Fifty years ago, offering opportunities for all kids to take part in extracurricular activities was recognized as an important part of a public school’s responsibilities to its students, their parents, and the wider community. No one talked then about soft skills, but voters and school administrators understood that football, chorus, and the debate club taught valuable lessons that should be open to all kids, regardless of their family background. Recall the rich array of extracurricular activities pursued by poor kids in Port Clinton High School in the 1950s.
In our new era of budget belt-tightening, high-stakes testing, and academic “core competencies,” however, school boards everywhere have decided that extracurricular activities and soft skills are “frills.” Affluent and impoverished school districts alike have felt this pressure, but given their different constituencies, they have followed different paths. Some poorer districts have simply cut back on extracurricular offerings, as reflected in Figure 4.4. Affluent districts instead have kept (and even expanded) their offerings by drawing on private resources. One such source, as we have seen, is para–school funding by parents and community members. While that approach obviously favors affluent school districts, at least within the schools themselves it does not discriminate between rich and poor students.
More insidious and more widespread has been the rapid proliferation of pay-to-play policies now imposed on students in more than half of American high schools. One nationwide survey in 2010 estimated that team fees and other costs of extracurricular sports averaged between $300 and $400 per student. An annual survey of six Midwestern states found that pay-to-play fees for high school sports alone doubled from $75 in 2007 to $150 in 2012, while average marching band fees rose from $85 in 2010 to $100 in 2013. Even in California, where pay-to-play was found by the courts to be unconstitutional, schools circumvented the ruling by collecting “donations” that were, in effect, mandatory.64 Some schools charge distinct fees for different sports; in Painesville, Ohio, cross-country costs $521, football $783, and tennis $933!65 In addition, equipment costs (formerly borne by the school, but now typically borne by parents) amount to roughly $350 per year.66
Firm nationwide numbers are still unavailable, but a reasonable estimate nowadays for the total costs of extracurricular participation might be $400 per student per activity per year, or roughly $1,600 for two kids in a family participating in two activities each year. For parents in the top quintile of the national income distribution that would amount to about 1–2 percent of their annual income, but for a household in the bottom quintile, the same cost would amount to nearly 10 percent (or more) of their annual income. Given these numbers, the surprise is that any poor kids at all take part in extracurricular activities.
Schools often counter that they waive fees for poor kids, but given the inevitable stigma attached to the waiver, it is hardly surprising that in 2012, while 60 percent of all kids nationwide who played school sports faced a pay-to-play fee, only 6 percent received a waiver. Prior to the institution of fees, roughly half of all kids, whether from affluent or less affluent backgrounds, were playing sports, but when fees were introduced, one in every three sports-playing kids from homes with annual incomes of $60,000 or less—the national median is about $62,000, so many of these kids come from solidly middle-class homes—dropped out because of the increased cost, as compared to one in ten kids from families with incomes over $60,000. Within a few decades America’s public schools have thrust the burden of extracurricular activity (and the resulting soft skills benefits) onto the family, reversing nearly a century of settled educational policy, with predictable results in terms of equality of access.
Yet even in today’s America the provision of extracurricular opportunities through public schools remains less discriminatory than wholly private provision—piano lessons, club soccer, and the like. Children in low-income families are even less likely to participate in organized nonschool activities, such as after-school programs, athletic teams, music lessons, and scouts, than they are in school-based activities. Among these nonschool programs, moreover, researchers have found greater class disparities in participation in expensive activities like sports or music lessons than in low-cost programs run by churches or community organizations.67 So by providing some working-class kids with activities to which they would otherwise have no access, schools still exert a modest leveling effect on extracurricular participation.
Are school-year jobs another contributor to the growing opportunity gap?68 Here experts caution us not to confuse part-time jobs and virtually full-time jobs. Part-time jobs typically have positive benefits in terms of preparation for adult life, and such jobs were in past decades more common among relatively affluent teens. By contrast, virtually full-time jobs have fewer (if any) beneficial long-term consequences and may well interfere with extracurricular activities. The past 40 years have seen a steady decline in school-year employment of all sorts among kids from all backgrounds, although that decline has been slightly faster among more affluent kids, which has thus slightly closed the class gap. Work, therefore, can’t be a major reason for the growing extracurricular gap. Budget cutting and the shifting priorities of American schools are probably the main reasons that extracurricular opportunities (and the soft skills they inculcate) are increasingly the preserve of more affluent young people.
