A new report on the nation’s achievement gap landed this week with an eye-popping claim that the educational divide costs the U.S. economy more than $1 trillion and new concerns about how early students fall behind.
The persistence of these educational achievement gaps imposes on the United States the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession. – “The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools.” If the United States had in recent years closed the gap between its educational achievement levels and those of better-performing nations such as Finland and Korea, GDP in 2008 could have been $1.3 trillion to $2.3 trillion higher.
Perhaps the McKinsey & Co. report’s most interesting findings for early learning professionals were on how prominent the achievement gap is in third and fourth grades.
Tests as early as fourth grade are powerful predictors of future achievement and life outcomes. For example, 87 percent of fourth grade students scoring in the bottom quartile on New York City math achievement tests remained in the bottom half in eighth grade. Students who scored in the top quartile in math in eighth grade had a 40 percent higher median income 12 years later than students who scored in the bottom quartile…
But, researchers offered hope, saying students who could improve between third grade and eighth grade, “are much more likely to graduate with Honors…”
This means that while some students may have different starting points than others, reaching low-achieving students in the early years of their education can have a tremendous impact on their life outcomes.
This analysis will resonate with many working in early learning, but it raises two critical questions: When does the achievement gap start – many in the early learning community might argue in the womb – and how can we define it in similar terms for students in pre-kindergarten through second grade? Many in the early learning community already regularly point to research that says that children who start school behind often stay behind or have a very hard time catching up.
“Early learning was a critical piece in all of our achievement gap reports,” said Erin Jones, director of our state’s Center for the Improvement of Student Learning. “Students who are not reading by third grade are much more likely to drop out and then much more likely to become involved in the prison system. One of our panelists, Dr. Ron Ferguson of Harvard University, said that children of all races generally score about the ‘same level’ when they’re assessed as one-year olds. But by the time they reach school age – only four years later – we can see visible gaps in their learning. That evidence alone demonstrates the crucial need for high-quality learning opportunities for all children.
Though the report offers a tough judgment of the nation’s education system, it also gives teachers, lawmakers and advocates big payoffs for closing the education gap between rich and poor, including:
If the gap between low-income students and the rest had been similarly narrowed, GDP in 2008 would have been $400 billion to $670 billion higher, or 3 to 5 percent of GDP.
