Low-income children perform better in school when school-focused future identities are a salient aspect of their possible self for the coming year and these school-focused future identities are linked to behavioral strategies . Hierarchical linear modeling of data from a four-state low-income neighborhood sample of eighth-graders suggests two central consequences of family and neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation on children's schoolfocused possible identities and strategies. First, higher neighborhood disadvantage is associated with greater salience of school in children's possible self for the coming year. Second, disadvantage clouds the path to school-success; controlling for salience of school-focused possible identities, children living in lower socioeconomic status families and boys living in more economically disadvantaged neighborhoods were less likely to have strategies to attain their school-focused possible identities. The influence of family socioeconomic status was seen particularly with regard to strategies to attain academic success and teacher engagement aspects of school-focused identities.In the United States there is a clear disjuncture between the expectations and outcomes of low-income and minority children. Almost half of low-income and minority students do not graduate from high school (Orfield, 2004(Orfield, , 2006. Risk of school failure is higher in neighborhoods (Aronson, 1997;Brooks-Gunn et al., 1993;Corcoran, Gordon, Laren, & Solon, 1992;Dornbusch, Ritter, Steinberg, 1991;Duncan, 1994;Entwisle et al., 1994;Halpern-Felsher et al., 1997) and families (DeGarmo et al., 1999;Mercy & Steelman, 1982;Scarr & Weinberg, 1978) with fewer socioeconomic resources. Yet, when asked, lowincome children expect to do well in school. Most low-income and minority eighth graders in nationally representative U.S. samples report that they expect to attend college (Mello, 2009), whether or not they are currently at grade-level in their schoolwork or planning to take a college preparation track in high school (Mello, 2009;Trusty, 2000).We interpret this contrast between children's outcomes and aspirations as meaning that low income and minority children do see school success as an important destination, but that for these children, the path to school success may not be clear. That is, children from socioeconomically disadvantaged contexts may be less aware that attaining the collegebound aspect of their distal (but possible) self requires sustained current school-focused effort, and because the path is not clear, they may fail to devote sufficient school-focused NIH Public Access Author Manuscript Self Identity. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2012 October 1.
NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript effort toward achieving academic success (for related conceptualizations, see Cook et al., 1996;Mickelson, 1990). If so, children from socioeconomically disadvantaged contexts may be less in need of intervention to raise their long-term expectations for school-succe...