It’s no secret that children from different demographic and socio-economic groups don’t have access to the same resources needed to help them reach their greatest potential. But a new study, led by University of Maryland Professor David Blazar, tries to quantify that gap. Spotlight spoke with Blazar recently; the transcript of that conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Thanks for taking the time to speak with us David. What was the spark for this research?
I think I started from a combination of my work as an academic, primarily studying teachers and schooling, but also having been a classroom teacher and understanding the ways in which school is just one factor that impacts the lives of youth and of kids. Being a faculty member kind of solidified me in this space and I felt like I wanted to push myself and my scholarship. It was kind of an obvious next step to think about—a focus on inequalities and youth experiences, opportunity outcomes that may be a function of what they get in schools, but also the ways in which that ripples across many other components of their lives, such as opportunities in housing and healthcare and food, and so many other sectors of potential investment.
Could you give us a sense of the methodology?
The methodology was really complex on one hand and kind of simple on another. The complex part was definitely around the data accumulation. And the simple part was around how our statistical analysis was basically kind of summing up. The data piece was challenging and it's what took us many, many years to do. And the reason it was challenging is because we wanted to speak about national trends, contemporary trends, that covered how we as a society invest in children, in education, but also in childcare, in housing, in healthcare and nutrition, in as many of the ways you could think of that we as a society invest in youth.
To compound the difficulty, we didn’t just look at data from consumer expenditure surveys or other sources but tried to think about the kind of investments that families make through their time—the time they read to kids or the time they spend in so many areas of kids’ lives that's so critical. In addition to what families might purchase and what government purchases for children, we think about all of those categories as so critical for children, as the bundle of goods they get. And yet scholarship, while attending to each, has generally kind of thought of those in separate areas. What we think of as our main contribution here is speaking across as many sectors of investment as possible.
And one of the key findings is that there is about an $80,000 investment gap for low-income kids?
I would actually say that to me, that's not the main finding. I think that that $80,000 gap between rich and poor kids is reflective of around like a 15% difference. And that difference in and of itself, was kind of surprising to me and many of my co-authors who went into this thinking the gaps would be much bigger. So, that headline is kind of suggesting that gaps are not particularly large. And there’s so much that the top number masks.
To me, there are a couple of key takeaways. One is, as I'm particularly thinking about the midterms coming and current policy conversations, government investment, which is to say that where government investment is largest, disparities are smallest. For example, universal public schooling almost entirely closes gaps between rich and poor kids and between Black and white and Hispanic children. But that only happens at age five, right? Our government has provided a lot more resources to kids age five and above and far less to early childcare and other supports. So, one takeaway from this study is that where government shows up gaps are reduced substantially and where it doesn't, gaps are incredibly large.
And what's an example of the flip side of that where government doesn't show up and the gaps are large?
Two of them are housing and healthcare. We see quite large disparities between rich and poor, Black and Hispanic versus white kids and how much investment in formal childcare they receive—gaps of about 70%. And that's driven in large part by the fact that while there is investment in Head Start and in other subsidized programs, it doesn't reach as many kids as we want it to.
Housing is an even more extreme case. Across the U.S., it's only about 4% of children who are in families that receive housing subsidies and around 15% of children from the lowest quartile of household income. And in turn, we see that investments in housing account for around 30% of the total disparities in kids that we accumulate from birth to age 18.
And you found, I'm assuming, a significant racial difference in these numbers?
Yes. In many ways, the patterns by income go hand in hand with patterns by race. They're not always the same, however. A counter to this would be that one of the biggest drivers of inequality for Black kids is healthcare and that's less true for low-income kids.
And did you look at these trends regionally?
We didn't. We want to provide a picture of the U.S. as a whole and our criteria for the data we included was that it had to be nationally represented.
And what about the time investment? What did you find? What differences did you find there?
Time is, I think, a second key finding from the work. We found that the largest gaps occur in the first several years of life and close substantially when kids start public school. Inadequate access to formal childcare is a key driver in their early years. I mentioned that we include parent and family time and by and large, and probably at later ages, parents spend a lot of time investing in their kids where we don't see actually large differences across race, ethnicity groups or income. But we do see larger disparities during that first year of life with investments such as the time you are able to spend feeding a child. I would infer that is at least partly related to family leave policies.
You’ve referred to these kinds of investments as an investment bundle. Explain what you mean by that.
As a former teacher and somebody who studies education, I think of education as a critical piece of investment that we give to children, but it's one of many kinds of resources that we give to kids. And it turns out that kids who have under-resourced schools also have under-resourced or have less access to childcare, right? And in healthcare and nutrition. And it’s when those things are added up that you can look at an investment bundle that’s indicative of the full childhood experience.
As I said, around age five, you see the total investments in kids shrink substantially between rich and poor, Black, Hispanic, or white in large part due to the nature of universal public schooling. However, the character of investments, what specifically they get, kind of differs. Once kids start formal school, low-income, Black, and Hispanic kids get a ton of in-school tutoring, but my hunch is that because they're getting a lot of it, it makes investments in public schooling look in some ways higher than investments in rich kids. The same thing is true for things like special education. Low-income kids get a lot of resources in special education, which means that their public schooling investments are higher than for rich kids. But the fact that they get those things are very likely a consequence of underinvestment in earlier years. So, at a high level we can say that the investments in public schooling look similar across groups, but what specifically you are getting and why you're getting it is relative to what you did earlier years. That is so important.
Is there anything else you’d like to underline?
I'll just reiterate some of the key takeaways around the role of social safety net supports. It's an important equalizer, but there are lots of instances in which it's not showing up. Even when the government does show up in places like public schools, the character of investments and what specifically kids get are not always the same. I think that's really important to acknowledge because our methodology pushed us to think a lot about the quality of investments kids get versus just the quantity.