Sociology of Education

Studies of when youth classify academic achievement in racial terms have focused on the racial classification of behaviors and individuals. However, institutions—including schools—may also be racially classified. Drawing on a comparative interview study, we examine the school contexts that prompt urban black students to classify schools in racial terms. Through Diversify, a busing program, one group of black students attended affluent suburban schools with white-dominated achievement hierarchies (n = 38). Diversify students assigned schools to categories of whiteness or blackness that equated whiteness with achievement and blackness with academic deficiency. Students waitlisted for Diversify (n = 16) attended urban schools without white-dominated achievement hierarchies. These students did not classify schools as white or black, based on academic quality. We assert that scholars may productively conceive of schools, not just individual students, as sites of potential racial classification. Furthermore, the racial classification of schools reinforces antagonism between black students attending ‘‘white’’ and ‘‘black’’ schools and perpetuates harmful racial stereotypes.

Religion is the most segregated arena of American life, but its effect on collegiate diversity outcomes has been overlooked, despite the significance of both race and religion in many students’ lives. This study examines whether religious observance, religious worldview identification, and participation in a religious student organization are significantly related to cross-racial interaction (CRI), a form of bridging social capital, during college. The current study yielded largely positive relationships between general religiosity and CRI. General religiosity was also positively linked to CRI for Asian American, white, and black students. CRI was higher for students from minority religious backgrounds. Participation in campus religious groups was nonsignificant, regardless of the racial composition of the group. Findings are surprising given previous work that has mainly found negative relationships between religion and diversity-related outcomes in college. We discuss implications for the study of the campus climate and the effect of religion on campus race relations.

Schools and neighborhoods are thought to be two of the most important contextual influences on student academic outcomes. Drawing on a unique data set that permits simultaneous estimation of neighborhood and school contributions to student test score gains, we analyze the distributions of these contributions to consider the relative importance of schools and neighborhoods in shaping student achievement outcomes. We also evaluate the sensitivity of estimated school and neighborhood contributions to the exclusion of an explicit measure of the other context, indicating the extent to which bias may exist in studies where either measure is unavailable. Taken together, results of these analyses provide substantial insight into the influences of two of the most important contextual settings in students’ lives.

Do schools reduce or perpetuate inequality by race and family income? Most studies conclude that schools play only a small role in explaining socioeconomic and racial disparities in educational outcomes, but they usually draw this conclusion based solely on test scores. We reconsider this finding using longitudinal data on test scores and four-year college attendance among high school students in Massachusetts and Texas. We show that unexplained differences between high schools are larger for college attendance than for test scores. These differences are arguably caused by differences between the schools themselves. Furthermore, while these apparent differences in high school effectiveness increase income disparities in college attendance, they reduce racial disparities. Social scientists concerned with schools’ role in transmitting inequality across generations should reconsider the assumption that schools either increase or reduce all disparities and should direct attention to explaining why high schools’ effects on specific outcomes and groups of students appear to vary so much.

By most media accounts, charter schools are innovative schools. But little empirical work interrogates this idea. We examine the growth and decline of specialist charter school mission statements as one indicator of innovation. In line with theories of resource partitioning, we find that specialist charter school missions—those asserting innovation with regards to populations served, curricula utilized, and/or educational focus—have become increasingly diverse over time. However, simultaneously, we find support for a generalist assimilation hypothesis: Charter schools have come to resemble traditional schools through isomorphic tendencies over time. Hence, we show that although specialist charter schools are becoming increasingly diverse in their missions, these charter schools are increasingly making up a smaller portion of the population. We also find, counter to charter school advocates’ intentions, that states with more permissive charter school laws are those that also tend to have a great proportion of charter schools with generalist missions. Our findings contribute to a theoretical understanding of specialist organizations by considering specialization as an example of innovation in the charter school population. Furthermore, our findings have implications for the way charter school laws are created and enacted to foster innovation through specialization.