Generational patterns in academic performance: The variable effects of attitudes and social capital

Abstract

This paper uses recent data on tenth graders’ performance, and school and family lives to provide a current assessment of generational disparities in math and reading scores, and to evaluate the roles played by a broad range of predictors in creating the observed relative performance of immigrant, second- and third-generation students. In the presence of a wide range of predictors, we find that preschool-aged immigrants outperform the third-plus generation in reading, while the third-plus generation scored higher than school-aged immigrants in reading and outperformed the second generation in both math and reading. We also find that all children of immigrants benefit from very high parental expectations, and that recently arrived immigrants have strong feelings of school attachment which they manifest in pro-school behaviors. In contrast, third-plus generation students socialize more heavily and are relatively indifferent toward school, but have access to more and stronger forms of between-family social capital. These generational differences in attitudes and social capital, and their subsequent effects on generational disparities in academic performance, lend considerable support to the immigrant optimism hypothesis.