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4 The Social Consequences of Growing Up in a Poor Neighborhood
Pages 111-186

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From page 111...
... Children who live in affluent neighborhoods also get into less trouble with the law and have fewer illegitimate children than children who live in poor neighborhoods. Similar patterns are found when we compare white neighborhoods to black neighborhoods.
From page 112...
... As a result, federal subsidies are quite likely to increase economic segregation. If the federal government wanted to reduce economic segregation, it would either have to help poor families move to better neighborhoods or encourage more affluent families to remain in poor neighborhoods (perhaps through mortgage subsidies)
From page 113...
... Social scientists have suggested three mechanisms that could produce this result: peer influences, indigenous adult influences, and outside adult influences. Those who emphasize peer influences usually construct what we call epidemic models of how neighborhoods affect individuals.
From page 114...
... When we speak of "affluent" neighborhoods, for example, we often mean all neighborhoods that are more affluent than "poor neighborhoods," not neighborhoods that are more affluent than the national average. Likewise, when we speak of "high-SES" students, we often mean all students whose socioeconomic status is higher than that of "low-SES" students.
From page 115...
... Institutional models also focus on the way adults affect children, but they focus primarily on adults from outside the community who work in the schools, the police force, and other neighborhood institutions. Almost everyone assumes, for example, that elementary schools in affluent neighborhoods get better teachers than those in poor neighborhoods and that this affects how much students learn.
From page 116...
... It follows that if their income remains constant, they feel poorer when they have rich neighbors than when they have poor neighbors. Likewise, a college dropout feels less culturally competent if his or her neighbors all have Ph.D.'s than if they are all high school dropouts.
From page 117...
... And even the most affluent neighborhood has some teenagers who hate schoolwork, reject adult standards of behavior, and get into the same sorts of trouble as teenagers in poor neighborhoods. Prospective troublemakers can therefore find coconspirators in a rich neighborhood, even though they are scarcer than they would be in the ghetto.
From page 118...
... We then review the evidence about how a neighborhood or school's social composition affects children's eventual educational attainment, cognitive skills, crime rates, sexual behavior, and labor market success. In the closing section we summarize our findings and discuss their implications for those who do research and those who finance it.
From page 119...
... This means that children who grow up in rich neighborhoods would differ to some extent from children who grow up in poor neighborhoods even if neighborhoods had no effect whatever. From a scientific viewpoint, the best way to estimate neighborhood effects would be to conduct controlled experiments in which we assigned families randomly to different neighborhoods, persuaded each family to remain in its assigned neighborhood for a protracted period, and then measured each neighborhood's effects on the children involved.
From page 120...
... Omitting or mismeasuring these family characteristics tends to inflate neighborhoods' estimated effects on children, because a neighborhood's mean SES is a partial proxy for unmeasured variation in individual SES. At present, we have no idea which specific family characteristics we must control in order to get relatively unbiased estimates of neighborhood effects.
From page 121...
... If neighborhood effects accumulate slowly as we might expect in the case of school achievement, for example-measuring neighborhood characteristics at a single point in time can lead to serious measurement errors. Just as failure to measure a family's past income may innate neighborhoods' apparent effects (because current neighborhood is a proxy for past income)
From page 122...
... Dispersing the poor will only command majority support if most people believe that it will improve poor neighborhoods a lot more than it will harm more affluent ones. The effect of poor neighbors must, in other words, be strongly nonlinear.
From page 123...
... That conclusion would be correct for most neighborhoods, but it would be seriously misleading if we were mainly concerned with the effects of the very worst ghetto neighborhoods. Interactions Between Neighborhood SES and Individual SES Most of the studies we review assume that neighborhoods and schools have the same effect on everyone, regardless of their family background.
From page 124...
... 6 If the effects of individual SES and neighborhood SES are not additive, neighborhood erects will ordinarily appear to be nonlinear. But neighborhood effects can be nonlinear even if the edects of individual SES and neighborhood SES are completely additive.
