School Segregation and Academic Achievement of Latino Immigrant Children.

This paper examines the relative importance of the school-level factors such as school racial/ethnic composition and income composition in their effects on Latino adolescents' academic achievement. Although previous research suggests that academic achievement is a function of both individual and family level characteristics, no prior work attempted to isolate the effects of race and class as both individual student's characteristics and factors of school composition. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) data, the paper examines the effects of school racial and ethnic composition, income composition, ethnicity, immigrant generational, socioeconomic status on the aggregate measure of academic achievement, while controlling for individual (e.g., sex, age) characteristics. These longitudinal data possess a hierarchical data structure in the sense that the individual level factors are viewed as nested within the school-level factors (school racial and ethnic composition effects moderated by school friendship segregation). Hierarchical linear modeling is used as an appropriate statistical procedure for nested data. The findings indicate that it is the income composition of the school, but not the race and ethnic composition, that is negatively related to the academic achievement of Latino adolescents. The poverty level of schools they attend with other students from poor families places many disadvantaged Latinos (apart from their individual economic status) in double jeopardy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]