Achievement gaps between students from different SES and racial/ethnic backgrounds stubbornly persist despite decades of policy interventions. My dissertation focuses on several unexpected sources of stress and disruption that may be related to the achievement gap: sunlight exposure, a sister’s teen childbearing, and nearby violent crime. I demonstrate that these may have important implications for academic performance, but each has received little attention in the academic literature. In Study 1, I examine the change in academic performance associated with changes to the amount of sunlight before school. Though previous work has examined school start times, this is the first paper to my knowledge that explicitly accounts for the physiological influence of sunlight on sleep timing and its relationship to school start times over the pubertal transition. Sleep patterns are determined in part by sunrise times, which vary across time zones. Because school start times do not fully reflect this difference, I instrument for the hours of sunlight before school with the time zone boundary in Florida. I find that moving start times one hour later relative to sunrise increases test scores by 0.07 and 0.05 standard deviations for adolescents in math and reading, respectively. In math, the effect is larger for older children and co-varies with entry into an important pubertal stage. School districts can improve performance while maintaining the current distribution of start times by moving classes earlier for younger children and later for older children. In Study 2, I examine another potentially disruptive event for students: the appearance of a baby belonging to a given student’s teenage sister in the home. Despite the abundance of research on mothers’ own outcomes, almost no research has examined the outcomes for the siblings of teen mothers. Using annual longitudinal data, this study shows that both teen mothers and their siblings are on a downward trajectory well before the teen pregnancy begins. However, when compared to students on a similar trajectory in families without teenage childbearing, the siblings of teen mothers have worse test scores, higher high school dropout rates, lower college attendance, and lower college graduation following the birth. The change in test score outcomes only occurs after the baby is born, indicating that it is the appearance of the newborn that affects performance, rather than some unobserved occurrence that leads to both teen pregnancy and poor outcomes. Sisters of teen mothers have larger academic effects than brothers; brothers have larger juvenile justice effects. I demonstrate similar patterns for the teen mothers, though the divergence in scores begins in the year of the pregnancy, not the year of birth. Finally, Study 3 examines the effect of unexpected nearby violent crime on students’ sleep and cortisol patterns. The data combine objectively measured sleep and thrice-daily salivary cortisol collected from a four-day diary study in a large Midwestern city with location data on all violent crimes recorded during the same time period. The primary empirical strategy uses a within-person design to measure the change in sleep and cortisol from the person’s typical pattern on the night/day immediately following a local violent crime. On the night following a violent crime, adolescents have later bedtimes. Adolescents also have disrupted cortisol patterns the following morning. Supplementary analyses using varying distances of the crime to the child’s home address confirm more proximate crimes correspond to later bedtimes.

Last modified

• 03/27/2018

Creator

• Jennifer Ann Heissel

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2QM4R

Subject

• Human Development and Social Policy

Keyword

• sleep
• education
• policy
• stress
• academic
• K-12

Date created

• 2017-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright