figure prominently in school funding overall: Nationwide, roughly 3,500 private groups, serving 12 percent of school districts, raised $271 million to support public schools across the country in 1995; by 2010, roughly 11,500 such groups, serving 29 percent of districts, raised $957 million. Ashlyn Aiko Nelson and Beth Gazley, “The Rise of School-Supporting Nonprofits,” Education and Finance Policy 9, no. 4 (February 2014): Table 4. These numbers come from annual tax reports that such groups are required to file with the IRS. Both sums are updates to constant (2015) dollars, using the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ CPI calculator, available at “CPI Inflation Calculator,” https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl. The nominal sums were $197 million for 1995 and $880 million for 2010. This is a natural and almost inevitable response to litigation aiming to distribute tax revenues more evenly across a state’s rich and poor districts, as privately raised funds fall outside of the pool that must be spread in this way.
at least $2,300 per child: Robert Reich, “Not Very Giving,” New York Times, September 4, 2013, accessed November 18, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/opinion/not-very-giving.html; Laura McKenna, “How Rich Parents Can Exacerbate School Inequality,” Atlantic, January 28, 2016, accessed November 18, 2018, www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/01/rich-parents-school-inequality/431640/. Hereafter cited as McKenna, “How Rich Parents Can Exacerbate School Inequality.”
$400,000 in a single night: McKenna, “How Rich Parents Can Exacerbate School Inequality.”
wealthy public schools: Between 2005 and 2011, the total budget of elementary school PTAs in San Francisco increased by about 800 percent, and by 2011, ten rich schools raised more money than the remaining sixty-one schools combined. Smith, “How Budget Cuts and PTA Fundraising Undermined Equity in San Francisco Public Schools.”
“public privates”: Kyle Spencer, “Way Beyond Bake Sales: The $1 Million PTA,” New York Times, June 1, 2012, accessed on November 18, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/nyregion/at-wealthy-schools-ptas-help-fill-budget-holes.html.
in one recent year: Smith, “How Budget Cuts and PTA Fundraising Undermined Equity in San Francisco Public Schools.” More generally, recall that principals of schools with richer students possess a full year’s more experience on average than principals of schools with poorer students; teachers possess two years’ more experience on average and 25 percent more master’s degrees; and first-year teachers, who commonly struggle as they learn their craft, are less than half as common. Tara Béteille, Demetra Kalogrides, and Susanna Loeb, “Stepping Stones: Principal Career Paths and School Outcomes,” Social Science Research 41 (2012): 904–19.
extravagant facilities: See Reich, “Back to School”; Motoko Rich, “Nation’s Wealthy Places Pour Private Money into Public Schools, Study Finds,” New York Times, October 21, 2014, accessed November 18, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2014/10/22/us/nations-wealthy-places-pour-private-money-into-public-schools-study-finds.html.
While Barbourville receives: “District Directory Information: Barbourville Independent,” National Center for Education Statistics, 2018, https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/districtsearch/district_detail.asp?Search=2&ID2=2100240&DistrictID=2100240&details=4. Nonlocal sources include 11 percent federal revenue and 70 percent state.
nearly $100,000 per year to own: The median price in Scarsdale is $1,059,700. “Scarsdale Home Prices & Values,” Zillow, October 2018, www.zillow.com/scarsdale-ny/home-values/. The payments on a $1.2 million mortgage (required to finance a $1.5 million home with a 20 percent down payment) amount to roughly $70,000 per year at current interest rates, and median real estate taxes in Scarsdale are $20,813. Based on $1.059 million estimate, 10583 Scarsdale zip code, and using calculator from “New York Property Tax Calculator,” SmartAsset, https://smartasset.com/taxes/new-york-property-tax-calculator.
Rich residents of “Scarsdales” across the country ensure that their communities remain exclusive by insisting on zoning regulations that keep lots and houses large and rejecting efforts to build affordable housing in their communities. Scarsdale itself has faced litigation and scandal concerning these practices. For information on the scandal, see Kate Stone Lombardi, “Home Sweet Affordable Home?,” Westchester Magazine, April 1, 2016, accessed November 18, 2018, www.westchestermagazine.com/Westchester-Magazine/April-2016/Home-Sweet-Affordable-Home/.
that serve poor students: OECD, Education at a Glance 2013: OECD Indicators, OECD Publishing (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/eag-2013-en; Reich, “Back to School”; Eduardo Porter, “In Public Education, Edge Still Goes to Rich,” New York Times, November 5, 2013, accessed November 18, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2013/11/06/business/a-rich-childs-edge-in-public-education.html.
