When evidence takes you places you don't necessarily want to go.

I commented on several reading related studies in a post Reading and Spoken Volumes.

Particularly intriguing that there is such a sharp association with completed college education. James Heckman found that there was no material earnings difference between high school dropouts and those who later earned a GED. His conclusion was that the earnings barrier was not the knowledge acquisition represented by the dropout versus the GED earner. Rather, the association ran between income and behavior; not between income and knowledge. If you had the self-control to complete high school on time, that behavior of self-control would later also serve you well in work.

There is a similar such break in this data. If your parents are high school graduates or attended college and did not complete it, then you are likely to have the same level of book reading (22 and 21 minutes respectively). The big jump, a jump of 50% from 21 minutes to 31 minutes of reading is between those home environments in which parents completed college versus anything less. I am guessing that the causative flow is one of values and behaviors. Parents that had the self-discipline to complete college also likely value reading and have the self-discipline to create an environment in which reading is encouraged and rewarded.

Also interesting is the disparity between reading volumes between the races. 28 minutes a day spent reading books by whites, 18 minutes by African-Americans, and 20 minutes by Hispanics. So whites are reading about 50% more than blacks. Now certainly that is a function of history, economics, and culture. This parallels, though somewhat less dramatically, the findings of Hart & Ridley where the cumulative volume of direct verbal communication before kindergarten was about 15 million words for the lowest income participants (primarily African American), 30 million words for middle class, and 40 million for wealthy families.

Combining these two studies together suggests that perhaps a significant causation of variance in communication capability and scores is probably solely related to practice. If whites are reading 50% more books and hearing 100-200% more words, you have to expect that they would have higher reading and verbal scores (and the attendant correlations that go with communication fluency) simply as a matter of exposure and practice. The factual and experiential content that go with that volume can't be ignored either.

There is a new study out that ties in to this phenomena, The Parenting Gap Is Widening by Anna Sutherland.

The first observation is that all parents are raising their game in terms of how they invest time with children.

The popular stereotype here is of middle-class moms enrolling their toddlers in foreign language classes in hopes of sending them to Harvard someday. College-educated parents do spend more time on educational activities than less educated ones, but Americans of all socioeconomic backgrounds have come to allocate more time to such activities over the past few decades. In fact, in 2008–2013, mothers with no more than a high school diploma devoted more time, on average, to developmental child care than mothers with bachelor’s degrees did in the early 1990s (57 minutes a day versus 44).

Of course, one of the problems is that there are fewer traditional families, the source of these measures.

Even though everyone is investing more time in their children, the gap between classes is growing as well.

Yet the “parenting gap” between social classes isn’t apt to close anytime soon, a new Journal of Marriage and Family article implies. Evrim Altintas of Oxford’s Centre for Time Use Research looked at data from the American Heritage Time Use Study spanning five decades, and discovered that despite positive trends in all groups, the disparity in educational child care between parents from different educational backgrounds has grown over that period.

The gap between mothers with only high school degrees and those with bachelor’s degrees, which was negligible in the 1970s, reached more than 30 minutes in the early 2000s, then narrowed somewhat to 21 minutes in the late 2000s. In 2008–2013, college-graduate mothers spent 78 minutes on developmental activities with their kids, while the figure was 62 minutes for women with some college education and 57 for those with a high school diploma or less. For fathers, the gap between the highest and lowest education groups is now around 15 minutes (55 minutes versus 39). In the most recent time period, at every education level, mothers devoted roughly 20 more minutes per day to developmental child care activities than fathers, on average.

This is the spanner in the equality of opportunity works:

Accounting for the fact that children with less educated parents are more likely to live apart from their fathers makes these gaps more dramatic. According to Altintas’s estimation, which she notes is if anything biased downward, once fathers’ residential status is taken into account, children of parents with bachelor’s degrees may receive more than 1,000 extra hours of cognitively stimulating care over the first four years of life, on average, relative to children with high school–­educated parents.

The very substantial differences between the top and bottom classes in the amount of time spent reading, talking, coaching, etc. in a child's first four years highlights the unattainable nature of helping children have "equal" opportunities. That is by no means an argument that we should abandon efforts to level the playing field. By no means. But it does suggest changes in the tactics.

If pre-K programs end up being validated as ineffective as the most recent large studies indicate, and if the four-fold increase in spending in K-12 makes no difference in outcomes by class as experience has shown, then what can make a difference?

I think, as challenging as it philosophically might be, the answer is in figuring whether, how, and to what degree, it is appropriate for government to foster and encourage the adoption of upper class values and behaviors by those in the lower classes. Yuck - writing the words chills me, but I think that is what the accumulating evidence is indicating. Sure, we still need to try and make schools more effective, but we shouldn't count too much on those investments actually equalizing the opportunity field. Too much happens in the first four years to catch-up on by the time the children hit K-12. Indeed, many studies indicate that the gaps only worsen during school.