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In the late 1990’s, The Department of Education undertook a project called the Early Childhood Longitudinal study, or ECLS for short. The goal of this project was to examine 1st-5th graders across the country and study them in order to measure and project their academic progress. The Department of Education used variables in their study including race, gender, family structure, socioeconomic status, the level of his or her parents’ education, and so on. They also conducted interviews with the parents of each child, which were much more complex than the typical government survey. In total, the project included 20,000 students.(146)
In my own words, regression analysis is a tool used to examine and detect positive and negative correlations between two variables in a set of data. Regression analysis is used by people all over the world including economists, managers, and entrepreneurs. Ceteris Paribus, or “all else being equal” means that there must be equality in all other variables (Z, W, V) in order to find the correlation between the variables you’re analyzing (X and Y).The author used a good example of how snowfall has a strong correlation with decrease in temperature. This is because it has to drop to a specific temperature in order for it to snow in the first place, so there is going to be no cases of snowfall without it being 32 F or less.
A regression analysis can demonstrate correlation, but it doesn’t prove cause. Correlation is when a variable has a direct link to another variable. A drawback of regression analysis is that it can’t answer questions like “Does having a lot of books in your home lead to your child doing better in school?”(148) Regression analysis must have a data set to analyze, then have two variables to be focusing on and finding correlations between the two chosen variables. A downside of this though, is that there are still a bunch of factors that will play in, so they must be exactly the same.
The quality of school does play a large role in the academic success of students. In the ECLS project study, the academic success of both black and white children suffered in schools that were lower quality. This is because the typical lower quality school has a far higher rate of troublesome indicators, such as gang problems, non-students loitering in front of the school, and lack of PTA funding. The ECLS data reveals that black students in bad schools don’t lose ground to their white counterparts, and black students in good schools outperform whites in poor schools.(150)
You could control the quality of schools in the study by limiting them to a certain region. Schools in the North East part of the country have a reputation of having much less violence, having a higher average resident income, and being better schools in general. In limiting the region to the northeast, you would also limit the average income to northeast, which would make the schools in the study have much more funding and be better schools in general.
The major takeaways from the reading were that no matter race, income, parents education, etc.., a student is more likely to fail in a lower quality school. Another key takeaway is parenting. It doesn’t matter if a parent sends them to a head start or reads books to them all the time, the ECLS project found that parents who are well educated, successful, and healthy tend to have children who test well in school. (160) This had a big influence in Nature vs. Nurture arguments. Genetics must have something to do with academic success, in my opinion.