Poster #8 - Nonprofit Organizations and Educational Attainment from Kindergarten to High School

• In Event: 2-001 - Poster Session 1 during Breakfast

Abstract

This study will develop the community contexts of educational inequality while highlighting a valuable approach to using—and building on—population data on children and families. It does so by combining the underutilized tax data of every registered nonprofit organization that filed a tax return in the United States with widely used educational data sets on children from kindergarten through high school (Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Kindergarten Cohort 1998 and the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009).
Creating strong school, family, community partnerships is a cornerstone of educational policy, and the characteristics of a child’s community are important components of their educational trajectories (ARRA, 2009; Zhou and Kim, 2006). The mandate or desire to form these connections, however, is distinct from the ability of schools and families to engage with community organizations (Hong 2011). Nonetheless, educational community organizations have responded to this priority, with steadily increasing numbers in recent decades (Nelson and Gazley, 2014). These organizations nearly unanimously purport to create the kinds of connections policy-makers prioritize, but any documented returns from these connections are often site- or program-specific and limited in their generalizability (Nelson 2017). In addition, the work that these organizations undertake, and what little coordination that exists among these organizations, does not appear grounded in a theoretical understanding of child development in the community context. Existing theory, in turn, is also limited in regards to the ability of these organizations to improve the conditions of children from historically marginalized communities such as minorities, immigrants, and those in poverty.
This study addresses these gaps and represents an advancement for developmental science by exploring a new measure of the community context. It’s attention to how the experiences of children with diverse backgrounds changes and compliments existing theories that connect community organizations to social outcomes also accomplishes integration of diversity. Fixed-effect and lagged-dependent variable models provide evidence of a link between the nonprofit organizational landscape surrounding a child and their academic development, in the form of math and reading achievement scores. Tables 1 and 2 display the results of analysis that predict math and reading with nonprofit community organization indicators, including a count of the educational nonprofits in a child’s zip code. This study concludes by discussing the implications of these results for developing the community context in developmental science, and the practicality of relying on community organizations to provide educational services to those most in need.

Author

• Robert W. Ressler, University of Texas at Austin
  Presenting Author