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.