Can family behavior affect school performance and future aspirations of students of different race?

Abstract

The study investigates the extent to which the sources of school performance inequalities and educational expectations by race / color are the result of socioeconomic disadvantages, the heterogeneity of parenting styles or whether they result from unobservable residual factors. The analyzes use data from the Fundaj (2013) research that provides information on race, future educational aspirations, and a longitudinal evaluation of the student’s school performance. The identification strategy uses the method of propensity score matching (PSM). The results show that the educational disparities between students of the 6th grade of Recife, who declare themselves to be black or of another ethnic group, persist in terms of failure and expectation of entering higher education, even after conditioning in a broad control of observables, suggesting that the source of these disparities stem from factors not observable in the analysis. Despite the fact that families of black students are more actively involved in the school monitoring of their children than families of non-black students, this greater involvement has not been enough to neutralize educational inequalities by race/color. Black students have higher failure rates than their non-black peers and lower expectations of access to higher education by about 5 percentage points, statistically significant differences at 5%.