Although there is an abundance of research on the association of school poverty (or socioeconomic status) and test score level, there is very little rigorous longitudinal evidence on the cumulative effects of exposure to differing school contexts. Drawing from methods used first in epidemiology and then in neighborhood effects research, we use…

Many developing countries have experienced increasing spatial inequality, but little is known about the effect of community disadvantages on educational attainment in these societies. Using data from the China Family Panel Studies (2010-2016), I examine the effect of community socioeconomic status (SES) on the transition into high school in urban…

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…

Given the dominance of residentially based school assignment, prior researchers have conceptualized K-12 enrollment decisions as beyond the purview of school actors. This paper questions the continued relevance of this assumption by studying the behavior of guidance counselors charged with implementing New York City's universal high school choice…

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…

Barbara Schneider is the John A. Hannah Chair and University Distinguished Professor in the College of Education and Department of Sociology at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on how the social contexts of schools and families influence the academic and social well being of adolescents as they move into adulthood. In this article…

in this article, Florencia Torche, professor of sociology at New York University, reflects on the central question posed by the Coleman Report: What role do schools play in promoting equality of opportunity? The Coleman Report relied on analysis of variance and regression analysis, but over the past 50 years, social scientists have developed new…

In the half century since the 1966 Coleman Report, scholars have yet to develop a consensus regarding the relationship between schools and inequality. The Coleman Report suggested that schools play little role in generating achievement gaps, but social scientists have identified many ways in which schools provide better learning environments to…

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…

Large achievement gaps exist between high- and low-income students and between black and white students. This article explores one explanation for such gaps: income segregation between school districts, which creates inequality in the economic and social resources available in advantaged and disadvantaged students' school contexts. Drawing on…

Country rankings based on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) invite politicians and specialists to speculate about the reasons their countries did well or failed to do well. Rarely, however, do we hear from the students on whose performance these rankings are based. This omission is unfortunate for two reasons. First,…

Schools and neighborhoods are thought to be two of the most important contextual influences on student academic outcomes. Drawing on a unique data set that permits simultaneous estimation of neighborhood and school contributions to student test score gains, we analyze the distributions of these contributions to consider the relative importance of…

Do schools reduce or perpetuate inequality by race and family income? Most studies conclude that schools play only a small role in explaining socioeconomic and racial disparities in educational outcomes, but they usually draw this conclusion based solely on test scores. We reconsider this finding using longitudinal data on test scores and…

Reducing socioeconomic differences in college transfer requires understanding how and why parental education, occupational class, and family income are associated with changing colleges. Building on prior studies of traditional community college transfer, the authors explore relationships between those factors and two types of transfer among…

Why does the United States lag behind so many other countries on international education assessments? The traditional view targets school-based explanations--U.S. schools attract poorer teachers and lack the proper incentives. But the U.S. educational system may also serve children with comparatively greater academic challenges as a result of…