Is it Too Late Baby? Pinpointing the Emergence of a Black-White Test Score Gap in Infancy

Abstract

Racial inequality in educational and occupational attainment has been shown to be related to racial inequality in test scores and cognitive skills. Most research and policy attention has been given to the ability of schools to equalize test scores. I argue that a major reason why researchers have been unable to explain why schools have not closed the gap is because by the time children begin school it may be too late. Cognitive skills develop from infancy and as such, it should be unsurprising that by the time children are five years old the differences across groups are firmly established. Thus, this research attempts to uncover where the racial test-score gap begins by examining infants.I perform a series of analyses using ordinary least squares regression (OLS) and structural equation modeling (SEM) using the first wave of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth cohort (ECLS-B). I utilize the mother's race, rather than the child's race, in the analyses because looking at the mother's race makes the most logical sense since the mother's race is more likely than the child's to determine household income, marital status, mother's education, parenting styles, and so on.

A Multilevel Analysis of Asian Immigrant Children’s Reading Achievement in the Early Years: Evidence from the ECLS-K Data

“…The patterns of achievement gaps have also been found to differ across different minority ethnic groups, especially among Hispanics and blacks. For example, while the gaps between the black-white reading achievements widen in early years 2004;Rippeyoung, 2009;Roscigno, 2000), the gaps between Hispanics and Whites in reading narrow somewhat as children progress through elementary school, especially in the first two years of schooling, although gains have also been noted in the fifth grade and beyond (Fryer & Levitt, 2006;Reardon & Galindo, 2009).…”

Cognitive Advantages of East Asian American Children: When Do Such Advantages Emerge and What Explains Them?

“…Presumably, East Asian American infants do not understand Confucian values any better than their peers in other racial/ethnic groups. Moreover, although Asian American families tend to have higher levels of financial and human resources, these resources have been found to be weak predictors of cognitive abilities during infancy (Rippeyoung 2009). Given these circumstances, if a significant Asian advantage in cognitive abilities can still be observed during early infancy, it might constitute evidence for potential biological and genetic differences.…”

“…In particular, preterm birth, low birth weight, and poor general health conditions have been found to be negatively associated with levels of cognitive development during infancy (Chyi, Lee, Hintz, Gould, and Sutcliffe 2008;Datar and Jacknowitz 2009) and, at the same time, unequally distributed between European and African American communities (e.g., Acevedo-Garcia, Soobader, and Berkman 2005; Nepomnyaschy 2009; Sparks 2009). Whereas some studies have started to investigate how problems such as low birth weight, poor health, and preterm birth may be responsible for the performance gaps between African and European American children (Currie 2005;Rippeyoung 2009), few studies have included these factors when studying the performance gaps between Asian American and other racial groups.…”

“…Meanwhile, Asian American children often score as high as their European American peers and higher than African and Hispanic Americans in other educational indicators (Sakamoto et al 2009). Given that these academic performance differences are closely linked to similar racial/ethnic disparities in high school graduation and college attendance (e.g., Xie and Goyette 2004) and, in the long run, to racial inequality in income, educational attainment, and health conditions in adulthood (Kao and Thompson 2003;Ross and Wu 1995), a thorough examination of these achievement differences during childhood is important not only to our understanding of the educational consequences of grovs'ing up in various racial and ethnic communities, but also to our general understanding of racial inequality in American society at large (Rippeyoung 2009). …”

“…On the policy front, a huge amount of effort has been made in the past few decades by the U.S. government and school systems to close up the educational gaps among different races. Obviously this effort can be better guided by information about whether such racial gaps already exist among infants and toddlers and, if so, how large such pre-kindergarten differences are for our schools to address when they get a chance to work with children at age five (Rippeyoung 2009). …”