Other studies have also shown that the harmful effects of relative poverty on children’s cognitive development become more severe when their families remain in poverty for longer periods. Data from the Millennium Cohort Study in the UK showed not only that children in poverty had lower cognitive development scores at three, five and seven years old, but that the longer they lived in poverty, the more marked the effects were.289 The evidence that the more time families spend in relative poverty, the worse the effects on the cognitive development of children has been clear from numerous studies for well over twenty years.290, 291 Family income has been found to be a more powerful determinant of children’s level of cognitive development at age three than either maternal depression or whether children are brought up by single parents, married or cohabiting parents.292
The ways in which poverty damages development seem to be mediated by stress and lack of mental stimulation. A study which measured levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the saliva of infants of seven months, fifteen months and two years old, found that the cognitive deficit of poor children was closely related to their cortisol levels, indicating that the effects of poverty were transmitted by stress.293 In another study, researchers measured the mental stimulation children received, their parents’ parenting style, the quality of the physical environment and the child’s health. They found that these factors completely accounted for the effects of poverty on cognitive development.294 Confirming the role of stimulation, it has been shown repeatedly that if children from poor families are enrolled in parental and child support services such as Early Head Start in the US, children’s performance improves and some of the effects of poverty are offset.295
When parents’ ability to provide a nurturing and stimulating environment for development is compromised by their experiences of inequality, then children miss out on some of the essential building blocks for development and later educational attainment. Figure 6.2 shows that children growing up in professional families in the USA hear a vastly richer vocabulary during their early years than children in working-class families or families receiving benefits.
Figure 6.2: Children from families receiving welfare benefits and in working-class families hear fewer words than children in professional families.296, 297
Perhaps the most striking illustration of how educational inequalities are a consequence of socio-economic inequalities, rather than a cause, comes from a series of studies of UK children that tracks educational performance over time, comparing high and low achievers from different social backgrounds. The most recent of these studies is shown in Figure 6.3.298 It compares the educational performance of children from more and less deprived backgrounds over time. Their progress is charted from their initial test results at age seven (shown as high, average and low on the left), and, moving rightwards, tracking their subsequent performance at ages eleven, fourteen, sixteen, eighteen and then at university.
Regardless of whether their initial scores are high, medium or low, the gap between the performance of children from the most and the least deprived backgrounds (the gap between the continuous and the dashed lines) widens as they get older. Children from the least deprived families either maintain their initial high relative position, or improve their average or low scores. Education enhances their performance. In contrast, the relative performance of children from deprived backgrounds who initially achieved a high or average score, declines over time. Deprivation makes so much difference that children from the least deprived backgrounds whose performance at age seven was only average or low, overtake – or at least catch up with – children who initially performed better than them but came from deprived backgrounds. And we should keep in mind that by age seven, when the graph in Figure 6.3 starts, family background has already had major effects on children’s cognitive development.289
In summary, Figure 6.3 shows that family background trumps what people continue to regard as ‘natural’ ability in accounting for children’s educational performance over time. An OECD study of resilience showed that in some countries, up to 70 per cent of poor children are educationally resilient, whereas in the UK less than a quarter of children manage to exceed expectations based on family socio-economic circumstances.299 Taken together with Figure 6.3, it is clear that differences in cognitive development and intelligence are the consequence of inequality rather than its cause.
Figure 6.3: How family background shapes educational performance over time.298
INEQUALITY AFFECTS TEACHERS TOO
The evidence that family poverty affects children’s intellectual development is incontrovertible, and refutes the notion that some people are born bright and others stupid and there is not much that can be done about it. Although we know that everyone’s cognitive performance can be increased, schools often become instruments of social sorting as differences in infant ability are widened further until they become the basis for the occupational and class differences of adulthood.
Researchers at the University of Bristol compared the marks given by classroom teachers with those given in national tests marked remotely by people unaware of who they were marking.300 They found that children from poor neighbourhoods were consistently given worse grades by their teachers, compared to children from more affluent neighbourhoods. Black children were also systematically marked down by their teachers, while children of Indian and Chinese origin tended to be marked upwards. The researchers interpreted these findings as an indication of unconscious stereotyping by ethnicity and class, and found that discriminatory marking was most pronounced in the areas with fewer black or poor children. This phenomenon, where children do better or worse depending on their teachers’ expectations of them, is known as the ‘Pygmalion effect’ and has been consistently reported in studies from the late 1960s onwards.301, 302 Nor is it confined to rich countries like the USA and the UK; a recent study in India found that teachers gave lower scores to exam papers they believed to come from lower-caste children.303 The point is not to criticize teachers, but to highlight our subconscious perceptions.
