The Influence Of Family Socioeconomic Status On Children’s Academic Performance

Since the reform and opening up,China’s economy has grown rapidly.By 2020,China has completed the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects and achieved the first centenary goal.This means that China has entered a new stage of becoming a great modern socialist country.However,national development and social progress are not only reflected in the improvement of economic level,but also reflected in the social fairness and justice.As an important aspect of social equity,educational equity is still an urgent problem to be solved at present.The Party and the state also attach great importance to the issue of education equity.In 2010,China clearly took education equity as the national basic education policy,adopted a series of measures to narrow the gap between urban and rural areas and between schools,and balanced the allocation of teaching resources in schools.However,family is also the cause of educational inequality.Whether the balanced allocation of school teaching resources can block the influence of family and completely eliminate the phenomenon of educational inequality is still supported by empirical data.Therefore,this paper will use a natural experimental sample to test the above problems.More specifically,the first question is whether there is a gap in the performance of children with different socioeconomic status(SES,Socio-Economic Status)even with the same educational resources;the second question is what is the mechanism of SES status affects children’s academic performance and how to mitigate the impact from SES.Most of the current findings on the impact of SES on academic performance in children are controversial.This may be the sample selective bias caused by high SES families tend to choose schools with better teaching quality for their children.Therefore,this paper takes the natural experiment samples formed by the temporary policy of Changchun Municipal government as the research object.Under this policy,students who originally belong to schools with backward teaching resources will have the opportunity to go to schools with stronger teachers and richer teaching resources.This natural experiment sample can skillfully avoid the above selective bias problem,and also provides an early natural experiment example to test "whether balanced school education resources can block the unfair results of education".In this paper,we use natural experiments and traditional synthetic indicators to define SES to explore the influence of family socioeconomic status on children’s academic performance,and to explore whether there are differences in students’ academic performance under the same educational resources in schools.Finally,this paper uses the structural equation model to explore the possible causal relationship between family SES and children’s learning performance.Through the analysis,this paper finds that: 1)the equalization of educational resources cannot achieve complete educational equity.Even if they enjoy the same educational resources,students’ academic performance will be greatly different due to the differences in family social and economic status.2)Family social and economic status has a positive impact on children’s academic performance.The higher the family social and economic status,the better the children’s academic performance.3)Among the variables that constitute family socio-economic status,the mother’s education level and family income play a major role in the children’s academic performance,while the father’s education level is not significant for their children’s academic performance.Mother’s education level for children’s grades(Chinese,math,English)have direct significant positive influence,also through the children’s education expectations indirectly affect their children’s academic achievement: the higher the level of education,the higher the expectations for their children’s education,so also pay more attention to their children’s early education investment and current education investment.Family income mainly works through the cost of extracurricular tutoring.4)In terms of parenting style,parents often praise their children for positively predicting their children’s performance in all subjects.5)From a methodological point of view,both the natural experiment sample method and the SES defined by the traditional synthetic index method have significant effects on various subjects of children,which indirectly proves the effectiveness of the natural experiment sample selected in this paper and the traditional definition SES method.This paper shows that family SES is an important aspect of children’s academic performance gap,and it is one of the important influencing factors of educational inequality.Therefore,while implementing the equalization of educational resources,we should also study ways to reduce the influence of family social and economic status on children’s academic performance,so as to promote educational equity: 1)the government,communities and schools should provide assistance to children in need and guide students to study independently;2)parents should pay attention to their children’s education,learn scientific parenting knowledge,and use appropriate parenting methods according to the law of child development.3)Schools should teach the difference between children with low SES and high SES in accordance with their aptitude;set up the score warning line to provide psychological counseling for students to avoid their weariness.4)The state should continue to implement the teacher rotation system and the double reduction policy to narrow the gap between high SES and low SES children;5)while the state is promoting the equalization of school education resources,it should also take measures to narrow the gap between families,such as popularizing scientific parenting knowledge to parents;6)the state should increase the investment in preschool education according to the characteristics of children’s development stage.Not only in the compulsory education stage,but also the education resources should be equalization before compulsory education.