Preliminary Analysis of School Characteristics and Educational Attainment of
Immigrant Children: Traditional and New Measures of School Characteristics
Abstract
This paper presents the preliminary analysis of the association of school quality with
immigrant status using traditional and new measures, and the association of immigrant
status and educational attainment by using standardized test scores. We used the
National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS: 88). Our analysis shows significant
associations between school quality and immigrant status and between educational
attainment and immigrant status, which encourages further research on the relationships
between educational outcomes and school quality for immigrant children.
Motivation
Despite efforts made by the government and other organizations, there has been a
persistent educational gap among American people, which consequently leads to a
disparity of earnings. For example, African Americans, Hispanics and American Indians
perform worse than Whites and Asians; and children from disadvantaged families are less
successful in education. Additionally early educational performance of children is
significantly associated with earnings in their later life, so it is especially important to
narrow the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged children as early as possible.
Schools are a tool to narrow the gap in children’s educational attainment, and
there has been much discussion about which school characteristics are associated with
this issue, such as teachers’ union participation, students’ expenditure, and children’s
educational outcomes. However, there is no consent yet over what constitutes school
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Convention