Poverty and Academic Achievement Across the Urban to Rural Landscape: Associations with Community Resources and Stressors

Abstract

Poor children begin school with fewer academic skills than their nonpoor peers, and these disparities translate into lower achievement, educational attainment, and economic stability in adulthood. Child poverty research traditionally focuses on urban or rural poor, but a shifting spatial orientation of poverty necessitates a richer examination of how urbanicity intersects with economic disadvantage. Combining geospatial administrative data with longitudinal survey data on poor children from kindergarten through second grade (N ≈ 2,950), this project explored how differences in community-level resources and stressors across urbanicity explain variation in achievement. Resources and stressors increased in more urbanized communities and were associated with academic achievement. Both mediated differences in poor children’s achievement. Mediation was both direct and indirect, operating through cognitive stimulation and parental warmth.

Family and community resource and stress processes related to income disparities in school-aged children’s development.

“…For publicly available administrative data to reach its full potential, we need data of this richness to be collected at a national level to expand the breadth of our research on neighborhood contexts. Research that leverages administrative data, such as the present study (also see Coley, 2019;Goerge & Wiegand, 2019;Miller, Votruba-Drzal, & Coley et al, 2019), may propel increasing efforts to integrate detailed administrative data and make them widely available to researchers and policymakers. Such research is not useful solely for psychological and educational researchers, but also for housing and urban development officials and community planners.…”

Does Money Matter More in the Country? Education Funding Reductions and Achievement in Kansas, 2010–2018

“…Less Access to Services. Access to fewer resources outside of school compared with more urban contexts (e.g., museums, libraries, health care; Miller et al, 2019) can make it more difficult for rural children and families to make up for school funding reductions (G. J. Duncan & Brooks-Gunn, 2000;Guo & Harris, 2000).…”

“…Evidence indicates larger benefits of education funding for socioeconomically disadvantaged students and districts (Biddle & Berliner, 2002;Candelaria & Shores, 2019a;Jackson et al, 2016;Lafortune et al, 2016;Rauscher, 2016Rauscher, , 2020Shores & Steinberg, 2019). Education funding may also have heterogeneous implications by geography, given geographic variation in resources and variation in the relationships between resources and achievement (Miller & Votruba-Drzal, 2015;Miller et al, 2019).…”

Using Administrative Data for Social Science and Policy

“…Brittany Murray and colleagues report the positive relation between strong parent-teacher associations and growth in student achievement (2019). Portia Miller, Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal, and Rebekah Coley find that community-level resources explain variation in student achievement (2019).…”