Bruce Fuller
Biographic Data
| ID | 3633254 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bruce Fuller |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bruce |
| FAMILY NAME | Fuller |
| SIGNATURE | FULLER B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Berkeley |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8256-3610 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 82 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 462 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 82 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Problematizing Assumptions About School Segregation
Which Families Benefited from the Expanded Child Tax Credit? The Effects of Income, Race, and Education
Neoliberalism in Decline? New Pluralists Recast Schools in Los Angeles
Neoliberal tenets have colored the past half-century of education reform, marked by top-down accountability, market competition, and regimented learning aims. Federal drift and post-pandemic recovery, along with economic uncertainty, will blur policy priorities going forward. Less noticed, local networks of pro-equity activists have come to challenge urban bureaucracies, while advancing fairness, diverse forms of schooling, respectful and rigorou…
Finding Integrated Schools? Latino Families Settle in Diverse Suburbs, 2000–2015
Diverse Latino families continue to settle in suburbs, hunting for better neighborhoods and educational opportunities. But do they discover more integrated schools relative to segregated city schools? We find that Latino children attending suburban elementary schools were exposed to a greater share of White peers nationwide between 2000 and 2015 than were Latinos attending urban schools. But exposure to White peers in suburbs declined on average …
California’s push for universal pre-K
Policy makers in California intend to provide free preschool to all 4-year-olds solely within public schools by 2026, becoming the nation’s second largest single pre-K program in the United States after Head Start. This initiative builds on the state’s existing Transitional Kindergarten (TK) option that has served a modest share of 4-year-olds since 2010. Tracing the historical growth in TK enrollments, we find that just 30, mostly urban school d…
The Key Question
What’s working in Los Angeles? Two decades of achievement gains
A novel set of civic activists arose in Los Angeles in the 1990s, gaining independence from neoliberal advocates and labor leaders to advance a variety of school reforms over the next three decades. In turn, student learning climbed steadily during the period. This paper first describes the rise of these “new pluralists” – a diverse coalition of black and Latina leaders, civil rights attorneys, pro-equity nonprofits, and pedagogical reformers – a…
Does Progressive Finance Alter School Organizations and Raise Achievement? The Case of Los Angeles
State finance reforms have raised per-pupil spending and elevated the achievement of disadvantaged students over the past half-century. But we know little about how fresh funding may alter teacher staffing or the social and curricular organization of schools, mediating gains in learning. We find that US$1.1 billion in new yearly funding—arriving to Los Angeles high schools after California enacted a progressive weighted-pupil formula in 2013—led …
Purposeful parenting by Mexican-heritage mothers
Understanding parents' "concerted cultivation" in differing cultural contexts may facilitate teachers' use of practices that better align with families' home practices and more effectively support the learning of Latinx children across academic domains. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
Do preschool entitlements distribute quality fairly? Racial inequity in New York City
Variation in the Local Segregation of Latino Children—Role of Place, Poverty, and Culture
Purpose: Does the rising share of Latino students in US schools help to integrate previously White campuses or exacerbate racial and economic segregation over time? This article details trends in the segregation of Latino children enrolled in elementary schools, 2000–2015, then examines how evolving patterns differ among the nation’s school districts. Research Methods: We compiled enrollment data from schools, merging census data on the demograph…
Factors Associated With Family Medicine and Internal Medicine First-Year Residents’ Ambulatory Care Training Time
PURPOSE: Despite the importance of training in ambulatory care settings for residents to acquire important competencies, little is known about the organizational and environmental factors influencing the relative amount of time primary care residents train in ambulatory care during residency. The authors examined factors associated with postgraduate year 1 (PGY-1) residents' ambulatory care training time in Accreditation Council for Graduate Medi…
Impact of Physical Education Litigation on Fifth Graders’ Cardio–Respiratory Fitness, California, 2007–2018
Objectives. To examine the impact of physical education (PE) litigation on changes in cardio–respiratory fitness among racially/ethnically and socioeconomically diverse students. Methods. We used annual school-level data for all California schools with measures of fifth graders’ cardio–respiratory fitness spanning 2007–2008 through 2017–2018. A difference-in-difference design assessed changes before and after lawsuits in the proportion of student…
Worsening School Segregation for Latino Children
