- School and neighborhood social contexts exacerbated family-based learning inequalities in ways that resulted in a double disadvantage for many students from low-SES families and a double advantage for many students from high-SES families.
- Descriptive results portray a great deal of social stratification among households, schools, and neighborhoods.
- During the summer season, African American students learned at a faster pace than White students when controlling for family SES, and Hispanic students did not learn at a significantly different pace from White students.
- Neighborhood context exerted considerable influence on reading achievement at schools entry but did not explain away the social gap attributed to family SES.
- Given the propensity of families to live in neighborhoods reflecting their own socioeconomic status, contextual advantages and disadvantages tended to exacerbate the social gap in reading achievement observed at the family level.
- High-SES neighborhoods provided a contextual advantage, which boosted reading achievement for students fortunate enough to live in them.
- Once school began, more than half the total amount of stratification in reading achievement took place during school seasons.
- School social contexts exerted a strong influence on reading achievement during kindergarten and first grade.
- Minority school composition created a substantial segregation disadvantage for students in high-minority schools during first grade.
- Results suggest that the first-grade reading disadvantage for Black students was a consequence of location in schools with large concentrations of minority students, rather than rearing in African American families.
- Neighborhoods contexts were most influential prior to school entry and during the summer, and school contexts were most influential during school seasons.
- Although neighborhood social context exerted clear and consistent effects prior to school entry and during the summer season, neighborhoods minority composition did not appear to affect math achievement.
- African American and Hispanic students learned math at the same rate as White students during first grade, when holding constant the social backgrounds of students’ families.
- Social context and social composition did not consistently influence math achievement during the school year.
- In first grade, students in high-SES schools learned math at a slower pace than middle- and low-SES students, and private schools accounted for the majority of this effect.
- Social context was most important for math achievement at school entry and during the summer, whereas minority social composition appeared largely irrelevant to math achievement.
- After controlling for school and neighborhood social contexts, racial composition was almost entirely irrelevant to achievement growth during the period of study, except during first grade for reading. For students in schools with minority compositions one standard deviation above the mean, reading growth rates were 0.66 months slower over the course of the first grade school year. Unlike, the contextual effects noted, this compositional effect explained away at least half of the Black-White gap in first-grade reading, thus making the coefficient for African American no significant.