Poverty, Race and the Contexts of Achievement: Examining Educational Experiences of Children in the American South Maryah

This paper reports findings of a study examining child-, classroom-, and school-level factors that effect academic achievement among public school children in the South. Using ECLS-K data, we compare and contrast the learning environments in high/low minority and high/low poverty schools. A sizeable minority of Southern children attend schools that are race and/or class segregated; on multiple dimensions these schools are less desirable than are schools attended by more privileged children, and children attending these schools have lower levels of academic achievement. Results from 3-level random intercepts models show that a range of child and family factors, as well as classrooms with less experienced teachers and with more low-level readers, and rural school location all contribute to lower reading gains during first grade. We find no “race effects” on achievement, net of other variables. Issues of “selection” are discussed, and implications for social work are explored. This project was supported in part by a grant from the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research through the US Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, grant number 5 ASPE417-02. The opinions and conclusions expressed in this paper are solely those of the authors and should not be understood to reflect the opinions or policies of the UK Center for Poverty Research or any agency of the Federal government. Raceand class-gaps in children’s academic achievement are a troubling phenomena, and have historically been thought to be connected to school segregation, particularly in the South. Research has provided some support for this idea, with studies showing that, in general, children attending schools with predominantly low-income and/or minority peers (Bankston & Caldas, 1998; Entwisle & Alexander, 1992; Hoxby, 2000; Reardon, 2003) fare worse than would be expected, after accounting for a range of individual and family characteristics. But complexities of accounting for selection into schools, and inadequate attention to more proximal, classroom differences in children’s educational experiences make it unclear how much impact race or class concentration, by itself, may have on student learning. Further, we are aware of no study that addresses such issue specifically within the South – an area where the intersection of race and class, and issues of segregation are particularly salient. This paper reports findings of a study examining child-, classroom-, and school-level factors that effect academic achievement among public school children in the South. We first provide a brief overview of the literature on the importance of peer group composition and classroom processes to individual learning. We then describe our study, report key findings, and discuss next steps as well as the limitations and implications of our analyses. Review of the Literature Education is traditionally viewed as a leveler of opportunity. In a free and public education system, children of all backgrounds can theoretically achieve any adult status by seizing opportunities available to all and excelling based on their merit and effort (see Stanton-Salazar, 1997). In an unequal society with a highly residualized social welfare system, the possibility of mobility through education is particularly critical for children born into poor families, and children whose families are marginalized due to racial discrimination. Problematically, a significant body of research suggests that American schooling does not adequately create equal opportunities (Braswell et al., 2001; Ferguson, 1998; Miller-Cribbs, Cronen, Davis, & Johnson, 2002). In fact, the school achievement gap between poor and non-poor children is troublingly high (Braswell et al., 2001), and due to the race/poverty overlap as well as historical and ongoing manifestations of institutional racism, it is not surprising that the poverty gap co-exists with a race gap in student achievement (Braswell et al., 2001; Jencks & Phillips, 1998). The South is characterized by high levels of poverty (Rural Poverty Research Institute, 1999; Southern Institute for Children and Families, 2002), a large Black population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2001), and generally poor performance in most domains of educational quality (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2003a, 2003b; United Health Foundation, 2002). Thus, in the South, there is a heightened need to understand and respond to these gaps or order to improve the effectiveness of education as a pathway to opportunity (U.S. Census Bureau, 2001). While some scholars have focused on cultural or attitudinal explanations for poor and minority children’s under-achievement (Ogbu, 1986), the mainstream of research has acknowledged the need for more structural or contextual explanations (Duncan & Brooks-Gunn, 1997; MacLeod, 1995; Tienda, 1991; Wacquant & Wilson, 1989; Wilson, 1987). Decades ago, while “culture of poverty” theorists (i.e. Murray, 1984) argued the failure of public efforts to improve outcomes for minorities, Loury (1977) demonstrated that structural disadvantage, in the form of inherited material and social marginalization, constrains what minority youth can achieve through equal opportunity educational programs. More recently Wilson (1987) has shown how the social isolation of minority youth from mainstream institutions and structures of opportunity constrains achievement. Also, Stanton-Salazar and Dornbusch (1995) and Fernandez-Kelly (1994) each find that the lack of opportunities for mentorship, relationship, support or information from more privileged social ties forecloses many options for poor minority youth, leaving high rates of school failure and early childbearing as sadly predictable outcomes. Recently, greater attention has been paid to understanding academic achievement in its more proximal school social context. Studies addressing “peer group effects” explore the idea that a child’s social ties in school somehow influence that child’s individual learning (Bankston & Caldas, 1998; Entwisle & Alexander, 1992; Hoxby, 2000; Johnson, 2000; Reardon, 2003). With consistent findings that higher proportions of minority or low-income children are correlated with lower levels of individual student achievement, “peer group effect” research has become a venue for debating and discussing the relationship between school segregation and student achievement. But without more nuanced conceptualization and empirical examination of “peer group effects”, this direction of research creates troubling ambiguities. “Peer group effects” may represent truly contextual effects of being educated (and socialized) in a race or class homogeneous setting. Alternatively, “peer group effects” could be a reflection of problematic school conditions and processes that are correlated with high minority or high poverty enrollment, perhaps due to funding inequities, or educational bias. Or finally, “peer group effects” could represent the accumulation of child and family risk factors at the school level due to selection processes. Of course, such “selection” processes may ultimately reflect contextual causes – to the degree that an individual’s attributes, choices or behaviors are consequences of structural inequalities and processes of marginalization. Among school conditions, classroom-level processes are deserving of particular attention. In a recent study of kindergarten and first grade classrooms, Stipek (2004) found that schools with higher proportions of minority and low-income children were rated by teachers as having more negative social climates. In addition, classrooms in such schools more strongly emphasized basic skills learning, and teachers used more didactic than constructivist approaches. Teachers’ approaches varied as well by the ethnic composition of the classroom, and by the degree to which teachers perceived the families of the children in their classes to have challenges associated with poverty. Pianta, La Paro, Payne, Cox & Bradley (2002) report that predominantly low-income kindergarten classrooms offer diminished instructional climates, and climates that are less child-centered. Also along these lines, a recent NCES (1999) study found that teachers in high poverty schools used more ‘routine skills’ such as basic methods, lecture, and worksheets. Finally, Knapp & Turnbull (1990) found that the percent of students in a class who read below grade level has a significant negative relationship to use of teacher-centered approaches. Taken together, such studies indicate that classroomlevel phenomena differ in important ways depending on peer group composition. Rutter & Maughan (2002) argue that, in fact, school-level compositional effects on learning are quite small, “. likely due to the very high levels of variability in the mediating factors of classroom processes” (pp 451-475). Today we are experiencing a trend toward school re-segregation (Frankenberg & Lee, 2002). The courts, in line with cultural explanations of race and class inequality, have attributed this re-segregation to personal preference rather than public inequity (Orfield, 1996). At the same time, pressures from the unfunded mandates of “No Child Left Behind” raise the stakes on educational achievement. There is, then, some urgency to unpacking what segregation means and does in our schools. As researchers in the South, we are particularly interested in what is happening in the unique local cultural contexts embedded in this area’s highly race-based societal organization. Toward this end, the research presented here has three major aims: 1) to describe the educational environments that are typical to public school children in the South; 2) to examine differences in these educational environments associated with different school levels of race and class segregation; and 3) to examine the effects of child-, classroomand school-level factors on indivi