Inequality is Everyone’s Problem

We don’t have to wait until kindergarten to begin breaking down socioeconomic inequalities. Education, the great equalizer, is the best defense against intergenerational poverty. The earlier formal education begins, the better the odds of breaking the cycle. That’s what researchers, including a Nobel laureate economist, have found from decades of studies on children in high-poverty areas who are exposed to high-quality early education programs.¹ This finding is not surprising since the swiftest progress in a child’s intellectual and social development occurs in the early years of life. The key to sustaining the benefits of early education is for children to move from good early education programs straight into good elementary schools and on to good middle schools and high schools.

Anyone concerned about inequality has to be troubled by the state of public education. Year after year, schools fail to adequately educate millions of children, leaving them unprepared to compete in the workforce for anything but low-wage jobs. The temptation is to put the blame on parents and the children themselves. But government shares a responsibility to make it possible for all Americans to participate in the economy. Educating children in low-income communities is an ambitious task that no one would describe as easy. In low-income neighborhoods, where children are already suffering from inequalities, schools should be the last bastion of hope. Unfortunately, schools largely appear to be mirroring the inequalities around them.

Everyone stands to benefit by improving the quality of public education. A 2009 report by McKinsey & Company, The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools, estimates that in 2008, if students from families with incomes below $25,000 a year had performed as well academically as students from homes with incomes above this threshold, GDP would have been $400 billion to $670 billion higher. That’s 3 to 5 percent of the nation’s GDP foregone.² Closing the international achievement gap, according to the report, would be worth up to an additional $1 trillion to the U.S. economy. “In other words,” state the authors, “the educational achievement gaps in the United States have created the equivalent of a permanent, deep recession in terms of the gap between actual and potential output in the economy.”³

Issues