Douglas B. Downey

WHEN BIGGER IS NOT BETTER: FAMILY SIZE, PARENTAL RESOURCES, AND CHILDREN'S EDUCATIONAL PERFORMANCE*

Although the inverse relationship between the number of siblings and childrens educational performance has been well established explanations for this relationship remain primitive. One explanation resource dilution posits that parents have finite levels of resources (time energy money etc.) and that these resources are diluted among children as sibship size increases. I provide a more rigorous investigation of the dilution model than previous studies testing its implications with a sample of 24599 eighth graders from the 1988 [U.S.] National Education Longitudinal Study. My analyses support the resource dilution model in three ways. First the availability of parental resources decreases as the number of siblings increases net of controls....Second parental resources explain most or all of the inverse relationship between sibship size and educational outcomes. Finally interactions between sibship size and parental resources support the dilution model as children benefit less from certain parental resources when they have many versus few siblings. (EXCERPT)

Are Schools the Great Equalizer? Cognitive Inequality during the Summer Months and the School Year

How does schooling affect inequality in cognitive skills? Reproductionist theorists have argued that schooling plays an important role in reproducing and even exacerbating existing disparities. But seasonal comparison research has shown that gaps in reading and math skills grow primarily during summer vacation, suggesting that non-school factors (e.g., family and neighborhood) are the main source of inequality. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten Cohort of 1998–99, this article improves upon past seasonal estimates of school and non-school effects on cognitive skill gains. Like past research, this study considers how socioeconomic and racial/ethnic gaps in skills change when school is in session versus when it is not. This study goes beyond past research, however, by examining the considerable inequality in learning that is not associated with socioeconomic status and race. This “unexplained” inequality is more than 90 percent of the total inequality in learning rates, and it is much smaller during school than during summer. The results suggest, therefore, that schools serve as important equalizers: nearly every gap grows faster during summer than during school. The black/white gap, however, represents a conspicuous exception.

Why are residential and school moves associated with poor school performance

Most research on residential mobility has documented a clear pattern: Residential and school moves are associated with poor academic performance. Explanations for this relationship, however, remain speculative. Some researchers argue that moving affects social relationships that are important to academic achievement. But the association between moving and school performance may be spurious; the negative correlation may be a function of other characteristics of people who move often. We offer several conceptual and analytical refinements to these ideas, allowing us to produce more precise tests than past researchers. Using longitudinal data, we find that differences in achievement between movers and nonmovers are partially a result of declines in social relationships experienced by students who move. Most of the negative effect of moving, however, is due to preexisting differences between the two groups.

The Effect of School on Overweight in Childhood: Gain in Body Mass Index During the School Year and During Summer Vacation

OBJECTIVES To determine whether school or nonschool environments contribute more to childhood overweight, we compared childrens gains in body mass index (BMI) when school is in session (during the kindergarten and first-grade school years) with their gains in BMI when school is out (during summer vacation). METHODS The BMIs of 5380 children in 310 schools were measured as part of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort. We used these measurements to estimate BMI gain rates during kindergarten, summer, and first grade. RESULTS Growth in BMI was typically faster and more variable during summer vacation than during the kindergarten and first-grade school years. The difference between school and summer gain rates was especially large for 3 at-risk subgroups: Black children, Hispanic children, and children who were already overweight at the beginning of kindergarten. CONCLUSIONS Although a schools diet and exercise policies may be less than ideal, it appears that early school environments contribute less to overweight than do nonschool environments.

