Early School Adjustment and Educational Attainment

Magnuson, Katherine; Duncan, Greg J.; Lee, Kenneth T. H.; Metzger, Molly W.

doi:10.3102/0002831216634658

Cited by 49 publications

(49 citation statements)

References 69 publications

(82 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Compared with 1998, in 2010 not only were a greater proportion of kindergartners living in poor families, they were also living in higher poverty neighborhoods. This is a concerning change because family and neighborhood poverty predict children’s school readiness, and children’s early school skills subsequently predict their later academic success and educational attainment (Duncan et al, 2007; Magnuson, Duncan, Lee, & Metzger, 2016). With greater family and neighborhood poverty, schools and communities are faced with greater challenges in supporting children’s learning.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Family poverty and neighborhood poverty: Links with children's school readiness before and after the Great Recession

Wolf

Magnuson

Kimbro

2017

Children and Youth Services Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper examines how neighborhood and family poverty predict children’s academic skills and classroom behavior at school entry, and whether associations have changed over a period of twelve years spanning the Great Recession. Utilizing the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten 1998 and 2010 cohorts and combined with data from the U.S. Census and American Community Survey, we find that the proportion of kindergarten children living in moderate and high poverty neighborhoods increased from 1998 to 2010, and that these increases were most pronounced for non-poor and white children. Using OLS and fixed effects regression analyses and holding family poverty constant, we find that children in neighborhoods with higher levels of poverty start school less ready to learn than their peers. Specifically, children from the highest poverty neighborhoods start school almost a year behind children from the lowest poverty neighborhoods in terms of their academic skills. In addition, we find that the academic skills gap between poor- and non-poor children within neighborhood poverty categories grew from 1998 to 2010, particularly in high poverty neighborhoods. These findings appear to be explained both by changes in the composition of families within neighborhood poverty categories and income increases among non-poor families. The findings indicate that neighborhood poverty may be a useful proxy to identify children and families in need of additional support.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Family poverty and neighborhood poverty: Links with children's school readiness before and after the Great Recession

Wolf

Magnuson

Kimbro

2017

Children and Youth Services Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Given the importance of academic preparation in determining educational attainment (Magnuson, Duncan, Lee, & Metzger, ), it should come as no surprise that growth in the income‐based gap in children's reading and mathematics achievement has contributed to a growing gap in the rate of college completion (see Figure , which is based on the calculations of Bailey & Dynarski, ). The fraction of children raised in affluent families who completed college jumped by 18 percentage points—from slightly more than one third to more than one half—for students entering high school in the mid‐1990s relative to their counterparts entering high school in the mid‐1970s.…”

Section: Growing Disparitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Given the importance of academic preparation in determining educational attainment (Magnuson, Duncan, Lee, & Metzger, 2016), it should come as no surprise that growth in the income-based gap in children's reading and mathematics achievement has contributed to a FIGURE 2. Race-and income-based gaps in reading achievement in SAT-type units at 14 years of age.…”

Section: Growing Disparitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Increasing gaps in the two-parent family structures of high-and low-income families accounted for relatively little of the schooling gap because estimates of the (regression-adjusted) associations between family structure and schooling were small. However, increasing gaps in the age of the mother at the time of birth accounted for a substantial portion of the increasing schooling gap because the mother's age is consistently predictive of children's completed schooling (Duncan et al, 2016).…”

Section: Evidence On Links Between Income and Achievement Gapsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Income Inequality and the Well‐Being of American Families

et al. 2019

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Income inequality has increased steadily over the past 40 years. We briefly review the nature and causes of this increase and show that income‐based gaps in children's academic achievement and attainment grew as well. To probe whether the increasing income gaps may have played a role in producing the growing achievement and attainment gaps, we summarize the evidence for the effect of family income on children, paying particular attention to the strength of the evidence and the timing of economic deprivation. We show that, in contrast to the nearly universal associations between poverty and children's outcomes as reported in the correlational literature, evidence from social experiments and quasi experiments shows impacts on some domains of child functioning but not others. At the same time, we have no experimental evidence on how economic deprivation affects children in the first several years of life in the United States. Family environments are all important in the first several years of a child's life, when they are developing most rapidly and have limited autonomy from family, yet family incomes tend to be the lowest in these early years of family development. We describe an ongoing experimental study of income effects on infants and toddlers.

show abstract

“…In the case of high school graduation, as would be expected, concrete achievement skills play an important role. However, early problem behavior, and more specifically persistent antisocial behavior during middle childhood, also predicts high school completion, college attendance, and years of educational attainment (Magnuson et al, forthcoming). Follow-up evaluations of high-quality early childhood interventions that had sizable impacts on multiple developmental domains also suggest the importance of early skills and behavior for long-term criminal activity and higher earnings (Heckman, Pinto, and Savelyev 2013).…”

Section: Which Early Skills Matter For Human Capital Accumulation?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Can Early Childhood Interventions Decrease Inequality of Economic Opportunity?

Magnuson

Duncan

2016

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper considers whether expanding access to center-based early childhood education (ECE) will reduce economic inequality later in life. A strong evidence base indicates that ECE is effective at improving young children’s academic skills and human capital development. We review evidence that children from low-income families have lower rates of preschool enrollment than their more affluent peers. Our analysis indicates that increasing enrollments for preschoolers in the year before school entry is likely to be a worthy investment that will yield economic payoffs in the form of increased adult earnings. The benefits of even a moderately effective ECE program are likely to be sufficient to offset the costs of program expansion, and increased enrollment among low-income children may reduce later economic inequality.

show abstract

Early School Adjustment and Educational Attainment

Cited by 49 publications

References 69 publications

Family poverty and neighborhood poverty: Links with children's school readiness before and after the Great Recession

Family poverty and neighborhood poverty: Links with children's school readiness before and after the Great Recession

Income Inequality and the Well‐Being of American Families

Can Early Childhood Interventions Decrease Inequality of Economic Opportunity?

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About