As the incomes of affluent and poor families have diverged over the past three decades, so too has the educational performance of their children. But how exactly do the forces of rising inequality ...affect the educational attainment and life chances of low-income children? In "Whither Opportunity?" a distinguished team of economists, sociologists, and experts in social and education policy examines the corrosive effects of unequal family resources, disadvantaged neighborhoods, insecure labor markets, and worsening school conditions on K-12 education. This groundbreaking book illuminates the ways rising inequality is undermining one of the most important goals of public education--the ability of schools to provide children with an equal chance at academic and economic success. The most ambitious study of educational inequality to date, "Whither Opportunity?" analyzes how social and economic conditions surrounding schools affect school performance and children's educational achievement. The book shows that from earliest childhood, parental investments in children's learning affect reading, math, and other attainments later in life. This book contains six parts. Part I, Overview, contains: (1) Introduction: The American Dream, Then and Now (Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane). Part II, The Developing Child and Adolescent, contains: (2) Lessons from Neuroscience Research for Understanding Causal Links Between Family and Neighborhood Characteristics and Educational Outcomes (Charles A. Nelson III and Margaret A. Sheridan); (3) The Nature and Impact of Early Achievement Skills, Attention Skills, and Behavior Problems (Greg J. Duncan and Katherine Magnuson); (4) Middle and High School Skills, Behaviors, Attitudes, and Curriculum Enrollment, and Their Consequences (George Farkas); (5) The Widening Academic Achievement Gap Between the Rich and the Poor: New Evidence and Possible Explanations (Sean F. Reardon); (6) Inequality in Postsecondary Education (Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski); and (7) Educational Expectations and Attainment (Brian A. Jacob and Tamara Wilder Linkow). Part III, The Family, contains: (8) Educational Mobility in the United States Since the 1930s (Michael Hout and Alexander Janus); (9) How Is Family Income Related to Investments in Children's Learning? (Neeraj Kaushal, Katherine Magnuson, and Jane Waldfogel); (10) Parenting, Time Use, and Disparities in Academic Outcomes (Meredith Phillips); and (11) Family-Structure Instability and Adolescent Educational Outcomes: A Focus on Families with Stepfathers (Megan M. Sweeney). Part IV, Neighborhoods, contains: (12) Converging Evidence for Neighborhood Effects on Children's Test Scores: An Experimental, Quasi-Experimental, and Observational Comparison (Julia Burdick-Will, Jens Ludwig, Stephen W. Raudenbush, Robert J. Sampson, Lisa Sanbonmatsu, and Patrick Sharkey); and (13) Unpacking Neighborhood Influences on Education Outcomes: Setting the Stage for Future Research (David Harding, Lisa Gennetian, Christopher Winship, Lisa Sanbonmatsu, and Jeffrey Kling). Part V, Labor Markets, contains: (14) The Effects of Local Employment Losses on Children's Educational Achievement (Elizabeth O. Ananat, Anna Gassman-Pines, and Christina M. Gibson-Davis); and (15) How Does Parental Unemployment Affect Children's Educational Performance? (Phillip B. Levine). Part VI, Schools, contains: (16) The Role of Family, School, and Community Characteristics in Inequality in Education and Labor-Market Outcomes (Joseph G. Altonji and Richard K. Mansfield); (17) Year-by-Year and Cumulative Impacts of Attending a High-Mobility Elementary School on Children's Mathematics Achievement in Chicago, 1995 to 2005 (Stephen W. Raudenbush, Marshall Jean, and Emily Art); (18) The Effect of School Neighborhoods on Teachers' Career Decisions (Don Boyd, Hamp Lankford, Susanna Loeb, Matthew Ronfeldt, and Jim Wyckoff); (19) Crime and the Production of Safe Schools (David S. Kirk and Robert J. Sampson); (20) Immigrants and Inequality in Public Schools (Amy Ellen Schwartz and Leanna Stiefel); (21) School Desegregation and the Black-White Test Score Gap (Jacob L. Vigdor); (22) The Challenges of Finding Causal Links Between Family Educational Practices and Schooling Outcomes (Frank F. Furstenberg); (23) It May Not Take a Village: Increasing Achievement Among the Poor (Vilsa E. Curto, Roland G. Fryer Jr., and Meghan L. Howard); (24) Understanding the Context for Existing Reform and Research Proposals (Harry Brighouse and Gina Schouten); and (25) Intervening to Improve the Educational Outcomes of Students in Poverty: Lessons from Recent Work in High-Poverty Schools (Brian Rowan). A foreword and an index is included.
