Sean Reardon, professor of sociology at Stanford University, penned a strong op-ed in the New York Times called No Rich Child Left Behind. The heart of his argument is is that the educational gaps among classes is growing. In fact, the  “rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago.”

Here are the highlights of the article:

• Wealth: “Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race.”
• Stratification: “[T]he rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor.”
• Poor kids are improving: “The income gap in academic achievement is not growing because the test scores of poor students are dropping or because our schools are in decline. In fact, average test scores  . . .have been rising — substantially in math and very slowly in reading — since the 1970s.”
• White gaps growing: “If we look at the test scores of white students only, we find the same growing [performance] gap between high- and low-income children as we see in the population as a whole.”
• Schools aren’t the whole story: “It may seem counter-intuitive  but schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students.”
• Early childhood: “It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.”
• Wealth and early investment: “High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources — their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school — on their children’s cognitive development and educational success.”
• Rapid change means hope: “Strangely, the rapid growth in the rich-poor educational gap provides a ray of hope: if the relationship between family income and educational success can change this rapidly, then it is not an immutable, inevitable pattern. What changed once can change again.”
• Not just schools; not just preschools; invest in parents. “But we need to do much more than expand and improve preschool and child care. There is a lot of discussion these days about investing in teachers and “improving teacher quality,” but improving the quality of our parenting and of our children’s earliest environments may be even more important. Let’s invest in parents so they can better invest in their children.”

Reardon is advancing an truly important argument, and doing it among the decision makers of education, policy and industry who have power to make choices that empower parents.