Impact of educational opportunities for children
The number of educational opportunities that children accrue as they mature is strongly linked to their educational attainment and earnings in early adulthood, according to new research led by co-author Eric Dearing, executive director of Boston College’s Mary E. Walsh Center for Thriving Children, and a professor in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development.
The results indicate that the large opportunity gaps between low- and high-income households from birth through the end of high school—at home, in early education and care, at school, in afterschool programs, and in their communities—largely explain differences in educational and income achievement between students from different backgrounds.
Eric Dearing (Caitlin Cunningham)
These findings are derived from a 26-year longitudinal study published in Educational Researcher, a peer-reviewed journal from the American Educational Research Association (AERA). The research team led by Dearing is the first to directly document opportunities and opportunity gaps as they accrue across early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence in multiple key areas of child development.
Using a 12-point index of opportunities, the authors found that approximately two-thirds of children from low-income households experience no more than one opportunity between birth and high school. Most high-income youth experience six or more opportunities.
The strength of the relationship between opportunities and early adult outcomes was strongest for low-income children. Moving from zero to four opportunities increased the odds of low-income children graduating from a four-year college from approximately 10 percent to 50 percent and increased annual salaries by about $10,000 per year.
The authors found that the opportunity gap was a more powerful predictor of educational attainment than early childhood poverty.
“For the first time, we are able to directly measure how large opportunity gaps are and how seriously they impact outcomes of low- and high-income students,” said Dearing. “These gaps are very large and appear to be a primary explanation for large gaps in attainment for children born into low- versus high-income households.”
The study was part of the National Institutes of Health’s NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, in which 814 children from low-, middle-, and high-income families were followed from birth through age 26 with frequent gold standard measurements of their developmental contexts and experiences from early childhood through adolescence, between 1991 and 2017.
For educational institutions and their leaders, Dearing stressed that educational initiatives that tackle children’s lives inside and outside of the classroom offer uniquely powerful chances to narrow cumulative opportunity gaps.
“Beyond what schools are able to do, narrowing gaps in attainment will likely require comprehensive public policies that offer systemic changes to the children’s chances of educational opportunities,” he said.
In addition to Dearing, the research was conducted by Andres S. Bustamante, an associate professor at the University of California-Irvine School of Education; Professor Henrik D. Zachrisson, Center for Research on Equality in Education at the University of Oslo; and Deborah Lowe Vandell, a Chancellor’s Professor of Education Emerita at the UCal-Irvine School of Education.