A few months ago, the Census Bureau
released data based on a relatively new, more sophisticated measure of
poverty. The old measure had been in place since the 1960’s and did
not account for the realities of today’s living expenses. The new measure
considers housing, medical, and child care costs and does a much better job
adjusting for support received through federal assistance programs.
In areas with high costs of
living like California and Hawaii, the new
measure classified substantially more residents as poor, while the reverse was
often true in areas with lower costs of living.
This new measure is by no means
perfect, and it certainly does not do anything directly to help poor families
in the U.S. But this measure may allow policy analysts to better assess
the needs of American families and the relative effectiveness of safety net
programs. The change is solely on paper, but it is an important change
nonetheless.
The K-12 education sector is long
overdue for improvements in how it routinely measures the social background of
children. More often than not, a student’s participation in the free and
reduced school lunch program and his or her LEP status are the only available
indicators of family background. Although additional indicators are
sometimes collected for research or special programs and assessments, free/reduced lunch and LEP tend to be the only measures that
are available for all schools in regular enrollment data.
Free/reduced
lunch is a lousy indicator of
socioeconomic status for a couple of reasons. First, it classifies all
students into just one of three categories (free lunch, reduced lunch, no lunch
support), losing valuable detail in the process. With this approach, a
family of four making $28,000 per year will be indistinguishable from a family
of four making $14,000 per year, as both would be classified as free lunch.
Second, free/reduced lunch is based on income primarily, and income by
itself is not a very good indicator of social class. In Class and
Schools, Richard Rothstein points out how the use of income via free/reduced lunch as the
primary measure of socioeconomic status can lead to the misrepresentation of
some schools’ populations. One school that was nationally
recognized as being both high poverty and high performing was actually a public
school where many Harvard and MIT graduate students sent their children.
True, graduate students don’t make much money, but few sociologists would
regard this group as a high needs population.
Social scientists have used hundreds
if not thousands of different indicators to measure class and socioeconomic
status, and the measures will often vary depending on available data.
However, a handful of variables emerge more often than the rest, due to
both availability and their quality as predictors of outcomes in the social
sector. If I had to pick a single variable to add alongside family income,
parental educational attainment would be a good choice. A common way of representing SES in richer datasets is
to combine information on income, parent education, and occupational status or
occupational prestige (e.g.). While converting occupational status into a number can
be tricky, it’s a bit more straightforward for parental education levels. In
many cases, measures of parent education are even reduced to maternal
educational attainment due to the prevalence of single-parent households.
Thinking back to the Boston public school that enrolls the children of Harvard
and MIT Ph.D. students, it is easy to see how a combination of income and
parental education levels would give you a much more accurate sense of the
average socioeconomic status of some families.
I am not a lawyer, and I don’t know
what legal justification the feds or states would need to collect additional
personal information from parents; but, from a researcher’s perspective,
the case is easy to make. The link between social background and academic
achievement is well established, but the debate over the extent to which these links
should influence educational policy continues. Achievement gaps
between racial and socioeconomic groups remain large, and school segregation
along these lines may be getting worse. Meanwhile, wage, wealth, and
income inequality in the U.S. continues to worsen, as it has been doing since
the mid 1970’s. In this context, there is substantial need for better
measures of students’ social background, particularly given the shortcomings of
current measures.
Moreover, the weaknesses of
free/reduced lunch as a socioeconomic indicator are not just an inconvenience
for researchers these days. For better or worse, many states and
districts are now using statistical models to influence the retention, tenure,
and promotion decisions of teachers. Better background variables on
students may help improve these models. With all of these factors in
mind, one could make the case that looking beyond free/reduced lunch is not
only in the best interest of federal and state departments of education but
also that it is their responsibility to do so.
The prospects for healthcare reform may be chillier than DC weather, but Democrats in the House and Senate are turning their attention to another warmer but still significant national issue: the increasing number of runaway and throwaway youth who are being forced into prostitution. In response to the growing concerns that desperate, runaway teens will be forced into prostitution in a sluggish economy, Congress is pushing several bills to improve how runaway kids are tracked by the police, fund crucial social services, and prevent teens from being caught in sex trafficking. Here's the gist of what the new legislation is trying to accomplish:
No comments:
Post a Comment