 Your peers’ parents: Spillovers from parental educationJane Fruehwirth and Jessica Gagete-Miranda Economics of Education Review, 2019, vol. 73, issue C Abstract: Better-educated parents bestow significant advantages on their children in life; we explore whether this advantage multiplies, spilling over to classmates. Using a nationally-representative sample of US kindergarteners, we find significant effects of the parental education of classmates on math and reading, but not on socio-emotional skills. The effects are economically meaningful: reassigning classrooms so that all students have the same parental education composition would narrow the achievement gap between children of parents who are high-school-educated (or less) and those who are university-educated by 9 to 13 percent. These spillovers are not explained by rich, beginning of the school-year, measures of cognitive and socio-emotional skills, nor by race or socioeconomic status. Interestingly, not all spillovers from parental education are positive. In reading, we find that university-educated parents who are not working full-time create some negative spillovers for the classroom, which appear to come from their children’s relatively advanced reading skills. Keywords: Peer effects; Parental education; Teaching practice (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:73:y:2019:i:c:s0272775719301219 DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2019.101910 Access Statistics for this article Economics of Education Review is currently edited by E. Cohn More articles in Economics of Education Review from Elsevier |
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