From page 125...
... First, they make it impossible to determine which particular neighborhood characteristics are important and which are not. It makes a big difference, for example, whether poor black teenagers' pregnancy rates fall when their parents live in affluent black neighborhoods or only when they live in predominantly white neighborhoods.
From page 126...
... As a result, we seldom know whether unmeasured neighborhood characteristics have important effects. In the absence of such data, readers should not interpret negative findings about the effects Alto estimate neighborhoods' explanatory power with the erects of family background controlled, we need an analysis of covariance, a regression equation that includes a separate dummyvariable for each school, or some statistically equivalent method.
From page 127...
... These studies seemed to show that twelfth graders in high-SES schools had higher aspirations than those in low-SES schools, even with their own family's SES controlled (Michael, 1961; Turner, 1964; ~ Wilson, 1959~. Sewell and Armer (1966)
From page 128...
... If students from highways secondary schools were more likely than other students to realize their college plans, a school's mean SES could affect its graduates' eventual educational attainment even though it did not affect their plans at the time they graduated. When investigators have looked at high school seniors' eventual educational attainment, they have found much the same thing as when they looked at twelfth graders' plans (Bible 11~.
From page 129...
... found that mean SES and mean test performance both had positive effects on southern black twelfth graders' college plans. This implies that the reduced-form effect of mean SES was fairly large and positive for
From page 130...
... Better controls for exogenous influences reduced the estimated effect of a school's mean SES almost to zero. This methodological finding has important implications not just for our understanding of college plans but for our understanding of school and neighborhood effects generally.
From page 131...
... The same pattern recurs for teenage sexual activity and crime.~° A school's racial composition could therefore have quite different effects from its socioeconomic composition, even though the two are quite strongly correlated.
From page 132...
... But neither study was very successful in locating high school dropouts, so almost all the variance in educational attainment in both studies is attributable to variance in whether high school graduates attended and completed college.
From page 133...
... . Since Mayer wanted an "upper bound" estimate for the cumulative impact of schools' social mix, her estimates of school effects control only those student characteristics that schools cannot influence, namely parental SES and ethnicity.
From page 134...
... A change of one individual-level standard deviation therefore implies a change of 1.72 school-level standard deviations, which is the difference between a school at the 5th percentile of the school-level distribution and a school at the 50th percentile. 15To maintain confidentiality, the Census Bureau did not merge individual records with regular census tract data, but instead created new "pseudotracts" from block-level data.
From page 135...
... Table 4-2 shows the estimated effects of a zip code's mean income and racial mix on the number of years of school Datcher's respondents had completed in 1978, when they were 23 to 32 years old. The estimates control parental income in 1968, the parents' educational attainment, the family head's educational aspirations for his or her children, the number of children in the family, region, community size, and age.
From page 136...
... The mean income for an urban zip code averaged about $11,500 in 1970; hence, 1bble 4-2 implies that a 10 percent increase in neighborhood income increased respondents' eventual educational attainment by about a tenth of a year regardless of their race. Unlike the effects of income, the effects of a zip code's racial composition differed for blacks and whites.
From page 137...
... strongly suggest that growing up in a high-SES neighborhood raises a teenager's expected educational attainment, even when the teenager's own family characteristics are the same. A high school's social composition, in contrast, has very little effect on a student's chances of finishing high school or attending college.
From page 138...
... The apparent difference between school and neighborhood effects on educational attainment could derive from differences in analytic method rather than differences in the underlying causal connections. The racial composition of a school seems to have had different effects on blacks in the North and South, at least in the past.
From page 139...
... The matrices do not include any direct measure of parental income or occupational status. Nor did the survey measure students' test scores when they entered a school.22 Table 13 shows the effect of mean encyclopedia ownership on test performance in the sixth, ninth, and twelfth grades with all seven background measures controlled.23 Measures of school quality, such as expenditures or teachers' credentials, are not controlled.