A half century of research details how segregating racial groups in separate schools corresponds with disparities in funding and quality teachers and culturally narrow curricula. But we know little about whether young Latino children have entered less or more segregated elementary schools over the past generation. This article details the growing share of Latino children from low-income families populating schools, 1998 to 2010. Latinos became mo…
Principal leadership and student achievement
Saudi Arabia has expanded access to secondary schooling over the past generation, while also pushing to lift quality. This includes decentralising authority out to principals, equipping them to set higher performance expectations and deploy incentives to attract and retain strong teachers. We find wide variability in the extent to which principals display leadership behaviours, based on nationally representative school samples drawn in 2003, 2011…
Child Developmentalists Engage the Media
Explaining Teacher Turnover
Lifting achievement in many schools depends on reducing the exit of effective teachers. We examine the extent to which teacher perceptions of school cohesion and intrinsic motivators stemming from two theoretical traditions contribute to the intent to leave one’s school. We find that elementary teachers report higher levels of organizational cohesion within their schools along with stronger intrinsic motivation compared with peers teaching at the…
Student Movement in Social Context
Higher rates of school switching by students contribute to achievement disparities and are typically theorized as driven by attributes of individual pupils or families. In contrast the neoclassical-economic account postulates that switching is necessary for competition among schools. We argue that both frames fail to capture social-referential and institutional comparisons that drive student mobility, hypothesizing that pupil mobility stems from …
Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Early Childhood Obesity
Organizing Locally
Positioning Charter Schools in Los Angeles
The debate over charter school effectiveness relies largely on neoclassical logic: individual parents or students express demand for a widening array of school types and then experience variable levels of organizational quality. We argue that market-like behavior is nested in segments of local organizational fields with different types of charter school operators seeking market niches to reduce resource uncertainties. We first describe the emerge…
Differing Cognitive Trajectories of Mexican American Toddlers
Recent studies reveal early and wide gaps in cognitive and oral language skills—whether gauged in English or Spanish—among Latino children relative to White peers. Yet, other work reports robust child health and social development, even among children of Mexican American immigrants raised in poor households, the so-called immigrant advantage. To weigh the extent to which Mexican heritage or foreign-born status contributes to early growth, we firs…
Home activities of Mexican American children
The question of how home activities advance the early social and cognitive development of Latino children receives growing attention from psychologists and social scientists. Some scholars and practitioners, focused on promoting "school readiness," frame the problem as weak parenting, signaled by insufficient rich language or academic skills. Other theorists, rooted in ecocultural theory, argue that early socialization and cognitive engagement ar…
Beyond Hierarchies and Markets
The state has experimented with a range of decentralized school organizations over the past half century, in part aiming to lift poor children. This movement stems from not only neoliberal ideology but also from the earlier “Third Way” of advancing public projects—severing local organizing from the state’s bureaucratic rules, while stopping short of atomized market remedies. This article first examines the economic and institutional forces that d…
Government Confronts Culture
Transitional societies—struggling to build democratic institutions and new political traditions—are faced with a painful dilemma. How can Government become strong and effective, building a common good that unites disparate ethnic and class groups, while simultaneously nurturing democratic social rules at the grassroots? Professor Fuller brings this issue to light in the contentious, multicultural setting of Southern Africa. Post-apartheid states,…
The social competence of Latino kindergartners and growth in mathematical understanding
We know that social competence contributes to young children's adaptation to, and cognitive learning within, classroom settings. Yet initial evidence is mixed on the social competencies that Latino children bring to kindergarten and the extent to which these skills advance cognitive growth. Building from ecocultural and developmental-risk theory, this paper shows children's social competence to be adaptive to the normative expectations and cognit…
Ethnic differences in child care selection
Early child-care selection
Child care quality
Worsening School Segregation for Latino Children
A half century of research details how segregating racial groups in separate schools corresponds with disparities in funding and quality teachers and culturally narrow curricula. But we know little about whether young Latino children have entered less or more segregated elementary schools over the past generation. This article details the growing share of Latino children from low-income families populating schools, 1998 to 2010. Latinos became mo…
