Schools do little to reduce or enlarge the gaps in skills that are present when children enter school

The American Family in Black and White: A Post-Racial Strategy for Improving Skills to Promote Equality

James J. Heckman

NBER Working Paper No. 16841
Issued in March 2011

In contemporary America, racial gaps in achievement are primarily due to gaps in skills. Skill gaps emerge early before children enter school. Families are major producers of those skills. Inequality in performance in school is strongly linked to inequality in family environments. Schools do little to reduce or enlarge the gaps in skills that are present when children enter school. Parenting matters, and the true measure of child advantage and disadvantage is the quality of parenting received. A growing fraction of American children across all race and ethnic groups is being raised in dysfunctional families. Investment in the early lives of children in disadvantaged families will help close achievement gaps. America currently relies too much on schools and adolescent remediation strategies to solve problems that start in the preschool years. Prevention is likely to be more cost-effective than remediation. Voluntary, culturally sensitive support for parenting is a politically and economically palatable strategy that addresses problems common to all racial and ethnic groups.

Education and health behaviours

A priori it seems reasonable that one of the benefits of more education is better health. For a start there is a positive socioeconomic gradient: more educated people have better health on average. That does not imply one causes the other: both are forms of human capital so it could be some common factor like discount rates that drives the association. But one might think more educated people make better health investment decisions if they are more aware of health risks and there may also be direct cash effects. This paper however finds no evidence of effects.

The causal relationship between education, health and health related behaviour: Evidence from a natural experiment in England
Nils Braakmann (Newcastle University Business School)
I exploit exogenous variation in the likelihood to obtain any sort of academic degree between January- and February-born individuals for 13 academic cohorts in England. For these cohorts compulsory schooling laws interacted with the timing of the CGE and O-level exams to change the probability of obtaining an academic degree by around 2 to 3 percentage points. I then use data on individuals born in these two months from the British Labour Force Survey and the Health Survey for England to investigate the effects of education on health using being February-born as an instrument for education. The results indicate neither an effect of education on various health related measures nor an effect on health related behaviour, e.g., smoking, drinking or eating various types of food.