The Meritocracy Trap

by Daniel Markovits

  in order to care for their children: “Life and Leadership After HBS: Findings from Harvard Business School’s Alumni Survey on the Experiences of Its Alumni Across Career, Family, and Life Paths,” Harvard Business School (2015), 8, www.hbs.edu/women50/docs/L_and_L_Survey_2Findings_13final.pdf. Twenty-one percent of female Harvard Business School graduates aged thirty-one to sixty-six with two or more children care for their children full time, and 20 percent work only part-time. For data on women with MBAs from the University of Chicago, see Marianne Bertrand, Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence F. Katz, “Dynamics of the Gender Gap for Young Professionals in the Corporate and Financial Sectors,” NBER Working Paper 14681 (January 2009), www.nber.org/papers/w14681.pdf. Fully 50 percent of female Chicago MBAs with two or more children (and 48 percent with at least one child) no longer work full time ten years after getting their degrees. Anne Alstott and Emily Bazelon provided helpful discussion and references on this point.

  a “flight risk”: Williams, White Working Class, 55. See also Lauren Rivera and Andreas Tilcsik, “Research: How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on Your Resume,” Harvard Business Review, December 21, 2016.

  much less match: The phrase comes from Annette Lareau, who observes, “Middle-class parents who comply with current professional standards and engage in a pattern of concerted cultivation deliberately try to stimulate their children’s development. . . . The commitment among working-class and poor families to provide comfort, food, shelter, and other basic support . . . stops short of the deliberate cultivation of children and their leisure activities that occurs in middle-class families.” Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011), 5.

  read to their children: See Pew Research Center, “Parenting in America,” December 17, 2015, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/17/parenting-in-america. Hereafter cited as Pew Research Center, “Parenting in America.” For more information, see Claire Cain Miller, “Class Differences in Child-Rearing are on the Rise,” New York Times, December 17, 2015, accessed November 18, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/upshot/rich-children-and-poor-ones-are-raised-very-differently.html. Hereafter cited as Miller, “Class Differences in Child-Rearing.”

  take their children to art galleries: When asked whether they had taken their children to an art gallery, museum, or historical site in the past month, 15 percent of high-school-only parents, 25 percent of parents with a BA, and 30 percent of parents with a graduate or professional degree answered that they had. Amber Noel, Patrick Stark, Jeremy Redford, and Andrew Zukerberg, Parent and Family Involvement in Education, from the National Household Education Surveys Program of 2012, U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (June 2016), Table 6, https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013028rev.pdf.

  enroll them in arts classes: Miller, “Class Differences in Child-Rearing”; Pew Research Center, “Parenting in America,” 11.

  speak to their children more: Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, “The Early Catastrophe: The Thirty Million Word Gap,” Education Review 17, no. 1 (2003): 116. Hereafter cited as Hart and Risley, “The Early Catastrophe.” Hart and Risley analyzed data gathered in observations of forty-two families for one hour per month for thirty months and concluded that the average child in a family on welfare heard 616 words per hour, the average working-class child heard 1,251 words per hour, and the average child in a professional family heard 2,153 words per hour, extrapolating based on a fourteen-hour waking day over four years to thirteen million words heard by the average child in a family on welfare, twenty-six million by the average child in a working-class family, and forty-five million by the average child in a professional family. On the connection between early language exposure and wealth, see Kirp, The Sandbox Investment, 127–28.

  The rich also speak: Kathy Hirsh-Pasek et al., “The Contribution of Early Communication Quality to Low-Income Children’s Language Success,” Psychological Science 26 (June 25, 2015); Douglas Quenqua, “Quality of Words, Not Quantity, Is Crucial to Language Skills, Study Finds,” New York Times, October 16, 2014, accessed November 18, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/us/quality-of-words-not-quantity-is-crucial-to-language-skills-study-finds.html?_r=2.

