A recent study of California high school teachers’ daily classroom routines made vivid just how different the learning environments are in high-poverty and low-poverty schools.46 Stressful conditions from outside school are much more likely to intrude into the classroom in high-poverty schools. Every one of ten such “stressors” is two or three times more common in high-poverty schools than in their low-poverty counterparts—student hunger, unstable housing, and economic problems; lack of medical and dental care; caring for family members and other family and immigration issues; community violence and safety concerns. One consequence is that even though the nominal number of instructional hours doesn’t differ between high-poverty and low-poverty schools, over the course of the average week teachers in high-poverty schools spend roughly three and one half fewer hours in actual instruction, and over the course of the academic year high-poverty schools lose almost two weeks more to teacher absences, emergency lockdowns, and other challenges concentrated in such schools. Formally, high-poverty and low-poverty schools may be given the same resources, but the ecological challenges facing the former render them much less effective in providing quality instruction to their students, precisely as we saw when comparing Santa Ana and Troy High Schools.
Sofia and Lola describe the classroom atmosphere from the point of view of students, but they also offer glimpses of what the teachers at Santa Ana have to confront. “There were kids with guns in the school, lots of fights, people throwing stuff in class, being very disrespectful to the teachers. Kids would spit in their faces, tell them off, start arguments, be really rude. It was nasty.” We were unable to speak with any Santa Ana staff, but we can imagine what the world of Santa Ana must look like to them.
Suppose that you were a bright, optimistic young teacher showing up each day to work in this war zone. Idealism might carry you through a year or two, but if you had an opportunity to move to a school with less mayhem and more students eager to learn, you’d jump at the chance. So faculty turnover would be higher, with more rookie teachers every year. Moreover, many of the teachers who remained would be timeservers: inured to turmoil, content to baby-sit, “paid to be there,” cynical even about helping well-meaning students, dismissing them as “pathetic,” lazily assuming that all Latinos speak Spanish.
Sadly, national data precisely confirm this picture. Better teachers, who can have a substantial effect on student success in later life, are disproportionately found in upper-income, high-performance schools, whereas more transient, less capable teachers are disproportionately found in lower-income, low-performance schools. This pattern is probably due less to district assignment of teachers and more to teacher flight. In short, poor teacher morale and higher turnover in low-income schools, driven by a climate of disorder and even danger, helps explain why low-income schools produce lower-achieving students, whatever the students’ own background and ability.47
Two other factors have sometimes been proposed as explanations for the growing class gap in American schools, but the evidence suggests that they play only minor roles, if any.
The first is tracking: the practice of separating students into college-prep and non-college-prep tracks, which for decades was common and tended to provide a modest edge to kids from more educated homes. During the period in which the opportunity gap has widened, however, access to the college-prep track among kids from less privileged backgrounds has increased. Tracking continues to provide a slight advantage to upper-class kids, but it can’t account for the substantial increase in the overall opportunity gap.48 (To be sure, as Figure 4.1 shows, schools serving poor students offer fewer AP courses, with important consequences for the educational opportunities in such schools.)
Private schools are a second factor that is probably not so important a contributor to the growing opportunity gap as many people think. During the past several decades, the percentage of high school students in private schools has dropped from just over 10 percent to just under 8 percent. Kids from college-educated homes are somewhat more likely (roughly 10 percent) to attend religious or nonsectarian private schools, or to be home-schooled, than kids from high-school-educated homes (roughly 5 percent), but that gap has not changed. Private schools may give a modest edge to affluent students, but that edge has apparently not grown during the years in which the opportunity and achievement gaps have widened sharply.49
School-based extracurricular activities emerged roughly a century ago, as part of the same wave of progressive educational reform that produced the High School movement. The idea was to use extracurriculars to diffuse among all classes what we now call “soft skills”—strong work habits, self-discipline, teamwork, leadership, and a sense of civic engagement. But if we look at participation in extracurricular activities today—in everything from football to band to French club to the student newspaper—we can see yet another dimension of the growing class disparity in America’s educational system.
Involvement in extracurricular activities has been shown repeatedly to have measurably favorable consequences. Consciously or unconsciously, affluent, more educated parents understand this, and as we saw earlier, they are increasingly investing substantial time and money in supporting their kids’ involvement in extracurricular activities. It’s why, in Bend, Earl bought his daughter Lucy a horse and built a barn for it; and why, in Atlanta, Desmond’s mother, Simone, insisted that each of her sons do a sport every season; and why, in Orange County, Isabella’s mother, Clara, paid those speeding tickets to ensure that her kids were extensively involved in extracurriculars. They had time and money that the poorer kids’ families lacked, and they invested those resources in helping their children acquire valuable soft skills through extracurricular activities.
