Journal of School Psychology, Vol. 37, No. 4, pp. 345–354, 1999Copyright 2000 Society for the Study of School Psychology

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Pergamon

PII S0022-4405(99)00025-4

Educational Success in High-Risk Settings:Contributions of the Chicago Longitudinal Study

Arthur J. ReynoldsUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison

I provide an overview of the Chicago Longitudinal Study. This prospective studytraces the educational and social success of a large sample of low-income children(over 90% of whom are African American) from high-poverty neighborhoods in theChicago Public Schools. In 1985–1986, the sample participated in the Child–ParentCenters and other early childhood programs. The four studies reported in this spe-cial issue highlight the contributions of school mobility, parent involvement, educa-tional expectations, and other family and school experiences in preventing learningproblems and promoting educational success. 2000 Society for the Study ofSchool Psychology. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd

Keywords: Educational success, Prevention, Low-income children, Longitudinalstudies, Early intervention.

This special issue of the Journal of School Psychology is about improving theschool success of urban children who are at risk of educational and socialdifficulties due to economic disadvantage. The increasing prevalence ofchildren at risk of school failure continues to concern educators, research-ers, and policy-makers alike (McLoyd, 1998; National Center for Childrenin Poverty, 1997; Weissberg & Greenberg, 1998). Because children repre-sent our human potential, the growing presence of children at risk due topoverty and associated factors may severely limit their future success.

Using data from the Chicago Longitudinal Study (CLS)—an ongoing in-vestigation of a large sample of low-income minority children—four studiesare reported on the personal, family, and school factors that contribute tochildren’s scholastic development during early to middle adolescence.Topics of these studies include school mobility (transfer), parent involve-ment in children’s education, parent and teacher educational expecta-tions, and motivational factors in the home and school, among others. Ex-ploration of the factors that predict educational success in urban settingsis timely, given the substantial investments in education today at all levelsof society, and the high priority of school reforms in states and localitiesaround the country. The studies reported illustrate some of the important

Received August 16, 1999; accepted August 16, 1999.Address correspondence to Dr. Arthur J. Reynolds, Waisman Center, University of Wiscon-

sin–Madison, 1500 Highland Avenue, Madison, WI 53705. E-mail: ajreynol@facstaff.wisc.edu

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issues for educators and policy-makers to address in improving schools andchildren’s educational and social development. The findings may provideimpetus to proactive rather than reactive policies for meeting the needs ofchildren and families in urban and other settings.

The CLS (Reynolds, 1991; Reynolds, Bezruczko, & Hagemann, 1997) in-vestigates the educational and social development of a same-age cohort of1,539 low-income minority children (93% African American) who grew upin high-poverty neighborhoods in central-city Chicago and completed gov-ernment-funded kindergarten programs in the Chicago Public Schools in1986. Children were at risk of poor outcomes because they face social–environmental disadvantages including neighborhood poverty, family low-income status, and other economic and educational hardships. The origi-nal sample included all 1,150 children who attended or received servicesfrom the 20 Child–Parent Centers in kindergarten in 1985–1986. Another389 children of the same age participated in an alternative all-day kinder-garten program in 5 Chicago public schools in similar neighborhoods.

As a consequence of living in school neighborhoods eligible for Title Ifunding, all children in this cohort were eligible for and participated in gov-ernment-funded early childhood programs. CLS children in kindergartenattended schools, for example, in which 67% of students in the attendancearea were from low-income families, compared to 42% for all students inthe Chicago Public Schools. As shown in Figure 1, children grew up and at-tended schools in the highest poverty neighborhoods in Chicago. Of the 77official community areas in Chicago, study children in kindergarten at-tended 25 schools representing 17 community areas. Many of these schoolswere concentrated in the most disadvantaged community areas, includingNorth Lawndale, East and West Garfield Park, Woodlawn, and Grand Bou-levard.

Selected sample characteristics of the original and age 14 follow-up sam-ples are displayed in Table 1. The sample is evenly split between boys andgirls, 58% of parents reported they graduated from high school, and over90% were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. About two thirds partici-pated in the Child–Parent Center (CPC) Program during preschool. Thesamples analyzed in the studies reported in this special issue varied in size,based on the available data for the questions addressed, and for the mostpart, fairly well represented the original sample on child and family back-ground characteristics.

