Enrolling Students in Higher-Quality Schools Pays Off

Parents who make economic sacrifices to live in more expensive neighborhoods often do so with the hope that their children will have access to better education and academic outcomes.

A study published in the August issue of Economics of Education Review by USC associate professor Gary Painter and co-author David I. Levine of the University of California, Berkeley, uses a new combination of data to determine those hopes aren’t just a hunch.  The researchers found that the average test scores of youth are influenced by the achievement of their peers.

On average, students who attended a better high school than their junior high classmates had small but statistically-significant test score gains than the students who attended worse schools, according to the study. The results here indicate that parents who pay extra to live near advantaged neighbors are buying valuable improvements in their children’s educations.

The study is titled Are measured school effects just sorting? Causality and correlation in the National Education Longitudinal Survey. Researchers used data from a sampling of 1,000 schools culled from the National Education Longitudinal Survey of 1988, a nationally representative sampling of eight graders who were first surveyed in the spring of 1988 and then surveyed regularly through 2000. The sampling the researchers used was comprised of 11,939 students.

The study differs from previous studies that analyze the academic outcomes of students in different neighborhood schools and then use this data for comparative purposes. Instead, the study looks at the connection between 8th grade achievement and one’s future high school environment since advantaged youth often attend better high schools than disadvantaged youth. The study then explores what part of the students’ junior high school achievement is due to family background and what part is due to the influence of the students’ peer group.

Studying the role of neighborhood or peer quality on educational outcomes is notoriously difficult, said Gary Painter, of USC’s School of Policy, Planning, and Development.

While experiments provide the cleanest tests in the social sciences, they are typically limited in scope and fall short of generalizations. Using creative approaches, this study provides new evidence that the achievement of your peers does influence a student’s performance.

For additional information contact Gary Painter, who is also Director of Research at USC’s Lusk Center for Real Estate,  at (213) 740-8754 or gpainter@usc.edu.