Thurston Domina
Biographic Data
| ID | 3685980 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thurston Domina |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thurston |
| FAMILY NAME | Domina |
| SIGNATURE | DOMINA T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0161-3215 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 644 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Remote School Parenting: Assessing Home-School Contexts and Parent Practices Aimed at Engaging Children in Learning
In this study, we examine the practices parents adopted to engage their elementary school-aged children in academically and socioemotionally nurturing activities during the 2020 to 2021 school year, when the pandemic forced schools to pivot to remote-only instruction. Analyzing parenting practices during this profoundly unsettled time, we argue, provides a window into potential mechanisms to narrow persistent class-based inequalities. Both socioe…
Structuring Choice Policy, School Segregation and the Two-Staged School Choice Process
School choice is both an important tool for school desegregation policy and an enabler of racial segregation. In this paper, we used a two-stage model of complex decision making to illustrate the relationship between school choice policy structure and school segregation. Our analyses draw on data describing the choices available to kindergarteners entering the Wake County Public School System between 2000 and 2010. As it pursued school diversity …
Virtual charter students have worse labor market outcomes as young adults
Virtual charter schools are increasingly popular, yet there is little research on the long-term outcomes of virtual charter students. In this research note, we link statewide education records from 9th grade students in Oregon with information on criminal legal contact and IRS records containing earnings information housed at the U.S. Census Bureau to provide evidence on how virtual charter students fare as young adults. Virtual charter students …
There Is Such a Thing as a Free Lunch: School Meals, Stigma, and Student Discipline
The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) allows high-poverty schools to offer free meals to all students regardless of household income. Conceptualizing universal meal provision as a strategy to alleviate stigma associated with school meals, we hypothesize that CEP implementation reduces the incidence of suspensions, particularly for students from low-income backgrounds and minoritized students. We link educational records for students enrolled …
Offer It and They Will Come? An Investigation of the Factors Associated With the Uptake of School-Sponsored Resources
In response to economic distress, schools are increasingly serving as providers and distributors of social service resources. However, even when schools offer resources that respond to needs, they struggle to attain high levels of uptake. We examine the family-level correlates of participation in school-sponsored resources during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic and find that uptake increases with economic need. In addition, net of need,…
Educational Inequality Regimes amid Algebra-for-All: The Provision and Allocation of Expanding Educational Opportunities
Schools can approach the task of sorting students to privileged learning opportunities in different ways, potentially creating distinct and durable educational inequality regimes. We test this idea by exploring variation in socioeconomic inequalities in advanced mathematics course-taking across California middle schools during a statewide algebra-for-all initiative. This case provides unique insight into local stratification processes since the s…
Award Given by the Vernon Prize Committee for Volume 40 of Jpam
Reining in Punitive Discipline: Recent Trends in Exclusionary School Discipline Disparities
Concerns around disparities in suspensions and expulsions from schools in the United States have resulted in a concerted effort to reduce the use of exclusionary school discipline. In this article, the authors describe trends in the use of exclusionary discipline in Indiana and Oregon, two U.S. states with different school discipline policy climates. The findings point to a substantial decline in the use of suspensions and other forms of exclusio…
Practicing Parental Involvement: Heterogeneity in Parent Involvement Structures in Charter and Traditional Public Schools
Purpose: This study examines differences in the mechanisms that charter schools and traditional public schools use to facilitate parental school involvement and the degree to which these differences account for the high levels of involvement among charter school parents. Data and Research Methods: We merge data from principals and teachers from the nationally representative Schools and Staffing Survey and National Teacher and Principal Survey wit…
The Kids on the Bus: The Academic Consequences of Diversity‐Driven School Reassignments
Many public school diversity efforts rely on reassigning students from one school to another. While opponents of such efforts articulate concerns about the consequences of reassignments for students' educational experiences, little evidence exists regarding these effects, particularly in contemporary policy contexts. Using an event study design, we leverage data from an innovative socioeconomic school desegregation plan to estimate the effects of…
Remote or Removed: Predicting Successful Engagement with Online Learning during Covid-19
