One potentially underestimated aspect of resource inequity in U.S. public schools is access to social capital in external organizational environments. This research examines partnerships among 211 New York City high schools and 918 partner organizations from 2001 to 2005 as sources of external school social capital providing resources that can…

Existing research has found evidence of widespread anti-Asian bias in the United States, yet limited work has examined whether anti-Asian biases affect parents' school preferences. In this article, using a conjoint experiment, we examine White parents' views on schools with varying percentages of Asian students. We find that respondents strongly…

Status transmission theory argues that leading educational institutions prepare individuals from privileged backgrounds for positions of prestige and power in their societies. We examine the educational backgrounds of more than 2,900 members of the U.S. cultural elite and compare these backgrounds to a sample of nearly 4,000 business and political…

Social origin affects not only access to higher education but also how students proceed through higher education. Based on the argument that an advantageous family background facilitates linear study trajectories through parents' provision of cultural and economic resources, this article investigates study trajectories in Germany and the United…

Why are some schools home to Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim student organizations but others are not? In this article, we draw on theories of student mobilization, especially recent theoretical insights on educational opportunity structures, to understand the factors associated with the presence and number of minority religious student…

The advent of mass schooling played a pivotal role in European societies of the later nineteenth century, transforming rural peasants into national citizens. The late-twentieth-century global expansion of higher education ushered in new transformations, propelling societal rationalization and organizing, and knitting the world into a more…

Landmark research from before the 2010s shows that college women rarely held institutions responsible for allowing rape-prone party contexts to persist and failing to support survivors. Yet the college landscape has changed profoundly since these studies were published, with prominent anti-rape campaigns and new guidelines to Title IX policy. To…

Research shows charter schools are more segregated by race and class than are traditional public schools. I investigate an underexamined mechanism for this segregation: Charter schools project identities corresponding to parents' race- and class-specific parenting styles and educational values. I use computational text analysis to detect the…

Expanded school-choice policies have weakened the traditional link between residence and school assignment. These policies have created new school options and new labor for families to manage and divide. Drawing on interviews with 90 mothers and 12 fathers of elementary-age children, I demonstrate that mothers across class, racial, and ethnic…

Public education relies heavily on data to document stratified inputs and outcomes, and to design interventions aimed at reducing disparities. Yet despite the promise and prevalence of data-driven policies and practices, inequalities persist. Indeed, contemporary scholarship has begun to question whether and how processes such as quantification…

This study explores the relationship between biracial identity development and college context. I draw on interviews with 49 black-white biracial first- and second-year students attending historically black colleges/universities (HBCUs) or historically white colleges/universities (HWCUs) and follow-up interviews with the same students at the end…

This article examines the rise of "test-optional" college admissions policies since the 1990s. I argue that the rationalization of college admissions policies after World War II contributed to the rise of "meritocratic" stratification (in policy) and standardized tests, like the SAT, but it also led to the expansion and…

School choice expansion in recent decades has weakened the strong link between neighborhoods and schools created under a strict residence-based school assignment system, decoupling residential and school enrollment decisions for some families. Recent work suggests that the neighborhood-school link is weakening the most in neighborhoods…

Debates in education policy draw on different theories about how to raise children's achievement. The "school competition" theory holds that achievement rises when students can choose among competing schools. The "school resources" theory holds that achievement rises with schools' resources per student. The "family…

Influential reports about the "learning crisis" in the global South generally pay insufficient attention to social inequalities in learning. In this study, we explore the association between family socioeconomic status and learning outcomes in 10 francophone African countries using data from the Programme for the Analysis of Education…