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Originally Posted by Crawford
I'd imagine the vast majority of students who start out ahead are advantaged due to parental involvement.
My 5-yo kindergartener reads and does math at a 2nd grade level, but I doubt he's unusually smart. We've been tutoring him, almost every day, since he was 3. And reading to him, daily, since in utero. And were fortunate enough to put him in a STEAM-oriented preschool from the beginning.
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There's...mixed evidence of this. Basically they attempt to study the outcomes of adopted children versus biological children to disentangle the genes vs. environment issue. The conclusion is environment matters a lot with small kids, but as children get older their natural inclinations take over. There's almost no correlation by HS, and no correlation at all between final educational attainment/adult earnings for parents and offspring.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Re. parental choice and urban public schooling, I generally agree the OP.
I don't know the Ed data, but I'd be surprised if teaching, and peer norms, had absolutely zero impact on learning. A crappy teacher or a classroom where discipline is taking up teaching time would seem to have some negative impact.
Part of the reason parents prefer "good" schools is a culture of higher expectations, extending beyond academics. There are social and extracurricular advantages in non-troubled schools. You're more likely to find a good tennis coach, or learn about that great Calc tutor. And there are no parental "hoops", as all the K-12 schools are pretty much fine.
I do see why urbanite parents sometimes end up sending their kids to Scarsdale, New Trier or wherever. In some ways it's just easier. You don't have to think about anything till college. Even if the outcomes are the same, it's peace of mind.
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Peer effects do exist, but they're relatively minor. I remember reading one landmark Texas study which looked into peer effects in education, and it concluded for every 10% blacker a public school is, white students did about 1%-2% less well on standardized tests. Oddly enough the negative effects for black students attending highly black schools were worse than for white students.
There's also been a lot of studies showing that when you take small numbers of inner-city kids and send them to suburban schools, it leads to big improvements in performance (if not total parity)...but if it becomes a sizable proportion of the student body, these kids are socially segregated within the school, and the achievement boost drops to close to zero.