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…

Over the past two decades, most states have adopted laws enabling charter schools, as charter advocates successfully presented charters as the solution to core problems in urban public education. Yet some states with large urban centers, notably Washington and Kentucky, resisted this seemingly inexorable trend for years. What explains their…

A growing literature documents the myriad penalties for children of incarcerated fathers, but relatively little is known about how paternal incarceration contributes to educational outcomes in early and middle childhood. In this article, we use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to provide the first estimates of the…

Despite the striking reversal of the gender gap in education, women pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degrees at much lower rates than those of their male peers. This study extends existing explanations for these gender differences and examines the role of the high school context for plans to major in STEM fields.…

The theories of cultural reproduction and cultural mobility have largely shaped the study of the effects of cultural capital on academic outcomes. Missing in this debate has been a rigorous examination of how children actually acquire cultural capital when it is not provided by their families. Drawing on data from a large-scale experimental study…

Peer relationships in secondary schools in two different cultural areas of India are compared. A general theory of status relations and a specification of the distinctive cultural features of each area are used to explain the observed differences in peer inequality, clique formation, petty deviance, putdowns, fashion consciousness, romantic…

Relational theories of gender conceptualize masculinity and femininity as mutually constitutive. Using a relational approach, I analyzed ethnographic and interview data from male and female black adolescents in Grades 8 through 10 enrolled in ''Diversify,'' an urban-to-suburban racial integration program ("n" = 38).…

In this article, a measure of students' beliefs is constructed from three sources of information on 12,509 high school seniors from the Education Longitudinal Study (2002 to 2006). First, verbatim responses to questions on occupational plans, drawn from restricted-access data records, are coded into 1,220 categories to capture detailed…

Why does the United States lag behind so many other countries on international education assessments? The traditional view targets school-based explanations--U.S. schools attract poorer teachers and lack the proper incentives. But the U.S. educational system may also serve children with comparatively greater academic challenges as a result of…

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…

Teachers' social networks can play an important role in teacher learning and organizational change. But what influences teachers' networks? Why do some teachers have networks that are likely to support individual and organizational change, while others do not? This study is a first step in answering this question. We focus on how…

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,…

Educational systems considerably influence educational opportunities and the resulting social inequalities. Contrasting institutional regulations of both structures and contents, the authors present a typology of educational system types in Germany to analyze their effects on social inequality in eastern Germany after unification. After 1990, the…

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…