The CLS is guided by four major goals:

1. To document patterns of school performance and social competencethroughout the school-age years, including participants’ school achieve-ment and attitudes, academic progress, and psychosocial development.

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Figure 1. Schools and the community contexts in the Chicago Longitudinal Study.

2. To evaluate the effects of the CPC and Expansion Program on child andyouth development. Children and families had the opportunity to par-ticipate in this unique Head Start-type early childhood interventionfrom ages 3 to 9 (preschool to third grade).

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Table 1Selected Characteristics of the Original Sample and the Follow-Up Sample

at Age 14

Original Age 14Sample Characteristic Sample Sample

Number of children 1,539 1,164CPC preschool 989 772No CPC preschool 550 392

Sample recovery (%) 100 75.6CPC preschool (%) 64.3 66.3CPC follow-on program (%) 54.8 57.0African American (%) 92.9 93.7Girls (%) 50.2 51.8From neighborhoods

.60% low income (%) 76.0 76.1Live in single-parent home by age 12 (%) 68.9 69.3From families with

high-school degree or more (%) 57.7 57.5Eligible for free

lunch from ages 8 to 12 (%) 83.7 83.7Age at kindergarten entry in months (M) 63.4 63.4Word analysis score in kindergarten (M)

(National average 5 60) 63.8 63.7

CPC 5 Child–Parent Center.

3. To identify and better understand the educational and psychosocialmechanisms through which the effects of early childhood experiencesare manifested, and more generally, through which scholastic and be-havioral development proceeds.

4. To investigate the contributions to children’s educational and social de-velopment of a variety of personal, family, school, and community fac-tors, especially those that can be altered by program or policy interven-tions to prevent learning difficulties and promote positive outcomes.

This special issue highlights Goals 3 and 4, especially the predictors of chil-dren’s school achievement and performance. Studies addressing the firsttwo goals have been reported extensively. Participation in the CPC Pro-gram for different lengths of time, for example, has been found to be sig-nificantly associated with higher levels of school achievement into adoles-cence as well as with higher levels of consumer skills, enhanced parentinvolvement in children’s education, lower rates of grade retention andspecial education, lower rates of early school dropout, and lower rates ofdelinquent behavior under a wide range of model specifications (Reynolds,1994, 1995, in press; Reynolds & Temple, 1995, 1998; Temple, Reynolds, &Miedel, in press; Reynolds, Chang, & Temple, 1998). Children’s patternsof school and social adjustment over time (Reynolds, Mavrogenes, Hage-mann & Bezruczko, 1993; Reynolds & Bezruczko, 1993; Reynolds & Gill,

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1994; Reynolds, in press) as well as several methodological contributions(Reynolds, 1998a, 1998b; Reynolds & Temple, 1995; Reynolds, Mavro-genes, Hagemann, & Bezruczko, 1996) also have been reported.

The CLS is particularly appropriate for addressing these and other goalsfor two major reasons. First, the CLS is one of the most extensive and com-prehensive studies ever undertaken of a low-income urban sample. Datacollection began during children’s preschool years and has continued ona yearly basis throughout the school-age years. Multiple sources of datahave been utilized in this on-going study, including teacher surveys, childsurveys and interviews, parent surveys and interviews, school administrativerecords, standardized tests, and classroom observations. Thus, the impactof a variety of individual, family, and school-related factors can be investi-gated. I am aware of no other longitudinal studies of this size and scope,especially for minority children growing up in the central city.

A second unique feature of the CLS is that although the project concernschild development, an emphasis is given to factors and experiences that arealterable by program or policy intervention both within and outside ofschools. Besides information on early childhood intervention, informationhas been collected on classroom adjustment, parent involvement and par-enting practices, grade retention and special education placement, schoolmobility, educational expectations of children, teachers, and parents, andon the school learning environment. In the studies reported in this issue,my colleagues and I investigate three factors of particular importance tochildren in central cities: school mobility, parent involvement in children’seducation, and parent and teacher expectations, as well as associated homeand school influence as revealed through personal essays. Indeed, each isan underinvestigated topic in urban education. We also report on positiveeffects of the CPC Program for these and other factors.

