Does Schooling Decrease Socioeconomic Inequality in Early Achievement? A Differential Exposure Approach

Abstract

Does schooling affect socioeconomic inequality in educational achievement? Earlier studies based on seasonal comparisons suggest schooling can equalize social gaps in learning. Yet recent replication studies have given rise to skepticism about the validity of older findings. We shed new light on the debate by estimating the causal effect of 1st-grade schooling on achievement inequality by socioeconomic family background in Germany. We elaborate a differential exposure approach that estimates the effect of exposure to 1st-grade schooling by exploiting (conditionally) random variation in test dates and birth dates for children who entered school on the same calendar day. We use recent data from the German NEPS to test school-exposure effects for a series of learning domains. Findings clearly indicate that 1st-grade schooling increases children’s learning in all domains. However, we do not find any evidence that these schooling effects differ by children’s socioeconomic background. We conclude that, although all children gain from schooling, schooling has no consequences for social inequality in learning. We discuss the relevance of our findings for sociological knowledge on the role of schooling in the process of stratification and highlight how our approach complements seasonal comparison studies.

Educational Inequality

“…Lavy (2015), for instance, finds that disadvantaged children are more strongly affected by cross-country differences in instruction time. The effects of early education found by Cornelissen and Dustmann (2019) are particularly large for English boys from low socioeconomic backgrounds, though in the German data, Passaretta and Skopek (2021) do not observe differences in the effect of the first year of schooling by socioeconomic background. Results in the summer learning literature are also mixed.…”

Union Dissolution and Children’s Educational Achievement: Decomposing Effects of School and Non-School Environments

“…Following Passaretta and Skopek (2021), we exclude students who either enrol early or late in grade 0, as non-compliance with the enrolment rules is likely correlated with child development, or other factors affecting academic achievement (including union dissolution). Differently from Passaretta and Skopek (2021), we extend the analyses to older grades in primary school (grade 2, 4, 6, 8). Hence, we also drop students who were younger or older for grade because they were retained or skipped a year.…”

“…There are multiple mechanisms with the potential to either increase or decrease inequality at play in school, which could result in students from worse or better-off families having similar gains from schooling. For example, Passaretta and Skopek (2021) show that for Germany schooling overall do not decreases or increases inequality across socioeconomic background. However, this may not be the case for other countries and other measures of social disadvantages, such as parental union dissolution.…”

Reproducing or Reducing Inequality? The Case of Summer Learning Programs

“…Second, these evaluations tend not to be guided by broader sociological frameworks that might pose a fuller range of research questions. Summer learning research is premised on a generic "faucet theory" that links seasonal variations in student achievement to learning opportunities (Alexander et al, 2016;Condron et al, 2021;Passaretta & Skopek, 2021). Our theoretical contribution is to conceive summer learning programs as supplementary extensions of public schooling, and thereby set them within a wider theory of educational inequality that opens novel lines of investigation.…”