How does schooling affect inequality in students’ academic skills? Studies comparing children’s trajectories during summers and school years provide a provocative way of addressing this question, but the most persuasive seasonal studies (1) focus primarily on skill gaps between social categories (e.g., social class, race/ethnicity), which constitute only a small fraction of overall skill inequality, and (2) are restricted to early grades, making it difficult to know whether the patterns extend into later grades. In this study, we use seasonal comparisons to examine the possibilities that schooling exacerbates, reduces, or reproduces overall skill inequality in math, reading, language use, and science with recent national data on U.S. public school students spanning numerous grade levels from the Northwest Evaluation Association. Our results suggest that schooling has a compensatory effect on inequality in reading, language, and science skills but not math skills. We conclude by discussing the theoretical implications of our findings, possible reasons why the math findings differ from those of other subjects, and discrepant seasonal patterns across national data sets.

学校教育如何影响学生学术技能的不平等？比较儿童在夏季和学年期间的发展轨迹的研究提供了一种解决这个问题的有启发性的方法，但最有说服力的季节性研究 (1) 主要关注社会类别（例如社会阶层、种族/民族）之间的技能差距，这仅构成整体技能不平等的一小部分，以及 (2) 仅限于低年级，因此很难知道这些模式是否会扩展到更高年级。在这项研究中，我们使用季节性比较来研究学校教育加剧、减少或再现数学、阅读、语言使用和科学方面整体技能不平等的可能性，以及最近美国公立学校学生的全国数据，这些数据来自西北评估，跨越多个年级协会。我们的结果表明，学校教育对阅读、语言和科学技能方面的不平等有补偿作用，但对数学技能没有补偿作用。最后，我们讨论了研究结果的理论意义、数学结果与其他学科的结果不同的可能原因，以及全国数据集的季节性模式差异。