{"title":"The Great Leveler? Juvenile Arrest, College Attainment, and the Future of American Inequality","authors":"Garrett Baker, David S. Kirk, Robert J. Sampson","doi":"10.1177/00380407251338844","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00380407251338844","url":null,"abstract":"A burgeoning literature suggests that criminal justice contact in adolescence hinders educational attainment, but prior research primarily considers short-term outcomes and relies on self-reported arrest information. In this article, we leverage Illinois administrative records over 25 years linked to a multicohort longitudinal study to provide estimates of whether an officially recorded juvenile arrest lingers beyond high school through college completion. We find that juvenile arrest is associated with a 20 to 30 percentage-point decrease in one’s likelihood of graduating from a four-year college. This association persists for college enrollees and is consistent across sociodemographic groups and birth cohorts. Given the unequal and prevalent nature of juvenile arrest, the association’s durability across time periods characterized by vast social-structural changes, and the potentially unique vulnerabilities of system-involved students on college campuses, our study offers new insights on how official legal entanglement prior to adulthood may contribute to inequality in the United States.","PeriodicalId":51398,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of Education","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144319674","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Peter Hepburn, Danny Grubbs-Donovan, Nick Graetz, Olivia Jin, Matthew Desmond
{"title":"Consequences of Eviction-Led Forced Mobility for School-Age Children in Houston","authors":"Peter Hepburn, Danny Grubbs-Donovan, Nick Graetz, Olivia Jin, Matthew Desmond","doi":"10.1177/00380407251333651","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00380407251333651","url":null,"abstract":"Eviction cases are concentrated among renter households with children, yet we know little about the repercussions of evictions for children’s educational trajectories. In this study, we link eviction records in Harris County, Texas, to educational records of students enrolled in the Houston Independent School District between 2002 and 2016. At least 13,000 public school students in Houston lived in households that were filed against for eviction. These students came from disadvantaged backgrounds, and nearly a quarter lived in households that were filed against repeatedly. Students whose parents were threatened with eviction were more likely than their peers to have left the district by the next academic year. Students who remained were more likely to have switched schools, often relocating to schools with fewer resources, more student turnover, and lower test scores. Eviction filings were associated with increases in absences and, among students who switched schools, more suspensions.","PeriodicalId":51398,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of Education","volume":"35 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2025-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143875884","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Labeling Power of Critical Race Theory: Evidence from a National Survey Experiment","authors":"Andrew Myers, Crista Urena Hernandez","doi":"10.1177/00380407251327971","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00380407251327971","url":null,"abstract":"Discussions about educational content on race and racism have captured widespread public and political attention, with much of this debate falling under the umbrella of critical race theory (CRT). Despite this attention, we currently do not know whether it is the content in these lessons or the CRT label that is influencing opinion on this issue. Are critics of CRT reacting to the content that CRT encapsulates? Or does the phrase “CRT” trigger partisan beliefs that are unrelated or only weakly tied to the central claims CRT advances? We use original data from two experiments in national surveys (N = 1,983) to answer these questions. In the first experiment, respondents were randomly assigned to one of three vignette conditions that described a local high school board’s decision to ban a lesson by either (1) describing the content of the lesson, (2) labeling the lesson as CRT, or (3) both describing and labeling the lesson. In the second experiment, a subset of respondents was assigned to conditions where the school board approved the lesson rather than banning it. Results indicate that labeling a lesson as CRT leads to opposition—either agreeing with its ban or disagreeing with its approval—regardless of whether a description of the lesson is included. Subgroup analyses are suggestive of the idea that although baseline levels of support varied, this label impacts individuals across a wide array of sociodemographic and political groups.","PeriodicalId":51398,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of Education","volume":"254 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2025-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143862896","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Irena Pietrzyk, Melinda Erdmann, Juliana Schneider, Marita Jacob, Marcel Helbig
