Final answer:
Children from low-income households generally perform worse academically than their more affluent peers due to a lack of educational resources and familial support. Economic inequality affects a child's education, which is further exacerbated in societies where resources are not equitably distributed. Studies show that in countries with equitable distribution of resources, there are more resilient students who outperform expectations based on their social background.
Step-by-step explanation:
Do kids perform worse in more unequal societies? The answer to this seems to be yes, based on multiple educational studies and statistics. Children from low-income households exhibit significantly lower standardized test scores, graduation rates, and college entrance rates, and they have much higher school dropout rates compared to their middle- and high-income peers.
The concept of the Ladder of Opportunity is important to consider here. It describes how the circumstances of a child's upbringing, influenced by economic inequality, can result in different educational and economic outcomes even for children with similar talents and efforts. A child from a more affluent background is likely to receive better education and more familial support than a child from a disadvantaged background, leading to better economic prospects for the former.
Moreover, research highlights a discrepancy in educational resources--including access to quality teachers and funding--that are not equitably distributed in the U.S. High-performing countries show that resilient students, or those who achieve higher than expected given their background, are more common when resources are more equitably distributed. Unfortunately, in the U.S., the proportion of such resilient students is below 30 percent, which is much lower than in places like Shanghai and Singapore, where it is about 70 percent.
Thus, students in more unequal societies where resources are not distributed fairly do tend to perform worse, and this may be indicative of a broader systemic issue in the educational system.