So let’s return to the core question in this chapter: Do K–12 schools make the opportunity gap better or make it worse?
The answer is this: the gap is created more by what happens to kids before they get to school, by things that happen outside of school, and by what kids bring (or don’t bring) with them to school—some bringing resources and others bringing challenges—than by what schools do to them.69 The American public school today is as a kind of echo chamber in which the advantages or disadvantages that children bring with them to school have effects on other kids. The growing class segregation of our neighborhoods and thus of our schools means that middle-class kids like Isabella hear mostly encouraging and beneficial echoes at school, whereas lower-class kids like Lola and Sofia hear mostly discouraging and harmful echoes.
What this means is that schools as sites probably widen the class gap. We’ve seen evidence that schools as organizations sometimes modestly contribute to leveling the playing field. For more than a century, school-related extracurricular activities have narrowed the opportunity gap, by providing important opportunities for kids from low-income backgrounds to build the soft skills that are increasingly important for economic and professional success. On the other hand, compared to Port Clinton in the 1950s (when my trombone, trombone lessons, and football coaching and equipment were all provided free of charge by the high school), recent decisions by school boards to withdraw from that historic responsibility are widening the class gap.
The fact that schools as organizations today have a mixed and modest impact on the opportunity gap does not mean that reforms in schools might not be an important part of the solution to the gap. On the contrary, even if schools didn’t cause the growing opportunity gap—and there’s little evidence that they have—they might well be a prime place to fix it. Americans concerned about the opportunity gap must not make the all too common mistake of blaming schools for the problem. Instead, we should work with schools to narrow the gap. School is, after all, where the kids are. As I discuss in the final chapter, promising reforms that might raise the performance of schools serving low-income students can be found across the country, raising the prospect that schools, though not a big part of the problem, might be a big part of the solution.70
Because education has long been the dominant pathway for upward mobility in America, trends in educational attainment—finishing high school, attending college, and completing college—are a crucial metric for how we are doing, and especially how we are likely to do in the future, as today’s students join the workforce. If high school and college are important rungs on the ladder of opportunity between the childhood foundation provided by family and the rewards of adult life, how have kids from various class backgrounds been doing as they climb those rungs in recent years? In each case, it turns out, there is good news and bad news.
Throughout most of the twentieth century the fraction of American young people who graduated from high school rose steadily, from 6 percent at the beginning of the century to 80 percent in 1970, the fruits of the High School movement I described earlier.71 If we include the GED (the national high school equivalency test), that increase continued in the last three decades of the century. Moreover, the earlier class gap in high school diplomas (including GEDs) tended to close in those decades, as kids from less privileged backgrounds caught up. Even though a gap remains—virtually all kids from the top quartile of socioeconomic status nowadays graduate from high school, whereas more than a quarter of kids from the bottom quartile don’t—so far the news about trends seems encouraging.
But a closer look at the trends suggests some bad news, too.
First, most of the apparent improvement among kids from less privileged backgrounds in the years after 1970 was attributable to a rapid increase in GED credentials. In fact, by 2011 the GED accounted for 12 percent of all high school credentials issued, and a disproportionate number of those GEDs were issued to kids from poorer backgrounds, like Lola. Furthermore, much recent research has confirmed that the GED does not have the same value as a regular high school degree, either in terms of continuing on to college or in the labor market. Indeed, some research suggests that the GED adds very little compared to dropping out of high school and getting no degree at all. Many GED recipients say that their ultimate objective is to get a college degree, but only a tiny fraction ever do. In that sense, the closing of the class gap in terms of high school graduation during the past several decades is mostly an illusion.72
Second, although the value of a regular high school degree (not counting GEDs) relative to simply dropping out has remained more or less constant over these years, the value of a high school degree relative to a college degree has declined sharply, because the “college premium” has grown rapidly. In terms of average wages, a college degree was worth 50 percent more than a regular high school degree in 1980, but by 2008 the college degree was worth 95 percent more.73 In that sense, the educational gains of kids from poor backgrounds have been doubly illusory. They’ve been struggling to catch up on a down escalator.