From page 140...
... 140 to U
From page 141...
... Jencks and Brown analyzed changes between ninth and twelfth grade In vocabulary, social studies information, reading comprehension, arithmetic reasoning, arithmetic computation, and abstract reasoning among students enrolled in 91 predominantly white, comprehensive public schools. In addition to SES, sex, and family size, they treated ninth graders' college plans, curriculum assignment, previous grades, and test performance as exogenous.
From page 142...
... A 30-point increase in a high school's poverty rate (e.g., from 20 to 50 percent) lowers reading scores by 0.25 standard deviations in tenth grade and 0.35 standard deviations in twelfth grade.
From page 143...
... presents a technically superior analysis of the HSB data, which focuses on cognitive growth between the tenth and twelfth grades. His measures of both individual SES and mean SES are composites that give equal weight to father's education, father's occupation, mother's education, family income, and possessions in the home.
From page 144...
... Ikken at face value these results support policies aimed at reducing racial segregation while increasing economic segregation, but they should not be taken at face value until they are replicated.29 Effects of Elementary School's Mean SES ~ rning from high schools to elementary schools, the evidence regarding determinants of academic achievement is much worse. Table ~3 suggests that in 1%5 mean SES had a moderate impact on the achievement scores of both black and white sixth graders.
From page 145...
... obtained somewhat larger effects using data derived from the full northern urban EEO sample and a better measure of mean SES. Because the measures of family background in the original EEO survey are inadequate, Jencks's analysis probably overstates the impact of mean SES on test performance.
From page 146...
... Effects of Racial Composition on Blacks The Coleman report was also the first major study of how a school's racial composition affected its students' achievement. The effects of racial composition are, of course, somewhat confounded with the effects of mean SES, since predominantly white schools usually have more affluent students than predominantly black schools.
From page 147...
... Once again, we control the seven exogenous family background characteristics available in the published matrices. Combining the coefficients in Table 14 with the standard deviations in Table 4-3 and averaging over all tests, we estimate that blacks in 90 percent white schools scored 0.30 standard deviation higher than blacks from similar backgrounds in all-black schools.
From page 148...
... Yet when black first graders in all-black and predominantly white schools differ by 0.42 standard deviations, they differ by 0.39 standard
From page 149...
... We do not know the actual correlation between first- and twelfth-grade scores, but we know it is less than 1.00. Thus, if a school's racial composition had no independent effect on black students' scores, the standardized difference between blacks entering all-black schools and those entering 90 percent white schools would decline as the students got older.
From page 150...
... A 0.09 standard deviation difference between two sixth graders is far larger, in absolute terms, than a 0.20 standard deviation difference between two first graders. One way to make this clear is to egress differences not in terms of standard deviations but in terms of time.
From page 151...
... Since desegregated schooling increases black children's gains by 0.09 standard deviations in sixth grade, it increases the amount they learn by about 0.09/0.42 = 21 percent, which is roughly equivalent to a two-month gain. Using this approach, therefore, desegregation is more valuable for older students, not younger students.
From page 152...
... First, imprecise measurement of students' family background and initial ability probably inflates the estimated effect of Proportion White more for whites than for blacks. White students' measured SES was quite strongly correlated with their school's racial mix in both the 1965 EEO and the NLS-72, which suggest that high-SES white parents avoided schools with high black enrollments.
From page 153...
... Our third reason for doubting that desegregation lowers white students' achievement as much as Table 44 implies is that in Gamoran's (1987) HSB sample, which was 90 percent white, a school's racial composition had no consistent impact on cognitive growth between the tenth and twelfth grades.
From page 154...
... An elementary school's mean SES appears to have an appreciable effect on both black and white students' cognitive growth, but again, longitudinal analysis is needed to be sure about this. We can summarize what we currently know about the effects of racial composition on test performance as follows: .