  Three-year-old children: Hart and Risley, “The Early Catastrophe,” 113. Hart and Risely report the following average recorded vocabularies at three years: 1,116 words for a child in a professional family, 749 words for a child in a working-class family, and 525 words for a child in a family on welfare. Differences in vocabulary by socioeconomic status have been observed in children as young as eighteen months. Similarly, other researchers report that at eighteen months, children in lower-SES families had a mean vocabulary of 114 words, while children in higher-SES families had a mean vocabulary of 174 words; at twenty-four months, it was 288 words and 442 words. See Anne Fernald, Virginia A. Marchman, and Adriana Weisleder, “SES Differences in Language Processing Skill and Vocabulary Are Evident at 18 Months,” Developmental Science 16 (December 8, 2012): 240, Table 3.

  more quickly than the poor ones: John K. Niparko et al., “Spoken Language Development in Children Following Cochlear Implantation,” Journal of the American Medical Association 303 (April 21, 2010): 1505, Table 2; Ann E. Geers, “Predictors of Reading Skill Development in Children with Early Cochlear Implantation,” Ear and Hearing 24 (2003): 64S, Table 6; Sara Neufeld, “Baby Talk Bonanza,” Slate, September 27, 2013, accessed November 18, 2018, https://slate.com/technology/2013/09/childrens-language-development-talk-and-listen-to-them-from-birth.html.

  half as likely to spank: Pew Research Center, “Parenting in America”; Miller, “Class Differences in Child-Rearing.”

  more open affection: P. Lindsay Chase-Landsdale and Laura D. Pittman, “Welfare Reform and Parenting: Reasonable Expectations,” The Future of Children 12 (2002): 168–71. The article surveys research showing that six “dimensions of parenting” affect child outcomes: (1) warmth and responsiveness; (2) control and discipline; (3) cognitive stimulation; (4) modeling of attitudes, values, and behaviors; (5) gatekeeping; (6) family routines and traditions. It concludes that “low-income parents have been found to use less effective parenting strategies, including less warmth, harsher discipline, and less stimulating home environments.” For further discussion and analysis, see Stacey Aronson and Aletha Houston, “The Mother-Infant Relationship in Single, Cohabiting, and Married Families: A Case for Marriage?,” Journal of Family Psychology 18 (2004): 5–18; Vonnie McLoyd, “Socioeconomic Disadvantage and Child Development,” American Psychologist 53 (1998): 185–204; Toby Parcel and Elizabeth Menaghan, “Determining Children’s Home Environments: The Impact of Maternal Characteristics and Current Occupational and Family Conditions,” Journal of Marriage and Family 53, no. 2 (1991); Julia B. Isaacs, Starting School at a Disadvantage: The School Readiness of Poor Children, Center on Children and Families (Brookings Institution, 2012), www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/0319_school_disadvantage_isaacs.pdf.

  long-term academic achievement: See Paul Tough, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), xviii, reporting on Heckman’s work that GED recipients look like high school dropouts when measured by income, unemployment, divorce, drug use, and low college enrollment. For a more detailed analysis of Heckman’s study, see James J. Heckman, “The Economic and Social Benefits of GED Certification,” in The Myth of Achievements: The GED and the Role of Character in American Life, ed. James J. Heckman, John Eric Humphries, and Tim Kautz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Other researchers found that “observed levels of affection between mothers and their 8-month infants are associated with fewer symptoms of distress 30 years later among the offspring.” J. Maselko et al., “Mother’s Affection at 8 Months Predicts Emotional Distress in Adulthood,” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 65 (2001): 625–26. This is a new line of research, however, and at present “the link betwee
n [socioeconomic status] and emotional well-being is not as consistent as the link with cognitive attainment.” Robert H. Bradley and Robert F. Corwyn, “Socioeconomic Status and Child Development,” Annual Review of Psychology 53 (2002): 371, 377.

  attend preschool at twice the rate: W. Steven Barnett and Donald J. Yarosz, “Who Goes to Preschool and Why Does It Matter?,” National Institute for Early Education Research 15 (2007): 7, Figure 6. In 2005, the data were as follows. For children age three, around 35 percent of those with family incomes (FI) of less than $60,000 participated in preschool, 44 percent of those with FI between $60,000 and $75,000 did so, 52 percent of those with FI between $75,000 and $100,000 did so, and 71 percent of those with FI of $100,000 or greater did so. For children age four, around 60 percent of those with family incomes of less than $60,000 participated in preschool, 77 percent of those with FI between $60,000 and $75,000 did so, 84 percent of those with FI between $75,000 and $100,000 did so, and 89 percent of those with FI of $100,000 or greater did so. Compare Robert J. Gordon, “The Great Stagnation of American Education,” New York Times, September 7, 2013, accessed November 18, 2018, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/07/the-great-stagnation-of-american-education, and Timothy Noah, “The 1 Percent Are Only Half the Problem,” New York Times, May 18, 2013, accessed November 18, 2018, https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/18/the-1-percent-are-only-half-the-problem.

