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The Gift of Time? School Starting Age and Mental Health

In many developed countries, children now begin their formal schooling at an older age. However, a growing body of empirical studies provides little evidence that such schooling delays improve educational and economic outcomes. This study presents new evidence on whether school starting age influences student outcomes by relying on linked Danish survey and register data that include several distinct, widely used, and validated measures of mental health that are reported out-of-school among similarly aged children.

Practical Issues in Estimating Achievement Gaps from Coarsened Data

Ho and Reardon (2012) present methods for estimating achievement gaps when test scores are coarsened into a small number of ordered categories, preventing fine-grained distinctions between individual scores. They demonstrate that gaps can nonetheless be estimated with minimal bias across a broad range of simulated and real coarsened data scenarios.

The Geography of Rural Educational Opportunity

We use nearly 430 million standardized test scores, including test scores from more than 6,500 rural school districts, to describe educational opportunity in rural America. Although we find modest differences in outcomes between rural and nonrural students overall, these disparities are larger for specific socioeconomic, racial-ethnic, and geographic groups. We also find that the relationship between socioeconomic status and achievement is somewhat weaker in rural areas compared to nonrural areas.

Out of the Education Desert: How Limited Local College Options are Associated with Inequity in Postsecondary Opportunities

The U.S. has a stratified hierarchy of college and universities. Consequences of this stratification include large disparities in the returns to higher education between levels of postsecondary institutions, and gaps by race and income in terms of where students enroll that, together, have the potential to reproduce longstanding social inequality. We study one potential cause associated with enrollment disparities: the uneven geographic distribution of colleges around the U.S.

A Continuous Measure of the Joint Distribution of Race and Income Among Neighborhoods

We develop and illustrate a general method for describing in detail the joint distribution of race and income among neighborhoods. The approach we describe provides estimates of the average income distribution and racial composition of the neighborhoods of households of a given racial category and specific income level. We illustrate the method using 2007-2011 tract-level data from the American Community Survey.

An Integrative View of School Functioning: Transactions Between Self-Regulation, School Engagement, and Teacher–Child Relationship Quality

This study investigates the dynamic interplay between teacher–child relationship quality and children's behaviors across kindergarten and first grade to predict academic competence in first grade. Using a sample of 338 ethnically diverse 5-year-old children, nested path analytic models were conducted to examine bidirectional pathways between children's behaviors and teacher–child relationship quality.

Early Childhood Memory and Attention as Predictors of Academic Growth Trajectories

Longitudinal data from the children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) were used to assess how well measures of short-term and working memory and attention in early childhood predicted longitudinal growth trajectories in mathematics and reading comprehension. Analyses also examined whether changes in memory and attention were more strongly predictive of changes in academic skills in early childhood than in later childhood.

The role of social science in action-guiding philosophy: The case of educational equity

Education policy decisions are both normatively and empirically challenging. These decisions require the consideration of both relevant values and empirical facts. Values tell us what we have reason to care about, and facts can be used to describe what is possible. Following Hamlin and Stemplowska, we distinguish between a theory of ideals and descriptions of feasibility. We argue that when feasibility constraints are used to rank competing states of affairs, two things must be articulated. First, one must explain why one feasibility constraint is preferred over another.

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