Abstract
Educational inequality is a well-established topic among the scientific community in Western countries. Major individual differences emerge well before children arrive at school. Therefore the following analysis deals with the explanation of early differences in cognitive outcomes. However, there is not much research done in Germany. The main question is if the strong effect of the educational background and the home environment on their outcomes and on the improvement exists as well. To test this, data of the project “Preschool Education and Educational Careers among Migrant Children” was used. The results of structural equation models confirm that the home environment and the education of the parents are important for children's outcomes at the age of 3 to 4. In addition both factors also play a major role for the explanation of the improvement of the cognitive abilities. The results show that in Germany the home environment and parental education are important predictors of cognitive abilities. As a main result the study shows that it is very important to control for earlier abilities of the children and to encourage low educated parents to be active with their children, since in that way they can compensate for their lower educational background.
Highlights
Educational inequality is a well-established topic among the scientific community in Western countries
The results show a marked difference in children from advantaged versus disadvantaged backgrounds and that inequalities in cognitive achievements are already established in early years
All fit indices suggest that the empirical model fits very well
Summary
Educational inequality is a well-established topic among the scientific community in Western countries. The following analysis deals with the explanation of early differences in cognitive outcomes. Current explanations of inequality stress the influence of cultural and human capital. The cultural capital of parents influences the home environment and activities between parents and their children [1, 2]. An analogous mechanism holds true for the case of human capital: if parents are highly educated, the probability rises that their children will be highly educated. It is assumed that it is easier for highly educated parents to help and stimulate their children. A child’s chance of positive cognitive outcomes depends on the (educational) resources of its parents and their home environment. Even though the disadvantages of social groups might still be quite small at early ages, in the long run, the accumulation process produces great differences
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