Education researchers have recently highlighted income achievement and behavior gaps – differences between children from high versus low income families in achievement scores and teacher-rated behavior. To date, scholars in this research stream have not considered the possibility that, compared to white students, non-white students may receive differential returns to the same category in the distribution of parental income (i.e., a given income quartile or quintile). In this dissertation, I investigate this possibility through analyses of racial gaps within income categories. I draw upon multiple national datasets. The first analysis considers black-white math achievement gaps within income quintiles among cohorts of 9th graders in 1960 and 2009, respectively. I find that, between 1960 and 2009, the gaps decreased significantly and became more uniform across the income distribution. But, in 2009, they were still substantively large, statistically significant, and largest in the highest income quintiles. Mechanisms driving the gaps have also changed over time. In 1960, within-quintile black-white inequalities in parental education and school characteristics explained a sizeable proportion of within-quintile black-white achievement gaps. By 2009, those inequalities had decreased and explained a negligible proportion of the gaps. The second analysis turns to a single cohort of students who began kindergarten in the fall of 1998. It considers black-white, Hispanic-white, and Asian-white gaps within income quartiles on school-entry achievement and behavior outcomes as well as key characteristics of preschool developmental contexts, which are thought to drive school-entry outcomes. On both the outcomes and the developmental context measures, compared to whites in the same income quartile, black and Hispanic children often fared significantly worse, while Asian children often fared significantly better. In many cases, these racial differences were not fully explained by other characteristics of children’s families, schools, and teachers, or controls for income differences, by race, within quartiles. The two analyses demonstrate that race and income have significantly and systematically intersected in the formation of educational inequality, both across birth cohorts of high school students from the mid twentieth century to the present and within one recent birth cohort of students as they began formal schooling in the fall of kindergarten. Taken together, this dissertation’s findings show that conceptions of educational inequality based on income alone produce an important, but incomplete, understanding of stratification dynamics.

Last modified

• 01/29/2019

Creator

• Jordan A. Conwell

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2JQ3V

Subject

• Sociology

Keyword

• Educational inequality
• Income achievement gaps
• Racial inequality
• Racial achievement gaps

Date created

• 2017-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright