Published in:
AERA Open
August 26, 2016
Sean F. Reardon, Stanford University
Ximena A. Portilla, MDRC
Abstract
Academic achievement gaps between high- and low-income students born
in the 1990s were much larger than among cohorts born two decades
earlier. During the same period, racial/ethnic achievement gaps declined.
To determine whether these trends have continued in more recent cohorts,
we examine trends in several dimensions of school readiness, including
academic achievement, self-control, externalizing behavior, and a measure
of students’ “approaches to learning,” for cohorts born from the early
1990s to the mid-2000s. We use data from nationally-representative
samples of kindergarteners (ages 5-6) in 1998 (n=20,220), 2006
(n=6,600), and 2010 (n=16,980) to estimate trends in racial/ethnic and
income school readiness gaps. We find that readiness gaps narrowed
modestly from 1998-2010, particularly between high- and low-income
students and between white and Hispanic students.
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