Spinal cord injury can lead to severe motor, sensory and autonomic dysfunction. Currently, there is no effective treatment for the injured spinal cord. The transplantation of Schwann cells, neural ...stem cells or progenitor cells, olfactory ensheathing cells, oligodendrocyte precursor cells and mesenchymal stem cells has been investigated as potential therapies for spinal cord injury. However, little is known about the mechanisms through which these individual cell types promote repair and functional improvements. The five most commonly proposed mechanisms include neuroprotection, immunomodulation, axon regeneration, neuronal relay formation and myelin regeneration. A better understanding of the mechanisms whereby these cells promote functional improvements, as well as an appreciation of the obstacles in implementing these therapies and effectively modeling spinal cord injury, will be important to make cell transplantation a viable clinical option and may lead to the development of more targeted therapies.
We replicated and extended Shoda, Mischel, and Peake’s (1990) famous marshmallow study, which showed strong bivariate correlations between a child’s ability to delay gratification just before ...entering school and both adolescent achievement and socioemotional behaviors. Concentrating on children whose mothers had not completed college, we found that an additional minute waited at age 4 predicted a gain of approximately one tenth of a standard deviation in achievement at age 15. But this bivariate correlation was only half the size of those reported in the original studies and was reduced by two thirds in the presence of controls for family background, early cognitive ability, and the home environment. Most of the variation in adolescent achievement came from being able to wait at least 20 s. Associations between delay time and measures of behavioral outcomes at age 15 were much smaller and rarely statistically significant.
In the United States, does growing up in a poor household cause negative developmental outcomes for children? Hundreds of studies have documented statistical associations between family income in ...childhood and a host of outcomes in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Many of these studies have used correlational evidence to draw policy conclusions regarding the benefits of added family income for children, in particular children in families with incomes below the poverty line. Are these conclusions warranted? After a review of possible mechanisms linking poverty to negative childhood outcomes, we summarize the evidence for income's effects on children, paying particular attention to the strength of the evidence and the timing of economic deprivation. We demonstrate that, in contrast to the nearly universal associations between poverty and children's outcomes in the correlational literature, impacts estimated from social experiments and quasi-experiments are more selective. In particular, these stronger studies have linked increases in family income to increased school achievement in middle childhood and to greater educational attainment in adolescence and early adulthood. There is no experimental or quasi-experimental evidence in the United States that links child outcomes to economic deprivation in the first several years of life. Understanding the nature of socioeconomic influences, as well as their potential use in evidence-based policy recommendations, requires greater attention to identifying causal effects.
Replications and robustness checks are key elements of the scientific method and a staple in many disciplines. However, leading journals in developmental psychology rarely include explicit ...replications of prior research conducted by different investigators, and few require authors to establish in their articles or online appendices that their key results are robust across estimation methods, data sets, and demographic subgroups. This article makes the case for prioritizing both explicit replications and, especially, within-study robustness checks in developmental psychology. It provides evidence on variation in effect sizes in developmental studies and documents strikingly different replication and robustness-checking practices in a sample of journals in developmental psychology and a sister behavioral science-applied economics. Our goal is not to show that any one behavioral science has a monopoly on best practices, but rather to show how journals from a related discipline address vital concerns of replication and generalizability shared by all social and behavioral sciences. We provide recommendations for promoting graduate training in replication and robustness-checking methods and for editorial policies that encourage these practices. Although some of our recommendations may shift the form and substance of developmental research articles, we argue that they would generate considerable scientific benefits for the field.
