Education And Socioeconomic Status
Socioeconomic status (SES) encompasses not just income but also educational attainment, financial security, and subjective perceptions of social status and social class. Socioeconomic status can encompass quality of life attributes as well as the opportunities and privileges afforded to people within society. Poverty, specifically, is not a single factor but rather is characterized by multiple physical and psychosocial stressors. Further, SES is a consistent and reliable predictor of a vast array of outcomes across the life span, including physical and psychological health. Thus, SES is relevant to all realms of behavioral and social science, including research, practice, education and advocacy.
SES Affects Our Society
SES affects overall human functioning, including our physical and mental health. Low SES and its correlates, such as lower educational achievement, poverty and poor health, ultimately affect our society. Inequities in health distribution, resource distribution, and quality of life are increasing in the United States and globally. Society benefits from an increased focus on the foundations of socioeconomic inequities and efforts to reduce the deep gaps in socioeconomic status in the United States and abroad.
SES And Educational Issues
Research indicates that children from low-SES households and communities develop academic skills slower than children from higher SES groups. For instance, low SES in childhood is related to poor cognitive development, language, memory, socioemotional processing, and consequently poor income and health in adulthood. The school systems in low-SES communities are often underresourced, negatively affecting students' academic progress and outcomes. Inadequate education and increased dropout rates affect children's academic achievement, perpetuating the low-SES status of the community. Improving school systems and early intervention programs may help to reduce some of these risk factors; therefore, increased research on the correlation between SES and education is essential.
SES And Family Resources
Literacy gaps in children from different socioeconomic backgrounds exist before formal schooling begins.
Children from low-SES families are less likely to have experiences that encourage the development of fundamental skills of reading acquisition, such as phonological awareness, vocabulary, and oral language.
Children's initial reading competency is correlated with the home literacy environment, number of books owned, and parent distress. However, poor households have less access to learning materials and experiences, including books, computers, stimulating toys, skill-building lessons, or tutors to create a positive literacy environment.
Prospective college students from low-SES backgrounds are less likely to have access to informational resources about college. Additionally, compared to high-SES counterparts, young adults from low-SES backgrounds are at a higher risk of accruing student loan debt burdens that exceed the national average.
Research indicates that school conditions contribute more to SES differences in learning rates than family characteristics do. Researchers have argued that classroom environment plays an important role in outcomes.
Students who were randomly assigned to higher quality classroom in grades K-3 earned more, were more likely to attend college, saved more for retirement, and lived in better neighborhoods. A teacher's years of experience and quality of training are correlated with children's academic achievement. Children in low-income schools are less likely to have well-qualified teachers.
The following factors have been found to improve the quality of schools in low-SES neighborhoods: a focus on improving teaching and learning, creation of an information-rich environment, building of a learning community, continuous professional development, involvement of parents, and increased funding and resources. Schools with students from the highest concentrations of poverty have fewer library resources to draw on (fewer staff, libraries are open fewer hours per week, and staff are less well rounded) than those serving middle-income children (Pribesh, Gavigan, & Dickinson, 2011).
SES And Academic Achievement
Research continues to link lower SES to lower academic achievement and slower rates of academic progress as compared with higher SES communities.
Children from low-SES families enter high school with average literacy skills five years behind those of high-income students. In 2014, the high school dropout rate among persons 16–24 years old was highest in low-income families (11.6 percent) as compared to high-income families (2.8 percent; National Center for Education Statistics, 2014).
The success rate of low-income students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines is much lower than that of students who do not come from underrepresented backgrounds.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau (2014), individuals within the top family income quartile are 8 times more likely to obtain a bachelor's degree by age 24 as compared to individuals from the lowest family income quartile.
Psychological Health
Increasing evidence supports the link between lower SES and learning disabilities or other negative psychological outcomes that affect academic achievement.
Low SES and exposure to adversity are linked to decreased educational success. Such toxic stress in early childhood leads to lasting impacts on learning, behavior, and health.
Children from lower SES households are about twice as likely as those from high-SES households to display learning-related behavior problems. A mother's SES is also related to her child's inattention, disinterest, and lack of cooperation in school.
Perception of family economic stress and personal financial constraints affected emotional distress/depression in students and their academic outcomes.
SES And Career Aspirations
Social class has been shown to be a significant factor in influencing career aspirations, trajectory and achievement.
Racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic barriers generally hinder individuals' vocational development. Career barriers are significantly higher for those from poor backgrounds, people of color, women, those who are disabled, and LGBTIQ-identified individuals.
A study showed that individuals from a lower social class generally had less career-related self-efficacy when it came to vocational aspirations.
Those from higher social class backgrounds tend to be more successful in developing career aspirations and are generally better prepared for the world of work because of access to resources such as career offices, guidance counselors, better schools, high level social actors, and familial experience with higher education.
