All they wanna do is go the distance

他们想做的就是坚持到底

Working-class parents might have changed their behaviour in response to market forces. In America the wage premium for completing a college degree has risen from 29% to 45% since 1979. Not surprisingly, poorer parents have become more ambitious for their children. The proportion of parents in the poorest quintile of America’s population who expect their children to get no further than high school fell from 24% in 1998-99 to just 11% in 2010-11.

工人阶级的父母们可能已经改变了他们的行为以应对市场力量。在美国，完成大学学位的工资溢价从1979年的29%上升到45%。毫不奇怪，贫穷的父母对他们的孩子更有野心。美国最贫穷的五分之一人口中，期望孩子止步于高中的父母比例从1998-99年的24%下降到2010-11年的11%。

词汇

premium /额外费用；(商)溢价

quintile /五分之一

Another possibility is that training has changed attitudes and behaviour. Joy is being assisted by an organisation called ParentChild+, which has been sending books and toys to poor families, and guiding parents to play in more stimulating ways, since the 1960s. It now caters to 8,500 households in America each year and is expanding elsewhere. Evaluations of ParentChild+ and similar programmes have mostly shown that they work. They are too small to have much of an impact nationally. But they may have helped change norms by spreading the idea that reading and playing with children are important.

另一种可能是，培训改变了人们的态度和行为。Joy得到了一个名为ParentChild+的组织的帮助，该组织自20世纪60年代以来一直在给贫困家庭送书和玩具，并指导父母们用更具有激励性的方式（与孩子们）玩耍。目前，该公司每年在美国为8500户家庭提供服务，并正在向其他地区扩张。对ParentChild+和类似项目的评估大多表明它们是有效的。但其业务面太小，不足以在全国范围内产生很大影响。但是，通过传播阅读和与孩子玩耍很重要的观念，他们可能已经帮助改变了规范。

Day care, which usually happens outside children’s homes, is common enough to make a difference. It is becoming more so as governments promote it. In the OECD the proportion of three-year-olds enrolled in pre-primary education rose from 62% in 2005 to 70% in 2014. As well as affecting children directly, these programmes could be changing their parents’ behaviour. A large evaluation of Head Start, America’s programme for poor children, found that enrolling three-year-olds raised the proportion who were read to at home.

日托通常发生在孩子们的家里以外，这非常普遍以至于足以产生影响。随着各国政府的推动，托管越来越普及。在经合组织国家，三岁儿童接受学前教育的比例从2005年的62%上升到2014年的70%。除了直接影响儿童之外，这些方针还可能改变他们父母的行为。一项针对美国贫困儿童的学前教育计划(Head Start)的大规模评估发现，让三岁的孩子在家里读书的比例提高了。

Another possible explanation for the change is that the working class is different. Sarah Walzer, the chief executive of ParentChild+, says that her outfit encounters many more immigrant families than it used to. Immigrant parents are often ambitious for their offspring, enduring hardship and loneliness to give them better lives. Dina, the mother of a three-year-old boy, moved to America from El Salvador. She does not have a job, and her husband works in a pizza parlour, making the family Squarely working class. But Dina, who went to college in El Salvador, has the aspirations of a middle-class parent.

另一种可能的解释是工人阶级不同了。ParentChild+的首席执行官Sarah Walzer说，她的公司遇到的移民家庭比以前多得多。移民父母往往对子女怀有雄心壮志，忍受艰辛和孤独，只为让子女过上更好的生活。Dina，一个三岁男孩的母亲，从萨尔瓦多搬到了美国。她没有工作，她的丈夫在一家披萨店工作，这使她的家庭成为不折不扣的工人阶级。但在萨尔瓦多上过大学的 Dina有着中产阶级父母的志向。

词汇

Offspring/后代，子孙

Squarely/干脆；正好的

Just as working-class children were catching up, covid-19 hit. School-age children were sent home to households where parents were already juggling pre-school children and their own work. This has been hardest on the poor. Academics at Harvard University discovered that American children did less work on a popular maths website in March and April, with the biggest decline in poor areas. The National Foundation for Educational Research surveyed British teachers in May, two months after the lockdown began. More than half reported that poor children were less engaged with their homework than others.

就在工人阶级的孩子们赶上来的时候，新冠爆发了。学龄儿童被送回家，在那里，家长们已经在应付学前班孩子和自己的工作了。这对穷人来说是最困难的。哈佛大学的学者发现，美国儿童在3、4月份在一个受欢迎的数学网站上花的时间更少，贫困地区降幅最大。全国教育研究基金会(National Foundation for Educational Research)在封锁开始两个月后的5月份对英国教师进行了调查。超过一半的人表示，贫困家庭的孩子对家庭作业的投入不如其他孩子。

But if the teachers were right about poorer children doing less work during lockdown (and they might not have been—few kept close tabs on their charges), it was probably not because parents lacked dedication or ambition. A British survey of almost 3,700 people, known as Understanding Society, found that 30% of parents with no more than GCSE qualifications spent at least two hours a day helping with home schooling during the lockdown. That proportion is a little higher than the 28% of parents with degrees who said the same. The parents might be exaggerating. But another survey, of children, found the same pattern. As in Spain after the financial crisis, they may have had more time because so many were furloughed or laid off.

但是，如果老师们认为贫穷的孩子在封锁期间做的工作量（学习）更少是正确的(他们也许并不会这么做——但很少有人会真正做到恪守职责)，这可能不是因为父母缺乏奉献精神或雄心壮志。英国一项名为“了解社会”(Understanding Society)的调查对近3700人进行了调查，结果发现，有30% 未达到GCSE【 （英国）普通中等教育证书】层次的家长在封锁期间每天至少花两个小时辅导家庭教育。这一比率略高于持有证书的那28%的家长，而他们也回答道会进行如此时长的辅导。家长可能有点夸张了。但另一项针对儿童的调查也发现了同样的规律。就像金融危机后的西班牙一样，他们可能有了更多的时间，因为很多人都被休假或解雇了。

词汇

 Furlough/ 休假；暂时解雇

Can you tell me all I need to know?

你能告诉我所有我需要知道的吗?

A likelier explanation for the widening gap is that schools asked less of poorer children. Another study of Britain by two sociologists, Sait Bayrakdar and Ayse Guveli, confirmed that the children of less-educated parents did less work during lockdown. Bangladeshi and Pakistani children (who are mostly working class) did especially little. But the researchers found that the single biggest influence on how much work children did was not how educated their parents were but how much work their schools assigned.

一个对于贫富孩童之间的逐步扩大的差距的可能的解释是学校对贫困孩子的要求更少。另一项由两名社会学家Sait Bayrakdar和Ayse Guveli对英国进行的研究证实，受教育程度低的父母的孩子在封锁期间的工作更少。孟加拉国和巴基斯坦的儿童(大多是工人阶级)做得尤其少。但研究人员发现，影响孩子们学习成绩的最大因素并不是他们的父母受教育程度，而是学校分配给他们的学习量。

Working-class parents have learned to bring up their children in a more stimulating way. The next thing they need to learn from the middle classes is how to nag their children’s teachers.

工薪阶层的父母已经学会了用一种更激励的方式来抚养他们的孩子。他们需要向中产阶级学习的下一件事是如何唠叨孩子的老师（大概是搞好关系让老师更关心点孩子？）。