Consistent involvement in extracurricular activities is strongly associated with a variety of positive outcomes during the school years and beyond—even after controlling for family background, cognitive skills, and many other potentially confounding variables. These positive outcomes include higher grade-point averages, lower dropout rates, lower truancy, better work habits, higher educational aspirations, lower delinquency rates, greater self-esteem, more psychological resilience, less risky behavior, more civic engagement (like voting and volunteering), and higher future wages and occupational attainment.50 One carefully controlled study, for example, showed that kids consistently involved in extracurricular activities were 70 percent more likely to go to college than kids who were only episodically involved—and roughly 400 percent more likely than kids who were not at all involved.51 Another study, which has a special relevance to the students we met in Orange County, found that involvement in extracurricular activities among low-income Latino students (all too rare, as the experiences of Lola and Sofia illustrate) predicts school achievement.52
Leadership in extracurricular activities appears to have even more intense effects: one study found that club and team leaders are more likely to command higher salaries in managerial positions later in life.53 And an intriguing study of students who attended high school in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1940s even found neurological effects a half century later: students who had participated in extracurricular activities were substantially less likely than those who hadn’t to suffer from dementia at the turn of the century, even after adjusting for differences in IQ and educational attainment.54 The only negative finding that emerges from the dozens of studies that have been done on the correlates of extracurricular activities is not startling: among young men, participation in sports is often correlated with excessive drinking (but not drug use). Nevertheless, among both men and women, the extracurricular activity most consistently associated with high academic achievement is sports. Jocks turn out to be brainy, too.
To be sure, few of these studies were true experiments, randomly assigning some kids to participate and excluding others, so we cannot entirely rule out the possibility that the robust correlation between extracurricular involvement and life success might be due, at least in part, to some unmeasured variable, like innate energy level. On the other hand, a number of studies measure change over time in the same individual, which should eliminate the effects of any enduring personality trait. One clever study found strong effects on college attendance and labor market outcomes after Title IX widened girls’ participation in sports, a kind of natural experiment; another study used comparison of siblings to tease out the causal effects of extracurricular involvement on later earnings; and several experimental studies have confirmed the effects of programs akin to conventional extracurricular activities.55
So why do extracurricular activities have such broad implications for a child’s future? Many suggestions have been offered: the effects on self-confidence, time use (the “idle hands” theory), positive peer effects, and so on. One important advantage that we shall explore in the next chapter is exposure to caring adults outside the family: coaches and other adult supervisors often serve as valuable mentors, as we saw with Jesse’s football coach in Port Clinton and Isabella’s track coaches.56
But the biggest benefit of extracurricular participation seems to be what the educational reformers who invented this practice hoped it would be: soft skills and character. Presumably it was character, not military skills, that the Duke of Wellington had in mind when he famously exclaimed upon revisiting the playing fields of Eton, “It is here that the battle of Waterloo was won!” Noncognitive skills and habits such as grit, teamwork, leadership, and sociability are unmistakably developed among participants in extracurricular activities.
Many researchers believe that soft skills and extracurricular participation are as important as hard skills and formal schooling in explaining educational attainment and earnings ten years later, even controlling for family background. That’s because employers increasingly value noncognitive traits, such as work habits and ability to work with others. These noncognitive traits may be even more important for students from more disadvantaged family backgrounds.57
To sum things up: extracurricular participation matters for upward mobility. It is thus distressing to learn that every study confirms a substantial class gap in extracurricular participation, especially when it comes to sustained involvement across different types of activity. Poor kids are three times as likely as their nonpoor classmates to participate in neither sports nor clubs (30 percent to 10 percent), and half as likely to participate in both sports and clubs (22 percent to 44 percent).58
Even more distressing is the fact that extracurricular participation rates in recent decades display the familiar scissors gap. One study found that during the past 15 years, activity levels in out-of-school clubs and organizations rose among affluent youth and fell among poor youth. From 1997 to 2012, the “extracurricular gap” between poor kids and nonpoor kids aged 6–11 nearly doubled, from 15 to 27 percentage points, while the comparable gap among kids aged 12–17 rose from 19 to 29 percentage points.59