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…

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…

As the numbers of working-class students at university grow, we need to gain a better understanding of the different ways in which they consolidate their working-class habitus with the middle-class culture of the academic field. Drawing on data from a four-year longitudinal, qualitative study of working-class students at a large,…

Drawing on comparative analyses from nine Western countries, we ask whether local-born children from a wide range of immigrant groups show patterns of female advantage in education that are similar to those prevalent in their host Western societies. We consider five outcomes throughout the educational career: test scores or grades at age 15,…

How do proficiency-based accountability systems affect inequality in academic achievement? This article reconciles mixed findings in the literature by demonstrating that three factors jointly determine accountability's impact. First, by analyzing student-level data from a large urban school district, we find that when educators face…

Schools with very few and relatively low-performing marginalized students may be most likely to trigger social identity threats (including stereotype threats) that contribute to racial disparities. We test this hypothesis by assessing variation in the benefits of a self-affirmation intervention designed to counteract social identity threat in a…

We investigate the effect of children's exposure to local violence on grade failure in Mexico. We construct an annual panel of all elementary schools from 1990 to 2010 and merge municipality-level homicide rates to analyze the effect of exposure to local homicide. Using a variety of causal inference techniques, we consistently find that…

Although some scholars report that all students are better served by attending more prestigious postsecondary institutions, others have argued that students are better off attending colleges where they are about average in terms of academic ability and suffer worse outcomes if they attend schools that are "out of their league" at which…

Educational outcomes vary dramatically across schools in the United States. Many underperforming schools, especially in Chicago, also deal with high levels of violent crime on school grounds. Exposure to this type of frequent violence may be an important factor shaping already disadvantaged students' educational experiences. However,…

We update theories of teacher expectancy and cultural capital by linking them to discussions of technology. We argue for broadening the span of culturally important forms of capital by including the digital dimension of cultural capital. Based on data from the third-grade and fifth-grade waves of the Early Childhood Longitudinal…

Scholars have not adequately assessed how organizational cultures in schools differentially influence students' mathematics achievement by race and socioeconomic status (SES). We focus on what we term "collective pedagogical teacher culture", highlighting the role of professional communities and teacher collaboration in influencing mathematics…

Although prior research has documented differences in the distribution of teacher characteristics across schools serving different student populations, few studies have examined the extent to which teacher sorting occurs within schools. This study uses data from one large urban school district and compares the class assignments of teachers who…

The authors ask whether choice-driven education systems, with comprehensive schools and mass education at the secondary and tertiary level, represented in this article by England and Sweden, provide educational opportunities for ethnic minorities. In studying educational attainment, the authors make a theoretical distinction between mechanisms…

This article examines two critical questions related to equality of educational opportunity. First, does the academic advantage that was observed in Catholic high schools more than two decades ago continue to hold for contemporary students in Catholic middle schools? Second, how closely do different school sectors adhere to the common school…

Using data from the Education Longitudinal Study, this study assessed the relevance of shadow education to the high academic performance of East Asian American students by examining how East Asian American students differed from other racial/ethnic students in the prevalence, purpose, and effects of using the two forms--commercial test preparation…