Sixth-grade Student Employment and Academic Achievement: First Findings from Latin America’s TERCE

• In Event: 153 - Section on Children and Youth Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 09. Family and Work

Abstract

Combining work with schooling could negatively affect children’s learning and future earnings if working harms proficiency in academic skills. Alternatively, work outside of school might also provide be developmental if it offers another route to adult socialization and to material welfare in communities where school systems do not serve children’s needs. Outside of the United States, estimating of the skills/work relationship is not an academic question only; the matter is of crucial policy importance. This paper illuminates debates over after-school student employment by analyzing newly-available student testing data from fifteen American countries. The first findings from this analysis show that there is no level of employment, paid or unpaid, for the family or for others, that is not associated with reduced mathematics and reading proficiency. Although primary schooling is now universal in the region, sociologists of education and labor can advance a policy debate by illuminating the trade-offs when young students work.

Author

• David Post, Pennsylvania State University