Linda Steffel Olson

First grade and educational attainment by age 22 : A new story

Studies of the persistence of social stratification rely heavily on students’ experience in secondary schools. In this study, outcomes for a randomly selected panel of Baltimore children, followed from age 6 to age 22, demonstrate that first graders’ social contexts and personal resources explain educational attainment levels in early adulthood about as well as do similar resources measured in adolescence. Years of schooling and the highest level of school attempted respond most strongly to family SES, but parental psychological support and the child’s own temperament/disposition had substantial effects on first‐grade academic outcomes. The predictive power of race, gender, SES, and neighborhood quality measured in first grade on educational status at age 22 supports Lucas’s “effectively maintained inequality.”

Schools, Achievement, and Inequality: A Seasonal Perspective

Are there socioeconomic differences in the seasonality of children’s learning over the school year and summer months? The achievement gap across social lines increases during the primary grades, as much research indicates, but descriptive analyses and HLM within-person growth models for a representative panel of Baltimore school children demonstrate that the increase can be traced mainly to the out-of-school environment (i.e., influences situated in home and community). School-year verbal and quantitative achievement gains are comparable for upper socioeconomic status (SES) and lower SES children, but summer gains, when children are out of school, evidence large disparities. During the summer, upper SES children’s skills continue to advance (albeit at a slower rate than during the school year), but lower SES children’s gains, on average, are flat. This seasonal pattern of achievement gains implies that schooling plays an important compensatory role, one that is obscured when achievement is compared on an annual basis, as is typical. Policy implications of the seasonality of learning are discussed, including support for preventive measures over the preschool years and for programs, possibly including calendar reforms and summer school, to support disadvantaged children’s learning year-round.

Lasting Consequences of the Summer Learning Gap

Prior research has demonstrated that summer learning rooted in family and community influences widens the achievement gap across social lines, while schooling offsets those family and community influences. In this article, we examine the long-term educational consequences of summer learning differences by family socioeconomic level. Using data from the Baltimore Beginning School Study youth panel, we decompose achievement scores at the start of high school into their developmental precursors, back to the time of school entry in 1st grade. We find that cumulative achievement gains over the first nine years of childrens schooling mainly reflect school-year learning, whereas the high SES-low SES achievement gap at 9th grade mainly traces to differential summer learning over the elementary years. These early out-of-school summer learning differences, in turn, substantially account for achievement-related differences by family SES in high school track placements (college preparatory or not), high school noncompletion, and four-year college attendance. We discuss implications for understanding the bases of educational stratification, as well as educational policy and practice.

The First-Grade Transition in Life Course Perspective

A life course perspective prompts a decided shift in how sociologists have traditionally approached issues of schooling and educational attainment. The core assumption of life course theory—that developmental processes and outcomes are shaped by the life trajectories children follow—has increasingly focused attention on cultural differences and socioeconomic variation in school outcomes and redirected attention to the process of schooling. Children, like adults, are socially organized in ways that have strong implications for their life experiences, including those in school. A life course perspective makes it natural to think about life transitions as turning points, and about the social basis of change and continuity through the successive phases of life (see McLeod and Almazan, this volume).

Urban Teenagers: Work and Dropout

This article explores how employment affects the likelihood of dropout among high school students in Baltimore, a high-poverty city with a high dropout rate. Among 15-year-olds, those with teen jobs (e.g., lawn mowing, babysitting, etc.) were less than one third as likely to drop out as those who took adult-type jobs (manufacturing or business). This pattern reversed at age 16, however, because, at that age, holding an adult-type job as compared to a teen job reduced dropout risk. Patterns of work, for those older than ages 15 and 16, also affected dropout risk. Students who had been retained, but who made an orderly transition into work, were less likely to drop out than retained students who made a disorderly transition.

Paid Work in Early Adolescence: Developmental and Ethnic Patterns

Descriptive data on paid work performed both by White and African American students in Baltimore were collected as part of a more extensive longitudinal study. More than one-half of the youth worked for pay during the school year at 13 and 14 years of age, and around 70% worked during the summers. Those who started work the earliest were those who had done more chores at home. Patterns of work by these relatively low socioeconomic status (SES) students are consistent with patterns of youth employment in other parts of the country. For example, rates of employment for African American youth were lower than for White youth. Despite weaker academic records, the lowest SES African American boys at 13 years of age held proportionately more of the semi-skilled jobs (clerical, sales, and craft) than did White students of either gender or African American girls. The findings are discussed in a life course framework.

Counteracting Summer Slide: Social Capital Resources Within Socioeconomically Disadvantaged Families

Research on summer learning has shown that children from a higher socioeconomic status (SES) continue to learn during the summer months of elementary school, but lower-SES students tend to stagnate or lose ground. However, not all low-SES students experience summer learning loss. Drawing on the Beginning School Study (BSS), a longitudinal study of a random sample of Baltimore public school students who began first grade in 1982, this article identifies a small sample of low-SES students who gained as much as their higher-SES peers in reading or math during at least three of the four summers of elementary school. Drawing on Coleman and Hoffers (1987) theory of within-family social capital, we identify parental characteristics and practices that set these low-SES exceptional summer learners (ESLs) apart from their low-SES peers, who evidence the more typical pattern of summer slide.

University-District Partnership Research to Understand College Readiness among Baltimore City Students.

The concept of college readiness is complex because of its many components, and its meaning is further complicated by disparate definitions applied by different postsecondary institutions. The research featured in this study attempts to measure college readiness according to traditional indicators, such as high school GPA and course taking, but also by assessed need for developmental courses upon college arrival. The analyses feature a cohort of graduating students from the Baltimore City Public Schools, which are part of an urban, high-poverty, predominantly African American school system. This research is part of a larger effort to inform the school districts efforts at improving college readiness, and was conducted by the Baltimore Education Research Consortium (BERC), a partnership of local university researchers and school district representatives. The history and current activities of this partnership with respect to college access and readiness research are described, along with descriptive findings concerning the extent to which the academic characteristics of graduates corresponded with readiness definitions at their most frequently attended postsecondary institutions.