Social class has been called the ‘zombie stalking English schools’ by Professor Diane Reay of the University of Cambridge, who argues that social class issues have never been adequately addressed within education.304 Efforts to widen participation in higher education have benefitted the middle class more than poorer children,305 who were too often seen as ‘inadequate learners with inadequate cultural backgrounds’. In the study examining the experience of poverty in different countries mentioned in Chapter 5, interviewees often experienced school as ‘an instrument of social grading’.253 In numerous papers, and in her recent book, Miseducation,306 Reay describes how many working-class children have a sense of educational worthlessness, and feel that they are not valued or respected within their schools. They feel that teachers look down on them, make them look stupid and treat them as dumb. Too often teacher-training courses are not geared towards enabling trainees to think about social class, socio-economic position and inequality in relation to education. Schools, classrooms and overstretched teachers are expected to overcome educational inequalities in spite of the social context of poverty and inequality, which they are powerless to address. As Reay concludes: ‘We cannot rely on serendipity, the fortuitous chance that teachers will educate themselves about the importance of social class in schooling, that they will have knowledge and understanding of the different class cultures of the children in their classes.’304
Decades of research show that low socio-economic status predicts a ‘wide array of health, cognitive and socio-emotional outcomes in children’.307 Researchers have shown that if children are already behind in terms of school readiness and cognitive development when they start school, then unfavourable educational outcomes are much more likely, in spite of good schooling.308-313 And the challenge for individual life trajectories and well-being is compounded by the fact that when children are not ready for school, this puts the school and all its pupils, as well as each deprived child, at
a disadvantage.
STEREOTYPE THREAT
Children’s development is not affected just by what the outside world does to them, whether through poverty or the social grading they might experience in school. There are also signs of processes that look almost like self-stigmatization. We described in Chapter 1 how status differentiation – the awareness of how other people perceive your status – affects the body, mind and emotions. We also saw how tasks that involve ‘social evaluative threat’ (threats to self-esteem or social status) are especially stressful.58 The Spirit Level included a study showing how children’s aptitude for solving puzzles was affected by status differentiation. In an experiment published by the World Bank, a group of eleven- to twelve-year-old Indian boys from high and low castes were able to solve mazes equally well before they knew each other’s caste. But as soon as the caste of the participants was made known, the lower-caste children did much less well and a large gap opened up between the performance of the groups.314 There are now several hundred, mostly experimental, studies of this process.315, 316 They show that people perform less well on tests when they are made even subtly more aware that they belong to a group stereotypically regarded as performing poorly in the test area, or when the task is made to appear more challenging to their abilities in an area in which they are typically regarded as less able. For example, low socio-economic status children performed less well when told that tests were a measure of intelligence rather than just a ‘general test’.317 Similar processes have been shown to affect the performance of African American schoolchildren and college students.318 When black and white students were given tests that they were told were measures of intelligence, the black students did much less well than when they were told it was a questionnaire designed to identify psychological factors involved in problem solving. The belief that their intelligence was being tested provoked their awareness of stereotyped perceptions of African Americans.
Gender stereotyping has also been shown to affect the performance of women. After women were ‘primed’ by being shown TV commercials selected for their gender stereotyping, they were more likely to prefer the verbal options to the maths questions in an aptitude test, and were less likely to favour quantitative educational and career options.319 Other studies have found that old people perform less well on memory tests when they are made more concerned about the effects of ageing on memory.320
To see if similar effects could be induced even when there was no general stereotype, an experiment compared maths-test scores of two groups of white men, all of whom were particularly good at maths. One group was told that the test was to help understand why whites tended to do less well than Asians on particular test questions. Despite the lack of a prior stigmatizing stereotype, this was enough of a threat to lead to poorer performance.321
Much of the effect of stereotype threat seems to result from additional anxiety, which reduces attention and mental capacity for the task at hand. This seems to be stronger among people who are more self-conscious about their stigmatized status and among those for whom the area being tested is important to their identity.322 African Americans, for example, were found to have higher blood pressure than European Americans in response to a stereotype threat involving intelligence tests.323 Studies have found that the working memory capacity of people under stereotype threat is reduced by factors such as increased physiological stress, monitoring their performance more and trying to suppress negative thoughts – all of which impair task performance.324, 325
Studies like these reveal our sensitivity to status differences and show why they are so powerful and so damaging – actually increasing people’s conformity with the stereotypes. They help to explain why the early effects of family income on children’s cognitive development are so difficult to eradicate during their school life and careers.
