In April this year, I spoke to a student assembly at the middle school that I attended as a young boy in Boadua, a small Ghanaian village. I had just wrapped up the talk at the conclusion of the question-and-answer session and was about to exit the room when a young girl in the audience raised her hand. She asked: How can I be like you?
The question has been etched in my mind since that day. I had spent a good portion of my talk explaining to the students the steps I took as a child to kick-start my improbable journey from those same classrooms they were sitting in to secondary school and then to college in the Soviet Union, graduate schools in America, and on to a professional career. Apparently, the story had made such a huge impression on the young girl that she was moved to seize the opportunity to extract one or two additional nuggets of wisdom from me before I left.
Five months after that school visit, I read this article in the Wall Street Journal about the ZIP Code effect on children’s life outcomes. The authors, James Heckman, an economics professor at the University of Chicago and a Nobel laureate in economics, and Sadegh Eshaghnia, a senior research associate at the University of Chicago, challenged the findings of a widely cited 2018 paper by economists Raj Chetty of Harvard and Nathaniel Hendren of MIT. Messrs. Chetty and Hendren argued in their paper that there is a strong correlation between the quality of the neighborhood that a child grows up in and the level of that child’s success in life. According to them, children who are raised in neighborhoods with better conditions tend to have better life outcomes, while the opposite is true for those who grow up in poorer neighborhoods.
Messrs. Heckman and Eshaghnia say that this claim is flawed. They point to Moving to Opportunity, an experiment conducted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the 1990s in which some families were moved from high-poverty neighborhoods to better districts. According to Messrs. Heckman and Eshaghnia, the results showed some benefits from the relocation, but there were no meaningful improvements in employment outcomes for adults or educational outcomes for children.
In the view of Messrs. Heckman and Eshaghnia, what in fact happens is that highly educated and affluent parents self-sort into neighborhoods with better conditions. Those parents, they say, are better equipped to provide the guidance and resources that their children need to succeed. Their argument therefore is that the better life outcomes observed in those places are more a function of the family structures inside homes, and less the result of some neighborhood effects.
To a large degree, I agree with the position of Messrs. Heckman and Eshaghnia. Over the course of three decades, I have had ample opportunities, through my work as a public school teacher and also as a parent whose children attended public schools, to observe the differences in educational outcomes in poor and affluent districts. The students I taught were mostly from homes that didn’t have the support structures in place for children to succeed academically. Many of them had single parents who were lowly educated and either unemployed or underemployed. They struggled to feed their children, meaning that those students were highly dependent on school breakfasts and lunches for their daily meals. I saw firsthand how those less-than-ideal conditions at home impacted the learning abilities of children.
In contrast, the schools my children attended were in districts where the vast majority of parents were married, college-educated professionals. Such students tend to have far better educational outcomes because of the resources available to them at home. My view is that generally, a move to a better neighborhood is by itself insufficient to bring about improved life outcomes if conditions inside the home remain suboptimal.
Despite my broad agreement with the position of Messrs. Heckman and Eshaghnia, I think they underestimate the importance of exposure. It is a tragedy that millions of children around the world remain forever trapped in the poverty into which they are born, for the simple reason that life’s possibilities are invisible to them. I grew up in a home with two of the most loving parents that anyone could hope for. But they were illiterate and dirt-poor, which meant that my prospects were quite bleak. What made the difference for me was the discovery of a crucial piece of information on a scrap of paper that I picked up from the ground purely by accident one day. It revealed to me what was out there beyond the borders of the village. It was the spark that I needed to begin to take the steps that brought me to where I am today.
I strongly believe that there are significant numbers of children in poor neighborhoods in America who would benefit from exposure to environments that provide a picture of what education can make possible. Children learn mostly by observation. Exposing them to the right visuals can sometimes make all the difference in their lives. And quite often, giving them access to role models is the most effective way to achieve that objective.
Even after all these decades since l left Boadua, it remains the case that a child born there has few opportunities to see examples of people who have become successful in life through education. That is because most parents in that little town are still illiterate and in that kind of environment, there is little understanding of where education can take a person. It dawned on me how much of a revelation my presence and talk at the school that afternoon had been to the young girl.