{"title":"Guidance Counseling Can Reduce Inequality in University Enrollment in Germany: Results from a Randomized Controlled Trial","authors":"Irena Pietrzyk, Melinda Erdmann, Juliana Schneider, Marita Jacob, Marcel Helbig","doi":"10.1177/00380407251323888","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00380407251323888","url":null,"abstract":"Guidance counseling is well known to foster enrollment in higher education among students from low social origins in the United States and Canada. However, because students in these North American countries face obstacles that do not exist in many European countries, generalizing previous findings to the European context is difficult. Against this background, we use a randomized controlled trial to investigate guidance counseling in Germany. Our results reveal that individuals from low social origins are more likely to enroll in higher education due to the program. Furthermore, we find substantial effect heterogeneity across social origin groups. Due to the program, individuals from high social origins enroll less frequently in higher education and more frequently in vocational training. Based on these opposing effects across social origin groups, we find that the program reduces inequality in higher education enrollment by approximately 70 percent.","PeriodicalId":51398,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of Education","volume":"35 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143702789","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Richard O. Welsh, Luis A. Rodriguez, Blaise Joseph
{"title":"Racial Threat, Schools, and Exclusionary Discipline: Evidence from New York City","authors":"Richard O. Welsh, Luis A. Rodriguez, Blaise Joseph","doi":"10.1177/00380407251321387","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00380407251321387","url":null,"abstract":"Given the mixed evidence on the role of school-level factors in contributing to racial inequality in exclusionary discipline, there is a need to revisit how the demographic composition of schools relates to the prevalence of and disparities in disciplinary outcomes. In this study, we extend the racial threat theoretical framework by illustrating the associations between racial composition and changes in the racial composition of schools and school-level disciplinary outcomes, such as rates of and disparities in office discipline referrals (ODRs) and suspensions, and student-level disciplinary outcomes, such as the likelihood of receiving an ODR and suspensions in New York City Public Schools. Similar to most prior studies, the findings indicate a significant association between the proportion of Black students in a school and overall suspensions and ODRs at both the school and student levels. At the school level, racial change in all other student groups except Black students is not significantly related to disciplinary outcomes. Our findings illustrate that a change in the percentage of Black students at a school is associated with an increased likelihood of receiving an ODR and suspension. Racial threat may be more pronounced in predominantly White schools compared to majority Black schools. The findings suggest that school climate, educator ethno-racial diversity, and principal experience moderate the relationship for school racial composition, with suggestive but inconsistent evidence for racial change. The results provide empirical evidence of anti-blackness in school discipline and support investments in school climate and educator diversity to disrupt discipline disparities.","PeriodicalId":51398,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of Education","volume":"89 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143635667","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Experimental Effects of “Opportunity Gap” and “Achievement Gap” Frames","authors":"David M. Quinn","doi":"10.1177/00380407251321372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00380407251321372","url":null,"abstract":"Racial equity in education is often framed around “closing the achievement gap,” but many scholars argue this frame perpetuates deficit mindsets. The “opportunity gap” (OG) frame has been offered as an alternative to focus attention on structural injustices. In a preregistered survey experiment, I estimate the effects of framing racial equity in education around “achievement gaps” (AGs) versus OGs. I find U.S. adult respondents on MTurk gave higher priority to “closing the racial opportunity gap” versus “closing the racial achievement gap” (effect size = 0.11 SD). When randomly assigned to read an OG frame before being asked to explain the Black/White “achievement gap,” respondents were less likely to endorse cultural or individual-level explanations compared with respondents only shown AG statistics (effect size = –0.10 SD). I find no evidence the OG frame affected respondents’ racial stereotypes or policy preferences.","PeriodicalId":51398,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of Education","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143618539","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Terms of Inclusion: Transitional School Programs in a Racialized Organizational Field","authors":"Dominic Terrel Walker","doi":"10.1177/00380407251319511","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00380407251319511","url":null,"abstract":"As organizations committed to providing upward social mobility and leadership development for academically high-achieving working-class youth of color, transitional school programs (TSPs) prepare students to transition from urban public schools to elite, mostly private high schools. However, TSPs’ dependence on wealthy, White institutions to achieve these goals highlights racialized contradictions in the organizational field. How do TSPs navigate the race and class conflicts