When Eve, a mother in Colorado, received a legal settlement, she found herself suddenly flush.
She drove over to the office of Eric Dearing, who was working with her as a family advocate for Head Start, and she gave him a shirt. Even though the shirt wasn’t his style, and he never wore it, he kept it in the closet. That was one of the few times that he’d seen a family, through “pure luck,” get a spike in income.
The change in Eve, when she went from receiving help to giving gifts, was palpable. “She was so excited and proud and suddenly full of this hope,” says Dearing, who is now a professor at Boston College.
Moments like that are rare these days. Social mobility in the U.S. is stagnant, with income inequality rising. Plus, the ability of people to move up in the world seems to decline with age, as their status gets set. It can cast doubt on the idea that schools prepare students to have good lives and raise questions about whether the country is a poverty-sustaining machine.
This may be getting worse, according to one researcher, whose recent study found that what matters for student outcomes isn’t so much money itself, but the number of supportive learning chances that a person gets.