UC Riverside

When considering issues of education in the United States of America, the vantage point to understanding inequity in education outcomes changes when the scope of an issue is seen from a systemic perspective compared to individual perspective. Research in public health suggests that childhood adversity is often experienced as a serious threat to a child’s physical or psychological sense of safety and wellbeing. In order to investigate childhood adversity and education over space, theoretical applications and methods focusing on more macro level systemic vantage points were selected for the current study. Addressing the need for more nuanced research on the relationship between ACEs, space and educational outcomes in secondary schools in California, the proposed study contributes by providing a complex database of expanded ACEs definitions, the creation of an ACE composite variable and then linking them to the educational outcomes of public high school students across California’s 58 counties. The primary techniques utilized in analysis focused on geospatial analysis and linear regression. The constructed ACE composite variable was especially suited to the proposed study given that it was explicitly designed to explore the magnitude of accumulated ACE exposure over a geographic area. Results of the study painted a complex relationship between ACEs, space and education, with particularly interesting findings surrounding the difference between more rural/suburban counties compared to their urban counterparts, including important regional differences between north/central counties and southern counties. Implications on how California can follow suit of other states in the nation to standardize, organize and disseminate statewide ACE data and what kind of policy is feasible within the state to combat the negative population effects of ACE exposure on education outcomes are provided.