between the goals of their program and the racial organizational field of elite schools on which they depend for survival? Drawing on two years of ethnographic research at Ascend, a TSP in a northeastern city, this article demonstrates how because of racialized dependencies, Ascend is compelled to adopt the inequitable practices and assumptions of the racialized organizational field of elite education. Yet over time, the organization begins to resist this organizational order by decoupling their practices from elite schools. Student voice and activism contributed to destabilizing this racialized organizational order through direct action. As Ascend’s loose coupling to the field became untenable during national student protests, the organization sought to recouple to the demands of student protesters by explicitly renegotiating the terms of inclusion for their students in the racialized organizational field. These findings contribute to a limited literature about TSPs, organizations critical to the desegregation of elite schools. The findings also demonstrate how studying an organization in the context of its organizational field can reveal how organizations become racialized in practice. Finally, the case of Ascend shows that decoupling, previously theorized to be a method of evading commitments to equity, may also be a method of subverting racialized dependencies.","PeriodicalId":51398,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of Education","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143452368","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Stratification in Countries with Flatter (Institutional) Hierarchies? Insights from Administrative Data in Canada","authors":"David Zarifa, Yujiro Sano, Roger Pizarro Milian","doi":"10.1177/00380407241311551","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00380407241311551","url":null,"abstract":"Researchers have repeatedly found that within modern higher education systems, students from wealthier backgrounds tend to be concentrated in the most advantageous sectors. Dubbed “effectively maintained inequality,” this process allows these groups to maintain a competitive advantage in the labor market by virtue of acquiring more elite credentials. But what happens in nations with flatter university hierarchies, where there is relatively modest vertical differentiation in the brand strength of domestic universities? Through this study, we provide the first national-level analysis of the relationship between parental income and access to more selective, better resourced, and higher ranking Canadian universities. We also assess the extent to which there is an earnings premium associated with attending these more elite institutions. Our results suggest there are few differences in the types of universities attended by Canadians from different economic strata. Moreover, any earnings premium associated with attending a more elite Canadian university disappears once we account for basic demographic and field of study controls. We theorize that Canadian universities’ flatter institutional hierarchy drives wealthy families to seek advantages through enrollment in elite majors (e.g., business, engineering) and other tactics that take place outside the higher education system.","PeriodicalId":51398,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of Education","volume":"111 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143375312","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Message from the Editors","authors":"William Carbonaro, Anna R. Haskins","doi":"10.1177/00380407241299625","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00380407241299625","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51398,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of Education","volume":"41 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2024-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142879637","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Curricular Differentiation and Informal Networks: How Formal Grouping and Ranking Practices Shape Friendships among Students in College","authors":"Wesley Jeffrey","doi":"10.1177/00380407241300602","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00380407241300602","url":null,"abstract":"This study draws on complete friendship network data on two first-year biological sciences cohorts at a selective university in the United States to investigate how and to what extent allocating students to curricular groups and grading their performance in class shape (1) processes of friend selection at the dyadic level and (2) friendship clustering at the network level. Through a set of stochastic actor-oriented models, results show that students tend to befriend peers from the same curricular group versus a different one (i.e., curricular group homophily) and befriend higher-performing peers (i.e., performance-based status). Follow-up analyses reveal that friendship clustering by curricular group placement is largely due to course co-enrollment (i.e., proximity), whereas academic-performance-based clustering is primarily the result of students aligning their own performance to match the average performance of their friends (i.e., influence). I discuss implications of these findings for helping to promote learning in higher education.","PeriodicalId":51398,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of Education","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2024-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142841974","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}