During recent decades, college preparedness (in terms of academic achievement) and college entry have risen for students from all socioeconomic backgrounds. However, a substantial class gap in college enrollment persists, though whether that gap has remained constant or increased is unclear.74 The economists Martha Bailey and Susan Dynarski compared kids who would have entered college around 1980 with their counterparts about 20 years later. In the earlier cohort, 58 percent of kids from the most affluent quintile of the income distribution entered college, compared to 19 percent of kids from the poorest quintile. By the end of the century, those figures were 80 percent and 29 percent, respectively.
While college going for poorer kids grew faster, because the richer kids began at a much higher level of college entrance, the absolute gap between the two groups expanded from 39 percentage points to 51 percentage points. A detailed examination of this growing gap identifies many of the same causal factors that we have already discussed—academic preparation in elementary and high school, family and peer support—and others that we shall explore in the next chapter, especially support from mentors and the wider community.75
But even if we count these changes in advancement to postsecondary education as good news, we must note some bad news.
First, growing access by poor kids to college does not mean growing access to selective colleges and universities. Increasingly, poor kids who go on to college are concentrated in community colleges—14 percent of poor kids in college in 1972 were in community colleges, compared to 32 percent in 2004. Community colleges can play a valuable role as a ladder out of poverty, of course. They represent hope for disadvantaged kids, as they do for Kayla in Bend, Michelle and Lauren in Atlanta, and Sofia in Orange County. In the concluding chapter we shall consider the contribution that community colleges might make to narrowing the opportunity gap.
On the other hand, for most kids, community colleges are not really a rung on a taller ladder, but the end of the line, educationally speaking. When students enter a community college, 81 percent say they plan to get a four-year degree, but only 12 percent actually do.76 So counting a community college as equivalent to a four-year institution (which our “good news” on college entry did) is misleading.
In terms of entry into more selective institutions, which for better or worse offer the best prospects for success in America, the class gap has actually widened in recent years. The fraction of kids from the bottom quartile of the income distribution who ended up at a selective college or university rose from 4 percent in 1972 to 5 percent three decades later, but for kids from the top quartile, the equivalent figures were 26 percent and 36 percent. By 2004, in the nation’s “most competitive” colleges and universities—such as Emory, West Point, Boston College, and USC—kids from the top quartile of the socioeconomic scale outnumbered kids from the bottom quartile by about 14 to one.77 Just as with high school degrees, even though young people from less privileged backgrounds are doing somewhat better now than kids from similar backgrounds did several decades ago, kids from privileged backgrounds are lengthening their lead.
That’s bad enough, but there’s worse news: much of the recent growth in enrollment in postsecondary institutions by low-income students has been concentrated in the rapidly expanding for-profit sector, in such institutions as the University of Phoenix and Kaplan. In 2013 this sector attracted 13 percent of all full-time undergraduates, compared to 2 percent in 1991. These students are disproportionately from low-income backgrounds (as well as older and ethnic minorities). Giving a leg up to such students could narrow the opportunity gap, and indeed Stephanie’s “golden” son in Atlanta exemplifies that possibility. But for-profit institutions are twice as expensive for students as public universities—and have much worse records in terms of graduation rates, employment rates, and earnings. Not surprisingly, therefore, students at for-profit institutions have much higher debt burdens (especially government-backed loans) and much higher default rates. For-profit institutions have a better track record in shorter certificate courses, but including them in estimates of college enrollment exaggerates the gains among low-income students in recent years.78
The worst news of all, however, is this: enrolling in college is one thing, but getting a degree is quite another. The class gap in college completion, which was already substantial 30 to 40 years ago, has steadily expanded. This matters hugely, because completing college is much more important than entering college on all sorts of levels: socioeconomic success, physical and mental health, longevity, life satisfaction, and more. Figure 4.5 estimates the big picture over the past 40 years.79 On the measure of postsecondary education that matters most—graduating from college—kids from affluent backgrounds are pulling further and further ahead, yet one more of our dispiriting scissors charts.