Governments have limited resources. When policy makers ask how to invest those resources to reduce inequality, schooling is one answer. We suggest that schooling has the capacity to reduce social inequality, even taking into account gross inequality in the home and school environments.

There is a huge debate about whether schooling has the potential to help us overcome the inequality we see in the United States, the United Kingdom and other societies. Some say that giving kids an equal opportunity to learn is a good way to equalize opportunity. Others say that because society is so unequal and schools are so unequal, kids who already have social and economic advantages would benefit more from school.

We believe that schooling can be a powerful tool for reducing inequality. It isn’t true that schools are a weak force. But the amount and quality of early schooling matters a lot.

LEARNING ENCOMPASSES ACADEMIC SKILLS AND SOCIAL SKILLS

We wondered whether experience in school increases or decreases equality among children in terms of academic skills but also as it relates to behavior regulation and ability to pay attention and get along with others. These skills are intrinsically valuable, but they also predict health, longevity and well-being, as well as how successful people will be in the labor market.

“The capacity for schooling to reduce inequality could be dramatically increased by investing in more and better schooling at every stage, particularly when kids are little.”

We reframed the question by examining the potential contrast between how much you would learn if you were in school versus how much you would learn if you weren’t.

How much you would learn depends on the quality of the learning environment you would experience in school or at home – the input –but it also depends upon your learning rate, which is the rate at which you gain skills. A key assumption, backed up by research, is that your capacity to gain from input increases the more you already know. A highly skilled person gains more from instruction than does a low-skilled person.

Research suggests that when children are young, socioeconomic differences in skill are small. So rich and poor kids have similar potential to gain from input at that age, giving us good reason to expect that schooling early in life should substantially reduce inequality. To understand why, we have to think about the quality of the learning environments children experience at home and at school. When disadvantaged children go from home to school, they experience a very significant improvement in input: the learning environment at school is much more favorable than the learning environment at home. In contrast, when better-off children go from home to school, the contrast in input is not as great: the learning environment at school is not so different from the learning environment at home. Since both children have, on average, similar capacities to benefit from input, schooling should reduce inequality.

Things change as kids get older. Since they get better input at home and at school than poor kids do, rich kids will tend to benefit more from future input. The skill differential between kids from high- and low-SES backgrounds becomes greater and greater, so the capacity of high-SES kids to benefit from input grows as well. As a result, the capacity of schools to reduce inequality decreases and actually reverses. This leads us to predict that, for older kids, an extra dose of schooling increases inequality.

EXPLORING INEQUALITY IN FOUR SITUATIONS

We examined four instances to analyze schooling’s effect on inequality:

1. Universal prekindergarten: The evidence is overwhelming that kids from families with a lower socioeconomic (SES) status benefit more from prekindergarten than do more well-off kids.
2. Extending the school day: A study that randomly assigned kids to half- versus full-day kindergarten found that children from lower-SES families improve their literacy skills more in full-day kindergarten.
3. Summer recess versus year-round school: This research is decisive that kids acquire more academic skills when they’re in school than when they’re not, but the benefit of attending school is more pronounced for kids from lower-SES backgrounds.
4. Increasing the duration of mandatory schooling: Kids who would have dropped out sooner in the absence of laws requiring them to attend school until 16 years of age—and these are mostly kids from low-SES families—benefit from the better jobs and greater earnings that result from additional schooling. However, research indicates that the benefit of an extra year of schooling accrues more to high-SES kids. One main benefit is that if you stay in school an extra year, you are more likely to get a degree, which makes it more likely that you will get another degree, which leads to higher earnings. However, this benefit is far more pronounced for high-skill than low-skill adolescents. Unfortunately, by the time they reach adolescence, rich kids have significantly higher skills than do poor kids, on average, given the prevailing education system. Increasing the amount and quality of schooling early can reduce this kind of inequality.

QUALITY EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION IS AN INVESTMENT IN BETTER FUTURES

If we can increase the amount and quality of schooling when children are young, we can delay the skill divergence that will lead to inequality later. We know that well-off kids are exposed to a better environment at home and at school; if we have more schooling and better schooling, then schooling’s capacity to reduce inequality will be preserved further in the course of life. If you start early, you don’t see as much skill divergence.

Investing substantially in early childhood education increases the benefits of later investments and enhances skills later on. We still have to invest down the road, but the benefits of the later investment are enhanced by early investments.

According to our model, schools could be doing a lot more to reduce inequality by equalizing the education that poorer and better-off children receive.

Schooling’s capacity to reduce inequality could be dramatically increased by investing in more and better schooling at every stage, particularly when kids are young. Putting kids in school or school-like environments when they’re young, coupled with longer school days and longer school years, would tend to reduce inequality.

The most counterintuitive conclusion from our research is that even though rich kids get better schooling than poor kids, schooling is equalizing. Why? Because the inequality in out-of-school environments is far greater than inequality in school environments. In other words, even though schools are unequal, spending more time in them decreases inequality. That’s a shocker, but I’m convinced it’s true. Imagine what we could do if we could actually equalize schooling!

