In 1848, the education reformer Horace Mann called public schooling “the great equalizer of the conditions of men.” More than 175 years later, education scholars are still arguing about whether he was right.
Some research finds that a child’s family background shapes their academic achievement far more than schools do. Other work finds that schools narrow academic achievement gaps that would otherwise be even wider.
A classic study following Baltimore children in the 1980s found that low-income and wealthier kids learned at similar rates during the school year. Achievement gaps grew over the summer, when some children read with parents, visited libraries and went to camp, while others didn’t have those same opportunities. How much summer learning loss exists is still an open question.
But the larger point holds: Gaps between rich and poor children in reading and math skills are already large on the first day of kindergarten, driven by factors outside of K-12 schooling. For a given group of students, those gaps then stay about the same size through the school years.
I am a scholar of education policy who studies the different factors that shape students’ learning, including teachers and the quality of their instruction.
Instead of measuring how much students learn at school, as is often the case, my colleagues and I recently measured what students receive in and out of school: the school funding, education support services and time that schools, government programs and families put into each child.
By some measures, schools really are an equalizer for children from different backgrounds – but this finding has its limits.
A gap that starts early in childhood
In our 2026 study, we combined data from 10 nationally representative government surveys to track 77 kinds of investments, as we call them, that contribute to raising and educating children. This includes teachers, tutoring, housing, food and childcare. We also measured factors that don’t have a direct cost, such as the time parents and caregivers spend reading with children.
We put a dollar value on each factor – valuing parents’ time at the average U.S. hourly wage, for example – so we could add them up and compare what children from different backgrounds receive.
Counting government investment, family spending and the time parents spend with their children, the average child in the U.S. receives about US$502,000 from birth to age 18, our analysis shows.
The gaps in how much different children receive start early.
Before age 5, children from the poorest fourth of families receive about $44,000 less in total investments than children from the richest fourth – marking a gap of 24%.
Most of that early difference comes from housing and childcare costs.
However, a striking pattern emerges as children transition into elementary school. The gap in total investment between the richest and poorest children is cut in half, from 24% to 12%.
For Black children, the benefit of starting school is even greater. Investment gaps between Black and white children shrink from 20% in early childhood years to 7% once kindergarten begins.
This matters because research shows that more school spending improves students’ achievement and long-term outcomes, especially for those from low-income families.
So why don’t achievement gaps close during the school years?
Catching up vs. getting ahead
Part of the answer is what money buys.
Our research shows that once children are in school, those from the lowest-income families receive 72% more in tutoring and 68% more in special education than those from the highest-income families, and Black children receive more than twice as much tutoring as white children.
These services are meant to help students catch up. A dollar spent catching up is not the same as a dollar spent getting ahead.
Tutoring has long been one of schools’ main catch-up tools, and since the pandemic, schools have leaned on it more than ever. It’s a reasonable bet. Studies that randomly assign students to tutoring find some of the largest test-score gains of any school program.
Schools serving many low-income students have long been able to use federal Title I money for tutoring. Pandemic relief money made a bigger push possible. Congress sent schools nearly $190 billion, and the largest round was divided among districts the same way as Title I money, so high-poverty districts got more.
By 2022-23, more than a third of public schools offered “high-dosage” tutoring, meaning frequent sessions in small groups. Schools serving more low-income students and students of color were more likely to offer it.
But for many low-income, Black and Latino students, tutoring wasn’t new.
In our data, collected from 2014 to 2021, about 17% of school-age children were being tutored, including 25% of Black children and 19% of Latino children, compared with 14% of white children. For Black, Latino and low-income children who received tutoring, over 75% got that support from public schools.
Early in the recovery, at least, the share of students getting tutoring didn’t appear to grow much. A nationally representative survey of parents in fall 2022 found about 15% of students were being tutored.
Meanwhile, the pandemic widened achievement gaps. Students in high-poverty districts still trail those in wealthier districts by more than students in the same grades did before the pandemic. Schools leaned harder on catch-up help that low-income, Black and Latino students were already getting. Federal relief money did help high-poverty districts recover. But even with that help, gaps remain wider than before the pandemic.
Who gets ahead
Catch-up help is only half the picture. Wealthier children also get more of the resources that help them pull ahead, in school and out.
Some studies show, for example, that low-income students and students of color are more likely than richer, white students to have newer, less experienced teachers. Our study documents the same pattern.
The differences are even starker outside of school.
In our data, wealthier families invest far more in music lessons, sports and other activities that can help kids get ahead.
Related research shows that by 2024, the richest 10% of families spent more than 13 times as much per child as the poorest quarter on childcare, education and extracurricular activities – up from about three times as much in the early 1980s.
Equal spending isn’t enough
Our findings show that public education is the main reason the investment gap between rich and poor children shrinks once kids turn 5.
But equal spending is not equal opportunity. Much of the extra school spending on low-income, Black and Latino children goes to making up for gaps that opened before they started school. Meanwhile, wealthier children keep getting more of the experienced teachers and enrichment that help them pull ahead.
If schools are going to be a true equalizer – closing gaps, not just keeping them from growing – more catch-up help won’t be enough on its own. These students also need more of what helps their wealthier peers get ahead. And because the widest gaps open before kindergarten – in housing and childcare, where public support is thinnest – closing them can’t be left to schools alone.
David Blazar, Malen Professor for Urban Education Policy, University of Maryland
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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