The distance between children who have a lot of advantages and children who don’t is often called the Opportunity Gap.
It’s a concept that Eric Dearing and his research team decided to explore, conducting a research study that reveals the tremendous potential of closing the gap by increasing opportunities.
Dearing is a professor of Applied Developmental Psychology in Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development and the new Executive Director of the Mary E. Walsh Center for Thriving Children, home to City Connects.
“To conduct our study, we made use of a longitudinal study called the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development,” Dearing says of the National Institute of Child Health and Development. “It’s a 26-year study that followed a cohort of children born in 1991 in 10 different sites around the United States.”
The NICHD researchers used an exceptionally rich set of assessments to look at the context of these children’s lives, including their homes, child care settings, communities, elementary schools, and afterschool programs.
“We took these gold standard measures and we used them to calculate the number of life opportunities that children experience,” Dearing says.
An opportunity is defined as access to developmentally enriching experiences: it could be living in a learning-rich home, being enrolled in a child care program with sensitive and responsive caregivers, or being in an elementary school where teachers use best practice instructional methods. Dearing boiled the criteria down to 12 opportunities that children could have from birth through adolescence.
“We wanted to know what these opportunities explain. Do they explain the strong connection between your family’s income at birth and how much you earn and whether you graduate from college in early adulthood?” Dearing says.
“The first finding we have was that about two thirds of children born into low income homes where earnings are at or below 200% of the federal poverty threshold had one or zero opportunities between birth and the end of high school.”
A key reason for the small number of opportunities is the high number of children who were not given access to high-quality settings.
“If you’re born with very little money, the odds are very, very low that you’ll end up, from a developmental psychologist standpoint, in some of the highest quality environments.”
In families between 200 and 400 percent of the federal poverty level, roughly lower middle class to middle class, two-thirds of children had four or more opportunities.
In upper middle class families, two-thirds of children had six or more opportunities. Many had eight or twelve opportunities.
“The number of opportunities children have almost entirely explains why those born into low income families graduate at lower rates and have lower levels of income in their mid 20s,” Dearing notes. “In fact, number of opportunities is a stronger predictor of college graduation and high school graduation than poverty is.”
“The strongest predictor of educational attainment that we have in our models is opportunities. It’s not how much money your parents have. It’s not how highly educated your parents are.
“Even more eye-opening is that each opportunity mattered more for the poorest kids. So going from six to seven opportunities for a high income child does not matter nearly as much as going from one to two opportunities for a low income child.”
“When we look at college graduation, we see that 10% of kids who were low income, who had zero opportunities, graduated. If you raised the number of opportunities for these kids to four, about 50% of them would graduate with a four year degree in college.”
What’s groundbreaking about this research finding is that it amplifies the importance of City Connects and other integrated student support programs that are already systematically increasing children’s opportunities. This can include bringing services into schools or enrolling children in high-quality afterschool programs. And at City Connects, we’re already seeing the benefits of providing children with more opportunities.
“City Connects,” Dearing adds, “provides opportunities and improves the quality of students’ experiences in school and in their homes and communities.”
These results were shared in March at the conference of the Society for Research in Child Development. The study is now undergoing peer review and Dearing hopes it will be published as soon as next spring.
“We’ll be really excited to share that paper not just for the findings,” he says, “but also for what it means for the practice of City Connects.”