  $50,000 per year: Ethical Culture Fieldston School, “Tuition and Financial Aid,” October 30, 2018, https://www.ecfs.org/en/tuition-and-financial-aid/.

  pay the full price: Michael Hwang and Taisha Thompson, “Financial Aid Task Force Report,” Ethical Culture Fieldston School (2015) (unpublished document on file with author), 6. Hereafter cited as Hwang and Thompson, “Financial Aid Task Force Report.”

  between $100,000 and $149,000: Hwang and Thompson, “Financial Aid Task Force Report,” 8. The school reports that among the 21 percent of students who receive financial aid, 35 percent come from families with household incomes below $75,000. Hwang and Thompson, “Financial Aid Task Force Report,” 8. Assuming that all students with low household incomes get financial aid, this entails that only about 7 percent of students at Fieldston come from families with annual incomes below $75,000, which is still nearly one and a half times the national median.

  Fieldston is not more expensive or exclusive than other elite private schools. Indeed, Fieldston claims that “among the peer schools in New York, we rank second in percent of students on financial aid and percent of dollars allocated to financial aid relative to gross tuition.” Hwang and Thompson, “Financial Aid Task Force Report,” 6. Fees at Bank Street School were $48,444 for preschool in 2018–19. “Tuition & Financial Aid,” Bank Street School, https://school.bankstreet.edu/admissions/tuition-financial-aid/. Over 60 percent of students paid full tuition. Riverdale Country School costs $54,150 for preschool (2018–19). “Tuition and Fees,” Riverdale Country School, www.riverdale.edu/page.cfm?p=786. Approximately 80 percent of students pay full tuition. “Fast Facts: Financial Aid,” Riverdale Country School, www.riverdale.edu/page.cfm?p=521 [inactive]. And Avenues World School costs $54,000 for preschool (2018–19), and financial aid is not available for nursery or pre-kindergarten. “Tuition and Financial Aid,” Avenues World School, www.avenues.org/en/nyc/tuition-and-financial-aid.

  harder to get into than Harvard and Yale: For reports of admissions rates at elite preschools, see LearnVest, “Confessions of a Preschool Admissions Coach,” Huffington Post, June, 24, 2013, accessed November 18, 2018, www.huffingtonpost.com/learnvest/confessions-of-a-preschool-admissions-coach_b_3461110.html, and Emily Jane Fox, “How New York’s 1% Get Kids into Preschool,” CNN Money, June 19, 2014, accessed November 18, 2018, http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/10/luxury/preschool-new-york-city. The acceptance rates at Harvard and Yale were 5.4 and 6.3 percent respectively. “Admissions Statistics,” Harvard College, https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics; Jon Victor, “Yale Admits 6.27 Percent of Applicants,” Yale Daily News, March 31, 2016.

  might reach $6,000: This is the fee charged by Manhattan Private School Advisors. Andrew Marks, “Cracking the Kindergarten Code,” New York Magazine, accessed November 18, 2018, http://nymag.com/nymetro/urban/education/features/15141/.

  in order to impress on school visits: For a description of an educational consultancy practice, see “An Hereditary Meritocracy,” The Economist, January 22, 2015, www.economist.com/briefing/2015/01/22/an-hereditary-meritocracy. For more information, see also Kirp, The Sandbox Investment, and Liz Moyer, “The Most Expensive Preschools,” Forbes, September 17, 2007, accessed November 18, 2018, www.forbes.com/2007/09/18/education-preschool-kindergarden-biz-cx_lm_0919preschool.html#43c4e100763d.

