After the school bell: The effects of neighborhood social processes on educational trajectories of children and adolescents

In both observational and experimental studies, children residing in disadvantaged neighborhoods exhibited lower educational achievement and attainment. Studies find that students living in high poverty neighborhoods show lower math and reading achievement, and are more than three times more likely to drop out of school than their peers in advantaged neighborhoods. However, we do not fully understand how, when, and to what degree contexts outside of the home and school affect child and adolescent education over time. Most research conducted on this population ignores time, space, and the multiple ecologies to which children belong. The vast majority of studies rely on cross-sectional data and limited conceptualizations of residential neighborhoods, which only characterize children’s contexts at one point in time and grossly ignores other influential spatial contexts. Moreover, most studies only model neighborhood-home or neighborhood-school combinations. Given the high degree of correlation between home, school and neighborhood characteristics, any analysis that omits one of these contexts runs the risk of overstating or misstating the effect of each. Using restricted and geocoded ECLS-K data, multiple residential- and school-based neighborhood conceptualizations, longitudinal propensity scores, and multilevel longitudinal regression, I examine the effect of neighborhoods on the educational trajectories of 9,704 children from kindergarten through eighth grade. Knowing the type and scale of neighborhood as well as the ways in which neighborhood processes influence educational trajectories will provide information to: 1) improve educational achievement during a critical developmental period, 2) target interventions appropriately, and 3) advance empirical knowledge neighborhood effect studies.