Using data on ninth graders, math teachers, and schools from the nationally representative High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, we investigate the following questions: (1) How do ninth graders' perceptions of their math teachers as equitable relate to their math identity at the intersection of adolescents' race and gender? and (2) Do differences in the percentage of students at the school who share the adolescent's race moderate (i.e., differentiate) the salience of perceptions of math teachers for adolescents' math identities? Our results suggest that adolescents who perceive their math teachers as equitable typically have higher levels of math identity regardless of their race or gender. Adolescents' perceptions of their math teachers as equitable are most salient for adolescents' math identity in racially diverse schools, where racial differences and stereotypes may be more visible. Findings also indicate the seeming resistance of Black youth to racist stereotypes, whose math identity remains high regardless of their perceptions of their teachers.

Most U.S. students attend racially segregated schools. To understand this pattern, I employ a survey experiment with New York City families actively choosing schools and investigate whether they express racialized school preferences. I find school racial composition heterogeneously affects white, black, Latinx, and Asian parents' and students' willingness to attend schools. Independent of characteristics potentially correlated with race, white and Asian families preferred white schools over black and Latinx schools, Latinx families preferred Latinx schools over black schools, and black families preferred black schools over white schools. Results, importantly, demonstrate that racial composition has larger effects on white and Latinx parents' preferences compared with white and Latinx students and smaller effects on black parents compared with black students. To ensure results were not an artifact of experimental conditions, I validate findings using administrative data on New York City families' actual school choices in 2013. Both analyses establish that families express heterogenous racialized school preferences.

We ask whether patterns of racial/ethnic and socioeconomic stratification in educational attainment are amplified or attenuated when we take a longer view of educational careers. We propose a model of to understand how educational inequalities evolve over the life course. Distinct from cumulative advantage, staged advantage asserts that inequalities in education ebb and flow over the life course as the population at risk of making each educational transition changes along with the constraints they confront in seeking more education. Results based on data from the 2014 follow-up of the sophomore cohort of High School and Beyond offer partial support for our hypotheses. The educational attainment process was far from over for our respondents as they aged through their 30s and 40s: more than six of ten continued their formal training during this period and four of ten earned an additional credential. Patterns of educational stratification at midlife became more pronounced in some ways, as women pulled further ahead of men in their educational attainments and parental education (but not income), and high school academic achievement continued to shape educational trajectories at the bachelor's degree level and beyond. However, African American respondents gained on White respondents during this life phase through continued formal (largely academic) training and slightly greater conditional probabilities of graduate or professional degree attainment; social background fails to predict earning an associate degree. These results, showing educational changes and transitions far into adulthood, have implications for our understanding of the complex role of education in stratification processes.

Utilizing the High School Longitudinal Study, a nationally representative sample of U.S. high school students, this study investigates the factors that predict different beliefs about gendered math ability and the potential consequences for students' choices to enter gender-segregated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors in college. Among other results, analyses reveal that while about 25 percent of students report a traditionally stereotypical belief in male superiority, about 20 percent report a counter-stereotypical belief in female superiority; among female students, such beliefs are more common among black students. Further, models reveal a robust association between holding counter-stereotypical beliefs and the likelihood that women choose biological science majors, which are female dominated, compared to non-STEM fields. Among men, holding counter-stereotypical beliefs is associated with a lower likelihood of majoring in physical science, computer science, math, and engineering fields, which are strongly male dominated, versus non-STEM fields. Implications for gender inequality in STEM fields are discussed.

In recent decades, the Black-White test score disparity has decreased, while the test score disparity between children of high- versus low-income parents has increased. This study focuses on a comparison that has, to date, fallen between the separate literatures on these diverging trends - Black and White students whose parents have similarly low, middle, or high incomes (i.e., same-income or race-within-income). To do so, I draw on three nationally representative datasets on ninth or tenth graders, covering the period from 1960 to 2009, all of which contain information on students' math test scores. I find that math test score disparities between Black and White students with same-income parents are to Blacks' disadvantage. Although these disparities have decreased since 1960, in 2009, they remain substantively large, statistically significant, and largest between children of the highest income parents. Further, family and school characteristics that scholars commonly use to explain test score disparities by race or by income have accounted for markedly decreasing shares of race-within-income disparities over time. The study integrates the literatures on test score disparities by race and by income with needed attention to race's historical and continued structural influence, net of parental income, on students' educational experiences and test score outcomes.

