What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? by Diane Ravitch

Author:Diane Ravitch [Ravitch, Diane; Finn, Chester E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-062-03673-5
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-10-23T04:00:00+00:00

Of all students in the top quartile of the history assessment, 62 percent have mothers with at least some postsecondary education and 69 percent have fathers who attended college. As we have seen, parent education is closely associated with student performance, so it is not surprising that the students in the top quartile tend to have well-educated parents.

Yet there are significant exceptions to this pattern. In fact, 22 percent of the students in the top quartile on the history assessment come from families in which neither parent had any formal education beyond high school. Almost two-thirds of these students are boys and more than nine in ten of them attend public schools. Eighty-eight percent are white, 5.6 percent are black, 4.2 percent are Hispanic, 1.5 percent are Asian, and the balance are “others.”

These students live in a home environment that is somewhat less likely to have books, newspapers, encyclopedias, and dictionaries than the home of the average student in the sample. They also watch more television than the average student: 38.7 percent watch four or more hours per day (compared with 32.2 percent of the entire sample). They spend about the same amount of time on homework as the sample as a whole: about 37 percent do it for half an hour or less each day, while about 32 percent spend two or more hours per day on homework. These high-scoring students are far less likely to have attended preschool than those in the entire sample: only 36 percent did, compared to 47 percent of all students. When it comes to computer use, they are just as likely as everyone else to have used a computer with a keyboard (89 percent have), and no more likely than the entire sample to have one at home (30 percent do).

The students in this group are more apt to be in the academic track than are those in the full sample, but far less likely to be in the academic track than others in the top quartile:

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