PROFESSOR CONDUCTS RESEARCH ON EARLY EDUCATIONAL DISADVANTAGE AND INEQUALITY
Professor
Irvine, Calif., February 1, 2009
George Farkas is Professor of Education and Sociology at the University of California at Irvine. He arrived in Summer 2008 from Pennsylvania State University, where he was Professor of Sociology, Demography, and Education, and served as the Director of Graduate Studies in the Sociology Department and Director of the Statistics Core in the Population Research Institute. A sociologist, he has a long history of research on educational disadvantage and inequality, and interventions to reduce them.
Dr. Farkas’ interest in educational outcomes for low income children began when, from 1972 – 1978, he served on the faculty of the Department of Sociology and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. Then, working at Abt Associates, Inc., a Cambridge MA think-tank, from 1978 to 1982, he evaluated the impacts of the Youth Incentive Entitlement Pilot Projects, a national demonstration project aimed to reduce school dropout and increase employment among low-income teenagers. The conclusion of this evaluation was that this intervention for teenagers was “too little, too late.” As a consequence, Farkas decided that the key to assisting disadvantaged youth lay in interventions beginning at younger ages. This insight has guided much of his subsequent research.
As a Professor of Sociology and Political Economy at the University of Texas at Dallas, Dr. Farkas began researching elementary and middle school student achievement within the Dallas School District in 1985. This led to articles in the American Sociological Review, the American Educational Research Journal, and other professional outlets, as well as his book, Human Capital or Cultural Capital? Ethnicity and Poverty Groups in an Urban School District. Working with business leaders from Texas Instruments and other corporations, Farkas was challenged to devise an intervention to raise the performance of low-income elementary school students. He responded by inventing the tutoring program, Reading One-to-One, which was implemented in a wide variety of school districts, and served as one of the models for President Clinton’s America Reads initiative of 1997, in which college work study students tutor elementary school students in reading. His paper, “Can All Children Learn to Read at Grade Level by the End of Third Grade?” was widely influential in promoting early reading initiatives.
Moving to Penn State in 2000, Dr. Farkas extended his studies of unequal achievement to elementary school students at risk of learning disabilities in reading and math, including grants (with Paul Morgan) from the American Educational Research Association to study the determinants and consequences of placement into special education, and from the U.S. Department of Education to study which instructional approaches are most effective in teaching mathematics to such students in grades K – 5. This research has led to more than ten papers published in peer reviewed journals within the past two years, as well as a number of papers currently in press.
Dr. Farkas is also working (with Katerina Bodovski) on a book, Early Inequality, that is under contract to the Rose Monograph Series of the American Sociological Association, published by Russell Sage Foundation Press. In September, 2008, he gave an invited lecture on this topic to the Population Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin. He repeated this lecture in January 2009 to the Program in Population, Society, and Inequality at UC-Irvine, and is also scheduled to present this lecture to the Center for Advanced Social Science Research at New York University in April.
Most recently, Dr. Farkas has extended his studies of early inequality to the preschool years. This has led to articles on the determinants of early cognitive delay and the determinants of early attention problems; these are in press at peer reviewed journals. Additional articles are in preparation.
Dr. Farkas’ other research interests include gender and social class differences in educational achievement, as well as the effects of such achievement on employment and earnings. He is an expert on statistical methodology, and currently teaches two semesters of the statistical methodology course sequence for graduate students in the Ph.D. program in Education. He has a long history of co-authoring papers with graduate students, and is always ready to begin new projects on subjects of mutual interest.
