Mind, Brain, and Education in Socioeconomic Context

Introduction Ten years ago, when I was just becoming interested in the relation between child development and socioeconomic status, I attended a small workshop sponsored by the McDonnell Foundation to discuss new directions in developmental cognitive neuroscience. At the time I knew virtually nothing about development or SES but, since the meeting was so small and informal, I decided to present some ideas on the topic of “cognitive developmental neuro-sociology” for the sake of getting feedback from the experts present. Although everyone gave me a good-natured hearing, one person took me aside afterward and offered a wealth of information, advice, and encouragement. He continued to educate me through subsequent correspondence and a visit to his lab in Toronto. That person was Robbie Case. By guiding me to relevant literatures on socioeconomic disparities and childhood development, of which I had been embarrassingly ignorant, and by encouraging me to try working in this area for which I was little prepared, he was instrumental in helping turn the vague musings of that small meeting into the program of empirical research described here. AQ1 What would a field with the inauspicious name “cognitive developmental neurosociology” be about? To me, it represented a new approach to the age-old problems of social stratification and the persistence of poverty. Why, in advanced societies that seem to offer opportunity for all, do some people remain poor? Why do many families remain poor across generations? These questions have occupied sociologists for as long as their field has existed, and have been answered in many ways. Marxist approaches to the persistence of poverty emphasized purely economic factors that create and maintain social stratification (Marx, 1867). Functionalist accounts highlight the many ways in which society as a whole is served by the enduring presence of a lower class (e.g., Weber, 1923). The concept of a Culture of Poverty emphasizes causes within individuals and their subculture, rather than