Relationships between urban vegetation and academic achievement vary with social and environmental context

Abstract

Urban greening is increasingly suggested as a means of supporting the health and well-being of urban populations. Given positive relationships between vegetation and academic performance, urban greening could support scholastic achievement, enhancing future success in life. These relationships may vary among social and environmental contexts, however, suggesting greening benefits populations unequally. We investigated relationships between vegetation and academic achievement as indicated by high school graduation rates across social and environmental contexts in the continental US, assessing this variation and the potential for urban vegetation to support academic attainment. We categorized 1,333 public high schools based on the socioeconomic and environmental attributes of their attendance areas using k-means clustering. We identified variation in relationships between vegetation and graduation rate based on socioeconomic status (SES) and estimated conditional mean rates by environmental category using multilevel beta regression. We found significant variation in the relationship between school graduation rate and vegetation among vegetation types and socio-economic contexts. Graduation rates were lower in high-intensity (i.e., more extensively built), low tree-cover settings and higher in lower-intensity (i.e., less extensively built), high tree-cover or agricultural settings. Agricultural vegetation associated positively with graduation rate broadly, while non-forest vegetation exhibited negative relationships for low-SES, majority Black schools. Tree canopy exhibited positive relationships that were stronger for high-SES schools and low-SES, majority Latino/a schools. These results highlight the importance of social and environmental context in mediating relationships between vegetation and academic achievement and the need to consider these disparities in supporting academic success through urban vegetation management.