Wealth, Traditional Socioeconomic Indicators, and the Achievement Debt

This study examined whether socioeconomic indicators including wealth, parents' education, parents' occupation, and parents' income predicted the academic outcomes of African Americans and European Americans differently. Using a sample of 1,302 African American and 6,362 European American public high school students drawn from the first- and second-year follow-up of the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988, the study found that socioeconomic status (SES) accounted for significant variance in the academic achievement of African American students, and that wealth explained variance for students of both ethnicities beyond what was explained by SES alone. Wealth accounts for greater variance in outcomes of African American students than of European American students. In her presidential address before the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in April 2006, Gloria Ladson-Billings called attention to the relationship between wealth and what she called an "achievement debt" accruing to African Americans over centuries in the United States. Her thesis, supported by a growing body of research (Conley, 1999; Orr, 2003; Shapiro, 2004) and testimony among African American scholars and elders, was that differences in educational outcomes between African American and European American students related to the historical denial of resources-social, intellectual, and financial capital-as a legacy of slavery, Jim Crow policies, and more subtle institutional racism. In the 1960s, researchers began making use of SES as a proxy measure of the accrued historical differences in resources and status that Ladson-Billings described. Starting with the Equality of Educational Opportunity Study (Coleman et al., 1966), hundreds of studies use SES to account for variance in educational outcomes and to explain differences in outcomes across ethnic and racial groups. For example, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study of 16,157 children in kindergarten (Lee & Burkam, 2002) found that SES accounted for about 40% of the difference in reading readiness between children of African American and European American ethnicity. In a meta-analysis research project, Sirin (2005) analyzed correlational studies conducted between 1990 and 2000 involving 74 independent data samples. The studies showed a mean correlation between SES and educational achievement of 0.29 for student-level data, and 0.60 for aggregated data. Studies showed different patterns of relationship between SES and academic outcomes for students of African American and European American ethnicity. Shin's (2005) meta-analysis found that the mean correlation between SES and educational outcomes was higher for European Americans (r = 0.27) across studies than for minority students (r = 0.17). Several studies have found strong relationships between SES and the academic achievement of African American students (Adams & Singh, 1998; Lee, 1993; Smith-Maddox, 1998), but others have revealed no significant relationship between SES and the academic achievement of African American students (Battle, 1997; Ford, 1993). Craig, Conner, and Washington (2003) found that African American students from a lower SES community achieved higher test scores than African American students from a higher SES community. The dissimilarities in the relationship between SES and the academic performance of African Americans and European Americans may be partly a reflection of the socioeconomic indicators used to measure SES. While SES may reflect the socioeconomic experiences of the general population, Conley (1999), Oliver and Shapiro (1997), and Shapiro (2004) proposed that debt and wealth are variables that are more relevant in understanding the economic experience of African Americans. Conley (1999) argued that wealth impacts academic attainment more than SES. Orr (2003) found that wealth had a significant relationship to the academic achievement of African American students. …