DETAINED POTENTIAL: CONSEQUENCES OF PARENTAL INCARCERATION FOR CHILDREN’S EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES
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This dissertation investigates the consequences of parental incarceration on youth’s education. First, I use Add Health data to examine how parental incarceration shapes outcomes for high schoolers by exploiting exogenous variation in the timing of parental incarceration, finding that the association between parental incarceration and grades was not significant when adjusting for selection yet associations with non-academic outcomes persisted. Next, I conducted an experiment where high school teachers review a student biography with altered parental incarceration and race and complete a series of tasks. In the second paper, I use these data to explore how parental incarceration and race shape teachers’ evaluations of and feedback on student writing, finding a leniency bias where teachers grade the student’s work less rigorously if they have a Black name or an incarcerated parent. I then extend my analysis to examine the feedback, finding two distinct profiles which demonstrate a range of teacher responses which can characterize discrimination. The first, which I refer to as positive promotion, is most common among feedback provided by teachers if the student had an incarcerated parent and is characterized by positive but vague and unaligned feedback which may deprive students of learning opportunities and communicate low expectations. The second, which I refer to as discouraging critique, is found near exclusively among feedback provided by teachers if the student had a Black name and an incarcerated mother and contains specific feedback which has a negative sentiment and personal critique which may disengage students. In the third paper, I explore how parental incarceration and race shape student referrals to the college or career track. I find that teachers have lower odds of referring the student to a college track program if the student has incarcerated parents when the student has a White name, but when the student has a Black name, a condition where teachers already have lower odds of referring the student to a college program, incarceration does not pose additional disadvantage. Combined, these studies provide various tests of how parental incarceration shapes the educational experiences of children with incarcerated parents in ways that contribute to educational inequity.
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Wildeman, Christopher James
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Ferguson, Melissa J.
Wildeman, Christopher James