The Social Context of Urban Education

The social context surrounding urban schools in high-poverty settings likeChicago presents adversities to children and families than can impair posi-tive development and limit the impact of positive early experiences such asthose provided in early childhood interventions. Wilson (1996) describesthese all too common adversities as follows:

Children of the inner-city ghetto have to contend with public schools plaguedby unimaginative curricula, overcrowded classrooms, inadequate plant andfacilities, and only a small proportion of teachers who have confidence in theirstudents and expect them to learn. Inner-city ghetto children also grow up inneighborhoods with devastating rates of joblessness, which trigger a whole se-ries of other problems that are not conducive to healthy child developmentor intellectual growth. Included among these are broken families, antisocialbehavior, social networks that do not extend beyond the confines of the ghetto

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environment, and a lack of informal social control over the behavior and activ-ities of children and adults in the neighborhood. (pp. xv–xvi)

Viewed from a larger historical perspective, the stark social and economicconditions of inner-city environments in Chicago emanate from commu-nity transformations that began at least three decades ago. The ChicagoFact Book Consortium (1995) described some of these economic and insti-tutional changes for the North Lawndale community area on the westside—one of the major neighborhoods in which children and families fromthe CLS have lived—as follows:

The newest residents of North Lawndale encountered a series of communitycatastrophes after 1960, which resulted in a stagnated economy and a deterio-rating social fabric. First were the riots which came after the King assassinationin 1968, during which substantial parts of the Roosevelt Road shopping stripwere destroyed by fire. After that storeowners moved when insurance compa-nies either canceled their policies or prohibitively increased their premiums.Another severe blow fell when the International Harvester Company’s tractorworks closed in 1969, with the loss of an estimated 3,400 jobs.

The riots, coupled with the racial turnover in North Lawndale between 1950and 1970, purportedly resulted in the loss of 75% of its business establishmentsand 25% of its jobs. The department store and other retail facilities burnedout or closed on Roosevelt Road were never replaced.

During the 1970s, 80% of the area manufacturing jobs disappeared, as Ze-nith and Sunbeam . . . electronics factories shut down, and a Copenhagensnuff plant was closed. The closing of an Alden’s catalogue store was a signalevent in a sequence that wiped out 44% of the retail and service jobs in NorthLawndale. The downturn continued through the 1980s when Western Electricstarted closing down, to disappear completely by 1985. (p. 107)

It was within contexts such as this that the CPC Program began in 1967 infour west-side sites. The CPC Program is a center-based early interventionthat provides comprehensive educational and family-support services toeconomically disadvantaged children from preschool to third grade. Theprogram was established through funding from Title I of the landmark Ele-mentary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. It is the second oldest (afterHead Start) federally funded preschool program in the United States andis the oldest extended early childhood intervention. The program is de-signed to promote children’s academic success and to facilitate parentinvolvement in children’s education. The studies that follow examine someconsequences of participation.

Summary of Study Contributions

In the rest of this overview, I provide a brief summary of the distinguishingfeatures of the studies described in this special issue. The major themes thatcut across the articles are (a) the investigation of factors and experiences

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that have been underresearched for urban low-income children, and (b)the identification of school- and family-related predictors of and contribu-tors to children’s educational achievement that can be a focus of preven-tion and promotion programs. Child outcomes were assessed in early tomiddle adolescence (ages 12 to 16).

In “School Mobility and Achievement: Longitudinal Findings From anUrban Cohort,” Judy Temple and Arthur Reynolds (this issue) imple-mented two unique study features. First, unlike most previous studies,school mobility was defined longitudinally from school records as the num-ber of school moves between kindergarten and seventh grade. Second, thestudy took into account the predictors of school mobility prior to when themove takes place, including early academic achievement. This is rarely everdone in studies of the effects of mobility (Mehana, 1997), but is essentialfor obtaining accurate effect sizes. Thus, this study is one of the method-ologically strongest in estimating the effects of school mobility on achieve-ment. Although we found that mobility was associated with lower levels ofschool achievement above and beyond child and family background fac-tors, only frequent school mobility (two or more moves) was consistently as-sociated with lower achievement. The estimated effect of frequent mobilitywas equal to about one-half year (sixth months) of academic progress.School- and family-based interventions designed to promote environmen-tal stability during children’s early school years may encourage greaterachievement as well as moderate the potential harmful effects of mobility.Indeed, participation in the CPC Program was associated with significantlyfewer school moves during the elementary grades, above and beyond sev-eral other explanatory factors.