Using data from a spring 2020 survey of nearly 10,000 parents of elementary school parents in one large southeastern public school district, the authors investigate predictors of elementary school student engagement during the initial period of pandemic remote learning. The authors hypothesize that household material and technological resources, school programming and instructional strategies, and family social capital contribute to student engag…
Failing at Remediation? College Remedial Coursetaking, Failure and Long-Term Student Outcomes
Heterogeneous Effects of Early Algebra across California Middle Schools
How should schools assign students to more rigorous math courses so as best to help their academic outcomes? We identify several hundred California middle schools that used 7th-grade test scores to place students into 8th-grade algebra courses and use a regression discontinuity design to estimate average impacts and heterogeneity across schools. Enrolling in 8th-grade algebra boosts students' enrollment in advanced math in ninth grade by 30 perce…
A Letter From the Editors: Reflections on Generative, Cross-Cutting, Transformative, and Timely Education Research
We’re in This Together”: Bridging and Bonding Social Capital in Elementary School PTOs
Scholarship on the links between families and schools encompasses contradictory notions about social capital and its relation to inequality. One view holds that schools can narrow inequality by generating dense relationships among families, while others suggest that advantaged parents can use these networks to hoard opportunities. This multiple case study analyzes qualitative data from diverse North Carolina elementary schools to learn how parent…
Beyond Tracking and Detracking: The Dimensions of Organizational Differentiation in Schools
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 develop empirical measures of five distinct dimensions of within-school cross-classroom tracking systems:…
Is Free and Reduced-Price Lunch a Valid Measure of Educational Disadvantage
Students in the United States whose household income is less than 130% of the poverty line qualify for free lunch, and students whose household income is between 130% and 185% of the poverty line qualify for reduced-price lunch. Education researchers and policymakers often use free and reduced-price lunch (FRPL) status to measure socioeconomic disadvantage. But how valid is this measure? Linking IRS income tax data to school administrative record…
Categorical Inequality: Schools As Sorting Machines
Despite their egalitarian ethos, schools are social sorting machines, creating categories that serve as the foundation of later life inequalities. In this review, we apply the theory of categorical inequality to education, focusing particularly on contemporary American schools. We discuss the range of categories that schools create, adopt, and reinforce, as well as the mechanisms through which these categories contribute to production of inequali…
Evaluating Promising Practices in Undergraduate STEM Lecture Courses
Lynn C. Reimer, Katerina Schenke, Tutrang Nguyen, Diane K. O'Dowd, Thurston Domina, Mark Warschauer, Evaluating Promising Practices in Undergraduate STEM Lecture Courses, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 2, No. 1, Higher Education Effectiveness (April 2016), pp. 212-233
Membership Has Its Privileges: Status Incentives and Categorical Inequality in Education
Prizes - formal systems that publicly allocate rewards for exemplary behavior - play an increasingly important role in a wide array of social settings, including education. In this paper, we evaluate a prize system designed to boost achievement at two high schools by assigning students color-coded ID cards based on a previously low stakes test. Average student achievement on this test increased in the ID card schools beyond what one would expect …
The Links Between Youth Employment and Educational Attainment Across Racial Groups
Research suggests that the relations between adolescent employment and youth development vary by socioeconomic status (SES) and race/ethnicity. However, it is unclear whether the links between paid work and college outcomes vary by either SES or race/ethnicity, or both. Using data from the Educational Longitudinal Study, we find that low-intensity work during high school is associated with positive college outcomes for almost all students, wherea…
Fadeout in an early mathematics intervention: Constraining content or preexisting differences
A robust finding across research on early childhood educational interventions is that the treatment effect diminishes over time, with children not receiving the intervention eventually catching up to children who did. One popular explanation for fadeout of early mathematics interventions is that elementary school teachers may not teach the kind of advanced content that children are prepared for after receiving the intervention, so lower-achieving…
Detracking and Tracking Up: Mathematics Course Placements in California Middle Schools, 2003–2013
Between 2003 and 2013, the proportion of California eighth graders enrolled in algebra or a more advanced course nearly doubled to 65%. In this article, we consider the organizational processes that accompanied this curricular intensification. Facing a complex set of accountability, institutional, technical/functional, and internal political pressures, California schools responded to the algebra-for-all effort in diverse ways. While some schools …
Professional Sense-Makers: Instructional Specialists in Contemporary Schooling
