Research by Author & Topic

Publications by Austin Nichols on Education

Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we consider how parental education relates to four outcomes in the children's generation: education, lifetime earnings, health, and wealth. By focusing on parents' and children's ranks, we characterize relative mobility in terms of distributions of outcomes and can see patterns that even a relatively disaggregated analysis, like a quintile-based transition matrix, can obscure. Our results show relatively high intergenerational mobility except at extremes, where very low-ranked parents are much more likely to have very low-ranked children and very high-ranked parents are much more likely to have very high-ranked children.

Gender differences in academic achievement have long fascinated researchers and policy-makers alike. In this paper we analyze differences in math and reading test score growth rates by gender for four different race and ethnic groups -- white, black, Hispanic, and Asian students -- for six different time periods. Our data cover both the earliest years of education and the crucial years of adolescence. In addition, we have data bracketing one non-schooling period. Together these data enable us to get a very complete picture of how gender gaps evolve over the course of early elementary and high school years and how these trajectories differ by race and ethnicity. While the gender gaps are not always statistically significant, they are for 15 of 48 comparisons made, all during school. In addition, all of the statistically significant results suggest that males learn more math and females more reading during early elementary school and again during high school.

This study estimates the typical grade-to-grade learning achievement in the United States of different type of students (race/ethnicity, gender, LEP status, disadvantaged) from pre-K through grade 3 with the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS) and from grade 8 through grade 12 with the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS). We specifically focus on differences in learning rates for different students at different grade levels. The study commissioned by the National Center for Education Statistics was intended to provide benchmarks for learning gains and to suggest what effects might be reasonably expected from interventions. Not surprisingly, the study shows large gaps in learning levels and learning rates across different subgroups of students. Achievement gaps exist at the start of kindergarten, typically increase across the first few grades, then become more stable in later years. Given these findings, we suspect that interventions targeted at early grades may produce a "bigger bang for the buck" than interventions targeted for later grades.