From page 155...
... The fact that neither the federal government nor individual social scientists have used the HSB and SE surveys to address these questions suggests that we need to rethink the way in which we organize social research on politically controversial topics. CRIME Regardless of whether we look at official police statistics or residents' reports about the frequency with which they have been victimized, we find more serious crime in poor neighborhoods than in affluent ones.
From page 156...
... than it reduces delinquency among high-SES boys (.018~.39 Unfortunately, Bible 4-5 is likely to exaggerate the impact of a school's mean SES on individual behavior. Reiss and Rhodes controlled only one measure of parental SES, the father's occupation.
From page 157...
... did not adjust their results to take account of the fact that they sampled only high-crime schools, their findings do not tell us much about the effects of mean SES in representative samples of schools.4i Neighborhood Effects: Chicago in 1972 Reiss and Rhodes's work has two major limitations: inadequate controls for individual SES and an exclusively white male sample. Johnstone's (1978)
From page 158...
... Because the ratio of arrests to self-reported serious crimes did not vary consistently with individual SES, we cannot attribute differences in arrest rates to police prejudice against low-SES teenagers. Teenagers in low-SES neighborhoods also reported committing more serious crimes than those in high-SES neighborhoods.
From page 159...
... Indeed, with Johnstone's detailed controls for individual SES, living in a high-SES rather than a middle-SES neighborhood does not seem to have any consistent effect on an individual's chances of committing serious crimes.44 Only low-SES neighborhoods appear to make a difference. Reiss and Rhodes's work leads us to expect that living in a low-SES neighborhood will raise the amount of serious crime among all sorts of teenagers, but that it will have its largest effect on low-SES teenagers.
From page 160...
... Simcha-Fagan and Schwartz (1986) also studied neighborhood effects on teenage crime, but their work is not useful for our purposes.
From page 161...
... Gottfredson and Taylor classified neighborhoods along three dimensions: racial composition, a cluster of locally visible "incivilities" (such as graffiti) that predicted the neighborhood crime rate, and industrial versus residential land use.
From page 162...
... We also need studies that follow families as they move in and out of very poor neighborhoods and examine how such moves affect teenagers' behavior. TEENAGE SEXUAL BEHAVIOR Our concern in this section is with the factors that influence young people's chances of having children before they are sufficiently mature to
From page 163...
... Because Crane wanted to separate neighborhood effects from family background effects, and because the census only provides data on teenagers' family background if they still live with their parents, he looked only at 16- to l~year-old girls who were still living at home.46 Crane found that living in a poor neighborhood substantially increased the probability that 16- to 18-year-old girls had had a child out of wedlock, even after controlling parental education, occupation, and income. This pattern recurred for both blacks and whites.
From page 164...
... Among students of any given ethnic background and SES, attending school with either low-SES or minority classmates increased the likelihood of having a baby before graduating. A one standard deviation reduction in parental SES increased the average non-Hispanic white tenth grader's chances of having a baby from 4.2 to 7.4 percent.
From page 165...
... studied 1,078 unmarried black Chicago women who were between the ages of 13 and 19 in 1979. Hogan and Kitagawa used a census tract's racial composition, median family income, percent poor, male-female ratio, children per ever-married female, and juvenile police contacts to construct an index of neighborhood quality.
From page 166...
... They found that with family background controlled black girls in very poor neighborhoods were only half as likely as those in better neighborhoods to use contraception at the time of first intercourse. This seems likely to explain a good part of the neighborhood effect on pregnancy rates.
From page 167...
... Holding race and family background constant, 1~ to l~year-old girls were substantially more likely to have had children out of wedlock if they lived in poor neighborhoods than if they lived in average neighborhoods. Black girls from very poor neighborhoods were also less likely to use contraception and more likely to become pregnant than black girls from similiar families who lived in better neighborhoods.
From page 168...
