So, we're welcoming Dr. Jane Waldfogel,
who's a professor here at the Columbia University School of Social Work,
and has for many years been studying policy related to children and families.
Today, she's here to talk about her most recent work in child equality and inequality.
So, Dr. Waldfogel, you've just completed a major pieces
of work in the area of child poverty and inequality,
and what made you choose that topic?
Educational inequalities are such an important aspect
of inequality in our country and many others.
The education system is also a huge part
of the social welfare system that we don't often look at,
and it's the one aspect of the social welfare system that truly is universal.
All children go to school and receive support in school,
and there's pretty widespread support for the idea
that children should get an equal chance in school.
So, I was really interested in seeing if that was the case.
So, you picked four countries to compare and to develop the study.
What led you to those four countries?
Well, my co-authors and I had a big debate about what countries to look at.
Do you look for the best possible cases,
the most equal countries to compare the US to or do you try to compare like to like?
So, in the end, we went with what's called the most similar case approach.
So we picked the four countries that are most comparable.
So, who are the nearest neighbors to the United States?
So obviously, Canada our nearest neighbor, the UK,
where we get much of our social welfare system,
and Australia, another big Anglo-American country.
So, we look specifically at if you compare the US to those three peer countries,
do they have as much educational inequality as we do or are they doing better?
Because if they're doing better,
then there's something for us to learn.
So, what did you find?
So, what we found was,
among those four countries,
they really clustered into two groups.
So, we have the US and the UK pretty much
together with the most inequality in terms of children's outcomes,
and then Canada and Australia doing significantly better.
So, what we looked at specifically was we compared children
whose families had a high level of education defined in American terms.
So, children whose parents had at least a college degree or more,
at least one parent had a college degree.
We compared those children to those whose parents had only completed high school or less.
We found they're equivalents in the other countries.
So we looked at how much does it matter if your parent is highly
educated versus low educated in each of the four countries?
In the US, the gap in achievement,
the gap in reading and math between those two groups of children is huge.
It's a standard deviation gap,
which is a huge gap.
At the time the children are entering school,
that's worth about a year of school education.
Wow.
It's an enormous gap.
The UK has a large gap as well,
slightly smaller than the US,
and then Canada and Australia had significantly smaller gaps when children enter school.
So, already in early childhood,
something's happening that's pulling those families
apart much more so in the United States than in the other countries.
So, it's sad news for the United States,
but in some ways it's really important news because it suggests that there's
something we can do about this because it doesn't have to be this way.
In a country not so far away,
like Canada or a little bit further away like Australia,
they're doing much better of keeping kids' outcomes more equal before they start school.
So, what's your hypothesis?
What do you think we need to be doing differently?
Well, we looked at these children's families and on a host of indicators,
it wasn't just that the children's outcomes were unequal,
but the resources that parents had were divided by their educational level.
So, in the United States,
if you have a low educated parent,
you also have a young parent,
you also have a single parent,
you also have a parent with very, very low income.
In the other countries,
you might have a parent with low education,
but that parent is more mature,
that parent is more likely to be partnered,
that parent has higher income because earnings are more equal in the labor market,
but also because this government supports incomes to
a greater extent for low income families than our government does here.
So there's lots of things we can do.
We also looked at preschool education.
Several of the countries we looked at have universal preschool,
which the United States doesn't.
All of the countries that we looked at have paid family leave,
the United States doesn't.
So, there are some obvious smoking guns in terms of things that
we're not doing in early childhood that we could do differently.
So, income is really important but also the supports to families.
Absolutely. Absolutely. These supports for families,
I've been emphasizing early childhood.
But these inequalities, of course,
continue when children are in school and
they grow even wider as children move through school.
We tend to blame the school system for this,
but we can't blame the school system for everything.
So, all of these family influences and family challenges,
they continue while children are moving through school.
So, for families worried about money all the time,
and worried about resources all the time,
or having to move house all the time, or homeless,
or living in a shelter,
that's surely going to impact a child's school achievement.
So these things matter,
not just in early childhood,
but during the school years.
So, it's very costly to the kids,
but it's also very costly to all of us, right?
It's very costly to all of us.
So we're being very shortsighted in not investing.
As I was saying at the start, we,
as a society, absolutely want children to achieve.
So we have a famous education law passed under
a Republican administration called No Child Left Behind.
So, we were being a bit cheeky in the book calling it Too Many Children Left Behind.
But that is what's going on and it's against every American value.
We all believe that children ought to have equal educational opportunities.
The lessons from the other countries
tell us that there are some things we could be doing about that.
Well, thank you, Dr. Waldfogel,
very much for being with us and leading us on this path.
Yeah, my pleasure.
John RobertsonPolicy Lecturer
