Educational Opportunity in Early and Middle Childhood: Using Full Population Administrative Data to Study Variation by Place and Age

Item

Title

Educational Opportunity in Early and Middle Childhood: Using Full Population Administrative Data to Study Variation by Place and Age

Abstract/Description

I use standardized test scores from roughly forty-five million students to describe the temporal structure of educational opportunity in more than eleven thousand school districts in the United States. Variation among school districts is considerable in both average third-grade scores and test score growth rates. The two measures are uncorrelated, indicating that the characteristics of communities that provide high levels of early childhood educational opportunity are not the same as those that provide high opportunities for growth from third to eighth grade. This suggests that the role of schools in shaping educational opportunity varies across school districts. Variation among districts in the two temporal opportunity dimensions implies that strategies to improve educational opportunity may need to target different age groups in different places.

Author/creator

Reardon, Sean F.

Date

2019

In publication

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences

Volume

5

Issue

2

Pages

40-68

Resource type

en Research/Scholarly Media

Resource status/form

en Published Text

Scholarship genre

en Empirical

Open access/full-text available

en Yes

Peer reviewed

en Yes

ISSN

2377-8253

DOI

10.7758/rsf.2019.5.2.03

URL

Open Access PDF (JSTOR)

Citation

Reardon, S. F. (2019). Educational Opportunity in Early and Middle Childhood: Using Full Population Administrative Data to Study Variation by Place and Age. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 5(2), 40–68. https://doi.org/10.7758/rsf.2019.5.2.03

Item sets

Handbook Chapter 20 Citations

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