... , a neighborhood's racial composition has more effect on how much money its residents make when they grow up. Young urban whites typically lived in zip code areas that were 94 percent white in 1970,
From page 169...
... used four neighborhood characteristics that are highly correlated with one another, the estimated eject of each specific characteristic has a large sampling error and none is reliably different from zero. Nonetheless, their cumulative effect is quite large.
From page 170...
... 51Corcoran et al. do not include racial composition in their model.
From page 171...
... Roughly one in five had attended a racially mixed northern high school. Three results are noteworthy: Blacks were more likely to work in predominantly white occupations if they had attended racially mixed northern high schools than if they had attended all-black northern schools.
From page 172...
... 54Younger northern blacks were more likely to have attended all-black schools because the number of all-black schools rose as the absolute number of blacks in the North rose. 55The 4 percent earnings advantage of blacks who attended racially mixed schools could be attributable to the fact that they got more schooling (Crain, 1971~.
From page 173...
... A neighborhood's social composition may have more effect on teenage childbearing than on teenage sexual activity, for example. Or a school's racial mix may have more effect on sixth-grade test scores than on twelfth-grade scores.
From page 174...
... We do not know whether high school graduates from similar families are more likely to attend college if they grow up in affluent neighborhoods. The effects of a school's racial composition on students' educational attainment are even less certain than the effects of its socioeconomic composition.
From page 175...
... A school's racial composition has different effects from its socioeconomic composition, even though the two are highly correlated. Data collected in 1965 and 1972 suggest that northern blacks at all grade levels learned more in predominantly white schools than in predominantly black schools, even with family background controlled.
From page 176...
... We found no evidence that a school's racial mix or mean SES affected its students' economic success independent of their own family background. Empirical Generalizations Social scientists need to be very cautious about estimates of neighborhood or school effects that control only one or two family background characteristics.
From page 177...
... Methodological Implications If social scientists want to make research on neighborhoods useful to public officials and legislators, they need to alter their analytic methods in at least three ways: · Future research should pay more attention to the most politically salient and easily understood differences between neighborhoods and schools, such as their poverty rate and racial composition. The effects of a school or neighborhood's poverty rate and racial mix should be estimated with no other neighborhood characteristics controlled.56 · Future research should report whether the effects of racial composition and poverty rates are linear.
From page 178...
... Judges believe it, which is why they turn cities upside down in order to desegregate their schools. Even committees of the National Research Council believe it, which is why they become concerned when the Census Bureau releases data suggesting that more people were living in very poor neighborhoods in 1980 than In 1970.
From page 179...
... We know less about neighborhood effects than about school effects because collecting data on neighborhoods is more expensive than collecting data on schools. Only the Census Bureau has enough money to collect data on the socioeconomic composition of large representative samples of neighborhoods, and it has released only one data tape that includes both individual records (cleansed of identifying information)
From page 180...
... Funding agencies also need more social scientists on their own staffs. Funding agencies without such staff members seldom specify in appropriate empirical terms the policy-related question they want answered.
From page 181...
... Altonji, Joseph G 1988 The Effects of Family Background and School Characteristics on Education and Labor Market Outcomes.
From page 182...
... Idward a more appropriate conceptualization of research on school effects: A three-level hierarchical linear model. American Journal of Education 97:65-108.
From page 183...
... 1~ 1~1 Scat Con and lbe amde~c acb~vemeD1 ~ Aft.
From page 184...
... 1980 A mete analysis of the effects of desegregation on academic achievement. The Urban Review 12:211-224.
From page 185...
... in the United States and Their Relationship With AFQT Test Scores: Findings of the 1979 1981 NLS Interviews. Working paper, Center for Labor Market Studies, Northeastern University, Boston.
From page 186...
... 186 INNER-CITY POVERTY IN THE UNITED STATES Thornton, Clarence H., and Bruce K Eckland 1980 High school contextual effects for black and white students: A research note.


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