Education professionals and policy makers have been working to "close the achievement gap" for some time. Differences in school performance for children from diverse and different family backgrounds have been at the core of past and present social, political, and education reform initiatives and practices. Previous research suggests that…

During recent years, there has been increased interest in the relationship between neighborhood environments and social deviancy. This article reports on the development of an index of neighborhoods, which is built upon community features of social and physical incivilities (Wandersman & Nation, 1998). Factor structure and internal consistency…

To examine how neighborhood characteristics influence academic achievement, data were drawn from a community survey of low-income neighborhoods and linked with data on performance on standardized testing for third-grade students attending elementary schools in those communities. Results of multilevel logistic regressions indicated that probability…

Examined associations between neighborhood risk factors and low-income children's academic performance from third to fifth grade. Neighborhood risk, based on characteristics such as income, education level, female-headed households, and violent crime, was not associated with children's academic performance in third grade but negatively predicted…