Influence of Home Environment on Children’s Schooling: From Teacher’s Perspective

Previous research in educational stratification has revealed that one of the mechanisms a child’s family background may affect school outcomes is through its influence on teacher-student relationships at school. Going beyond the conventional modeling of using only measures of the family’s socioeconomic situation, this article incorporate the teachers’ perspectives of the importance of the children’s family background into the examination of teachers’ evaluations of children’s learning capacity and their expectations for the children’s future school attainment, using a unique dataset from rural Gansu in northwest China. The analysis results reveal that teachers’ perceptions of the importance of children’s family background are closely associated with teachers’ evaluations and educational expectations of children, beyond children’s academic achievement and their family’s actual socioeconomic situations; and teachers’ expectations at early time point help to predict children’s later school persistence. The findings point to the importance of bringing teachers’ subjective perceptions into educational research, and the increasing importance of examining school-related factors to deepen our understanding of the different passageways through which family background leads to educational stratification. Disciplines Education Comments Suggested Citation: Yuping, Z. (2011). Influence of Home Environment on Children’s Schooling: From Teacher’s Perspective (Working Paper). Gansu Survey of Children and Families. This working paper is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/gansu_papers/21 1 Influence of Home Environment on Children’s Schooling: From Teacher’s Perspective 1 Yuping Zhang Department of Sociology and Anthropology Lehigh University 681 Taylor Street Bethlehem, PA 18015 United States [email protected] 1 The Gansu Survey of Children and Families is supported by a grant from the UK Economic and Social Research Council and Department for International Development (ESRC RES-167–25–0250). Earlier support for data collection came from the Spencer Foundation Small and Major Grants Programs, the World Bank, and NIH Grants 1R01TW005930–01 and 5R01TW005930–02.