Evaluating administrative measures of school quality as mediators of the relationship between attending a segregated school and cognitive function among older Black individuals: The STAR study

Research highlights school segregation's impact on cognitive aging for older Black adults, yet the mediating role of school quality - reflecting systemic (dis)investment in segregated schools - remains unexplored. This study included 726 community-dwelling Black adults from the Study of Healthy Aging in African Americans. Participants self-reported segregated school attendance, while administrative measures of state-level school quality (term length, percent attendance, student-teacher ratio, composite z score) were linked to their grade-specific state of residence. We estimated the extent to which associations between segregated schooling and domain-specific cognition were mediated by school quality. Sensitivity analyses examined grade-specific effects. Attending a segregated school was associated with poorer school quality (e.g., βterm-length = -1.71 [-2.52, -0.91]) and lower semantic memory (β = -0.17 [-0.32, -0.02]). The school quality composite measure mediated 30% of the overall association with semantic memory (natural indirect effect: β = -0.05 [-0.09, -0.01]; direct effect: β = -0.14 [-0.30, 0.02]). Total effect estimates were imprecise for executive function and verbal episodic memory. Our results suggest that state-level (dis)investments in school quality may be an important mechanism by which school-based segregation contributes to late-life cognitive function. Interventions that target the upstream, structural drivers of school-based segregation and related disinvestments may be important strategies for reducing cognitive aging inequities.