Magnuson, Katherine A.
McGroder, Sharon M.
The Effect of Increasing Welfare Mothers’ Education on their Young Children’s Academic Problems and School Readiness
Working Paper, Northwestern University, [N.D.] .
Also: http://www.northwestern.edu/ipr/jcpr/workingpapers/wpfiles/magnuson_mcgroder.pdf
Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79
Publisher: Author
Keyword(s): Children, Academic Development; Children, Well-Being; Educational Attainment; Family Environment; Home Environment; Home Observation for Measurement of Environment (HOME); Modeling, Multilevel; Mothers, Education; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading);

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

Does an increase in a mother’s education improve her young child’s academic performance? Positive correlations between mothers’ educational attainment and children’s well being, in particular children’s cognitive development and academic outcomes, are among the most replicated results from developmental studies. Yet, surprisingly little is known about the causal nature of this relationship. Because conventional regression (e.g., OLS) and analysis of variance (e.g., ANOVA) approaches to estimating the effect of maternal schooling on child outcomes may be biased by omitted variables, we use experimentally induced differences in mothers’ education to estimate Instrumental Variable (IV) models. Our data come from the National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies Child Outcomes Study—an evaluation of mandatory welfare-to-work programs in which welfare recipients with young children were randomly assigned to either an education or work focused program group or to a control group that received no additional assistance. We find that increases in maternal education are positively associated with children’s academic school readiness, and negatively associated with mothers’ reports of their children’s academic problems. Our estimated causal effects of maternal education on children’s academic school readiness and academic problems are large enough to be of considerable importance for policies that affect the work, welfare, and training of low-income mothers.