Achievement Gaps by Parental Income and Education

Astrid Marie Sandsør, Henrik Daae Zachrisson and Lynn A. Karoly

No unvcy, EdArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Socioeconomic achievement gaps measure the disparity in test scores between students from high and low socioeconomic backgrounds, commonly measured as a combination of parental income, education and occupation. However, educational data often limits the ability to create such measures of family background and link them to student test scores, leading researchers to arrive at different conclusions about levels and trends depending on the SES measure and estimation method. In this paper we disentangle the importance of each by using register data from Norway with precise measures of parental income and education. We show that results crucially depend on the SES measure, as parental income and education are not interchangeable measures of socioeconomic background. Achievement gaps by parental income in Norway are large, 0.55-0.93 standard deviations, and have increased by about 10% of a standard deviation over the 11-year time period we study, whereas achievement gaps by parental education are even larger, 0.86-1.15 standard deviations, but remain stable over the same period. Accounting for compositional changes in immigration decreases the magnitude of the gaps, whether measured by parental income or education, while trends remain the same.

Date: 2021-09-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-eur, nep-isf and nep-ure
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/613f141b28b37604727d0f45/

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:osf:edarxi:unvcy

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/unvcy

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EdArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().