Abstract
The mission of the Sociology of Education (SOE) is to publish “research that examines how social institutions and individuals’ experiences within these institutions affect educational processes and social development.” As editor of SOE, Rob Warren has been a great steward of this mission. As SOE’s new editor, I am committed to maintaining this responsibility to publish research broadly focused on education issues.
With the changing landscape of schooling at all education levels in the United States and abroad and the changing demographic of those involved in education, sociological perspectives on issues of education should be in the forefront of scholarly inquiry. School choice, test-based accountability, rising college debt, immigration, and countless other factors are changing the organizational basis of schooling around the world. I believe SOE can and will be the publication venue for work that has theoretical importance and methodological rigor to inform educators, policy makers, and scholars about lived educational matters.
Funding agencies increasingly call on education scholars to study some of the heaviest issues surrounding us today. Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) research for higher education has been on the agenda at the National Science Foundation for some time now. Perhaps as a result, in my short six months as editor-elect, I have seen many great papers related to STEM, college major, gender, income, and occupations. The racial tensions and the inequalities ever so present in our society have also given rise to many manuscripts related to race, the school-to-prison pipeline, and bullying in schools. These issues remain important for our inquiry as well as others, such as organizational analysis of schooling, sexuality, family–school interfaces, mental health in schools, and political activities surrounding education. I have written more thoroughly about my thoughts regarding the future of sociology of education in Social Currents in 2014. Contributions from SOE authors will continue to play key roles in developing theory, testing hypotheses, and providing rich description to help us understand how schooling and education affect and are affected by society. I encourage our colleagues from other areas of inquiry to think of schooling and education as part and parcel of larger social issues and find a home in SOE too. After all, SOE is an American Sociological Association journal and should have broad appeal to our discipline.
SOE’s success as the flagship journal in the sociology of education reflects the rigor and creativity of the community of scholars in the subdisciplines. Unquestionably, I have seen some of the most interesting and sophisticated techniques in quantitative and qualitative methodologies that are improving our understanding of educational institutions and the people in them. My call is for more of that—more empirical research questions informed by theoretical perspectives, more inductive analysis of rich qualitative data to create new theories, and more answers to our pressing educational questions. I am equally impressed with the pool of reviewers who have contributed hours of their time and their skills to improving manuscripts from small edits of readability to larger issues of logic and methodological suggestions. All these efforts go into making our journal successful.
I would be remiss if I did not also welcome a great team of deputy editors to SOE. I am pleased to welcome these leading scholars with enviable publication records: Thurston Domina, Karolyn Tyson, Jennifer C. Lee, and Katerina Bodovski. This team reflects the diversity of substantive and methodological traditions in SOE, and as deputy editors, they will make editorial decisions on manuscripts in which I have a conflict of interest. They have also already stepped up to help me understand a method or substantive area where my own substantive and methodological breadth was too limited.
I am deeply grateful to the immediate past editor, Rob Warren, and his managing editor, Amy August. They consistently produced a high-quality journal and facilitated a very smooth transition from the University of Minnesota to Purdue University. Under Editor Warren’s leadership, the journal published a great set of papers and increased the number of manuscripts that used qualitative data and focused on international topics. Rob Warren also shortened the review time considerably, making SOE review time one of the shortest in the discipline. We hope to continue this excellent work and to include more manuscripts per issue. I am also pleased to introduce Rebecca Boylan, SOE’s new managing editor. I am very lucky to have Rebecca on my team; her skills and her knowledge of the field make her invaluable in this role.
This journal is special to me. I have always found SOE editors to be diligent, rigorous, and just. Past Editors Karl Alexander, Barbara Schneider, David Bills, and John “Rob” Warren all have very big shoes to fill (as do those before them as well), but I feel like they have been training me indirectly through their example since my very first interaction with the journal. I am humbled to be in their company, and I am committed to upholding the traditions of rigor and intellectual guidance as I work as your editor.