Kids in Poor Neighborhoods Fall Behind in School

FRIDAY, Dec. 21 (HealthDay News) -- Black children living indisadvantaged neighborhoods fall behind the equivalent of one year or moreof schooling simply because of where they live.
"[The study] does speak to the power of external resources," saidRichard Gilman, coordinator of psychology and special education in thedivision of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at CincinnatiChildren's Hospital in Ohio. "It focuses on race as a characteristic, butit's not necessarily race. It's what's going on in families and externalto families. . . the characteristics [of neighborhoods they identify] aregoing to be disproportional to African-American families because of thestate of affairs for those families. They are the type of families livingprimarily in the inner cities."
Gilman was not involved with the study, which is published in thisweek's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy ofSciences.
A person's cognitive ability, which is mainly shaped early in life, canpredict how well he or she will do later in life in terms of education,employment, whether or not they enter the criminal justice system andhealth.
But experts differ in whether genetics or environment are the primaryshapers. And the role of the neighborhood has not been extensivelystudied.
For this study, sociologists at Harvard University analyzed Chicagocensus tract data from 1990 and 2000 and identified six neighborhoodcharacteristics which, together, formed "concentrated disadvantage" andwere linked to the cognitive abilities of children.
The six characteristics were: welfare receipt, poverty, unemployment,female-headedhouseholds, racial composition and density of children.
More than 2,000 urban Chicago children aged 6 to 12 were assessed forverbal ability and other characteristics.
The children, with their caretakers, were followed wherever they movedin the United States for seven years.
The researchers took into account the impact of moving into and out ofareas of disadvantage. About 17 percent of black children not living indisadvantage moved to a disadvantaged neighborhood between 1995 and 2002,while 42 percent of black children in disadvantaged neighborhoods in 1995moved to a non-disadvantaged neighborhood during those years.
Children who lived in a severely disadvantaged neighborhood halfwaythrough the follow-up period were almost all black, and they fell behindtheir otherwise identical peers by about four points on an IQ test. Thistranslates into about one year of schooling.
Almost one-third of black children lived at some point in "concentrateddisadvantaged" neighborhoods compared to almost no white or Latinochildren.
The findings tilt the nature-versus-nurture debate toward the latterfactor.
"The study has implications for interventions, because they'veidentified the risk factors, it appears, that contribute to negativeoutcomes," Gilman said. "We don't have a lot of intervention research. Itwould seem that if you began to design intervention studies that targetthese specific risk factors, hopefully, you will begin to see an increasein verbal scores, particularly among African-Americans."