This brief documents the expansion of instructional specialist staffing in U.S. public school districts. We use data from the National Center of Education Statistics’ annual Common Core of Data to chart staffing trends in public school districts between 1997–1998 and 2012–2013. The number of instructional specialists per 1,000 U.S students doubled during that period, and the proportion of districts employing no specialists declined from nearly 20…
Curricular policy as a collective effects problem: A distributional approach
The Changing Bases of Segregation in the United States
The nature and organization of segregation shifted profoundly in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. During the first two-thirds of the century, segregation was defined by the spatial separation of whites and blacks. What changed over time was the level at which this racial separation occurred, as macro-level segregation between states and counties gave way steadily to micro-level segregation between cities and neighborhoo…
Categorical Inequality: Schools As Sorting Machines
Despite their egalitarian ethos, schools are social sorting machines, creating categories that serve as the foundation of later life inequalities. In this review, we apply the theory of categorical inequality to education, focusing particularly on contemporary American schools. We discuss the range of categories that schools create, adopt, and reinforce, as well as the mechanisms through which these categories contribute to production of inequali…
Leveling the Home Advantage: Assessing the Effectiveness of Parental Involvement in Elementary School
In the past two decades, a great deal of energy has been dedicated to improving children's education by increasing parents' involvement in school. However, the evidence on the effectiveness of parental involvement is uneven. Whereas policy makers and theorists have assumed that parental involvement has wide-ranging positive consequences, many studies have shown that it is negatively associated with some children's outcomes. This article uses data…
Is Free and Reduced-Price Lunch a Valid Measure of Educational Disadvantage
Students in the United States whose household income is less than 130% of the poverty line qualify for free lunch, and students whose household income is between 130% and 185% of the poverty line qualify for reduced-price lunch. Education researchers and policymakers often use free and reduced-price lunch (FRPL) status to measure socioeconomic disadvantage. But how valid is this measure? Linking IRS income tax data to school administrative record…
The Link between Educational Expectations and Effort in the College-for-all Era
From the Wisconsin status attainment model to rational choice, classical sociological, social-psychological, and economic theories of student educational transitions have assumed that students' expectations are positively related to their ultimate attainment. However, the growth of the college-for-all ethos raises questions about that assumption. Noting that American students' educational expectations rapidly outpaced their educational attainment…
New Evidence on College Remediation
Additional informationNotes on contributorsPaul AttewellPaul Attewell and David Lavin are professors of sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Thurston Domina is a postdoctoral fellow at the office of Population Research at Princeton University. Tania Levey is an assistant professor of sociology at York College, CUNY.David LavinPaul Attewell and David Lavin are professors of sociology at the Graduate Center of the Ci…
Brain Drain and Brain Gain: Rising Educational Segregation in the United States, 1940–2000
The post‐industrialization of the American economy, combined with the expansion of American higher education, has created a new form of residential segregation. This paper examines recent trends in residential segregation between college graduates and high school graduates, demonstrating that America's educational geography became increasingly uneven between 1940 and 2000. During this period, educational inequality between American census divisio…
What Clean Break: Education and Nonmetropolitan Migration Patterns, 1989-2004
Recent data suggest that nonmetropolitan America is experiencing an outmigration trend. Between 1998 and 2004, more people have moved out of nonmetropolitan areas than moved into these areas. This net outmigration trend presents a fundamental challenge to nonmetropol-itan areas and contradicts the predictions of social scientists who argued that the rural renaissance of the 1970s represented a clean break with earlier patterns of internal migrati…
Beyond Tracking and Detracking: The Dimensions of Organizational Differentiation in Schools
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 develop empirical measures of five distinct dimensions of within-school cross-classroom tracking systems:…
Detracking and Tracking Up: Mathematics Course Placements in California Middle Schools, 2003–2013
Between 2003 and 2013, the proportion of California eighth graders enrolled in algebra or a more advanced course nearly doubled to 65%. In this article, we consider the organizational processes that accompanied this curricular intensification. Facing a complex set of accountability, institutional, technical/functional, and internal political pressures, California schools responded to the algebra-for-all effort in diverse ways. While some schools …
Does Raising the Bar Level the Playing Field: Mathematics Curricular Intensification and Inequality in American High Schools, 1982–2004
Over the past three decades, American high school students’ course taking has rapidly intensified. Between 1982 and 2004, for example, the proportion of high school graduates who earned credit in precalculus or calculus more than tripled. In this article, the authors investigate the consequences of mathematics curricular intensification for social stratification in American high schools. Using representative data from U.S. high school graduates i…