Third World School Quality
Eager to boost literacy, economic growth, and national institutions, Third World governments and international aid agencies have greatly expanded schooling since the 1950s. Enrollments have quintupled since the late ‘50s, from 100 million children to now more than 500 million. The sharp economic decline felt over the past decade throughout the developing world, however, has led to deep cuts in education budgets. Child populations are doubling eve…
Gauging Growth
Many policymakers feel pressure to claim that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is boosting student performance, as Congress reconsiders the federal government’s role in school reform. But how should politicians and activists gauge NCLB’s effects? The authors offer evidence on three barometers of student performance, drawing from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and state data spanning the 1992–2006 period. Focusing on the perform…
Learning from Latinos
Two generations ago, Latino children and families were often defined as disadvantaged, even "culturally deprived," by psychologists, social scientists, and pediatric researchers. Since then, empirical work from several disciplines has yielded remarkable discoveries regarding the strengths of Latino families and resulting benefits for children. Theoretical advances illuminate how variation in the child's culturally bounded context or developmental…
What is “appropriate practice” at home and in child care
Which low-income parents select child-care
Commands, competence, and cariño
Early research on the socialization of Latino children has posited that mothers exercise authoritarian practices, compared with lateral reasoning (authoritative) strategies emphasized by Anglo mothers. This work aimed to categorize fixed types of parenting practices tied to the mother's personality rather than to culturally bounded contexts; it often ignored the emotional warmth or harshness present in compliance attempts and relied on interview …
How Do Mothers Choose Child Care? Alternative Cultural Models in Poor Neighborhoods
The dominant focus on structured variation in parents' actions across vertically defined social classes (from the inequality or the culture-ofpoverty perspective) continues to eclipse recent work on between-family variability within poor communities. Yet new research is emphasizing the variety of cultural models, kin supports, and parenting practices that circulate in low-income neighborhoods. This article details how 14 working-poor mothers act …
Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Early Childhood Obesity
Bien Educado
Families and Child Care
The authors outline two perspectives on the respective roles of families and preschools in socializing and educating young children. The family-oriented perspective emphasizes the primacy of parents as educators, moral guides, and nurturers of their children. The early childhood education perspective is more likely to view preschools as independent of the family. This perspective highlights the scientific basis of the early socialization enterpri…
The Active State, Investment in Human Capital, and Economic Growth
Human capital theory postulates that school expansion should foster economic growth, but credentialing theory questions such a relationship. We hypothesize that some conditions must obtain before educational expansion can have an affect on economic growth. First, the curriculum must be standardized and a large proportion of the age cohort beyond grade six must be enrolled for a sufficient period of time. Second, education and the economy must be …
Youth Job Structure and School Enrollment, 1890-1920
Explanations of early growth in American school enrollment alternatively point to rural-cultural beliefs or urban-economic antecedents. Research suggests that urban labor markets encouraged youth to stay in school longer, especially into the early 1900's, as job opportunity structures began to exclude young people. However, more recent study indicates that early grammar school enrollments rose most quickly in rural areas, and began decades before…
Education Policy Under Cultural Pluralism
Many policymakers are shedding essential tenets of modern statecraft. Few seek to sustain the monolithic one best system of schooling: herding students through large institutions, regulated by bureaucracy and guided by professionals under monopolistic conditions. Instead, distinctly unmodern forms of policy and institutional reformation are in ascendance: even when common aims of schooling are advanced, big and impersonal schools are yielding to …
Why do Daughters Leave School in Southern Africa? Family Economy and Mothers' Commitments
Journal Article Why Do Daughters Leave School in Southern Africa? Family Economy and Mothers' Commitments Get access Bruce Fuller, Bruce Fuller Harvard University Direct correspondence to Bruce Fuller, 6 Appian Way, Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Judith D. Singer, Judith D. Singer Harvard University Search for other works by this autho…
What factors shape girls' school peformance? Evidence from Ethiopia
Assessing child-care quality with a telephone interview
Family Effects on Students' Achievement in Thailand and Malawi
