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The Life Course Origins of the Immigrant Advantage? Parental Nativity, Parental Education, and Academic Achievement Gaps From Kindergarten to High School in the United States

In the United States, there is a wide academic achievement gap, beginning in early childhood, between children with more and less educated parents. However, we know little about the differences in size and trajectories of achievement gaps associated with parental education and nativity. Drawing on two US education datasets that enable me to follow a cohort of children from kindergarten to high school, I estimate the size and trajectories of standardized test-score gaps associated with parental education, separately for children of native-born and immigrant parents. I find that the test-score gap between children with more and less educated native-born parents stays wide and stable from kindergarten entry to high school. In contrast, the test-score gap between children with more and less educated immigrant parents is narrower in kindergarten because of higher achievement of children with less educated immigrant parents, compared to their counterparts with less educated native-born parents. Moreover, the gap between more and less educated immigrant parents further narrows in their early life course because the achievement of children with less educated immigrant parents improves relative to children with more educated immigrant parents. Differences by parental nativity in the size and trajectories of achievement gaps associated with parental education can be partially explained by the fact that children with less educated immigrant parents have relatively greater resources than their peers with less educated native-born parents from early in life. My findings provide evidence that the “immigrant advantage” in academic achievement, a common finding in the literature on immigrant education in the United States, originates early in the life course.