Broad higher education contexts shape how community college students and postsecondary personnel approach transfer from community colleges to baccalaureate-granting institutions. We leverage the concept of strategic action fields, an organizational theory illuminating processes that play out as actors determine "who gets what" in an existing power structure, to understand the role of political-ecological contexts in "vertical" transfer. Drawing on interviews with administrators, transfer services personnel, and transfer-intending students at two Texas community college districts and with administrators, admissions staff, and transfer personnel at public universities throughout the state, we examine how institutional actors and students create, maintain, and respond to rules and norms in the community college transfer field. Our results suggest university administrators, faculty, and staff hold dominant positions in the field, setting the rules and norms for credit transfer and applicability. Students, who hold the least privilege, must invest time and energy to gather information about transfer pathways and policies as their primary means of meeting their educational aspirations. The complex structure of information-wherein each institution provides its own transfer resources, with little collaboration and minimal alignment-systematically disadvantages community college students. Although some community college personnel voice frustration that the field disadvantages transfer-intending community college students, they maintain the social order by continuing to implement and reinforce the rules and norms set by universities.

Debates in education policy draw on different theories about how to raise children's achievement. The theory holds that achievement rises when students can choose among competing schools. The theory holds that achievement rises with schools' resources per student. The theory holds that achievement rises as parents become more educated and earn higher incomes. We test all three theories in Chile between 2002 and 2013, when reading and math scores rose by 0.2 to 0.3 standard deviations, as school competition, school resources, and family resources all increased. We compare Chilean municipalities in a difference-in-differences analysis, asking whether test scores rose fastest in municipalities with greater increases in school competition, school resources, or family resources. We find that municipal test scores did not rise with school competition but did rise with family resources (parental education, not income) and, to a smaller extent, with school resources (as measured by class sizes). Results favor the family resource theory, and to a lesser extent the school resource theory, but not the school competition theory.

Decades of research have estimated the effect of entering a community college on bachelor's degree attainment. In this study, we examined the influence of methodological choices, including sample restrictions and identification strategies, on estimated effects from studies published between 1970 and 2017. After systematically reviewing the literature, we leveraged meta-analysis to assess average estimates and examine the role of moderators. In our preferred model, entering a community college was associated with a 23-percentage-point decrease in the probability of baccalaureate attainment, on average, compared with entering a four-year college. The size of effects appeared to grow over the past three decades, though this coincides with substantial shifts in the college-going population. Methodological choices, particularly how researchers define the treatment group, explain some variation in estimates across studies. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for future inquiry and for policy.

When do children become unequal in reading and math skills? Some research claims that inequality grows mainly before school begins. Some research claims that schools cause inequality to grow. And some research-including the 2004 study "Are Schools the Great Equalizer?"-claims that inequality grows mainly during summer vacations. Unfortunately, the test scores used in the Great Equalizer study suffered from a measurement artifact that exaggerated estimates of inequality growth. In addition, the Great Equalizer study is dated and its participants are no longer school-aged. In this article, we replicate the Great Equalizer study using better test scores in both the original data and a newer cohort of children. When we use the new test scores, we find that variance is substantial at the start of kindergarten and does not grow but actually shrinks over the next two to three years. This finding, which was not evident in the original Great Equalizer study, implicates the years before kindergarten as the primary source of inequality in elementary reading and math. Total score variance grows during most summers and shrinks during most school years, suggesting that schools reduce inequality overall. Changes in inequality are small after kindergarten and do not replicate consistently across grades, subjects, or cohorts. That said, socioeconomic gaps tend to shrink during the school year and grow during the summer, while the black-white gap tends to follow the opposite pattern.

Are equal educational opportunities sufficient to narrow long-standing economic and racial inequalities in achievement? In this paper, I test the hypothesis that poor and minority students benefit less from effective elementary school teachers than their non-poor and White peers, thus exacerbating inequalities. I use administrative data from public elementary schools in North Carolina to calculate value-added measures of teachers' success in promoting learning and assess benefits for different students. Results suggest that differential benefits of effective teachers uniquely exacerbate Black-White inequalities while not contributing to economic achievement gaps. Racial differences are small relative to the benefits for all groups on average, not explained by differences in prior achievement, and largest for low-achieving students. While teacher-related learning opportunities at school are crucial for all students, these differences point to a relative disconnect between typical school learning opportunities and low-achieving minority students.

