Neighborhoods and Education

Summary

A large body of scholarly evidence points to the independent influence of neighborhood conditions on a wide set of individual well-being outcomes. A particular set of outcomes that has drawn significant attention by neighborhood research is children’s educational development and achievement. One reason for this interest is that childhood and adolescence are the stages in the life course during which individuals are most susceptible to social and environmental factors. Early studies focused on answering the question of whether neighborhood matters by implementing rigorous causal inference designs to minimize bias related to household selection into certain types of neighborhoods. With the answer to the question of whether neighborhoods matter for children converging toward yes, there has been a greater focus since the turn of the 21st century to determine how and in what ways they matter. Neighborhoods may influence children’s educational outcomes through their social and physical environments. Studies empirically examining the social environment have organized features into four broad categories: the degree and nature of social connections between neighbors, the presence of social norms, levels of safety and violence, and various features of local social institutions. Studies empirically examining the physical environment have categorized features into three broad categories: built environment, environmental hazards, and local amenities and services. A growing body of research points to the importance of these neighborhood mechanisms in shaping child well-being, and as a result, place-based policies and interventions have been implemented to improve educational outcomes. Yet there is more work to be done. In particular, future research should focus on disentangling the effects of school and neighborhood contexts, examining the influence of neighborhood conditions that children are exposed to outside their residential setting, and understanding temporal and spatial heterogeneity in neighborhood effects, including differences by age group, duration of exposure, geographic scale, and urban, exurban, and rural settings.