Most inequalities in children’s academic skills originate during periods when children are not in school, yet sociological and educational research too infrequently examines how non-school policies shape learning. In this study, we show that increasing rates of children’s health insurance coverage during Medicaid expansion modestly improved fourth-grade reading and math outcomes at the state level. Drawing on data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress and other sources, our pooled time-series analyses with two-way fixed effects link changes in rates of child health insurance coverage to changes in fourth-grade reading and math outcomes among U.S. states. Results suggest that increasing child coverage within a state by one percentage point was associated with (a) increases of.08 SD in reading scores and.06 SD in math among low-income students, (b) a reduced proportion of students with less than basic proficiency, (c) greater overall mean scores, but (d) no evidence that SES gaps narrowed. These associations were more robust for reading than for math. Our results suggest that educational inequality is not confined to classrooms—it begins in the policies and conditions that shape children’s lives outside of school.
South Korea has reached the lowest fertility levels ever recorded in a developed society, yet relatively little is known about how childbearing within marriage is distributed across the socioeconomic hierarchy. This study examines how marital fertility levels and their changes vary across the income distribution of married couples. Using nationwide administrative data from the National Health Insurance Service linked to medical delivery claims, we analyze legally married co-resident couples and estimate marital fertility rates by household income decile for the period 2005–2021. We also examine cohort patterns among women born between 1980 and 1987. The results show a stable inverted U-shaped relationship between marital fertility and economic position, with the highest fertility observed among middle-income couples and lower levels at both the lower and upper ends of the distribution. Over time, however, marital fertility levels shifted downward across all income groups, while the relative ordering of income groups remained broadly similar. Cohort analyses further show that successive cohorts of married women had fewer births during the observed age range than earlier cohorts, even when marital exposure was comparable. These findings indicate that changes in marital fertility in South Korea have occurred broadly across the socioeconomic distribution rather than being concentrated within particular income groups. By documenting income-specific marital fertility patterns using nationwide administrative data, the study provides new evidence on how demographic outcomes are structured across the socioeconomic hierarchy in an ultra-low-fertility context.
Sociologists claim that the cultural dispositions and aptitudes parents pass on to children are important determinants of success in school. Despite theoretical and qualitative work supporting this insight, few quantitative studies operationalize and test the mechanism through which middle-class parents’ concerted cultivation translates into higher academic achievement of children. To address this gap, we build on research in developmental science to measure school belongingness as a plausible proxy of cultural advantage and examine whether it mediates the effect of concerted cultivation. To rule out the possibility that school belongingness simply reflects a general cognitive advantage gained through engaged parenting, we test whether shadow education (i.e., extracurricular test-prep and tutoring), a source of academic preparation that does not confer cultural advantage, affects achievement via school belongingness. Situating the analysis in South Korea, a context that facilitates causal inference, we find that school belongingness accounts for roughly half of the effect of concerted cultivation on children’s achievement. This is consistent with qualitative insights regarding the key role of cultural advantage in the effect of concerted cultivation. Additionally, we find that shadow education does not affect achievement through school belongingness. Together, these findings are consistent with the argument that concerted cultivation operates, in part, through culturally rooted processes of belongingness, rather than purely through cognitive skill acquisition.
