Do Schools Reduce or Exacerbate Inequality? How the Associations Between Student Achievement and Achievement Growth Influence Our Understanding of the Role of Schooling

Abstract

This article explores how the associations between student achievement and achievement growth influence our understanding of the role schools play in academic inequality. Using nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010–2011 (ECLS-K:2011), we constructed parallel growth and lagged score models within both seasonal learning and school effects frameworks to study how student- and school-level socioeconomic and racial/ethnic backgrounds relate to student learning. Our findings suggest that seasonal comparative scholars, who generally argue that schools play an equalizing role, and scholars focused on school compositional effects, who typically report that schools exacerbate inequality, come to these contrasting findings not only because they ask different questions but also because they treat student initial achievement differently when modeling student learning.

Ambiguity in European seasonal comparative research: how decisions on modelling shape results on inequality in learning?

“…In their widely influential work based on the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS, Kindergarten Cohort of 1998-1999, Downey et al (2004) showed that disparities in reading and math performance development grew faster during the summer compared to the rest of the school year. More recent U.S. studies that re-analyze ECLS and BSS data as well as analyzing new ECLS cohort data (e.g., Dumont and Ready 2019;Hippel and Hamrock 2019;Quinn et al 2016), report more nuanced results where schools do play a compensatory role but SES-related inequality in learning rates is smaller than reported by previous studies and not consistent across grades in elementary education.…”

“…From this strand, scholars have portrayed schools as balancing inequalities. From the strand of research on school compositional effects, which investigates the effects of stratification across schools and teaching practices, schools have been portrayed as a source of inequality (Dumont and Ready 2019). To a certain extent, the conflicting views of these scholarly strands on the role of schools in educational inequality can be explained by the different counterfactual frameworks in which these research strands operate.…”

“…In line with earlier works (e.g., Holland and Rubin 1982), Quinn (2015) argues that rather than pointing to a supposedly paradoxical situation of contradictory results, the statistical models applied answer different research questions. Very recently, Dumont and Ready (2019) outlined how differing modeling strategies of student learning influence our understanding of the role schools play in educational inequality. They showed that research strands favoring or opposing the view that schools exacerbate educational stratification differ in their methodological habits concerning the way learning progress is modelled (Dumont and Ready 2019).…”

“…Very recently, Dumont and Ready (2019) outlined how differing modeling strategies of student learning influence our understanding of the role schools play in educational inequality. They showed that research strands favoring or opposing the view that schools exacerbate educational stratification differ in their methodological habits concerning the way learning progress is modelled (Dumont and Ready 2019). Complementing Dumont and Ready's (2019) thorough discussion on the differential model foci of strands of scholars on schools' part in educational stratification, which mainly pertains to the U.S. seasonal comparative context, the main aim and contribution of this paper is to draw attention to the methodological inconsistencies in European summer setback research and, in particular, to technically illustrate the distinct dynamics in inequality that may be revealed by the model of choice.…”

“…They showed that research strands favoring or opposing the view that schools exacerbate educational stratification differ in their methodological habits concerning the way learning progress is modelled (Dumont and Ready 2019). Complementing Dumont and Ready's (2019) thorough discussion on the differential model foci of strands of scholars on schools' part in educational stratification, which mainly pertains to the U.S. seasonal comparative context, the main aim and contribution of this paper is to draw attention to the methodological inconsistencies in European summer setback research and, in particular, to technically illustrate the distinct dynamics in inequality that may be revealed by the model of choice. This paper intends to make the technicalities underlying the relevance of the parameterization of learning progress for the interpretation of results and for international comparative purposes accessible to applied social science research in general.…”