Neighborhoods attributes as determinants of children´s academic achievement

Studies of neighborhood effect on educational attainment have generally found that such effects exist for adolescents. A common deficiency of empirical research to date, the lack of information on multiple contexts, is addressed in this paper by using school data survey to gain further insight on the effect of neighborhood poverty deprivation on elementary education children in the USA. The paper proposes a cross-classified hierarchical linear model to account for the nested structure of the samples of individuals in neighborhoods and schools. Our results, based on the ECLS-K survey, a sample of more than 20000 children in approximately 1,000 neighborhoods and 1,200 schools, highlights the association between neighborhood´s socioeconomic composition and student´s outcomes. This study provides evidence in favor of both socialization and epidemic theories. The presences of well-educated adults in the neighborhood and the median income have a positive impact on student´s achievement. High levels of poverty have a significant influence but negative influence on student´s tests scores. Nevertheless, the impact occurs when a threshold of 30% of poor households in the neighborhood has been reached. Even when our findings for the whole sample are stable over different specifications, the implicit assumption that school and neighborhood have a uniform effect on all children regardless their ethnicity, gender and socio economic status is challenged. Neighborhoods have a larger impact on some subgroups (Black and Hispanics, for instance) than on the whole sample.