So much public policy – especially the stinginess of social safety nets – is based on deep-seated beliefs that if only poor people would embark upon self-improvement, they'd have more money and could provide more economically stable lives for their children.
A core belief in this rhetoric is that too many poor children are raised in single family homes and single parent homes are inherently harmful to children.
Jill Barshay of the Hechinger Report just analyzed federal data on school achievement and family structure. There are correlations between family structure and doing well in school. But Barshay went a step further than most researchers and disaggregated the data by income.
And she found very different effects of faculty composition for low-income and higher income children, but not in the ways that policy makers often assume.
Among low-income households, she found no difference in the school achievement of children in two-parent or single-parent households.
Among low-income students, achievement differs little by family structure. Fourth- and eighth-grade students from low-income households score at roughly the same level whether they live with both parents or with only one parent. Two-parent households do not confer a measurable academic advantage in this group. Fourth-grade reading is a great example. Among the socioeconomic bottom third of students, those who live with both parents scored a 199. Those who live with just mom scored 200. The results are almost identical and, if anything, a smidge higher for the kids of single moms.
Yet middle- and upper- income children living in a single-parent households did have lower school achievement levels,
As socioeconomic status rises, however, differences by family structure become more pronounced. Among middle- and high-income students, those living with both parents tend to score higher than their peers living with only one parent. The gap is largest among the most affluent students. In fourth grade reading, for example, higher-income kids who live with both parents scored a 238, a whopping 10 points higher than their peers who live with only their moms. Experts argue over the meaning of a NAEP point, but some equate 10 NAEP points to a school year’s worth of learning. It’s substantial.
Below the income levels that families need to feed and house and clothe children, family structure is not the primary stressor on children. Multiple states have refused to raise their minimum wage to levels at which families working full-time can earn enough to live on. Whether single or two-parent household, what benefits low-income children the most is economic security, yet families cannot provide stable housing and food at the minimum wage in many states. And financial safety nets are kept low to encourage people into those very low-wage jobs.
Barshay's analysis is an excellent example of how assumptions about poor families drive decisions about how data will be collected and analyzed. Essentially, if you don't look for effects of income because you assume personal "lifestyle" factors, you only see effects of "lifestyle".
It's also an excellent example of how given the long-standing opposition to ensuring that all children live in homes with with stable and sufficient incomes, policy makers instead will find ways to blame and shame low-income parents for harming their own children. The powerful have long believed that their personal beliefs should dictate the resources that low-income parents can access to raise their children.
Rather than learning how to shape a more equitable policy landscape as educated citizens, many first-generation students are instead praised for being personally "resilient" in the face of "challenges" and encouraged to be inspirational role models to their own communities as the means to lift up friends and neighbors.
What if much of the research and programming for first-generation students that focuses on students' personal qualities and personal academic and social growth also reflect the unchallenged assumptions of more powerful gatekeepers?
What if the implicit messaging across this programming is that structural class inequalities and classism are irrelevant beyond their potential for building students' character and "resiliency", leaving students to blame themselves for just not being resilient enough when they struggle? What if the absence of discourse about classism on campus, like the discourse about racism or sexism or homophobia and disablism means they're left on their own to figure out if the classism they experience is actually valid criticism of their flaws?
What if those untested beliefs about supporting students' personal growth within a presumably welcoming institution mean we're missing the importance of proactively providing students with material resources? Or we're missing the potential of advocacy through teaching the entire campus to understand class inequalities and classism? What if we could make a deeper difference than donuts and motivational speakers might offer students?
How would we know, if caring, well-intended researchers aren't asking the questions about what students might need, beyond encouragement and applause for their personal self-improvement?