Immigrant parents often avoid speaking their native language at home for fear of confusing their children by presenting two languages at once. That’s a shame, because learning to be bilingual actually improves children’s concentration – and that enhanced focus offers lifelong advantages.

Bilingualism strengthens the attention system in the front of the brain, because constantly selecting from two available languages enhances powers of concentration. These powers are essential for many other important mental tasks.

The crucial factor is that when bilingual people speak, both their languages are activated. Yet they rarely make the mistake of choosing a word from the wrong language. That’s because the front of the brain – the prefrontal cortex – focuses their attention on whichever language is required at any particular moment. So an Anglo-French speaker talking to a monolingual British person won’t say “chien” instead of “dog”. The mental gymnastics of constantly focusing in this way – for hours every day – builds the attention system, providing vital strengths that can then be used in other cognitive tasks.

FILTERING INFORMATION, HELPING CONCENTRATION

This training for the attention system provides a great advantage. All the information that bombards us is filtered first through the front of the brain. We have to sift through information to focus on what our sensory and cognitive systems should be considering at any particular moment. In other words, we have to selectively attend to the information that’s needed for the tasks we’re currently performing.

“The real advantage is more profound: bilingualism rewires the brain in ways that matter throughout life, even into old age and cognitive decline.”

A selective attention system is essential for everything we do. For example, when you drive down a highway, it helps you spot your exit sign without being distracted by billboards. When you’re typing, it helps you focus your attention on writing even if someone is shouting in the background. When children are studying multiplication and division, it helps them focus on the integers and on learning the various operations, rather than being distracted by something else going on in the classroom.

Building the capacity to concentrate is a key part of children’s development in the first five years of life. They need the ability to focus on important elements of a problem without being distracted by irrelevant and misleading information. Indeed, the progress that children achieve in their attention capacity during these early years is a predictor of long-term academic success. However, children’s progress around concentration can be slow.

In recent years, neuroscience has found that the neural pathways governing attention aren’t fully connected until later adolescence. As a result, many focusing tasks can be highly challenging for children. For example, if you say to 4-year olds, “Try to sit still, colour in and I’ll tell you when dinner is ready,” they often have trouble blocking out other distractions to do as requested.

So the importance for children of concentration – combined with their immature development – helps explain why strengthened attention systems are such an asset to bilingual speakers.

Other factors also help build the frontal attention system. Research shows that socioeconomic status, for example, is crucial for the attention system’s healthy and rapid development: young children from better-off families typically have more well-developed attention systems and perform better on tasks that require concentration and selective attention. However, bilingualism is separate from those effects; even in poorer families, bilingualism promotes development of the frontal attention system.

BEING BILINGUAL REWIRES THE BRAIN

Some of this advantage might be dismissed as simply accelerated progress – bilingual children excelling at a mental task which their monolingual peers will be able to achieve just as well in perhaps six months or a year. However, studies show that the real advantage is more profound: bilingualism rewires the brain in ways that matter throughout life—even, we’re beginning to understand, into old age and cognitive decline.

Research demonstrates that even when bilinguals perform a task with the same success as their monolingual peers, their brains are functioning in a different way. First, imaging shows that bilinguals’ brains require less activation to achieve the same level of performance than the brains of monolingual people. In other words, bilingual brains are more efficient, needing less fuel, which frees up capacity for other tasks.

Second, the normal cognitive decline that’s characteristic of most people as they age is slower in bilingual people. We don’t know why, but we do know, from imaging, that connections among regions of the brain are different for bilingual people. So it could be that when parts of the brain age, other parts step in more effectively for bilingual people and compensate when a problem is difficult. A particularly interesting research finding that supports this hypothesis concerns dementia. Although dementia occurs and progresses similarly for bilingual people as for their monolingual peers, among bilinguals the cognitive symptoms are typically delayed by four or five years.

“The importance for children of concentration – combined with their immature development – helps explain why strengthened attention systems are such an asset to bilingual speakers.”

The story of bilingualism is not all a story of advantage. Typically, bilingual speakers, especially children, have less command of either language than their monolingual peers have over a single language. On average, bilinguals have a smaller vocabulary and more difficulty retrieving words and forming sentence structures. It’s vital that educators understand these potential weaknesses, since norms for standardized test scores were created for monolingual, English-speaking children. These tests can therefore lead to mistaken diagnoses for bilingual children and should be recalibrated to accommodate this group.

MESSAGE TO POLICY MAKERS AND EDUCATORS

Policy makers and educators should understand that bilingualism is an asset and that they shouldn’t treat it like a disease to be prevented. We know, for example, that Hispanic children in the United States – who rank low on socioeconomic curves – achieve their best outcomes when Spanish is spoken in the classroom. Speech and language clinicians should understand a child’s entire language profile at home and at school. They should not be afraid to say: “We need to build up her Portuguese because that’s going to help her to learn English in the long run.”