Should Mom go back to school? Post-natal educational attainment and parenting practices
Remote or Removed: Predicting Successful Engagement with Online Learning during Covid-19
Using data from a spring 2020 survey of nearly 10,000 parents of elementary school parents in one large southeastern public school district, the authors investigate predictors of elementary school student engagement during the initial period of pandemic remote learning. The authors hypothesize that household material and technological resources, school programming and instructional strategies, and family social capital contribute to student engag…
We’re in This Together”: Bridging and Bonding Social Capital in Elementary School PTOs
Scholarship on the links between families and schools encompasses contradictory notions about social capital and its relation to inequality. One view holds that schools can narrow inequality by generating dense relationships among families, while others suggest that advantaged parents can use these networks to hoard opportunities. This multiple case study analyzes qualitative data from diverse North Carolina elementary schools to learn how parent…
Fadeout in an early mathematics intervention: Constraining content or preexisting differences
A robust finding across research on early childhood educational interventions is that the treatment effect diminishes over time, with children not receiving the intervention eventually catching up to children who did. One popular explanation for fadeout of early mathematics interventions is that elementary school teachers may not teach the kind of advanced content that children are prepared for after receiving the intervention, so lower-achieving…
Reining in Punitive Discipline: Recent Trends in Exclusionary School Discipline Disparities
Concerns around disparities in suspensions and expulsions from schools in the United States have resulted in a concerted effort to reduce the use of exclusionary school discipline. In this article, the authors describe trends in the use of exclusionary discipline in Indiana and Oregon, two U.S. states with different school discipline policy climates. The findings point to a substantial decline in the use of suspensions and other forms of exclusio…
The Kids on the Bus: The Academic Consequences of Diversity‐Driven School Reassignments
Many public school diversity efforts rely on reassigning students from one school to another. While opponents of such efforts articulate concerns about the consequences of reassignments for students' educational experiences, little evidence exists regarding these effects, particularly in contemporary policy contexts. Using an event study design, we leverage data from an innovative socioeconomic school desegregation plan to estimate the effects of…
Professional Sense-Makers: Instructional Specialists in Contemporary Schooling
This brief documents the expansion of instructional specialist staffing in U.S. public school districts. We use data from the National Center of Education Statistics’ annual Common Core of Data to chart staffing trends in public school districts between 1997–1998 and 2012–2013. The number of instructional specialists per 1,000 U.S students doubled during that period, and the proportion of districts employing no specialists declined from nearly 20…
Using Value-Added Models to Measure Teacher Effects on Students’ Motivation and Achievement
Value-added (VA) models measure teacher contributions to student learning and are increasingly employed in educational reform efforts. Using data from 35 seventh-grade teachers and 2,026 students across seven schools, we employ VA methods to measure teacher contributions to students’ motivational orientations (mastery and performance achievement goals) and their mathematics performance. The analysis suggests less variation in teachers’ contributi…
Heterogeneous Effects of Early Algebra across California Middle Schools
How should schools assign students to more rigorous math courses so as best to help their academic outcomes? We identify several hundred California middle schools that used 7th-grade test scores to place students into 8th-grade algebra courses and use a regression discontinuity design to estimate average impacts and heterogeneity across schools. Enrolling in 8th-grade algebra boosts students' enrollment in advanced math in ninth grade by 30 perce…
The Links Between Youth Employment and Educational Attainment Across Racial Groups
Research suggests that the relations between adolescent employment and youth development vary by socioeconomic status (SES) and race/ethnicity. However, it is unclear whether the links between paid work and college outcomes vary by either SES or race/ethnicity, or both. Using data from the Educational Longitudinal Study, we find that low-intensity work during high school is associated with positive college outcomes for almost all students, wherea…
The black middle class: Progress, prospects, and puzzles
Curricular policy as a collective effects problem: A distributional approach
Membership Has Its Privileges: Status Incentives and Categorical Inequality in Education
Prizes - formal systems that publicly allocate rewards for exemplary behavior - play an increasingly important role in a wide array of social settings, including education. In this paper, we evaluate a prize system designed to boost achievement at two high schools by assigning students color-coded ID cards based on a previously low stakes test. Average student achievement on this test increased in the ID card schools beyond what one would expect …
