Neighborhood and School Effects on Children’s Development and Well-Being

Jinsook Kim, University of California, Los Angeles
Alair MacLean, RAND
Anne Pebley, University of California, Los Angeles
Narayan Sastry, RAND

Academic skills acquired during childhood are associated with higher educational attainment and occupational status throughout the life course (Warren, Sheridan, and Hauser 2002). Child behavioral problems shape how well children do in school and in other spheres of life (McLeod and Kaiser 2004). Average levels of achievement and behavioral problems, however, are not equally distributed across different social groups. For example, children of parents with lower socioeconomic status, as measured by parental education, parental occupational status, and household income, receive lower reading and math achievement scores than those of parents with higher status (Fryer and Levitt 2004; Phillips and Chin 2004). In this paper, we use new data from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (L.A.FANS) and the Child Development Supplement to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID-CDS) to examine the relative contributions of families, neighborhoods, and schools to children’s development and well-being.