The richest 10% outspend the poorest quarter over 13 to 1 per child on childcare, education and activities — up from about 3 to 1 in the early 1980s

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In 1848, the education reformer Horace Mann called public schooling “the great equalizer of the conditions of men.” More than 175 years later, education scholars are still arguing about whether he was right. Some research finds that a child’s family background shapes their academic achievement far more than schools do. Other work finds that schools narrow academic achievement gaps that would otherwise be even wider. A classic study following Baltimore children in the 1980s found that low-income and wealthier kids learned at similar rates during the school year. Achievement gaps grew over the summer, when some children read with parents, visited libraries and went to camp, while others didn’t have those same opportunities. How much summer learning loss exists is still an open question. But the larger point holds: Gaps between rich and poor children in reading and math skills are already large on the first day of kindergarten, driven by factors outside of K-12 schooling. For a given…

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