Barbara Schneider is the John A. Hannah Chair and University Distinguished Professor in the College of Education and Department of Sociology at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on how the social contexts of schools and families influence the academic and social well being of adolescents as they move into adulthood. In this article she comments on the need to invest in the most disadvantaged schools, as Downey and Condron discuss in their work. She writes here that while educators can motivate students to do better, a problematic context can hinder even those with the best intentions. The work Coleman (1997) saw as valuable emphasized the importance of creating socially constructed, trusting environments where teachers and students worked to accomplish learning and social goals. Schools have the potential to become the hot spots of micro societies of change. The challenge for education sociologists is to renew the focus on what happens in schools, especially for students for whom the school is the most stable environment they are likely to inhabit. [For "Fifty Years since the Coleman Report: Rethinking the Relationship between Schools and Inequality," see EJ1104970.]