I investigate how the educational demands of local labor markets shape high school course offerings and student course taking. Using the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 linked to the U.S. Census 2000, I focus on local economic variation in the share of jobs that do not demand a bachelor's degree. I find that schools in local labor markets with higher concentrations of subbaccalaureate jobs devote a larger share of their course offerings to career and technical education (CTE) courses and a smaller share to advanced college-preparatory courses compared to schools in labor markets with lower concentrations of subbaccalaureate jobs, even net of school resources. Students in labor markets with higher concentrations of subbaccalaureate jobs take greater numbers of CTE courses, and higher-achieving students in these labor markets are less likely to take advanced math and Advanced Placement/International Baccalaureate courses. These course-taking disparities are largely due to school course offerings. This study shows how local economic inequalities shape high school curricular stratification, and suggests that school curricula linked to the educational demands of local jobs delimits the college preparation opportunities of high-achieving students.

In this study I hypothesize a larger penalty of obesity on teacher-assessed academic performance for white girls in English, where femininity is privileged, than in math, where stereotypical femininity is perceived to be a detriment. This pattern of associations would be expected if obesity largely influences academic performance through social pathways such as discrimination and stigma. In the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (~age 9) and the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997 (~age 18), I find obesity to be associated with a penalty on academic performance among white girls in English but not in math, while no association is found in either subject for white boys or for black students net of controls. Findings suggest that the relationship between obesity and academic performance may result largely from how educational institutions interact with bodies of different sizes, rather than primarily via constraints on physical health.

Parental income and wealth contribute to children's success but are at least partly endogenous to parents' cognitive and noncognitive skills. We estimate the degree to which mothers' skills measured in early adulthood confound the relationship between their economic resources and their children's postsecondary education outcomes. Analyses of NLSY79 suggest that maternal cognitive and noncognitive skills attenuate half of parental income's association with child baccalaureate college attendance, a fifth of its association with elite college attendance, and a quarter of its association with bachelor's degree completion. Maternal skills likewise attenuate a third of parental wealth's association with children's baccalaureate college attendance, half of its association with elite college attendance, and a fifth of its association with bachelor's degree completion. Observational studies of the relationship between parents' economic resources and children's postsecondary attainments that fail to account for parental skills risk seriously overstating the benefits of parental income and wealth.

Our understanding about the relationship between education and lifetime earnings often neglects differences by field of study. Utilizing data that matches respondents in the to their longitudinal earnings records based on administrative tax information, we investigate the trajectories of annual earnings following the same individuals over 20 years and then estimate the long-term effects of field of study on earnings for U.S. men and women. Our results provide new evidence revealing large lifetime earnings gaps across field of study. We show important differences in individuals' earnings trajectories across the different stages of the work-life by field of study. In addition, the gaps in 40-year (i.e., ages 20 to 59) median lifetime earnings among college graduates by field of study are larger, in many instances, than the median gap between high school graduates and college graduates overall. Significant variation is also found among graduate degree holders. Our results uncover important similarities and differences between men and women with regard to the long-term earnings differentials associated with field of study. In general, these findings underscore field of study as a critical dimension of horizontal stratification in educational attainment. Other implications of the empirical findings are also discussed.

No recent reform has had so profound an effect as no-excuses schools in increasing the achievement of low-income, black and Hispanic students. In the past decade, no-excuses schools-whose practices include extended instructional time, data-driven instruction, ongoing professional development, and a highly structured disciplinary system-have emerged as one of the most influential urban school-reform models. Yet almost no research has been conducted on the everyday experiences of students and teachers inside these schools. Drawing from 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork inside one no-excuses school and interviews with 92 school administrators, teachers, and students, I argue that even in a school promoting social mobility, teachers still reinforce class-based skills and behaviors. Because of these schools' emphasis on order as a prerequisite to raising test scores, teachers stress behaviors that undermine success for middle-class children. As a consequence, these schools develop worker-learners-children who monitor themselves, hold back their opinions, and defer to authority-rather than lifelong learners. I discuss the implications of these findings for market-based educational reform, inequality, and research on noncognitive skills.