This article analyzes the effects offamily background on students' achievement in Third World countries and uses measures of social class that are both broader than previous work and more valid for developing countries. Study 1 examined panel data on the backgrounds and mathematics achievement of approximately 4,000 Grade 8 studentsfrom 99 schools in Thailand. Itfound thatfamily background and prior achievement affected students' educational expe…
Explaining School Cohesion
Effective schools often possess teachers who hold shared beliefs in similar instructional goals and practices. But little empirical evidence exists that helps to explain what factors shape the level of convergence in teachers' beliefs. Organizational theorists and practitioners alike are divided between two theoretical camps. Some claim that a strong principal and factors within the school can move teachers toward a shared commitment to the schoo…
A Framework for Academic Planning
As higher education's environment is characterized by shortages of students, financial support, and institutional confidence, the desirability of academic planning has increased. However, the meaning of academic planning remains imprecise. The proposed framework for planning urges that current conditions in which planning occurs must first be examined. Desired characteristics of the academic planning process are discussed, including assessment of…
Student Movement in Social Context
Higher rates of school switching by students contribute to achievement disparities and are typically theorized as driven by attributes of individual pupils or families. In contrast the neoclassical-economic account postulates that switching is necessary for competition among schools. We argue that both frames fail to capture social-referential and institutional comparisons that drive student mobility, hypothesizing that pupil mobility stems from …
A Framework for Academic Planning
As higher education's environment is characterized by shortages of students, financial support, and institutional confidence, the desirability of academic planning has increased. However, the meaning of academic planning remains imprecise. The proposed framework for planning urges that current conditions in which planning occurs must first be examined. Desired characteristics of the academic planning process are discussed, including assessment of…
Situational Determinants of Causal Attributions
Youth Job Structure and School Enrollment, 1890-1920
Explanations of early growth in American school enrollment alternatively point to rural-cultural beliefs or urban-economic antecedents. Research suggests that urban labor markets encouraged youth to stay in school longer, especially into the early 1900's, as job opportunity structures began to exclude young people. However, more recent study indicates that early grammar school enrollments rose most quickly in rural areas, and began decades before…
Explaining School Cohesion
Effective schools often possess teachers who hold shared beliefs in similar instructional goals and practices. But little empirical evidence exists that helps to explain what factors shape the level of convergence in teachers' beliefs. Organizational theorists and practitioners alike are divided between two theoretical camps. Some claim that a strong principal and factors within the school can move teachers toward a shared commitment to the schoo…
When Does Education Boost Economic Growth? School Expansion and School Quality in Mexico
any economic output effects of school expansion should be studied at an aggregate level. First, economic effects may be more related to the changing social rules of trade and work within modernizing economies, which are increasingly oriented around markets and mass production, not village-based subsistence. Second, aggregate analysis avoids the ecological fallacy of estimating nation-level productivity growth from individual-level correlations be…
What School Factors Raise Achievement in the Third World?
Within industrialized countries, much is known about the relationship between schools’ material inputs or social practices and pupils’ achievement levels. Less is known about school effects in developing countries. In the Third World, the secular school is often a novel institution, operating in social settings where written literacy and formal socialization are relatively recent phenomena. Therefore, even schools with limited material resources …
Educational Policies in Crisis
The essays in this book, prepared by Japanese and American educators, examine why the two countries have sought to learn about each other's educational system and what lessons have emerged from this process
Organizational construction of intrinsic motivation
Pre‐school Quality in Mexico
Government policy regarding early childhood education in Latin America reflects increasing concern with child survival in a broad sense, including cognitive development, nutrition, and physical health (Halpern, 1980; Myers, 1983; Smilansky, 1979). Like architects of antipoverty programmes in the United States in the 1960s, early childhood educators and Federal officials in Latin America are attempting to eliminate educational deficits stemming fr…
The Active State, Investment in Human Capital, and Economic Growth
Human capital theory postulates that school expansion should foster economic growth, but credentialing theory questions such a relationship. We hypothesize that some conditions must obtain before educational expansion can have an affect on economic growth. First, the curriculum must be standardized and a large proportion of the age cohort beyond grade six must be enrolled for a sufficient period of time. Second, education and the economy must be …
