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Growing up poor but doing well: Contextual factors that predict academic success

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Abstract

This paper combines data on family, school, neighborhood, and city contexts with survey data from the Year 9 (n = 2,193) and Year 15 (n = 2, 236) Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to study children in America’s inner-cities who are “beating the odds”. We identify children as beating the odds if they were born to families of low socio-economic status but scored above the state average in reading, vocabulary and math at age 9, and were academically on-track by age 15. We also examine if the influences of these contexts are developmentally nuanced. We find that living in two parent households where harsh parenting methods are absent (family context) and living in neighborhoods where two parent families predominate (neighborhood context) are protective factors that help children beat the odds. We also find that city-wide contexts of higher levels of religiosity and fewer single parent households contribute to children beating the odds, however, these macro predictors are weaker when compared with family/neighborhood contexts. We find that these contextual effects are indeed developmentally nuanced. We conclude with a discussion of some interventions and policies that could help increase the number of at-risk children who beat the odds.

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Data availability

The Fragile Families data subset that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request. The data and documentation for the larger Fragile Families study are publicly available from: https://fragilefamilies.princeton.edu/documentation

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Edward J Bloustein School of Planning & Public Policy, Rutgers University, 33 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick, NJ, 08901, USA

    Radha Jagannathan

  2. School District of Philadelphia, 440 N Broad St, Philadelphia, PA, 19130, USA

    Louis Donnelly

  3. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA

    Sara McLanahan

  4. Department of Agricultural, Food & Resource Economics, Rutgers University, 55 Dudley Road, New Brunswick, NJ, 08901, USA

    Michael J. Camasso

  5. Princeton University, Center for Research On Child Wellbeing, Princeton University, Wallace Hall, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA

    Yu Yang

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  1. Radha Jagannathan
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Dr. Sara McLanahan passed away on December 31, 2021 after a battle with cancer. She was actively engaged in the preparation of this manuscript until a few months prior to her passing.

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Jagannathan, R., Donnelly, L., McLanahan, S. et al. Growing up poor but doing well: Contextual factors that predict academic success. J Econ Inequal 21, 169–200 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-022-09549-3

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