Spatial divisions of poverty and wealth: does segregation affect educational achievement?

Abstract

We examine how different spatial compositions affect the educational achievement in mathematics of 16-year-old students in Chile, a Latin American country with high inequality and one of the most segregated education systems in the world. Conceptually, we complement the literature on ‘neighbourhood effects’, which typically addresses the influence of concentrated disadvantage, by focusing on concentrated advantage and its influence on educational outcomes. We construct a panel with all school students who took a national standardized mathematics test in 2010, 2014 and 2016 in the Metropolitan Region of Santiago, Chile. We complement it with survey data for the 52 districts of the Metropolitan Region, clustering the districts based on factors such as unemployment, economic inequality, access to services, experiences of violence and stigmatization. Our different identification strategies consistently show that concentrated poverty and affluence are both relevant for explaining educational achievement in mathematics above and beyond individual and school characteristics.

Space and social capital: social contacts in a segregated city

“…This suggests that the self-selection of more privileged groups in Santiago not only leads to greater neighborhood cohesion and better educational outcomes, as found by prior research (e.g. Méndez et al, 2021;Otero, Carranza et al, 2021), but also provides further opportunities for affluent residents to make valuable social contacts and forge parallel lives within the city. As such, rather than serving as a coping mechanism used in deprived areas to counter increasing structural disadvantage and urban marginality, our study indicates that social capital emerges strongly in affluent areas, arguably as a condition for the reproduction of privilege (e.g.…”

“…Although the causes and trends of spatial segregation in Santiago have been explored extensively, there is relatively less knowledge concerning the consequences of spatial inequality in terms of residents' life opportunities. Researchers have shown that spatial segregation in Santiago has led to marked differences regarding neighborhood cohesion, lifestyles and identities, accessibility to services, fear of crime, educational outcomes, and perceived residential stigma among residents from different spatial configurations (Brain & Prieto, 2021;Cortés, 2021;Dammert, 2004;Márquez & Pérez, 2008;Méndez et al, 2021;Otero, Carranza et al, 2021;Otero, Méndez et al, 2021). Despite these valuable contributions, however, we still do not know how spatial segregation affects one essential aspect of societal life: the way in which people make social connections and form social networks that can help them to climb the social hierarchy, or more precisely, how and why various features of urban geography are associated with social capital.…”

Urban poverty and vulnerability in global South: An alternative multidimensional framework for measurement and targeting

“…These neighbourhood effects are source of concentrated disadvantages or ‘shared negative effects’ (negative externalities). This has significant tangible influence on various achievements of occupants and creates ‘poverty hotspots’ (Otero, Carranza & Contreras, 2021). Slums and low‐income ghettos are generally occupied by marginalized sections of society.…”

“…This finds expression through the housing commodification involving increasingly high costs of land, the speculative interests of private developers and the marketization of social housing. Self-segregation by the rich, to appropriate spatial privileges, is also an important phenomenon in the Global South (Otero, Carranza & Contreras, 2021). Locational patterns of inequality within cities coincide with dimensions of social hierarchy, class, caste or community-based segregation, which can perpetuate social exclusion (Baker & Gadgil, 2017).…”

Agricultural production structure and inequality of educational development in China

“…Through the study of the intergenerational transmission of educational inequality, it is found that the distribution of financial funds in the field of education and the financing mechanism of public schools have reduced intergenerational mobility and made the transmission of educational inequality more stable between generations (Zheng and James, 2022 ). Research from a spatial perspective shows that the relative concentration of wealth and poverty is an important factor in educational inequality (Otero et al, 2021 ). A study of educational inequality in Spain confirms this view (Romero-Sanchez et al, 2020 ).…”