The unequal spending patterns, incidentally, almost certainly contribute to the striking inefficiency of public education in the United States, which spends more per student than every OECD nation save Luxembourg, Norway, Switzerland, and Austria, but produces average academic achievement levels at the middle of the OECD pack. OECD, Country Note: Key Findings from PISA 2015 for the United States, OECD Publishing (2016), 7, 9, www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-2015-United-States.pdf.
multibillion-dollar industry today: See, for example, Patrick Clark, “The Test Prep Industry Is Booming,” Bloomberg, October 8, 2014, accessed November 18, 2018, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-10-08/sats-the-test-prep-business-is-booming.
skew overwhelmingly toward wealth: 2013 College-Bound Seniors: Total Group Profile Report, College Board, 4, http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/2013/TotalGroup-2013.pdf; Ezra Klein, “Wall Street Steps In When Ivy League Fails,” Washington Post, February 16, 2012, accessed November 18, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/business/econ omy/wall-street-steps-in-when-ivy-league-fails/2012/02/16/gIQAX2weIR_story.html; Daniel Pink, “How to Predict a Student’s SAT Score: Look at the Parents’ Tax Return,” Dan Pink, www.danpink.com/archives/2012/02/how-to-predict-a-students-sat-score-look-at-the-parents-tax-return, hereafter cited as Pink, “How to Predict.”
as much as $100,000: Emma Jacobs, “The $600-an-Hour Private Tutor,” Financial Times, December 12, 2013, accessed November 18, 2018, www.ft.com/content/080d6cce-61aa-11e3-aa02-00144feabdc0. Hereafter cited as Jacobs, “The $600-an-Hour Private Tutor.”
$1,250 per hour: Caroline Moss, “Meet the Guy Who Makes $1,000 an Hour Tutoring Kids of Fortune 500 CEOs over Skype,” Business Insider, August 26, 2014, accessed November 18, 2018, www.businessinsider.com/anthony-green-tutoring-2014-8. Hereafter cited as Moss, “Meet the Guy Who Makes $1,000 an Hour Tutoring Kids of Fortune 500 CEOs over Skype.” Robert Frank, “Meet the $1,250-an-Hour Tutor,” CNBC, December 12, 2013, accessed November 18, 2018, www.cnbc.com/2013/12/12/meet-the-400000-a-year-tutor.html. Hereafter cited as Frank, “Meet the $1,250-an-Hour Tutor.”
charging the students substantially more: Email conversation with author.
accepted the arrangement: Email conversation with author.
In addition to earning: Frank, “Meet the $1,250-an-Hour Tutor.”
years in advance: Moss, “Meet the Guy Who Makes $1,000 an Hour Tutoring Kids of Fortune 500 CEOs over Skype.”
“If you’ve invested”: Jacobs, “The $600-an-Hour Private Tutor.”
have become national celebrities: Simon Mundy, “South Korea’s Millionaire Tutors,” Financial Times, June 16, 2014, accessed November 18, 2018, www.ft.com/content/c0b611fc-dab5-11e3-9a27-00144feabdc0.
will soon surpass $100 billion: “Private Tutoring,” Global Industry Analysts, Inc., September 2016, www.strategyr.com/Private_Home_Tutor_Services_Market_Report.asp; James Marshall Crotty, “Global Private Tutoring Market Will Surpass $102.8 Billion By 2018,” Forbes, November 12, 2012, accessed November 18, 2018, www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2012/10/30/global-private-tutoring-market-will-surpass-102-billion-by-2018/#3820c5cd2ee0.
roughly $5 billion: Drew Gilpin Faust, “Financial Report, Fiscal Year 2017,” Harvard University, October 26, 2017, 6,
https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/final_harvard_university_financial_report_2017.pdf.
highly educated mothers: For more on the claim that maternal education significantly influences children’s participation in extracurricular activities—especially those that require significant parental time investment—see Elliot Weininger, Annette Lareau, and Dalton Conley, “What Money Doesn’t Buy: Class Resources and Children’s Participation in Organized Extracurricular Activities,” Social Forces 94, no. 2 (December 2015): 479.