The Search for Oppositional Culture among Black Students

RESULTS PUBLISHED in our 1998 ASR article (Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey 1998, henceforward A-D&D) presented a serious challenge to the oppositional culture explanation for racial/ethnic differences in school performance. It was a surprise to many to learn that black students typically report more optimistic occupational expectations, view education as more important to their future, and maintain more pro-school attitudes than do white students. In our conclusion, we stated our hope that this new evidence would lead to further debate regarding the source of racial/ethnic differences in school performance:

Are “Failing” Schools Really Failing? Using Seasonal Comparison to Evaluate School Effectiveness

To many, it seems obvious which schools are failing—schools whose students perform poorly on achievement tests. But since evaluating schools on achievement mixes the effects of school and nonschool influences, achievement-based evaluation likely underestimates the effectiveness of schools that serve disadvantaged populations. In this article, the authors discuss school-evaluation methods that more effectively separate school effects from nonschool effects. Specifically, the authors evaluate schools using 12-month (calendar-year) learning rates, 9-month (school-year) learning rates, and a provocative new measure, “impact”—which is the difference between the school-year learning rate and the summer learning rate. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study of 1998–99, the authors show that learning- or impact-based evaluation methods substantially change conclusions about which schools are failing. In particular, among schools with failing (i.e., bottom-quintile) achievement levels, less than half are failing with respect to learning or impact. In addition, schools that serve disadvantaged students are much more likely to have low achievement levels than they are to have low levels of learning or impact. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to market-based educational reform.

Living in single-parent households : An investigation of the same-sex hypothesis

The authors examine the social scientific evidence regarding one question increasingly addressed in legal scholarship and in custody cases : are children who live with their same-sex parent in a better situation than their peers who live with an opposite-sex parent ? After evaluating the current research on the same-sex hypothesis, they extend this literature by analyzing three data sets (National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, High School and Beyond, and the General Social Survey). They focus on a broader array of socioemotional, academic and personality variables than those previously studied to explore the implications of same-sex parenting on adolescence and adulthood. They find virtually no evidence of a benefit from living with a same-sex parent. This study represents the most complete test to date of, and rebuttal to, the same-sex argument

Fifty Years since the Coleman Report Rethinking the Relationship between Schools and Inequality

In the half century since the 1966 Coleman Report, scholars have yet to develop a consensus regarding the relationship between schools and inequality. The Coleman Report suggested that schools play little role in generating achievement gaps, but social scientists have identified many ways in which schools provide better learning environments to advantaged children compared to disadvantaged children. As a result, a critical perspective that views schools as engines of inequality dominates contemporary sociology of education. However, an important body of empirical research challenges this critical view. To reconcile the field’s main ideas with this new evidence, we propose a refraction framework, a perspective on schools and inequality guided by the assumption that schools may shape inequalities along different dimensions in different ways. From this more balanced perspective, schools might indeed reproduce or exacerbate some inequalities, but they also might compensate for others—socioeconomic disparities in cognitive skills in particular. We conclude by discussing how the mostly critical perspective on schools and inequality is costly to the field of sociology of education.

Number of Siblings and Social Skills Revisited Among American Fifth Graders

Most research on the consequences of the number of siblings highlights their downside—the negative association between sibship size and educational outcomes. But recently scholars have begun to understand the potential benefits of siblings, with some research indicating that kindergartners are more socially adept when they have at least one brother or sister. We expand this line of inquiry by studying fifth graders, a point where sufficient school-based peer interactions have occurred to potentially eliminate the social skills deficit observed among only children beginning kindergarten. Analyzing 11,820 children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten Cohort of 1998-99, we find that, contrary to our expectations, only children failed to gain more social skills between kindergarten and fifth grade than their counterparts with siblings. This pattern has important implications for the one in five children now raised without siblings.

Number of Siblings and Friendship Nominations Among Adolescents

Considerable social science research questions the benefit of siblings. The most prominent example is the consistent negative association between sibship size and educational outcomes. But more recent work among kindergartners uncovered a potentially positive outcome—greater social skills—at least for those who have at least one sibling. We extend this line of inquiry to adolescence to see if there are long-term negative consequences of growing up without any siblings. Analyzing 13,466 youths from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we find no evidence that only children receive fewer peer nominations of friendship than youths with one (or more than one) sibling(s). Our results suggest that the previously observed social skills deficit among only children in kindergarten appears to be overcome by adolescence.