JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Sociology of Education.In tracking the educational progress of a sample of Baltimore schoolchildren from entrance into first grade in fall 1982 through early spring 1996, the authors examined the children's personal qualities, first-grade experiences, and family circumstances as precursors to high school dropout. Logistic regression analyses were used to identify predictors of dropout involving family context measures (stressful family changes, parents' attitudes, and parents' socialization practices), children's personal resources (attitudes and behaviors), and school experiences (test scores, marks, and track placements). These various measures were found to influence dropout independently of sociodemographic factors and account for much of the difference in the odds of dropout associated with family socioeconomic status, gender, family type, and other "risk factors." The authors take a life-course perspective on dropout, viewing it as the culmination of a long-term process of academic disengagement.

Prior research has demonstrated that summer learning rooted in family and community influences widens the achievement gap across social lines, while schooling offsets those family and community influences. In this article, we examine the long-term educational consequences of summer learning differences by family socioeconomic level. Using data from the Baltimore Beginning School Study youth panel, we decompose achievement scores at the start of high school into their developmental precursors, back to the time of school entry in 1st grade. We find that cumulative achievement gains over the first nine years of children's schooling mainly reflect school-year learning, whereas the high SES-low SES achievement gap at 9th grade mainly traces to differential summer learning over the elementary years. These early out-of-school summer learning differences, in turn, substantially account for achievement-related differences by family SES in high school track placements (college preparatory or not), high school noncompletion, and four-year college attendance. We discuss implications for understanding the bases of educational stratification, as well as educational policy and practice.

From a life course perspective, high school dropout culminates a long-term process of disengagement from school. The present paper uses data from a representative panel of Baltimore school children to describe this unfolding process. Over 40% of the study group left school at some point without a degree, but this high overall rate of dropout masks large differences across sociodemographic lines as well as differences involving academic, parental, and personal resources. A sociodemographic profile of dropout for the study group shows how dropout rates vary across different configurations of background risk factors including family socioeconomic status (SES), family type, and family stress level. Dropout risk factors and resources in support of children's schooling then are examined at four schooling benchmarks: the 1st grade, the rest of elementary school (years 2–5), the middle school (years 6–8), and year 9 (the 1st year of high school for those promoted each year). Academic, parental, and personal resources condition dropout prospects at each time point, with resources measured early in children's schooling forecasting dropout almost as well as those from later in children's schooling. Additionally, evidence is presented that resources add on to one another in moderating dropout risk, including risk associated with family SES. These patterns are discussed in terms of a life course view of the dropout process.

Are there socioeconomic differences in the seasonality of children’s learning over the school year and summer months? The achievement gap across social lines increases during the primary grades, as much research indicates, but descriptive analyses and HLM within-person growth models for a representative panel of Baltimore school children demonstrate that the increase can be traced mainly to the out-of-school environment (i.e., influences situated in home and community). School-year verbal and quantitative achievement gains are comparable for upper socioeconomic status (SES) and lower SES children, but summer gains, when children are out of school, evidence large disparities. During the summer, upper SES children’s skills continue to advance (albeit at a slower rate than during the school year), but lower SES children’s gains, on average, are flat. This seasonal pattern of achievement gains implies that schooling plays an important compensatory role, one that is obscured when achievement is compared on an annual basis, as is typical. Policy implications of the seasonality of learning are discussed, including support for preventive measures over the preschool years and for programs, possibly including calendar reforms and summer school, to support disadvantaged children’s learning year-round.

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In trying to understand the origin of gender differences favoring girls in reading skills, analysts have examined mainly the performance of students who are in the same grade, with samples pooled across socioeconomic status (SES). Using a longitudinal sample in Baltimore, where all students in a randomly selected panel are the same age and are followed from the beginning of the first grade, the authors found that the early reading skills of boys who are receiving meal subsidies-those who are disadvantaged-are lower than those of girls. Among children who are not on meal subsidies, boys do about the same as girls. This gender gap that emerges over the elementary school years is explained in terms of the higher retention rate of disadvantaged boys, which traces back to teachers' low ratings of classroom behavior and reading skills for boys on meal subsidies and to their parents' lower expectations for boys' school performance. The longitudinal design of this study, the early point from which children are followed (age 6), and the attention given to SES differences in how parents and teachers treat boys are key differences between this research and other studies of gender differences in reading comprehension. The discussion points up the critical nature of the first-grade transition in relation to the gender gap and some of its long-term implications.

How successfully children adapt to the routine of schooling in the first grade or two likely has long-term implications for their cognitive and affective development. This study aims to understand how home and school factors either facilitate or impede this process of adaptation by examining longitudinal data on cognitive performance for a large and diverse sample of youngsters over grades 1 and 2 in Baltimore City Public Schools. Report-card marks in reading and mathematics and scores on verbal and quantitative subtests of the California Achievement Test (CAT) battery over the 2-year period are the achievement criteria. The analysis directs attention to some of the social-structural (socioeconomic background, gender, and minority/majority status) and social-psychological (significant others and self-reactions) factors that shape youngsters' development during this period, as measured by changes in their cognitive standing. Racial comparisons (black youngsters vs. white) and comparisons by school year (first vs. second) highlight some key differences in the transition to full-time schooling. We find more numerous social-structural and social-psychological influences on CAT gains over the first year than over the second, and fall to spring stability in testing levels is more pronounced in the second year than in the first. This pattern identifies the first year of schooling as a period of considerable consequence for shaping subsequent achievement trajectories, and, for this reason, it may be especially important as a key to understanding black-white achievement differences. Minority and majority youngsters in this sample began school with similar CAT averages, but, by the end of the first year, blacks' performances lagged noticeably behind those of whites, and the cleavage widened over the second year. Blacks also received lower report-card marks than whites. This, along with smaller CAT gains, reveals that the transition to school is more problematic for blacks than it is for whites. We also observed stronger persistence of blacks' marks from one period to the next, indicating that recovering from these initial difficulties is more challenging. Social-psychological aspects of these early achievement patterns also differ by race in important ways: blacks' achievements are less influenced by parent variables than are those of whites, and black youngsters' self-expectations are less affected by the expectations held for them by their parents than are those of whites. These results and others are discussed in terms of their implications for students' development and for what they reveal about social structure in relation to the early schooling process.