For decades, social theorists have posited--and descriptive accounts have shown--that students isolated by both social class and ethnicity suffer extreme deprivations that limit the effectiveness of equal-opportunity interventions. Even educational programs that yield positive results for moderately disadvantaged students may not prove beneficial…

This article bridges the literature on educational inequality between and within families to test whether high--socioeconomic status (SES) families compensate for low cognitive ability in the transition to secondary education in Germany. The German educational system of early-ability tracking (at age 10) represents a stringent setting for the…

Are equal educational opportunities sufficient to narrow long-standing economic and racial inequalities in achievement? In this article, I test the hypothesis that poor and minority students benefit less from effective elementary school teachers than do their nonpoor and white peers, thus exacerbating inequalities. I use administrative data from…

In the half century since the 1966 Coleman Report, scholars have yet to develop a consensus regarding the relationship between schools and inequality. The Coleman Report suggested that schools play little role in generating achievement gaps, but social scientists have identified many ways in which schools provide better learning environments to…

Research on college admissions shows that all students tend to benefit from overmatching, but high-status students are most likely to be overmatched, and low-status students are most likely to be undermatched. This study examines whether mismatching takes place when students are sorted into classrooms in middle school. Given prior research on…

Is education the social leveler it promises to be? Nowhere is this question better addressed than in Singapore, the emblematic modern-day meritocracy where education has long been hailed as the most important ticket to elite status. In particular, what accounts for gender and ethnic gaps in enrollment into Singapore's elite junior colleges--the…

This article examines global changes in tracking policies over the post-World War II period. Using a newly constructed quantitative panel data set of 139 countries from 1960 to 2010, I show that a majority of countries around the world have shifted away from sharply tracked institutions at the junior secondary level toward more formally…

On the basis of theories of cultural reproduction and rational choice, we examine whether access to study-abroad opportunities is socially selective and whether this pattern changed during educational expansion. We test our hypotheses for Germany by combining student survey data and administrative data on higher education entry rates. We find that…

The commentaries on Downey and Condron found in this issue help advance an overdue conversation about schools and inequality. This paper considers two questions that are prompted by the comments from the authors' colleagues: (1) Would we make more progress reducing socio-economic and racial achievement gaps by reforming schools or by reforming the…

Christopher Jencks is the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Here he comments that Downey and Condron (2016) (DC) argue that the sociology of education suffers from a one-sided view of schools' contribution to inequality. He agrees that most sociologists who study what goes on inside schools tend to portray…

Schools use an array of strategies to match curricula and instruction to students' heterogeneous skills. Although generations of scholars have debated ''tracking'' and its consequences, the literature fails to account for diversity of school-level sorting practices. In this article, we draw on the work of Sørensen and others to articulate and…