in the first place: For example, 84 percent of children of high-income parents participate in sports or athletic activities, compared with 69 percent of their middle-income peers and 59 percent of their low-income peers. Similarly, 64 percent of children of the rich do volunteer work, compared with just 49 percent and 37 percent of their middle-income and lower-income counterparts, respectively. Children of rich parents are also more likely to gain work experience, participate in peer organizations like the Scouts, and take lessons in music, dance, or art. Pew Research Center, “Parenting in America”; Miller, “Class Differences in Child-Rearing.”
Moreover, the gap: Kaisa Snellman et al., “The Engagement Gap: Social Mobility and Extracurricular Participation Among American Youth,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 657 (January 2015): 194–207; Robert Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 177. Hereafter cited as Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis.
$7,500 annually: Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane, “Introduction: The American Dream, Then and Now,” in Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances, ed. Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011), 11.
(The calculations are based on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditure Survey and use 2008 dollars. Adjusted to 2018 values, $75,000 in 2008 is equivalent in purchasing power to $87,834.12 in 2018.) For further discussion, see Miles Corak, “Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 79–102; Miller, “Class Differences in Child-Rearing”; and Pew Research Center, “Parenting in America.”
Ratios of expenditure also roughly tripled, from 3:1 in the 1970s to almost 8:1 today, so that rich parents’ expenditures increased dramatically—by nearly $4,000 per child per year—even as both poor and indeed middle-class parents’ expenditures remained effectively flat. See Carbone and Cahn, Marriage Markets, 85–86. According to another study (again reporting constant dollars), in 1972 the richest 10 percent of families spent $2,832 per child, the middle tenth spent $1,143, and the bottom spent $607. In 2006, the disparity grew substantially: $6,573 per child for the richest families, $1,421 for the middle tenth, and $750 for bottom tenth. Sabino Kornrich and Frank Furstenberg, “Investing in Children: Changes in Parental Spending on Children, 1972–2007,” Demography 50, no. 1 (February 2013). Hereafter cited as Kornrich and Furstenberg, “Investing in Children.”
through the end of high school: Abby Abrams, “Raising a Ballerina Will Cost You $100,000,” FiveThirtyEight, August 20, 2015, accessed November 18, 2018, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/high-price-of-ballet-diversity-misty-copeland/.
in lessons alone: Though the prices of violin lessons vary, it is expected that for an experienced and well-qualified instructor, private lessons can cost around $100 per session. For a discussion of lesson costs, see “How Much Are Violin Lessons for Kids?” Take Lessons, January 25, 2015, https://takelessons.com/blog/violin-lesson-prices. Three half-hour lessons per week at $100 each amounts to $15,600 per year. This sum does not include other costs related to equipment, sheet music, and books.
between the ages of six and ten: Chris Taylor, “How Much Does It Cost to Raise a Child Prodigy?,” Reuters, September 11, 2015, accessed November 18, 2018, http://time.com/money/4031222/child-prodigy-cost/.
training their children: Kornrich and Furstenberg, “Investing in Children.”
expenditure on education: Mark Aguiar and Mark Bils, “Has Consumption Inequality Mirrored Income Inequality?,” American Economic Review 105, no. 9 (September 2015): 2725–56, 2746, 2753. Hereafter cited as Aguiar and Bils, “Has Consumption Inequality Mirrored Income Inequality?” Aguiar and Bils study rising consumption inequality between 1980 and 2010 and report that over the course of these three decades, consumption inequality increased by a little more than 30 percent, a rise that roughly equaled the increase of income inequality over the same period. They also break down rising consumption inequality across categories of consumption and report that by 2008–10, education expenditures had become the single most income elastic expenditure category. These observations about consumption inequality benefited from discussions with Conor Clarke.
