Does family policy environment moderate the effect of single-parenthood on children's academic achievement? A study of 14 European countries

This paper examines whether national family and welfare policies reduce or exacerbate the effects of single-parenthood on a child's educational achievement. Using the Third International Math and Science Study (TIMSS), we compare 5th grade students from English single-parent families with their counterparts from 13 other European countries. The analysis results suggest that the achievement gap between students from twoparent and single-parent families is far greater in England than it is in all other countries, with the exception of Scotland. The evidence provided in this study suggests that a nation's family policy environment plays an important role in moderating the influence of single-parenthood on children's academic achievement

Mechanisms Behind the Negative Influence of Single Parenthood on School Performance: Lower Teaching and Learning Conditions?

We take a first step toward unravelling the mechanisms behind the negative influence of single parenthood and the proportion of single-parent families on school performance, using 2012 international Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) data. We find that individual truancy of pupils fully explains the relationship between living in a single-mother family and math performance (after controlling for confounding factors, such as parental socioeconomic status). School-level measures of classroom disruption and truancy and individual truancy explain some of the negative effect of the school’s concentration of students from single-parent families on individual students’ math performance. However, the effect of a school’s proportion of single-parent families remains significantly negative on individual performance

Family Resources, Gender, and Immigration: Changing Sources of Hong Kong Educational Inequality, 1971-2001-super-

This study gauged the impact of government-led educational expansion on Hong Kong's social stratification over a 30-year period. The historically close state control over school supply in Hong Kong allows us to test the effectiveness of public policy in changing the transmission of advantages across generations. Copyright (c) 2004 by the Southwestern Social Science Association.