Laura D'Andrea Tyson: Income Inequality and Educational Opportunity - NYTimes.com

Laura D'Andrea Tyson: Income Inequality and Educational Opportunity - NYTimes.com

According to the most recent census report, about one-quarter of children under the age of 6 live in poverty. Recent research shows that early childhood poverty has negative effects on brain development. At the age of 3, children in poverty have smaller vocabularies than their peers and a harder time sorting and organizing information and planning ahead.

Children in poor families are also less likely to have access to early-childhood education programs. Such programs have a proven record of raising future educational attainment levels, especially for poor children. Sadly, many states are slashing such programs, despite the fact that the funds dedicated to them earn an annual real rate of return of 10 percent or higher.

R-B people are usually chaotic so investment getting them off the floor can lead to dramatic growth and returns on investment. There is no equilibrium for them so they tend to either succeed or fail badly. 

Disparities in educational achievement among children from different income groups increase with age. Such gaps are larger in fifth grade than they are in kindergarten, and they continue to grow as children move through primary and secondary school.

As a result of residential segregation, children from low-income families are more likely to have classmates with low achievement levels and behavioral problems than children from affluent families. Poor children are also disproportionately situated in schools that often find it difficult to attract and retain skilled teachers. And as the Chicago teachers’ strike reminds us, poor children are often hungry, depending on their schools rather than their homes for breakfast and lunch.

Some communities are more Bi-Ro and act as teams to help their weaker members, this can overcome some of these problems bringing them up to a normal level around the center of their normal curve. 

The United States is caught in a vicious cycle largely of its own making. Rising income inequality is breeding more inequality in educational opportunity, which results in greater inequality in educational attainment. That, in turn, undermines the intergenerational mobility upon which Americans have always prided themselves and perpetuates income inequality from generation to generation.

An Iv-B economy creates extreme winners and losers, the winners when they crash might bump repeatedly against the ceiling like the 1% did after the GFC, the poor bump against the floor repeatedly rising a little then crashing into extreme poverty and crime. This underclass becomes more nomadic as R.

This dynamic all but guarantees a permanent underclass. Indeed, the process is already under way: An American child’s future income is already more dependent on his or her parents’ income than a child born in most other developed countries.