Socioeconomic inequality at school entry: A cross-cohort comparison of families and schools

Abstract

The widening income gap between the wealthy and the disadvantaged in the United States has been well documented and has coincided with a near doubling of the income-achievement gap among school-age children. Motivated by calls for approaches to research that enable comprehensive accounts of change in the social ecologies of children, we leverage recently released data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to compare two nationally representative samples of kindergartners. Using multiple indicators reflecting children's family and school ecologies, we document a substantial and widening divide between kindergarteners from high- and low-income households. We show that kindergartners from families with low-income are more disadvantaged in 2010, following the Great Recession than they were in 1998 on a number of measures of well-being including higher levels of maternal unemployment and greater food insecurity. We also document a dramatic increase in the proportion of school administrators reporting a decline in school funding as well as increased student mobility in the latter time period. Our results raise concerns that schools may not be prepared to compensate for the widening gap between the rich and the poor.