Cash for Poor Families Isn't Enough to Boost Academic Outcomes

Reducing child poverty is a worthy goal, but we also need to change schools so they work for all students.

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A recent rigorous study found, to the researchers’ apparent surprise and disappointment, that providing parents of newborns with cash for four years didn’t result in measurable benefits. The researchers recruited a thousand low-income mothers in various US cities for the study. One group got $333 a month, while the control group got only $20 a month.

The researchers assessed all the children on seven measures: vocabulary, executive function, pre-literacy skills, spatial perception, social and emotional behavior, and chronic health conditions. They found no significant differences between the groups on any of the measures.

The results weren’t widely reported, although the New York Times ran a story about them on the front page of its print edition. And there are reasons to view the data with caution.

According to the Times, some lead researchers on the study suspect the pandemic skewed the outcomes. Not only did it disrupt people’s lives, the federal government also provided pandemic-related aid to all poor families, including the control group. That had the effect of making the two groups more similar in terms of income than they otherwise would have been.

In any event, some point out that $333 a month might not have been enough to make a difference to the outcomes they were measuring. In addition, they say, the benefits of the cash payments may not become apparent until after the children start school.

The money might also have yielded benefits that didn’t show up in the data. The mothers who got the $333 felt it made a difference in their lives, according to the Times story. They spent it on things like gifts for their children and family outings to restaurants or the zoo.

Confusing Correlation with Causation

But fundamentally, the assumption that raising family income will automatically translate into bigger vocabularies or better pre-literacy skills seems to confuse correlation with causation. Yes, children from more affluent families generally have bigger vocabularies and better literacy skills than their low-income peers, but that’s not just because they have more money. More likely, it’s because their parents have higher levels of education, enabling them to surround their children from birth in an environment that expands their vocabularies and their knowledge of the world.

The way to test the relative effects of money and parental education would be to take a group of poor parents that includes some with high levels of education and see if the latter group’s kids have different outcomes. Are there, for instance, differences in academic ability between children of poor parents who didn’t finish high school and those of poor parents with college degrees? Like most studies, this one didn’t look at that question. The mothers in both the control group and the group that got more cash had about the same amount of education, just short of 12 years.

Of course, it can be hard to find poor kids with highly educated parents because those parents usually earn a pretty good income. But imagine a child whose parents have PhDs—let’s say in the humanities—but don’t earn much. (Given the current academic job market, that’s not so hard to imagine. Maybe they’re poorly paid adjunct professors.) Let’s say the family is living on rice and beans, but they have lively dinner-table discussions about English literature, or history, or philosophy, or the news of the day—whatever—and the child is absorbing the information. We have evidence that general cultural knowledge is highly correlated with better reading comprehension. What would that poor kid’s academic achievement look like?

At least one study has shed some light on the question. It was done by the Brookings Institution in 2012, focusing on kindergarten readiness Not surprisingly, the study found that poor children were generally less likely to be ready for school than wealthier children. But the researchers also sliced and diced the data using a number of variables: race, mother’s marital status, preschool attendance—and mother’s education level. The only situation in which poor kids were more likely to be ready for kindergarten than wealthier kids was if their mother had at least a college degree.

We also have data, from a study by TNTP, showing that adolescents from poor families who had strong academic records were three times as likely to earn a living wage and twice as likely to report high levels of well-being by age 30 than poor kids with weak academic outcomes. So, while more cash might not produce better academic outcomes, better academic outcomes can produce not only more cash but more happiness.

Can We Provide Poor Kids with More Knowledge?

All of this raises a question: can society devise an institution that would provide students from less highly educated families with the sophisticated vocabulary and knowledge of the wider world that could enable their success?

Wait—there is such an institution. It’s called school.

Generally speaking, American schools haven’t been successful in promoting social mobility over the last several decades, despite massive efforts to change that situation. That has led people to look to other ways to address inequality in society—like reducing poverty. Reforming education has taken a back seat to those efforts.

When asked about his plans for education, Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate in the New York City mayor’s race, said through a spokesperson that “our children can’t learn downstream from poverty.”

A former prominent education reformer seems to agree. “I don’t think there’s any greater education reform we could pursue than ending childhood poverty in this country,” Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado said in a recent interview.

As superintendent of the Denver school system, Bennet oversaw initiatives that moved the needle somewhat—but not enough. Now running for governor of Colorado, Bennet added that he isn’t coming back “to impose the same standards-based reform effort that we led in Denver. Times have changed, and we’ve seen the limitations of those reforms.”

Yes, there are limits to standards-based reforms—and school choice, and all the other things that reformers tried. And yes, we should strive to end child poverty. But there’s a lot more we could do to turn schools into the engines of social mobility that they should be. From what I’ve seen in classrooms and heard from teachers, I’m convinced that children from poor families have an enormous amount of potential that is only being stifled by our current system of education.

“It Doesn’t Matter if They Come from Poverty”

A good start would be to immerse children in a knowledge-building, content-rich curriculum beginning in kindergarten, and to use methods of instruction grounded in cognitive science that make learning easier. Most of the American education system hasn’t been doing that, unfortunately, but there’s a growing movement in that direction. It can take time to see the results on standardized tests, but some schools and districts are beginning to demonstrate that poor kids can learn at high levels.

Last year I visited classrooms in Monroe, Louisiana, and I’ve interviewed several educators there. About 80 percent of the district’s students are economically disadvantaged. For the past six or seven years, Monroe has been combining a content-rich curriculum that begins in elementary school with an explicit method of writing instruction embedded in the content of the curriculum. Not only has students’ writing improved, but teachers have seen striking increases in reading comprehension, oral language, learning—and thinking.

“It doesn’t matter if they come from poverty,” one teacher told me. “They can do it.”

Schools can’t entirely eliminate socioeconomic gaps. And yes, poverty can interfere with learning if students are hungry or stressed or traumatized—and we need to pay attention to that. But I’ve been in classrooms where students were getting not only free lunch but free breakfast—as much as they wanted. These were young children who were curious about the world and eager to learn, but they still weren’t learning much—not because they were hungry but because their school’s curriculum and instruction were designed in ways that simply didn’t work.

I believe it’s worth continuing to experiment with giving poor families cash payments. But let’s also give poor kids the kind of education that can lift them out of poverty.