  is largely fixed by age ten: James Heckman, “Schools, Skills, and Synapses,” Economic Inquiry 46, no. 3 (2008): 305–7. Heckman summarizes research showing that IQ scores become stable by age ten, that ability gaps between socioeconomic groups appear at a young age, and that interventions to correct them are more effective at a young age. For further analysis of fixed IQ scores, see James Heckman, “Lessons from the Bell Curve,” Journal of Political Economy 103, no. 5 (October 1995). Heckman writes, “The available evidence suggests that ability—or IQ—is not a fixed trait for the young. Sustained high-intensity investments in the education of young children, including parental activities such as reading and responding to children, stimulate learning and promote education, although they do not necessarily boost IQ by very much. The available evidence suggests that such interventions stimulate motivation and social performance in the early adult years even if they do not raise IQ” (1112).

  when children enter kindergarten: Sean F. Reardon, “The Widening Income Achievement Gap,” Educational Leadership 70, no. 8 (May 2013): 10–16. Reardon similarly writes that “children from rich and poor families score very differently on school readiness tests when they enter kindergarten, and this gap grows by less than 10 percent between kindergarten and high school.” Reardon, “No Rich Child Left Behind.”

  that their alumni eventually attend: For example, see “Fast Facts: Most Frequently Attended College/Universities by Recent Alumni,” Riverdale Country School, www.riverdale.edu/page.cfm?p=521 [inactive].

  perfect practice makes perfect: The phrase is commonly attributed to the football coach Vince Lombardi. For example, see David A. Sousa, How the Brain Learns (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2011), 105.

  roughly twenty-one, nineteen, and twenty-three months: The test score gaps between median children in the most and least elite deciles in mathematics, reading, and science literacy were 125, 116, and 132 points respectively. The test score gaps between the median children in most elite and middle-class groups in mathematics, reading, and science literacy were 69, 63, and 76 points respectively. OECD, PISA Codebook, PISA 2015 Database, www.oecd.org/pisa/data/2015database/Codebook_CMB.xlsx. Twenty points on the test amounts to a half year of schooling. See also Niall Ferguson, “The End of the American Dream? How Rising Inequality and Social Stagnation Are Reshaping Us for the Worse,” Newsweek, June 28, 2013, accessed November 18, 2018, www.newsweek.com/2013/06/26/niall-ferguson-end-american-dream-237614.html.

  already locked in: Julia B. Isaacs, “Starting School at a Disadvantage: The School Readiness of Poor Children,” Center on Children and Families at Brookings (March 2012), 3, Figures 1, 2. Isaacs reports that 52 percent of poor children score very low on one of five measures of school readiness, while only 25 percent of moderate- or high-income children do so; this includes 26 percent of poor children scoring very low on math skills and 30 percent scoring very low on reading skills, while only 7 percent of moderate- or high-income children score very low in either of those areas. She also shows that low maternal supportiveness has a significant negative effect on school readiness (Figure 7).

  active leisure: Richard V. Reeves, Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in t
he Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2017), 42. Hereafter cited as Reeves, Dream Hoarders. Reeves cites Phillips, “Parenting, Time Use, and Disparities in Academic Outcomes.”

  By the time she is eighteen: Rich children spend nearly thirteen hundred more hours in novel places between birth and age six than poor children do, they spend a total of perhaps eighteen hundred more hours in novel places over the course of their school-aged years than poor children do, and they spend a total of perhaps eighteen hundred more hours speaking to their parents over the course of their school-aged years than poor children do. See Phillips, “Parenting, Time Use, and Disparities in Academic Outcomes,” 217–21. Rich children of course also take more arts and music lessons, receive more coaching at sports, and so on.

  hours of screen time: Rich children (aged zero to eight), for example, spend nearly two and a half fewer hours per week watching television and playing video games than poor children and nearly one and a half fewer hours per week than middle-class children. Among zero- to eight-year-old children, those with a parental income of less than $30,000 spend one hour and seven minutes per day watching TV, those with a parental income of between $30,000 and $75,000 spend fifty-eight minutes per day watching TV, and those with greater than $75,000 spend forty-six minutes per day watching TV. “Zero to Eight: Children’s Media Use in America 2013,” Common Sense Media (October 2013), Table 8, www.commonsensemedia.org/research/zero-to-eight-childrens-media-use-in-america-2013.