The Case for Dreaming Big
The American educational system is no fairy tale. Students who think that it takes nothing more than a wish upon a star to make their educational dreams come true are sure to be disappointed. We agree with Professor Rosenbaum: In order to realize their educational dreams, students must invest considerable effort. Indeed, we believe so strongly in the central role of effort in the status attainment process that we made it—not test scores or cognit…
The black middle class: Progress, prospects, and puzzles
Leveling the Home Advantage: Assessing the Effectiveness of Parental Involvement in Elementary School
In the past two decades, a great deal of energy has been dedicated to improving children's education by increasing parents' involvement in school. However, the evidence on the effectiveness of parental involvement is uneven. Whereas policy makers and theorists have assumed that parental involvement has wide-ranging positive consequences, many studies have shown that it is negatively associated with some children's outcomes. This article uses data…
Brain Drain and Brain Gain: Rising Educational Segregation in the United States, 1940–2000
The post‐industrialization of the American economy, combined with the expansion of American higher education, has created a new form of residential segregation. This paper examines recent trends in residential segregation between college graduates and high school graduates, demonstrating that America's educational geography became increasingly uneven between 1940 and 2000. During this period, educational inequality between American census divisio…
New Evidence on College Remediation
Additional informationNotes on contributorsPaul AttewellPaul Attewell and David Lavin are professors of sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Thurston Domina is a postdoctoral fellow at the office of Population Research at Princeton University. Tania Levey is an assistant professor of sociology at York College, CUNY.David LavinPaul Attewell and David Lavin are professors of sociology at the Graduate Center of the Ci…
What Clean Break: Education and Nonmetropolitan Migration Patterns, 1989-2004
Recent data suggest that nonmetropolitan America is experiencing an outmigration trend. Between 1998 and 2004, more people have moved out of nonmetropolitan areas than moved into these areas. This net outmigration trend presents a fundamental challenge to nonmetropol-itan areas and contradicts the predictions of social scientists who argued that the rural renaissance of the 1970s represented a clean break with earlier patterns of internal migrati…
Raising the Bar: Curricular Intensity and Academic Performance
Using national transcript data, the authors examine inequality in access to an advanced curriculum in high school and assess the consequences of curricular intensity on test scores and college entry. Inequalities in curricular intensity are primarily explained by student socioeconomic status effects that operate within schools rather than between schools. They find significant positive effects of taking a more intense curriculum on 12th-grade tes…
The Changing Bases of Segregation in the United States
The nature and organization of segregation shifted profoundly in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. During the first two-thirds of the century, segregation was defined by the spatial separation of whites and blacks. What changed over time was the level at which this racial separation occurred, as macro-level segregation between states and counties gave way steadily to micro-level segregation between cities and neighborhoo…
Stymied Mobility or Temporary Lull? The Puzzle of Lagging Hispanic College Degree Attainment
We assess the intergenerational educational mobility of recent cohorts of high school graduates to consider whether Hispanics' lagging postsecondary attainment reflects a temporary lull due to immigration of low education parents or a more enduring pattern of unequal transmission of social status relative to whites. Using data from three national longitudinal studies, a recent longitudinal study of Texas high school seniors and a sample of studen…
Educational imposters and fake degrees
The Link between Educational Expectations and Effort in the College-for-all Era
From the Wisconsin status attainment model to rational choice, classical sociological, social-psychological, and economic theories of student educational transitions have assumed that students' expectations are positively related to their ultimate attainment. However, the growth of the college-for-all ethos raises questions about that assumption. Noting that American students' educational expectations rapidly outpaced their educational attainment…
The Case for Dreaming Big
The American educational system is no fairy tale. Students who think that it takes nothing more than a wish upon a star to make their educational dreams come true are sure to be disappointed. We agree with Professor Rosenbaum: In order to realize their educational dreams, students must invest considerable effort. Indeed, we believe so strongly in the central role of effort in the status attainment process that we made it—not test scores or cognit…
Does Raising the Bar Level the Playing Field: Mathematics Curricular Intensification and Inequality in American High Schools, 1982–2004
