Neighborhood Poverty and Children's Academic Skills and Behavior in Early Elementary School
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12430 |
| Author | Katie M. Vinopal,Taryn W. Morrissey |
| Date | 01 February 2018 |
| Published date | 01 February 2018 |
T W. M American University
K M. V The Ohio State University∗
Neighborhood Poverty and Children’s Academic
Skills and Behavior in Early Elementary School
Neighborhoods provide resources that may
affect children’s cognitive and behavioral out-
comes. However, it is unclear to what degree
associations between neighborhood disadvan-
tage and outcomes persist into elementary
school and whether neighborhood disadvan-
tage interacts with household disadvantage.
Using data from the 2010–2011 Early Child-
hood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort
(N=15,100 children) merged with census data
from the American Community Survey, this
study examines associations between neigh-
borhood poverty and children’s math, reading,
and behavioral outcomes at kindergarten and
rst and second grades. Findings indicate that
as tract-level poverty increases, children’s
achievement worsens after controlling for child
and family characteristics. These associations
persist into second grade and are stronger
for children in poor versus nonpoor house-
holds. Findings suggest that neighborhood
disadvantage may contribute to poorer achieve-
ment scores, particularly among children with
few household resources, but that household
Department of Public Administration and Policy, School of
Public Affairs, American University,4400 Massachusetts
Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20016
(morrisse@american.edu).
∗John Glenn College of Public Affairs, The Ohio State
University,Paige Hall, 1810 College Road, Columbus, OH
43210.
Key Words: at-risk children, neighborhoods, poverty,school
readiness.
disadvantage and other characteristics largely
explain behavioral outcomes. Research and
policy implications are discussed.
The experience of family poverty during child-
hood has strong, negative, and long-term
impacts on children’s development (Acker-
man & Brown, 2006; Bhattacharya, Currie, &
Haider, 2004; Brooks-Gunn & Duncan, 2000;
Evans, Wells, & Schamberg, 2010; Murasko,
2009). The experience of poverty during the
early years of life has particularly detrimental
effects (Duncan, Kalil, & Ziol-Guest, 2013;
Duncan, Magnuson, Kalil, & Ziol-Guest, 2011),
negatively affecting children’s readiness to enter
school (Committee on Integrating the Science of
Early Childhood Development Youth and Fami-
lies, 2000; Duncan, Magnuson, et al., 2011). The
income gap in achievement appears well before
kindergarten and widens during elementary
school, with important and costly consequences
for children’s long-term success (Reardon,
2011). Given the growing proportion of the
American population living in areas of concen-
trated poverty (Bishaw, 2014), understanding
the implications of neighborhood disadvantage
for children’s development is important. Recent
research suggests that neighborhood disadvan-
tage, specically neighborhood poverty, may
affect children’sreadiness for kindergarten entry
(Wolf, Magnuson, & Kimbro, 2016). What is
less clear is the persistence of associations
between neighborhood disadvantage and child
outcomes into elementary school and whether
182 Journal of Marriage and Family 80 (February 2018): 182–197
DOI:10.1111/jomf.12430
Neighborhoods in Early Elementary School 183
household and neighborhood resources interact.
This study examines the associations between
neighborhood poverty, family poverty, and chil-
dren’s achievement and behavioral outcomes in
kindergarten and rst and second grades.
N C D
Neighborhoods provide both structural (i.e.,
schools, employment opportunities) and social
(i.e., relationships, role models) supports that
together constitute an important context for chil-
dren’s development. Following Leventhal and
Brooks-Gunn (2000), neighborhoods affect chil-
dren through the following three mechanisms:
institutional resources (e.g., availability of
schools, health care), relationships (e.g., social
support, mental health), and norms or collective
efcacy (e.g., physical risk, crime; see social
disorganization theory, Bradley & Corwyn,
2002). Disadvantaged neighborhoods, typically
dened as those having high poverty rates, tend
to have fewer institutionalized resources (e.g.,
Jencks & Mayer, 1990), such as high-quality
child-care centers (Gordon & Chase-Lansdale,
2001). High-poverty communities also have
higher rates of parental depression and reduced
social support (Klebanov, Brooks-Gunn, &
Duncan, 1994) and higher crime rates (Samp-
son, 1997), which are associated with decreases
in academic achievement at the school level
(McCoy, Roy, & Sirkman, 2013).
Indeed, a growing body of research nds that
growing up in neighborhoods with concentrated
disadvantage affects the educational outcomes
of the children growing up in such environments
above and beyond their own household disad-
vantage (Alexander, Entwisle, & Olson, 2014;
Chetty & Hendren, 2016; Chetty, Hendren, &
Katz, 2016; Roy, Mccoy, & Raver, 2014; Wolf
et al., 2016). In general, among young children,
the presence of afuent neighborhoods has been
found to be associated with more positive cog-
nitive development (Chase-Lansdale, Gordon,
Brooks-Gunn, & Klebenov, 1997). Moves from
high-poverty to low-poverty neighborhoods are
associated with improved child self-regulation,
whereas the opposite was found for moves from
low- to high-poverty neighborhoods (Roy et al.,
2014). Sustained exposure to neighborhood
disadvantage during childhood decreases the
probability of high school graduation (Wodtke,
Harding, & Elwert, 2011). Analysis of the
long-term effects of the experimental Moving to
Opportunity (MTO) program, a study involving
the random assignment of housing vouchers,
found large effects on the earnings of adults who
had moved from high- to lower poverty neigh-
borhoods before the age of 13 (Chetty et al.,
2016). Indeed, quasi-experimental evidence
supports a duration hypothesis such that each
additional year a child lives in a better neighbor-
hood is associated with increased adult earnings,
and boys appear most susceptible to the nega-
tive impacts of poor neighborhoods (Chetty &
Hendren, 2016). Neighborhood income explains
roughly half of the effect on future earnings as
parental income (Rothwell & Massey, 2015).
By contrast, other research nds no effects of
neighborhood disadvantage on medium-term
outcomes, such as working memory (Hackman
et al., 2014). Likewise, despite the large impacts
on later earnings, studies using MTO data found
no signicant effects on short-term test scores
for children aged 6 to 20 years old (Sanbon-
matsu, Kling, Duncan, & Brooks-Gunn, 2006).
A major challenge with studying the causal
effect of neighborhoods on child outcomes is
that families select into neighborhoods based
on characteristics that are also associated with
children’s outcomes (Sampson & Sharkey,
2008). Although the random-assignment MTO
study partially addressed this selection issue,
it confounds moving with neighborhood char-
acteristics and only provides an estimate of
the average effect of neighborhoods, which is
problematic when generalizing to families who
would not be willing to move. In turn, some
nonexperimental research suggests that associ-
ations between neighborhoods and children’s
outcomes are attributable to household circum-
stances rather than neighborhood resources.
Page and Solon (2003a, 2003b) found that
long-term earnings are attributed to shared
home environments rather than shared neigh-
borhoods. Once family factors were taken into
account, the correlation between neighborhood
characteristics and educational attainment was
small (0.1), demonstrating the importance of
accounting for the family background charac-
teristics associated with neighborhood selection
(Solon, Page, & Duncan, 2000).
To date, one study has examined descriptive
associations between neighborhood poverty
and children’s academic skills and behavior at
kindergarten entry. Using both the 1998 and
2010 cohorts of the Early Childhood Longitudi-
nal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K), Wolf
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