Teachers can alleviate some of this stress by providing a calm and supportive environment, while demonstrating high standards, and passing on human and social capital both explicitly and implicitly.

Finally, we are reminded by Willingham:

We should keep in the forefront of our minds that the trends discussed here are exactly that – trends. There are harsh, inconsistent parents with stressed-out children in high-SES homes, and sensitive, consistent parents with well-prepared children in low-SES homes. Obviously, making assumptions about kids and their home lives based on parents’ income or occupation is nothing more than stereotyping.