Investing in Preschool Programs Duncan, Greg J.; Magnuson, Katherine
The Journal of economic perspectives,
01/2013, Letnik:
27, Številka:
2
Journal Article
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We summarize the available evidence on the extent to which expenditures on early childhood education programs constitute worthy social investments in the human capital of children. We provide an ...overview of existing early childhood education programs, and then summarize results from a substantial body of methodologically sound evaluations of the impacts of early childhood education. The evidence supports few unqualified conclusions. Many early childhood education programs appear to boost cognitive ability and early school achievement in the short run. However, most of them show smaller impacts than those generated by the best-known programs, and their cognitive impacts largely disappear within a few years. Despite this fade-out, long-run follow-ups from a handful of well-known programs show lasting positive effects on such outcomes as greater educational attainment, higher earnings, and lower rates of crime. It is uncertain what skills, behaviors, or developmental processes are particularly important in producing these longer-run impacts. Our review also describes different models of human development used by social scientists, examines heterogeneous results across groups, and tries to identify the ingredients of early childhood education programs that are most likely to improve the performance of these programs. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
The present study uses nationally-representative data to estimate longitudinal associations between core executive function (EF) components—working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive ...flexibility—at kindergarten entry and third grade academic achievement. We focus on one key question: to what extent do EF components uniquely contribute to children’s subsequent reading and math achievement over and above academic skills, social-emotional behaviors, and learning-related behaviors? Study findings indicated that the three core EF components have differential associations with third grade achievement. Evidence of associations across domains of math and reading achievement are strongest for working memory, and these associations are stronger for math than reading achievement. Early working memory was also shown to be just as predictive of academic achievement as were learning-related behaviors. The evidence for achievement associations was weaker for inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility, with estimated effect sizes on reading and math achievement of less than a tenth of a standard deviation. We discuss implications for future studies and consider the measurement issues that arise in examining EF and its relations to longitudinal achievement.
Many interventions targeting cognitive skills or socioemotional skills and behaviors demonstrate initially promising but then quickly disappearing impacts. Our article seeks to identify the key ...features of interventions, as well as the characteristics and environments of the children and adolescents who participate in them, that can be expected to sustain persistently beneficial program impacts. We describe three such processes: skill-building, foot-in-the-door and sustaining environments. We argue that skill-building interventions should target "trifecta" skills-ones that are malleable, fundamental, and would not have developed eventually in the absence of the intervention. Successful foot-in-the-door interventions equip a child with the right skills or capacities at the right time to avoid imminent risks (e.g., grade failure or teen drinking) or seize emerging opportunities (e.g., entry into honors classes). The sustaining environments perspective views high quality of environments subsequent to the completion of the intervention as crucial for sustaining earlier skill gains. These three perspectives generate both complementary and competing hypotheses regarding the nature, timing, and targeting of interventions that generate enduring impacts.
The strengths and abilities children develop from infancy through adolescence are crucial for their physical, emotional, and cognitive growth, which in turn help them to achieve success in school and ...to become responsible, economically self-sufficient, and healthy adults. Capable, responsible, and healthy adults are clearly the foundation of a well-functioning and prosperous society, yet America's future is not as secure as it could be because millions of American children live in families with incomes below the poverty line. A wealth of evidence suggests that a lack of adequate economic resources for families with children compromises these children's ability to grow and achieve adult success, hurting them and the broader society.
A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty reviews the research on linkages between child poverty and child well-being, and analyzes the poverty-reducing effects of major assistance programs directed at children and families. This report also provides policy and program recommendations for reducing the number of children living in poverty in the United States by half within 10 years.
Nearly 9 million Americans live in extreme-poverty neighborhoods, places that also tend to be racially segregated and dangerous. Yet, the effects on the well-being of residents of moving out of such ...communities into less distressed areas remain uncertain. Using data from Moving to Opportunity, a unique randomized housing mobility experiment, we found that moving from a high-poverty to lower-poverty neighborhood leads to long-term (10- to 15-year) improvements in adult physical and mental health and subjective well-being, despite not affecting economic self-sufficiency. A 1—standard deviation decline in neighborhood poverty (13 percentage points) increases subjective well-being by an amount equal to the gap in subjective well-being between people whose annual incomes differ by $13,000—a large amount given that the average control group income is $20,000. Subjective well-being is more strongly affected by changes in neighborhood economic disadvantage than racial segregation, which is important because racial segregation has been declining since 1970, but income segregation has been increasing.
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