School Poverty Concentration and Kindergarten Students' Numerical Skills

Thomas Hoffer () and Shobha Shagle
Additional contact information
Thomas Hoffer: NORC at the University of Chicago
Shobha Shagle: NORC at the University of Chicago

No 2012-004, Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group

Abstract: Schools that enroll disproportionately high percentages of pupils from low-income families are widely believed to have negative consequences for student performance. Prior research has investigated the relationship of school poverty and outcomes in numerous ways, but the basic proposition is that school composition affects student learning, such that otherwise similar students realize different levels of achievement in schools with different proportions of low-income. This paper updates and extends the research on compositional effects in several respects. First, we extend the research to the early elementary level of schooling. Second, the data needed to assess the relative importance of individual and school factors have not been available and the mechanisms that mediate the school-level effect independent of student background factors are thus not clear. This paper draws upon nationally representative data on kindergarten pupils and the schools they attend to estimate both the overall impact of school poverty on mathematics achievement and its impact on a variety of other school and schooling-experience variables that may in turn affect student learning. Finally, this paper analyzes the effects of high poverty schools on several schooling variables hypothesized to affect student achievement.

Date: 2002-03
Note: ECI
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Hoffer ... 2_school-poverty.pdf First version, (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hka:wpaper:2012-004

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jennifer Pachon ().