Please explain Sean Reardon, "The Widening Income Achievement Gap." the formation of student identity. How are these perspectives crucial for understanding student identity? Given these ideas, which recommendations would you give to a teacher training program for educators, so that they could write a more holistic and respectful pedagogy for their students? Please be sure to indicate when you cite the text.

THE WIDENING INCOME ACHIEVEMENT GAP SEAN F. REARDON Has the academic achievement gap between students from high-income and low-income families changed in the last few decades? And if s0, why? Historically, low-income students as a group have performed less well than high-income stu- dents on most measures of academic success including standardized test scores, grades, h:igh school completion rates, and college enrollmznt and completion rates. Countless studies have documented these disparities and investigated the many underlying reasons for them. But no research had systematically investigated whether these income-related achievement gaps have nar- rowed or widened over time. To answer this question, I conducted a com- prehensive study of the relationship between academic achievement and family income in the United States over the last 50 years. [ used data from 12 nationally representative studies that included information on family income end student performance on a standardized test in math or reading. Because each of the tests mea- sured reading and math skills on a different scale, 1 standardized all the test scores and expressed the income achievement gap in standard deviation units (Reardon, 2011). STRIKING FINDINGS Finding 1: The income achievement gap has grown significantly in the last three decades. Among children born in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, the reading achievement gap between those from high-income families (at the 90th percentile of the income distribution) and those from low-income families (at the 10th percentile) was about 09 of a standard deviation. As illustrated in Figure 20.1, this gap began to widen beginning with the cohorts born in the SOURCE: Sean F. Reardon, \"Widening Income Achievement Gap,\" in Educational Leadership, 70(8), May 2013, Reprinted with permission from the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. 288 mid-1970s. Among those born 20-25 years later, the gap in standardized test scores was roughly 1.25 standard deviations40 percent larger than the gap several decades earlier.! Although the trend in the income achieve- ment gap is striking in its own right, it is even more striking when compared with the concur- rent trend in the black-white achievement gap Figure 20.1 In standard deviation units w o (90/10 Income Gap or Black-White Gap) Average Difference in Standardized Test Scores ) (431 .00 1940 1950 1960 The Widening Income Achievement Gap 289 (see Figure 20.1). The black-white achievement gap was considerably larger than the income achievement gap among cohorts born in the 1950s and 1960s, but now it is considerably smaller than the income achievement gap. This change is the result of both the substantial prog- ress made in reducing racial inequality in the 1960s and 1970s and the sharp increase in Income Achievement Gap and Black-White Achievement Gap in Reading for 1943-2001 1970 1980 1999 2000 Cohort Birth Year Income Gap - Black-White Gap SOURCE: Adapted from \"The Widening Socioeconomic Status Achievement Gap: New Evidence and Possible Explanations (p. 98) by S. F. Reardon, in R. J. Murnane & G. J. Duncan (Eds.), Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children's Life Chances, 2011, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. 290 o PART IIIA. CLASS economic inequality in education outcomes in more recent decades. Indeed, Figure 20.1 encapsulates two impor- tant trends in U.S. history over the last 50 yeers. In the 1950s and 1960s, racial inequality was high in virtually every domain of lifeeduca- tion, health, earnings, residential segregation whereas economic inequality was lower than it had ever been in the last century (Piketty & Saez, 2003). By the early part of the 21st century, racial inequality was much lower (although far from eliminated) in terms of wages, health dis- parities, and residential segregation. Meanwhile, economic inequality reached historic highs (Saez, 2012). Although both remain high, eco- nomic inequality now exceeds racial inequality in education outcomes. Finding 2: Income gaps in other measures of education success have grown as well. Academic achievement, as measured by standardized test scores, is not the only educa- tion outcome for which disparities between high-income &nd low-income students have been growing The college-completion rate among children from high-income families has grown sharply in the last few decades, whereas the completion rate for students from low- income families has barely moved (Bailey & Dynarski, 2011). Moreover, high-income stu- dents make up an increasing share of the enrcll- ment at the most selective colleges and universities (Reardon, Baker, & Klasik, 2012) even when compared with low-income students with similar test scores and academic records (Bailey & Dyrarski, 2011; Belley & Lochner, 2007; Karen, 2002). A related trend during the last 20 years is the growing social-class gap in other important measures of adolescents' \"*soft skills'\" and behav- iors related to civic engagement, such as partici- pating in extracurricular activities, sports, and academic clubs; volunteering and participating in community life; and self-reports of social trust (Putnam, Frederick, & Snellman, 2012). Finding 3: The income achievement gap is already large when children enter kindergarten, and it does not grow significantly as they progress through school. Onc possible cxplanation for the widening income achievement gap is that K-12 schools have grown more unequal in quality over the last few decades. If this were true, then the gap should grow larger the longer students are in school. But when I examined the data, I found little evidence that this occurs. In one study, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K), roughly 25,000 students were tested in math and literacy skills in kindergarten in 1998 and then were reas- sessed as many as six more times between 1998 and 2007, when the students were in 8th grade (Tourangeau, Nord, L, Pollack, & Atkins-Burnett, 2006). I used this study's data to examine how the income achievement gap changed as this cohort of students progressed through elementary and mid- dle school. As Figure 2(.2 shows, the gap in read- ing grew very little during this periodit was 1.15 standard deviations when the children entered kindergarten and 1.25 standard deviations in 8th grade. Other longitudinal studies that assessed students multiple times during middle and high school show the same pattern: The achievement gap changes little during the K12 years. The fact that the income achievement gap is large when children enter kindergartenand does not grow substantially during the school yearssuggests that the primary cause of the gap is not unequal school quality. In fact, the data in Figure 20.2 show that schools may actu- ally narrow academic achievement gaps, rather than widen them. The data show the gap narrow- ing between the fall and spring of the kindergar- ten and 1st grade yearsperiods when students were in schooland widening in the summer between kindergarten and 1st gradewhen they were not in school. Although we can't assume that the same pattern holds in later grades, the ECLS-K data do suggest that schools may reduce inequality rather than widen it. This find- ing is consistent with other research on the \"summer setback that has been conducted in E L5 (QFTI opd Spring G1 2 g S S o 2 >