The effect of health impairment on educational outcomes is a topic of great policy relevance. It has been relatively under-researched, however, due to the paucity of data that include detailed measures of both health and school performance and to the difficulty of separating the impact of health on education from the impact of education on health. The proposed study investigates the relationship between the health status and educational performance of kindergarten children and effectively overcomes these two obstacles. First, the study uses a newly released data set that contains more detailed and appropriate measures of the variables of interest than any data set hitherto collected on a large scale for children in this age group. Second, given the young age of the children involved in the study and the longitudinal nature of the data set, problems associated with the endogenous effects of education on health are considerably mitigated. The study will (1) assess the strength of the association between health status and the cognitive skills of children entering the kindergarten class of 1998-1999, (2) assess the effect of health status on changes in the cognitive skills of these children over time, and (3) determine how the effect of health status on cognitive development varies by child and family characteristics, such as minority status, income, and access to health insurance.
