Brookings Institution reports:
But after decades of rhetoric and reform, the American education system is failing as an engine of social mobility. The poorest children (black and white alike) receive the worst public education. Achievement gaps between poor and affluent children tend to widen, rather than narrow, during the K-12 years.
There's more:
The proportion of children being raised by a single parent has more than doubled in the last four decades, and most of the growth rate is among those who are poorer and less educated. Unintended pregnancy rates are high. More parents have multiple relationships while raising their children, a trend the sociologist Andrew Cherlin describes as a “Marriage-go-Round.”
These differences in family formation patterns are reinforced by “assortative mating,” a stunningly unromantic term for the natural tendency of people to form relationships and have children with people like themselves. College grads marry college grads—and now there are of course many more female college grads around to marry. Online dating has just added algorithms to the process.
All this matters because family structure impacts on social mobility. Even the finest public school system in the world would be unable to compensate children for what Nobel laureate James Heckman calls the “biggest market failure of all”—choosing the wrong parents. Parents with college degrees have fewer children, later in life, and after marriage. And they are high-investment parents, spending generous amounts of time, energy, and money on their offspring. Class gaps in terms of parenting are not new, of course, but they are widening. In the 1970s, there were no serious differences in the amount of time spent with children by parents of differing education levels.
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