In “Parent Involvement in Early Intervention for Disadvantaged Chil-dren: Does It Matter?” Wendy Miedel and Arthur Reynolds (this issue) in-vestigated the link between parent involvement in children’s early child-hood programs and later school competence at age 14 as measured bystandardized test scores, incidence of grade retention, and special educa-tion placement. Although parent involvement in early childhood programsis believed to be essential to children’s success, very few studies have system-atically investigated this issue. We are aware of no other studies that havelinked parent involvement in early childhood intervention to children’slong-term school success. Based on parents’ retrospective reports of theirparticipation in the CPC Program, we found that the number of activities(e.g., volunteer in class, attend field trips) in which parents participated inthe program during preschool and kindergarten was significantly associ-ated with higher reading achievement at age 14, and with lower rates ofgrade retention and years in special education. The frequency of parents’reported involvement in the program (days per week or month) was less as-sociated with children’s later school performance. Teacher ratings of par-ent involvement in school in first and second grade, however, were associ-ated with greater school competence above and beyond child and family

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background factors. This prospective finding corroborates, in part, par-ents’ retrospective reports. Study findings provide rare evidence of the po-tential benefits of parent involvement in early childhood programs.

In “Educational Expectations and School Achievement of Urban AfricanAmerican Children,” Sukhdeep Gill and Arthur Reynolds (this issue) inves-tigated the role of parent and teacher expectations for children’s educa-tional attainment and school success, and whether children’s perceptionsof these expectations mediate these estimated effects on children’s readingand math achievement at age 12. Based on an analysis of 712 children forwhom teacher and parent survey responses were available at ages 10 to 12,findings indicated that both parent expectations for children’s educationalattainment and teacher expectations of children’s school success were sig-nificantly and independently associated with higher reading and mathachievement scores on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, and with growth inachievement between third and sixth grades. Interestingly, teacher expec-tations were more associated with achievement than parent expectations.Although child perceptions of parent expectations were also indepen-dently associated with higher achievement, they only partially mediated theeffects of adults’ expectations on achievement, specifically, parents’ expec-tations. These results plus the finding that years of CPC intervention wasassociated with significantly higher parent and teacher educational expec-tations reveal the critical role of families in child development, and theneed for strong and enduring family–school partnerships in urban settings.

In “Resilience and Protective Factors in Adolescence: An Autobiographi-cal Perspective From Disadvantaged Youth,” Paul Smokowski, Arthur Reyn-olds, and Nikolaus Bezruczko (this issue) investigate the child, family,school, and peer factors in the development of resilience for a subsampleof 86 youth. This sample was selected to represent the original sample onthe basis of extent of CPC Program participation. The study used an inno-vative autobiographical essay method of data collection to investigate pro-tective factors that helped children overcome adversity. At the end of theface-to-face interview during youths’ sophomore year, they were asked thefollowing:

Please stop for a few minutes and picture yourself in a movie about your life.What are some of the events and persons you would want to see in the movie?Naturally, the movie describes what is important to you, how you got where youare today, and where your life is heading in the future. The movie might alsoinclude your family or friends and why they mean what they do to you. Finally,the movie might present some of your ideas about people or life. Now, havingthought about your life, go ahead and write its story.

Among the findings identified from the youths’ essays were the strong influ-ence of families and schools in educational success, especially in providing themotivational support to persist in educational tasks and goals. The impact

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of peers were decidedly mixed, and highlight some of the difficulties ofyouth in finding “true” friends and the role of friends in their life.

Motivational support from both parents and teachers appeared to be anespecially important influence in promoting successful adjustment formany youth. Interestingly, the key factors that emerged in this qualitativestudy dovetail with the regression and path analysis study of Reynolds(1998b), in which children’s early school competence and commitment,parent expectations and involvement, and teacher ratings of classroom ad-justment helped distinguish resilient children from those less resilient.

Of course, the studies described in this special issue examine only someof the plethora of factors that impact children’s educational development.As reported in the articles that follow, additional studies on the topics ad-dressed are certainly warranted as they are for a variety of individual, pro-grammatic, family, school, and community factors. It is hoped that the CLSand other projects can continue to advance knowledge that can be used tohelp meet the needs of children in urban and other settings for a new ageof school, family, and community partnerships.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Preparation of this article was partially supported by grants from the Na-tional Institute of Child Health and Human Development (No.R29HD34294) and the Office of Educational Research and Improvement,U.S. Department of Education (No. R306F960055). The project web site islocated at the following URL: www.waisman.wisc.edu/cls/

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