No Rich Child Left Behind

via the Los Angeles County
Office of Education

While the idea of standardized testing and the gap between the rich and poor may not seem to have any connection besides the fact that they are both rising, they do correlate in an uncanny way: they can be used to assess the widespread effect of one another in America.

It is fairly common knowledge that kids from a higher income background tend to have higher GPAs and perform better on standardized tests than kids from lower income households. However, it is lesser known that there is actually a more substantial discrepancy of educational success between social classes than between that of different races. According to Professor Sean F. Reardon of Stanford University in an article for The New York Times entitled 'No Rich Child Left Behind', "If we look at the test scores of white students only, we find the same growing gap between high- and low-income children as we see in the population as a whole". Therefore, the American public's test scores in general are fluctuating at the 'same growing gap', regardless of race.

I think the use of standardized testing in testing the rate of the increase in the gap between the rich and poor is a unique idea. Why do you think standardized testing can be applied to assess different socioeconomic thresholds? To learn more about the disparities of education for rich students versus poor, you should check out my classmate, Lily Stein's, blog.