Sarah Garland provocatively reports in The Atlantic and in The Hechinger Report Growing income achievement gap overshadows race that nowadays well-to-do children are experiencing a widening educational gap with their less economically fortunate peers.
Affluent children usually enjoy not only superior schooling but also better private education after-school through ongoing and extensive enrichment programs. Garland writes that the “widening academic divide means that kids who are born poor and kids who are born rich are staying that way once they reach adulthood.”
Garland notes:
Wealthy parents have zeroed in on this shift, says Emily Glickman, a Manhattan private-school consultant, and are not only spending more on their kids, but focusing that spending on the new technologies and skills that will be in demand in the 21st century workforce.
“Every afternoon, every weekend, every summer nowadays is often taken up with expensive enrichment and remediation,” she says. “Now people are getting very strategic. Ivy League colleges like squash and fencing. [Before], maybe you went to Hebrew school on Saturdays. Now people are enrolling their children in Mandarin.”