All individuals in the dataset were born before 2004, when North Carolina law allowed children born on or before October 16 to start kindergarten prior to their fifth birthday. Specifically, they examined four important characteristics of family background: race, mothers' educational attainment, family structure, and school poverty levels. The researchers analyzed a unique dataset provided by the North Carolina Education Research Data Center that links birth certificate information with school administrative records. Cook of Duke University and Poh Lin Tan of the University of Singapore. The study, published in the American Journal of Sociology, was coauthored by Philip J. "While most previous studies assume these spillover effects occur across socioeconomic statuses, our findings demonstrate that they are much stronger among disadvantaged families than in advantaged families, which has important implications for how we think about inequality and the policies we enact to address it." "We establish the causal effect of having an academically successful sibling on a student's academic outcomes," said Zang, an assistant professor of sociology in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the study's lead author.
Using data from North Carolina public schools, a team led by Yale sociologist Emma Zang found that children whose birthdays fall shortly after the state's cutoff date for starting kindergarten-and who are therefore among the oldest in their classes-tend to perform better academically than their younger classmates.įor those students with younger siblings, the study found, their success in turn has a positive influence on those siblings once they reach middle school-particularly among children from disadvantaged families.
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