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Title: Does School Performance Increase when Children Enter at Younger Ages?
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Lillard, Dean R. Gerner, Jennifer L. |
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Does School Performance Increase when Children Enter at Younger Ages? Presented: Washington, DC, Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) Annual Research Conference, "Understanding and Informing Policy Design", 3-5 November, 2005 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79 Publisher: Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) Keyword(s): Academic Development; Age at School Entry; Modeling, Fixed Effects; Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT); School Entry/Readiness; Siblings; State-Level Data/Policy Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. We use data from the Children of the NLSY79 to investigate whether enrollment at earlier ages increases school performance. We characterize school performance using test scores from standardized ability tests administered to these children at ages 3, 6, and 9. We focus on the age at which a child first enrolled in school, recognizing that parents have some choice over this age. To estimate age of enrollment we take advantage of differences across states and over time in compulsory schooling laws that determine the age by which a child must be enrolled. Since variation in these regulations are plausibly orthogonal to the unobserved individual and family background characteristics we can use them to predict the age of school entry of a given child. Under the assumption that parents do not choose a state of residence based on these laws, we identify the policy effect of earlier enrollment on performance. A second identification strategy takes advantage of having observations on multiple children in the same family to estimate how age of school entry affects siblings who were required to enter school at different ages either by virtue of a change in the compulsory school age or because their family moved to a state with a different compulsory school age. We will estimate family and state fixed effects models. We model school performance as a function of home inputs, school inputs and three levels of instability suffered by children - at home, school, and in their neighborhood. We include these measures of instability in our model under the assumption that a childs school performance will be higher when the circumstances of their lives are relatively stable. We include circumstances of co-residence, where they are living, their parents' relationship, and mobility. Of course, the circumstances are largely chosen by parents. Although it is very interesting to consider the impact of stability on performance, to do so, we would need to model the stability itself. Since we are primarily interested in the relationship between age at school entry and subsequent school performance we want to account for as much of the heterogeneity within and across households in factors that also affect school performance. We use our measures of instability in this spirit. |
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Bibliography Citation
Lillard, Dean R. and Jennifer L. Gerner. "Does School Performance Increase when Children Enter at Younger Ages?" Presented: Washington, DC, Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) Annual Research Conference, "Understanding and Informing Policy Design", 3-5 November, 2005. |