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. Building on recent gender theories, we argue that widely shared and hegemonic gender beliefs manifest differently across schools so that the gender-specific formation of study plans is shaped by the local environment of high schools. Using the National Education Longitudinal Study, we first show large variations between high schools in the ability to attract students to STEM fields conditional on a large set of pre-high school measures. Schools that are successful in attracting students to these fields reduce the gender gap by 25 percent or more. As a first step toward understanding what matters about schools, we then estimate the effect of two concrete high school characteristics on plans to major in STEM fields in college-a high school's curriculum in STEM and gender segregation of extracurricular activities. These factors have a substantial effect on the gender gap in plans to major in STEM: a finding that is reaffirmed in a number of sensitivity analyses. Our focus on the high school context opens concrete avenues for policy intervention and is of central theoretical importance to understand the gender gap in orientations toward STEM fields.

How do proficiency-based accountability systems affect inequality in academic achievement? This paper reconciles mixed findings in the literature by demonstrating that three factors jointly determine accountability's impact. First, by analyzing student-level data from a large urban school district, we find that when educators face accountability pressure, they focus attention on students closest to proficiency. We refer to this practice as , and show that the difficulty of the proficiency standard affects whether lower or higher performing students gain most on high-stakes tests used to evaluate schools. Less difficult proficiency standards decrease inequality in high-stakes achievement, while more difficult ones increase it. Second, we show that educators emphasize test-specific skills with students near proficiency, a practice that we refer to as . As a result, the effects of accountability pressure differ across high and low-stakes tests; we find no effects on inequality in low-stakes reading and math tests of similar skills. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence that instructional triage is most pronounced in the lowest performing schools. We conclude by discussing how these findings shape our understanding of accountability's impacts on educational inequality.

Educational outcomes vary dramatically across schools in the United States. Many under-performing 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, estimating the effect of school violence on learning is difficult due to potential selection bias and the confounding of other school-level problems. Using detailed crime data from the Chicago Police Department, complete administrative records from the Chicago Public Schools, and school climate surveys conducted by the Consortium on Chicago School Research (2002-10), this study exploits variation in violent crime rates within schools over time to estimate its effect on academic achievement. School and neighborhood fixed-effects models show that violent crime rates have a negative effect on test scores, but not on grades. This effect is more likely related to direct reductions in learning, through cognitive stress and classroom disruptions, than changes in perceived safety, general school climate, or discipline practices.

Stereotype threat is a widely supported theory for understanding the racial achievement gap in college grade performance. However, today's minority college students are increasingly of immigrant origins, and it is unclear whether two dispositional mechanisms that may increase susceptibility to stereotype threat are applicable to immigrants. We use survey data to examine whether and how negative ability stereotypes affect the grades of 1,865 first, second, and third generation or higher (domestic) minority students at 28 selective American colleges. Structural equation model results indicate that first generation immigrants are highly-resistant to both dispositional identity threat mechanisms we consider. Second generation immigrants experience only certain dispositional elements of identity threat. Drawing on research in social psychology, we suggest immigrants tend to resist stereotype threat in part due to the primacy of their immigrant identities and their connectedness to the opportunity structure of mainstream society.

Why do men in the United States today complete less schooling than women? One reason may be gender differences in early self-regulation and pro-social behaviors. Scholars have found that boys' early behavioral disadvantage predicts their lower average academic achievement during elementary school. In this study, I examine longer-term effects: do these early behavioral differences predict boys' lower rates of high school graduation, college enrollment and graduation, and fewer years of schooling completed in adulthood? If so, through what pathways are they linked? I leverage a nationally representative sample of children born in the 1980s to women in their early-to-mid-20s and followed into adulthood. I use decomposition and path analytic tools to show that boys' higher average levels of behavior problems at age 4 to 5 years help explain the current gender gap in schooling by age 26 to 29, controlling for other observed early childhood factors. In addition, I find that early behavior problems predict outcomes more for boys than for girls. Early behavior problems matter for adult educational attainment because they tend to predict later behavior problems and lower achievement.

Rising student debt has sparked concerns about its impact on the transition to adulthood. In this paper, we examine the claim that student debt is leading to a rise in "boomeranging", or returning home, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 Cohort and discrete time event history models. We have four findings. First, student loan debt is not associated with boomeranging in the complete sample. However, we find that the association differs by race, such that the link between student debt and returning home is stronger for black than white youth. Third, degree completion is a strong predictor of returning home, whereby those who fail to attain a degree have an increased risk of boomeranging. Fourth, young adult role transitions and socioeconomic well-being are associated with boomeranging. Findings suggest that rising debt has created new risks, and may reproduce social inequalities in the transition to adulthood.