produce higher-achieving students: For a detailed discussion on the effects of better-equipped schools on education, see Jonathan Rothwell, “Housing Costs, Zoning, and Access to High-Scoring Schools,” Brookings Institution, www.brookings.edu/research/housing-costs-zoning-and-access-to-high-scoring-schools/. Hereafter cited as Rothwell, “Housing Costs.” Rothwell writes that “studies show important benefits from attending classes with higher scoring students and higher ‘value-added’ teachers. In addition to those factors, teacher experience is strongly related to student outcomes but experienced teachers are less likely to teach disadvantaged students. Furthermore, teacher experience is highly correlated with school test scores, even adjusting for other factors, and the average black, Hispanic, or low-income student attends a school with significantly less experienced teachers than white and Asian students.” For causal effects of teacher quality on test scores for students in grades three through eight, see Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, and Jonah E. Rockoff, “The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood,” NBER Working Paper No. 17699 (issued December 2011, revised January 2012). For the effects of teacher quality and experience on standardized test scores in math and reading, see Jonah E. Rockoff, “The Impact of Individual Teachers on Student Achievement: Evidence from Panel Data,” American Economic Review 94, no. 2 (May 2004): 247–52. Another study considered data from all North Carolina students and teachers over a ten-year period to demonstrate that teacher credentials have large effects on student achievement—particularly math achievement. Charles Clotfelter, Helen Ladd, and Jacob Vigdor, “How and Why Do Teacher Credentials Matter for Student Achievement?,” Urban Institute National Center for Longitudinal Analysis of Education Research working paper no. 2 (2007).
“better at what the test measures”: Jacobs, “The $600-an-Hour Private Tutor.”
retreat in reading and math: Karl L. Alexander, Doris R. Entwisle, and Linda S. Olson, “Schools, Achievement, and Inequality: A Seasonal Perspective,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 23, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 171, Table 2. Alexander, Entwisle, and Olson show summer gains on the CAT-V (Reading) and the CAT-V (Math) across four consecutive summers for high-SES students, while low-SES students experienced losses on both tests during the first two summers, small gains on the Reading test after the third summer, and small gains on both tests after the fourth summer. For a similar discussion, see Alan B. Krueger, “Inequality, Too Much of a Good Thing,” in Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies?, ed. Alan B. Kruger and Benjamin M. Friedman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 1, 15, Table 2.
for example, in Japan: Raghuram G. Rajan, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 188. Hereafter cited as Rajan, Fault Lines. James J. Shields, Japanese Schooling: Patterns of Socialization, Equality, and Political Control (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 82. For a sample calculation, see “Mathematics Teaching and Learning Strategies in PISA,” OECD (2010), Table A.1. The 75th percentile of number of weeks of instruction in Japan is 43; multiplied by 5 days of instruction per we
ek, that is roughly 215 days of instruction per year.
do no such activities at all: Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, 175.
adds the most value to her human capital: One study found, “Low-income students perform better when their non-low-income schoolmates perform better. Low-income students who attend schools with the lowest-scoring middle/high-income students score 18.5 percentage points below the state average for their subject/grade, but those who attend schools with top-scoring middle/high-income peers score 2 percentage points above state averages. Further regression analysis finds that the proficiency rates of low-income students increase by 0.7 percentage points for every 1 percentage point increase in the proficiency rates of middle/high-income students in the same school, controlling for factors such as the school’s racial diversity, enrollment, share of low-income students, pupil-teacher ratio, and location.” Rothwell, “Housing Costs,” 10.
four grade levels ahead of those from poor ones: Reardon, “The Widening Academic Achievement Gap,” 94–97.
three grade levels: Reardon, “The Widening Academic Achievement Gap,” 97–99; Reardon, “No Rich Child Left Behind.”
International comparisons: Achievement in this comparison is measured by scores on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests of academic skills. For an analysis of this data, see Reich, “Back to School.”
between the middle class and the poor: The studies are rendered comparable in spite of measuring achievement on different scales by adjusting scores for the reliability of the tests and then expressing test score gaps in terms of standard deviations. This is, as Reardon says, “standard practice when comparing achievement gaps measured with different tests [citations omitted]. So long as the true variance of achievement remains constant over time, this allows valid comparisons in the size of the gaps across different studies using different tests.” Reardon, “The Widening Academic Achievement Gap,” 94. The basic result that 90/50 achievement gaps have been rising even as 50/10 gaps have held roughly steady—and in some cases even fallen—reappears across a range of estimation techniques. See Reardon, “The Widening Academic Achievement Gap,” Online Appendix 5.A2, www.russellsage.org/sites/default/files/duncan_murnane_online_appendix.pdf.
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