Executive Summary: “Family and Neighborhood Sources of Socioeconomic Inequality in Children's Achievement” by Anne R. Pebley and Narayan Sastry

Basic skills, such as reading and math, are essential to children’s success in life. These skills also provide the building blocks for more advanced types of learning in science and other domains. Children’s skills acquisition remains highly unequal and is closely tied to family socioeconomic status. Observers have speculated that high levels of residential segregation between the rich and poor in the United States may play an important role in the persistent skills gap. To what degree can neighborhood disadvantage account for inequality in children’s reading and math skills?

            Experimental and observational studies indicate that children in poor neighborhoods perform more poorly in school and have lower skill levels and more behavior and health problems, even when family characteristics are held constant. Poor neighborhoods may affect skills acquisition in several ways, over and above the disadvantages associated with growing up in a poor family. However, most studies did not control adequately for family characteristics which affect children’s skills acquisition. Previous research has also generally been based on study designs and statistical models which are poorly suited to separating neighborhood and family effects.

            We examined the effects of family and neighborhood socioeconomic status on inequality in children’s reading and math skills using new data from the 2000-2001 Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (L.A.FANS) that were designed specifically for studies of neighborhood effects. To describe inequality in skills, we borrowed summary measures, such as Lorenz and concentration curves, from research on income inequality. These measures allow us to assess skills inequality directly and comprehensively. Despite its usefulness, this innovative approach has not previously been applied to studying inequality in children’s skills acquisition. Using these tools, we compared the proportion of skills inequality that is attributable to inequality in family income and assets, in mother’s reading skills and years of schooling, and in average neighborhood income, both before and after controlling for other child, family, and neighborhood characteristics. To calculate adjusted concentration indices, we estimated multilevel linear regression models for children’s reading and mathematics test scores. These models also allowed us to investigate the effects of family and neighborhood characteristics on children’s achievement. Our analysis also included more complete information on family characteristics that allowed us to draw clearer conclusions about the net effects of neighborhood socioeconomic status on children’s skills acquisition.

Observed differences in socioeconomic status were associated with at least one-fifth of the total inequality in children’s reading test scores and one-third of the total inequality in children’s math test scores. After controlling for the full set of variables in the model, mother’s reading scores and average neighborhood levels of income were the most important factors in accounting for inequality in children’s achievement. There was no inequality in achievement by family income and only modest inequality by family assets once other variables were held constant. We found large and robust effects of average neighborhood income on children’s reading and mathematics achievement. Our results suggest that living in a low-income neighborhood may have a greater effect on inequality in test scores than coming from a low-income family.