Narrative storytelling surrounds us. Narratives are especially salient in politics, as policy problems do not simply exist, but are actively created through the stories policy actors tell. Scholars introduced the narrative policy framework (NPF) to create a generalized framework for studying how policy actors use storytelling strategically to…

Despite evidence of the benefits of early care and education (ECE) for child development and family employment, the supply of providers is scarce and variable; leading many families with young children to experience limited and inequitable access. To examine the multidetermined nature of access, this study leverages a multidimensional,…

Charter school policy represents two simultaneous forms of accountability, in which schools are accountable to both parents and authorizers. This study of a K-8 charter renewal decision interrogates these accountability relationships and the role of race and power in privileging the interests of particular stakeholders over others. Using…

Books shape how children learn about society and norms, in part through representation of different characters. We use computational tools to characterize representation in children's books widely read in homes, classrooms, and libraries over the last century, and describe economic forces that may contribute to these patterns. We introduce new…

In most stratification research, race is treated as a static and one-dimensional individual characteristic, though a growing literature indicates dynamic and multidimensional measures better represent experiences of racial categorization and inequality. The authors leverage such measures to explore the relationship between material hardship and…

Why are some fields and occupations more diverse than others? In this review, we describe a conceptual framework--the field-specific ability beliefs (FAB) model--that provides a promising answer to this question. This model proposes that gender and racial/ethnic imbalances in a field or occupation result in part from the confluence of two beliefs:…

It has only recently become possible to assess librarian staffing at school level, due to the long interval between the two most recent datasets from NCES's periodic sample survey of schools. In 2023, the National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS) released long-awaited 2020-21 school-level data--the first from that survey since 2015-16. These…

We center the voice of Dwyan Moore, a Black 12-year-old boy, during his transition of being diagnosed with a learning dis/Ability. We do so to grapple with the problem of disproportionate representation in special education along race and dis/Ability, with particular attention to educational leadership. Disproportionate representation is a…

Making school meaningful is a widely accepted goal in education, yet "what" is considered meaningful, meaningful to "whom," and "why," leaves room for interrogation. This sequential explanatory mixed methods study aims to understand: (1) The extent to which students experience meaningful education at EL Education…

The way that people of different identities are portrayed in children's books can send subconscious messages about how positively or negatively children should think about people with those identities. These messages can then shape the next generation's perceptions and attitudes about people, which can have important implications for belief…

This brief analyzes 4-year graduation rates among students ever classified as English learners (ever-ELs) and those never classified as English learners (never-ELs) at the intersections of gender, race/ethnicity, and neighborhood income. We follow two cohorts of New York City students who entered ninth grade in 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 (N =…

Racial inequities in school discipline are well-established, but most studies have examined disparities at the school or district level rather than the individual level. Examining how individual teacher characteristics relate to discipline disparities could yield important information for consultation. We utilized a sample of 300 teachers (each…

Demonstrating how race is socially constructed has been a core sociological objective, yet many individuals continue to hold essentialist and other concepts of what races are and how to account for group differences. These conceptualizations have crucial consequences for intergroup attitudes, support for social policies, and structures of…

In this study, we identified the specific discipline decision situations (i.e., vulnerable decision points [VDPs]) that contribute most to racial discipline disparities from a sample of 2020 schools across the United States. We also examined how much VDPs contributed to overall discipline disparities and the extent which there was similarity among…

Images in children's books convey messages about society and the roles that people play in it. Understanding these messages requires systematic measurement of who is represented. Computer vision face detection tools can provide such measurements; however, state-of-the-art face detection models were trained with photographs, and 80\% of images in…