Eroding Economy, Declining School Quality
Since 1980 harsh economic factors have hit Malawi: periodic drought and subsequent decline in crop output, falling world prices for export commodities, and an ever heavier debt burden. How have these economic shocks touched children and schools? This article shows how Malawi's protracted period of adjustment temporarily towered school enrolment, as rural families drew on their children's labour to backstop erosion of subsistence and surplus produ…
Rethinking the Nineteenth Century
Series Foreword Preface Introduction Economic Expansion and Political Integration: The United States Movements, Transformations, and Limitations British Empire: Dynamics and Repercussions Rethinking the Emergence of the Social Sciences in the Nineteenth Century Selected Bibliography Index
Third World School Quality
Eager to boost literacy, economic growth, and national institutions, Third World governments and international aid agencies have greatly expanded schooling since the 1950s. Enrollments have quintupled since the late ‘50s, from 100 million children to now more than 500 million. The sharp economic decline felt over the past decade throughout the developing world, however, has led to deep cuts in education budgets. Child populations are doubling eve…
Family Effects on Students' Achievement in Thailand and Malawi
This article analyzes the effects offamily background on students' achievement in Third World countries and uses measures of social class that are both broader than previous work and more valid for developing countries. Study 1 examined panel data on the backgrounds and mathematics achievement of approximately 4,000 Grade 8 studentsfrom 99 schools in Thailand. Itfound thatfamily background and prior achievement affected students' educational expe…
The Strong State, Social Class, and Controlled School Expansion in France, 1881-1975
Current theories argue that school expansion reflects demands that stem from changes in the occupational structure, from a ideological commitment to building an integrated nation-state, or from the processes of modernization. However, these theories have not been tested relative to different social classes. Since most of the evidence has accumulated in the United States, where demand is usually met by supply, the possibility that demand might not…
State Action and Labor Structure Change in Mexico
Third World “development” often is characterized by rapid growth in trade and service jobs, not in manufacturing employment. Prior explanations emphasize materialist conceptions: a widening division of (white-collar) labor is required to match technological complexity. Or the central state pushes investment of capital-intensive industry, and resulting urban immigration outpaces growth in labor demand. This article focuses on how the central state…
Growing-up modern
What factors shape teacher quality? Evidence from Malawi
What factors shape girls' school peformance? Evidence from Ethiopia
Nation Building and Scbool Expansion under the Fragile French State
Raising Literacy under Fragile State Institutions
Governments and educators are digging more deeply into the question of how to make Third World classrooms more stimulating settings in which to learn. Interventions emphasize making more complex the skills of teachers and the social organization of classrooms. But are fragile political institutions and education agencies equipped to move teachers toward more complex, more invigorating forms of instruction
The Great Child-Care Experiment
Child-care settings provide a national laboratory for testing questions related to parental choice in K-12 schooling. Operating in open-market conditions with little oversight by the government, the child-care field embodies many of the organizational characteristics advocated under certain school choice models. In fact, parents’ general satisfaction with child care suggests that they are unlikely to act as major catalysts of K-12 reform. Their d…
The Political Construction of Education
Preface Does the State Expand Schooling? Review of Evidence by Bruce Fuller and Richard Rubinson Rising Demand for Schooling: Institutional Origins and Political Accommodations The Rise of Popular Literacy in Europe by David Mitch Building the Institution of Mass Schooling: Isomorphism in the Modern World by Francisco O. Ramirez and Marc J. Ventresca Institutions, Citizenship, and Schooling in Sweden by John Boli Western versus Islamic Schooling:…
Raising School Effects While Ignoring Culture? Local Conditions and the Influence of Classroom Tools, Rules, and Pedagogy
How educators and researchers define and study school effectiveness continues to be shaped by two divided camps. The policy mechanics attempt to identify particular school inputs, including discrete teaching practices, that raise student achievement. They seek universal remedies that can be manipulated by central agencies and assume that the same instructional materials and pedagogical practices hold constant meaning in the eyes of teachers and c…
Explaining variation in teaching practices? Effects of state policy, teacher background, and curricula in Southern Africa
Psychology (51 works) · Political science (43 works) · Sociology (42 works) · Economics (35 works) · Parental Involvement in Education (34 works) · Early Childhood Education and Development (27 works) · School Choice and Performance (27 works) · Developmental psychology (26 works) · Economic growth (21 works) · Medicine (18 works)