The evidence in this chapter shows how mistaken it is to see the social hierarchy as a reflection of natural differences in people’s abilities. There are differences in ability between people at different levels in the social hierarchy, but those differences are more the product of that hierarchy than the source of it. The idea that the success of a society depends on identifying natural talents early, and hot-housing those who possess them as if they were a rare natural resource, is almost the opposite of the truth. Educational systems that separate out the more and less talented children as if the differences between them were set in stone, do so on the basis of a fundamental misunderstanding. We should instead be removing the causes of underperformance to maximize the talents and abilities of the whole population.
The research papers on the effects of poverty discussed earlier in this chapter are concerned with the effects of relative poverty, defined in terms of the incomes elsewhere in society and usually measured as below 60 per cent of the national median income. The effects those papers showed were not confined just to the poor. Typically the poor do least well, but each layer in the income hierarchy tends to do less well than those above it. So the study which showed that the volume of grey matter grew more slowly among children from poor families, also showed that the gap between children in high- and middle-income families was just as big as that between children from poor and middle-income families. Similarly, in Figure 6.2 we saw not only that children in families receiving state income support hear fewer words – less conversation – than those in working-class families, but also that those in working-class families hear less than children in professional families. The issue is not simply how the poor do compared to everyone else, but that people do less well at each step down the social hierarchy from top to bottom.
The underlying issue is, as we saw in the last chapter, our human sensitivity to social status and rank. The central issue in this chapter has been whether the differences in ability, talent and intelligence, which people see as giving rise to the social pyramid, are innate or whether they come from the differences in class and income that influence our circumstances: the evidence points strongly to the latter. In the following section we will see the evidence that a range of outcomes, crucial to child development and education, are worse in countries where bigger income differences increase the influence of status on all.
‘AND WORSE WITH MORE INEQUALITY …’
Figure 6.4 shows that countries with bigger income differences have, as we would expect, bigger differences in children’s educational performance, as measured by literacy scores (the same relationship is shown for twenty countries in an OECD report of 2014326). This is powerful evidence of the effect of social status differences on educational performance. The larger the income differences, the more strongly children’s educational performance is marked by status differences.
Figure 6.4: Income inequality is related to a wider gap in educational attainment among adults.327
Bigger income differences in a society not only make inequalities in educational performance larger, they also lower the average levels of educational attainment for children across the whole society. We showed in a paper published in the Lancet in 2006 that the national average performance of countries on the 2003 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests of maths and reading literacy was significantly related to a measure of income inequality among rich nations (Figure 6.5).328 And in The Spirit Level, we showed the same thing for educational attainment of eighth graders (thirteen- to fourteen-year-olds) in relation to income inequality among the fifty states of the USA.
Income inequality affects the educational standards of whole societies because bigger income differences depress performance at each step down the social ladder. The data show that the relationship between income inequality and educational outcomes spans the economic spectrum, worsening the performance of a large majority of children. The differences in educational attainment are, however, most marked at the bottom of the social ladder: that is where inequality does most damage. A crucial influence on average performance – on national levels of achievement – is the steepness of the social gradient, and it is
this which is increased by bigger income differences.
Figure 6.5: Maths and literacy scores tend to be higher in more equal rich countries.328
This pattern has been demonstrated for a set of developed countries by the OECD and Statistics Canada.327 When countries were grouped by income inequality, literacy scores of fifteen-year-olds not only tended to be higher in the more equal countries, but nearly all socio-economic groups in those countries had scores above the international average: the social gradient in literacy was shallower in the more equal countries. A 2013 report from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) showed a similar pattern of social gradients in adult literacy.329 And a 2010 OECD analysis of PISA literacy scores in sixty-five countries again showed that the gradients in performance among children (classified by their parents’ socio-economic status) tended to be steeper in more unequal countries.330
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