Over the past three decades, American high school students’ course taking has rapidly intensified. Between 1982 and 2004, for example, the proportion of high school graduates who earned credit in precalculus or calculus more than tripled. In this article, the authors investigate the consequences of mathematics curricular intensification for social stratification in American high schools. Using representative data from U.S. high school graduates i…
Should Mom go back to school? Post-natal educational attainment and parenting practices
Using Value-Added Models to Measure Teacher Effects on Students’ Motivation and Achievement
Value-added (VA) models measure teacher contributions to student learning and are increasingly employed in educational reform efforts. Using data from 35 seventh-grade teachers and 2,026 students across seven schools, we employ VA methods to measure teacher contributions to students’ motivational orientations (mastery and performance achievement goals) and their mathematics performance. The analysis suggests less variation in teachers’ contributi…
An Education in Politics: The Origins and Evolution of No Child Left Behind
Professional Sense-Makers: Instructional Specialists in Contemporary Schooling
This brief documents the expansion of instructional specialist staffing in U.S. public school districts. We use data from the National Center of Education Statistics’ annual Common Core of Data to chart staffing trends in public school districts between 1997–1998 and 2012–2013. The number of instructional specialists per 1,000 U.S students doubled during that period, and the proportion of districts employing no specialists declined from nearly 20…
Curricular policy as a collective effects problem: A distributional approach
Evaluating Promising Practices in Undergraduate STEM Lecture Courses
Lynn C. Reimer, Katerina Schenke, Tutrang Nguyen, Diane K. O'Dowd, Thurston Domina, Mark Warschauer, Evaluating Promising Practices in Undergraduate STEM Lecture Courses, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 2, No. 1, Higher Education Effectiveness (April 2016), pp. 212-233
Membership Has Its Privileges: Status Incentives and Categorical Inequality in Education
Prizes - formal systems that publicly allocate rewards for exemplary behavior - play an increasingly important role in a wide array of social settings, including education. In this paper, we evaluate a prize system designed to boost achievement at two high schools by assigning students color-coded ID cards based on a previously low stakes test. Average student achievement on this test increased in the ID card schools beyond what one would expect …
The Links Between Youth Employment and Educational Attainment Across Racial Groups
Research suggests that the relations between adolescent employment and youth development vary by socioeconomic status (SES) and race/ethnicity. However, it is unclear whether the links between paid work and college outcomes vary by either SES or race/ethnicity, or both. Using data from the Educational Longitudinal Study, we find that low-intensity work during high school is associated with positive college outcomes for almost all students, wherea…
Fadeout in an early mathematics intervention: Constraining content or preexisting differences
A robust finding across research on early childhood educational interventions is that the treatment effect diminishes over time, with children not receiving the intervention eventually catching up to children who did. One popular explanation for fadeout of early mathematics interventions is that elementary school teachers may not teach the kind of advanced content that children are prepared for after receiving the intervention, so lower-achieving…
Detracking and Tracking Up: Mathematics Course Placements in California Middle Schools, 2003–2013
Between 2003 and 2013, the proportion of California eighth graders enrolled in algebra or a more advanced course nearly doubled to 65%. In this article, we consider the organizational processes that accompanied this curricular intensification. Facing a complex set of accountability, institutional, technical/functional, and internal political pressures, California schools responded to the algebra-for-all effort in diverse ways. While some schools …
Categorical Inequality: Schools As Sorting Machines
Despite their egalitarian ethos, schools are social sorting machines, creating categories that serve as the foundation of later life inequalities. In this review, we apply the theory of categorical inequality to education, focusing particularly on contemporary American schools. We discuss the range of categories that schools create, adopt, and reinforce, as well as the mechanisms through which these categories contribute to production of inequali…
Is Free and Reduced-Price Lunch a Valid Measure of Educational Disadvantage
Students in the United States whose household income is less than 130% of the poverty line qualify for free lunch, and students whose household income is between 130% and 185% of the poverty line qualify for reduced-price lunch. Education researchers and policymakers often use free and reduced-price lunch (FRPL) status to measure socioeconomic disadvantage. But how valid is this measure? Linking IRS income tax data to school administrative record…
Beyond Tracking and Detracking: The Dimensions of Organizational Differentiation in Schools
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 develop empirical measures of five distinct dimensions of within-school cross-classroom tracking systems:…
Sociology (29 works) · Political science (22 works) · Psychology (22 works) · School Choice and Performance (19 works) · Economics (14 works) · Mathematics education (14 works) · Demography (13 works) · Mathematics (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Demographic economics (11 works)