Finally, setting aside the attention and cognitive advantages available to bilingual children, this language issue also concerns their social and emotional well-being, which is important to every aspect of their progress. Bilingualism is typically an enriching experience for reasons of culture and identity. Home languages connect children to their ancestors, their grandparents and their extended families. These connections should be valued and developed, not hampered by insensitive approaches to bilingualism.

Many parents underestimate their children’s reading potential. It’s not unusual for them to say: “My boy’s not that good at reading, and that’s the way he is.” So they’re less inclined to make an effort to read with their children. They tend to believe that it won’t help much, that their children’s skills and abilities are fixed.

This “fixed mind-set” is mistaken. Children who read more get better at it, whether or not they are good at the outset. Furthermore, our research shows particular improvement among children whose parents have this mind-set, if they are offered advice on the benefits of helping and a concrete way to support the child. In these cases, children can make significant progress in both reading and writing. The improvements are at least as significant as those achieved through methods that support classroom learning. They’re also a lot less expensive, which suggests that educators should reconsider how they spend their funds on reading support.

Our findings raise many fascinating possibilities that are currently the subject of further research. First, might the same problem of parental underestimation apply to other basic skills, such as numeracy? If so, could encouragement of more positive attitudes and giving parents straightforward ways to help their children be similarly cost-effective in improving children’s mathematical skills?

POORER CHILDREN BENEFITED

“The biggest improvements were for children whose parents had previously strongly underestimated their capacity to read better.”

Our insights may also begin to offer what the social sciences value highly – new ways to reduce the impact that socioeconomic status typically imposes on children’s achievement. We know that poverty is linked to lower expectations of children’s performance. Our findings show that with the right supports, parents with such low expectations can be helped to bring about significant improvements in their children’s educational outcomes. The improvements we identified were found even among poorer parents and immigrants.

TALKING ABOUT READING

Our randomised trial involved 1,587 children aged 8 to 9 from 72 classrooms in Denmark. We gave parents a booklet and access to an online video explaining that their child’s reading ability could be improved, whether the child was already good or bad at reading.

Second grade is when children typically start to read for themselves, making the leap from decoding single words to comprehending text and relating it to their own lives. Parents talking with their children about a book before, during, and after reading can be a way to help them shift from decoding to proper understanding.

That’s why, for our study, we used what’s called a “dialogical reading model”. We provided some books and specific guidance on how to talk about books with children in a constructive and positive manner. So, for example, before children began the first page, parents encouraged them to read the front title and the back cover to gain an overview. Then they helped with difficult words as the children read. Once children had finished, parents were advised to talk to them about what they had read and how it related to their lives. We recommended that parents praise the children’s effort, rather than performance or results.

LARGEST READING GAINS AMONG UNDERESTIMATED CHILDREN

We found that such involvement was associated with the biggest changes among children whose parents had previously strongly underestimated their capacity to read better. During the two-month experiment, the reading age of such children improved by six months, compared to a four-month average improvement for all children in the study. Their writing also got better. Meanwhile, the control group, not subject to the programme, gained two months in reading age, as one would have expected.

Our data don’t allow us to separate fully the effect of shifting parental mind-sets from the effect of reading support strategies. However, our findings clearly show that the biggest impact was on children whose parents had most underestimated their potential to get better at reading.

We also found that the rate of reading improvement tailed off about seven months after the experiment began. This suggests that support for parents’ positive attitudes – and the provision of reading strategies – may need to be strengthened over time to ensure that they sustain their efforts.

APPROACH IS GOOD VALUE FOR MONEY

“A similar approach might work to enhance children’s numeracy and social and emotional skills. We’re designing studies to examine this question.”

Engaging parents to directly support children’s reading is much cheaper than increasing the time children spend with teachers in school. We have run randomised trials that increased children’s lessons and the numbers of co-teachers in the classroom. These changes had effects of similar magnitude on reading skills but cost at least twice as much.

We suspect that a similar approach might work to enhance children’s numeracy and social and emotional skills. Parents’ views of their children’s reading potential may reflect more deep-seated attitudes about their skills in general. We are designing studies to examine this question.

Our researchers are also trying to assess how parents from different socioeconomic backgrounds may underestimate the effects of spending time with their children. Our studies so far suggest that people from lower socioeconomic groups don’t fully appreciate the positive impact that they could have on their children’s educational achievement. We are looking for ways to reverse this underestimation, so that children enjoy more positive support in learning. This work may help to alter the strong relationship between parent’s poorer educational background and children’s lower educational achievements.

It’s also worth noting that the reading improvements children gained in our study were more pronounced for boys than girls. This may reflect the fact that the boys generally performed worse at the outset, leaving more room for improvement. However, it may also be that parents are more inclined to underestimate boys’ reading potential. If so, reversing this inclination could prove particularly fruitful for increasing boys’ achievement.