| Geoffrey Borman
University of Wisconsin - Madison
School and neighborhood context and school-year and summer achievement
FINAL REPORT:
Researchers have disagreed on the extent to which socioeconomic-status (SES) based differences in achievement accumulate during the school year as compared to the summer, and the literature has not fully assessed the contributions of social contexts-in the form of both school and neighborhood poverty concentration and racial and ethnic composition-to seasonal disparities in learning. We addressed these shortcomings by examining how family SES and school and neighborhood contexts explained differences in children's achievement growth during kindergarten and first grade, as well as during the summer season between these school years. Data on student achievement, family background, and the school context came from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K). We linked information regarding neighborhood social context by merging data from the Census 2000 with the ECLS-K using students' home zip codes. We partitioned variation in reading and mathematics outcomes between the student and organizational levels of analysis by using three-level growth models. We found strong evidence that differences in family SES were associated with reading and math achievement gaps during the school year, in both kindergarten and first grade for reading, and in kindergarten for math. These school-season SES disparities were larger in magnitude than the summer season disparities. Neighborhood social contexts were explained differences in reading and math achievement outcomes at school entry and during the summer season and school social contexts were more salient for reading than for math achievement. The importance of SES-based inequalities during the school year raises important questions regarding previous research on seasonal learning outcomes and suggests that schools may not necessarily serve as the Ògreat equalizer.Ó Moreover, school and neighborhood contexts shape children's school readiness and early achievement growth in profound ways not previously suggested by the literature.
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