Relationship Between Achievement And Student Socioeconomic Background
There is some discussion about the size of the effect, however the relationship between a student's socioeconomic background and their educational achievement seems enduring and substantial. Using data from PISA, the OECD have concluded that while many disadvantaged students succeed at school socioeconomic status is associated with significant differences in performance in most countries and economies that participate in PISA. Advantaged students tend to outscore their disadvantaged peers by large margins'.
The strength of the relationship varies from very strong to moderate across participating countries, but the relationship does exist in each country. In Australia, students from the highest quartile of socioeconomic background perform, on average, at a level about 3 years higher than their counterparts from the lowest quartile. Over the 15 years of PISA data currently available, the size of this relationship, on average, has changed little, and over the now 50 years since the publication of the report, the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students remains.
How Are These Effects Transmitted?
What the continued gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students highlights is that despite all the research, it is still unclear how socioeconomic background influences student attainment.
There are those that argue that the relationships between socioeconomic background and educational achievement are only moderate and the effects of SES are quite small when taking into account cognitive ability or prior achievement.
Cognitive ability is deemed to be a genetic quality and its effects only influenced to a small degree by schools. Much of the body of research particularly that generated from large-scale international studies would seem to contradict this reasoning.
Others have argued that students from low socioeconomic level homes are at a disadvantage in schools because they lack an academic home environment, which influences their academic success at school. In particular, books in the home has been found over many years in many of the large-scale international studies, to be one of the most influential factors in student achievement.
From the beginning, parents with higher socioeconomic status are able to provide their children with the financial support and home resources for individual learning. As they are likely to have higher levels of education, they are also more likely to provide a more stimulating home environment to promote cognitive development. Parents from higher socioeconomic backgrounds may also provide higher levels of psychological support for their children through environments that encourage the development of skills necessary for success at school.
The issue of how school-level socioeconomic background effects achievement is also of interest. Clearly one way is in lower levels of physical and educational resourcing, but other less obvious ways include lower expectations of teachers and parents, and lower levels of student self-efficacy, enjoyment and other non-cognitive outcomes.
There is also some evidence that opportunity to learn (particularly in mathematics) is more restricted for lower socioeconomic students, with 'systematically weaker content offered to lower-income students [so that] rather than ameliorating educational inequalities, schools were exacerbating them'.
How To Measure Socioeconomic Status?
The measurement of socioeconomic position is central to the analysis of the social inequities in health and requires updated instruments, adapted to a framework conceptual reference, the local context, and the characteristics of the populations.
The goal of this study is to present and discuss, in the light of international literature, the advantages and disadvantages of different ways of measuring socioeconomic position for the analysis of that exist. The objective of this study is to construct an index capable of measuring the level of socioeconomic status of the families of Primary Education students.
It was found that there is a great diversity of instruments at the individual or geographical level that allows measuring the position socioeconomic in the framework. Each substitution is developed based on a framework conceptual reference and must be adapted to the study design, to the characteristics of the population study (e.g. age), and the feasibility of data collection.
However, due to the great diversity of variables and existing conceptual frameworks. It is not possible to establish the existence of a gold standard for the measurement of applicable to all studies.
The analysis of social inequities in health has two peculiarities that locate measurement of socioeconomic position at the center of the problem. The first is that socioeconomic position (or social stratification) integrates different dimensions, related between them, who have their influence on health outcomes: education, material conditions, occupation, prestige social, relative deprivation, place of residence, among others.
Each affects health throughout life, through material conditions, psychosocial and individual behaviors.
The second particularity is the concept of social gradient: it has been shown in many countries that, on average, as the socioeconomic position of individuals, improve your health outcomes. Measuring socioeconomic should allow highlighting this ongoing relationship between and health. From this perspective, comparison between social extremes, that is between the poorest (or the richest) and the rest of the population, is reductionist and can be translated into public policies creating threshold effects.
At a global level, different ways to measure socioeconomic depending on the framework dominant conceptualization in the country and the need to adapt the measurements to the local context.
In the case of human capital, the usual way of measuring it has been through the educational level of the parents, which we have considered here for both father and mother. It has also been included in the index occupational status, which is usually a closely associated indicator both at the level of income and education. Compared to income level, it is easier to measure and less variable over time.
Regarding the number of variables used, the criterion used has been to consider a small number. Thus, the increase in cases is avoided lost, motivated by the possible non-response to questions regarding the variables involved in the construction of the index.
If the role of education is not simply to reproduce inequalities in society then we need to understand what the role of socioeconomic background more clearly. While much research has been undertaken in the past 50 years, and we are fairly certain that socioeconomic background does have an effect on educational achievement, we are no closer to understanding how this effect is transmitted. Until we are, it will remain difficult to address. In this edition of Science of Learning, two further contributions to this body of knowledge have been added—and perhaps indicate new paths that need to be followed to develop this understanding.
