Does schooling decrease social inequality in early achievement?

Abstract

Does schooling affect social inequality in educational achievement? Earlier studies based on seasonal comparisons suggested schooling to equalize social gaps in achievement, but recent replication studies gave rise to skepticism about the validity of older findings. We propose an alternative causal design that identifies schooling exposure effects by exploiting (conditionally) random variation in test dates and birth dates for children participating in assessment studies. We test effects of school exposure in first grade for a series of learning domains (vocabulary, grammar, math, and science) by drawing on recent data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). Findings clearly indicate that schooling increases learning in all domains and particularly in math and science. However, we did not find any evidence that schooling effects differed by children’s socio-economic background. We conclude that, while all children benefitted by first-grade exposure, first-grade schooling had no consequences for social inequality in learning. We discuss the relevance of our approach and results in the context of the massive school lockdowns due to the COVID-19 crisis and to further knowledge on the roleof schooling in the process of social stratification.

Does Schooling Affect Socioeconomic Inequalities in Educational Attainment? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Germany

“…For In terms of more causally oriented designs, other natural experiments also found schooling not to affect socioeconomic inequality in educational performance. Passaretta and Skopek (2020) For all these reasons, the findings of the present study, whilst being certainly arising in a specific context, are part of a more general pattern. As a consequence, we argue that social scientists interested in explaining the intergenerational transmission of advantage should change their focus of attention from school to non-school factors (Coleman et al 1966;Jencks et al 1972).…”

“…In a similar analysis, using measures of intelligence from military conscription tests among male adolescents in Sweden, Carlsson et al (2015) found no socioeconomic differences in the effects of the number of school days spent prior to the test on test performance by parental education and father's earnings. A limitation of these two studies (Carlsson et al 2015;Passaretta and Skopek 2020) is, that there is rather little actual variation in the amount of schooling in this research design. The vast majority of the students who are tested later experienced some days but not several months more of schooling.…”

“…There is also another problem of the research design employed in the summer learning literature, which is pointed out by Passaretta and Skopek (2020). The research design has to assume that any differences in learning rates between the summer and the school year are due to the absence of schooling.…”

“…More recently, however, methodological critiques of these studies have emerged arguing that after taking into account measurement error the increases in socioeconomic inequalities in skills during the summer are smaller than previously assumed and of little substantive importance (von Hippel and Hamrock 2019;von Hippel, Workman, and Downey 2018). In addition, evidence from other research designs does not find the benefits of more schooling for skill development to vary by family socioeconomic background (Carlsson et al 2015;Passaretta and Skopek 2020). In economics, the dynamics of skill formation model also predicts that "skills beget skills and abilities beget abilities" (Cunha and Heckman 2007:10).…”

The development of language achievement gaps by migration background during primary school - A path-model of educational inequalities

“…Consistent with this pattern of persistent disadvantage, several studies have shown that most gaps by social background, gender and ethnicity are already present at the start of primary school and change very little during school (e.g., Farkas and Beron 2004;von Hippel and Hamrock 2019;von Hippel, Workman, and Downey 2018;Morgan et al 2016;Passaretta and Skopek 2021;Skopek and Passaretta 2021). A few studies have examined early skill gaps by migration status in the European context.…”