“We Don't Know How to Do This”: Rural Parents' Perspectives on and Roles in Enrollment at a Private,Selective Liberal Arts College

Rural youth trail their non-rural counterparts in college enrollment and attainment, especially for degrees from selective schools; these gaps further spatial inequality in the United States. Much research has focused on rural parents as impediments to rural college-going: many rural parents did not attend college, and their educational aspirations for their children are lower than those of urban parents. However, every year, thousands of rural students do head to college, even to selective schools, and little is known about their parents' influence on their enrollment. This qualitative study focuses on rural parents without a bachelors degree, investigating the roles they play in their children's aspirations and enrollment at a private, selective liberal arts college and examining their perspectives on this type of school. The results suggest that parents are an important source of social capital, supporting aspirations and enrollment. They also show that these parents see a liberal arts education as a path to a remunerative and rewarding career, and, in supporting their children's college choice, they value factors—financial aid, proximity, and a welcoming school culture—that mitigate the social, cultural, and moral boundaries separating home from college.     

Race,poverty, and markets: urban inequality after the neoliberal turn

Classic scholarship on the problem of urban inequality tends to highlight the absence of “the market” and the correspondingly problematic and inadequate role of the state in poor communities. This article explores how the relationship between markets and urban poverty has shifted in recent decades. Scholars have become increasingly attentive to the growing influence of market logics and privatization—core features of “neoliberal” change—in areas such as housing, education, federal policy, local politics, employment, and social services. I discuss how this recent work adds to our understanding of how markets shape urban disadvantage. I also argue that—given the rising influence of market logics in city governance—urban scholarship stands to benefit from a deeper engagement with insights from the field of economic sociology. Building bridges between the two subfields, I argue, will help to specify what markets mean in the lives of the urban poor, and also can bring issues of race and poverty to the attention of economic sociologists.     

Interdisciplinary Collaboration for LGBTQ Students in Foster Care: Strategies for School Counselors

abstract

Unsafe and ill-prepared school environments exist for many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) students in foster care. School counselors are uniquely positioned to develop safe and inclusive schools for this vulnerable student population; however, strategies for interdisciplinary collaboration and advocacy with schools, families, and systems incorporated with LGBTQ youth in foster care are limited. This article explores how school counselors can advocate across disciplines for LGBTQ youth in foster care, including K-12 education systems, family/caregivers, and social service organizations providers.     

Schools,Their Spatial Distribution and Characteristics,and Fertility Limitation*

This article investigates the complex relationship between various dimensions of women's educational context and their contraceptive use later in life. Using data from rural Nepal on all the schools that ever existed in one community, I create geographically weighted measures of school characteristics—specifically teacher and student characteristics—that capture exposure to the complete array of schools and investigate the direct relationship between these dimensions of school characteristics and contraceptive use. These analyses provide new information on the broader issue of how social context influences the adoption of innovative behaviors by exploring the wide-reaching effects of school characteristics on individuals. Findings show that the gender of teachers, the gender of other students, and the level of teacher education are all related to women's use of contraception; that increased exposure to these school characteristics throughout the study area, but not necessarily at the closest school, is related to higher rates of contraceptive use; and that school characteristics early in the life course can have long-term consequences for individual behavior.     

The production of racial inequality within and among organizations

This article examines the production of racial inequality. Although most research concerned with racial inequality focuses exclusively on individuals, we argue that higher level actors, namely, organizations, contend with racial inequality in much the same way that people do. Using prior research on race and organizations, this paper illustrates that understanding how organizations produce and experience racial inequality is necessary. We argue that racial inequality regimes have the capacity to operate on people, but also among organizations.     

Beyond composition: What the study of diversity in K12 schools can learn from research in higher education

Several decades of interdisciplinary research have demonstrated the benefits of racially and ethnically integrated K12 schools. However, there is still much we do not know about what happens inside diverse schools that lead to these outcomes. In this article, we argue that the study of diversity in higher education, with its greater focus on internal institutional dynamics and a broader range of outcomes, can help K12 researchers fill in these gaps. However, the framework for studying diversity in higher education cannot be applied to K12 schools without first accounting for developmental and structural differences across students and sectors. To that end, this article summarizes the main components of the framework for studying diversity in the higher education literature—compositional, interactional, and organizational diversity—as well as the broad range of outcomes including not only academic achievement but also skills for lifelong learning and dispositions for citizenship in a multiracial democracy, and suggests how they can be adapted for K12 research. We argue that with this comprehensive but adapted framework, research on K12 education can inform practice and policy by providing more insight into the underlying mechanisms of school diversity and its consequences.     

Mapping the literature on child marriage: A critical engagement

U.S. “child marriage”—marriage including at least one person under the age of 18—is legal and practiced in 44 states. In this article, I map the existing literature on child marriage and offer insights on how child marriage can expand our sociological understandings of marriage, gender inequality, and youth sexualities. Social scientists have almost exclusively focused on child marriage in the Global South at the expense of understanding child marriage in the Global North, which I argue reinforces racist and xenophobic narratives that cast child marriage as a non-Western social problem. The research on U.S. child marriage that does exist focuses on the consequences, rather than the causes, of child marriage, which may shift focus away from a structural understanding of how intersecting inequalities shape girls' likelihood of getting married as minors. I position a sociology of U.S. child marriage at the intersection of sociological understandings of marriage and gender inequality and critical research on youth sexualities. I conclude by calling for intersectional research on U.S. child marriage that builds on these literatures, examining how girls' sexualities are racialized, gendered, and classed within the institution of marriage.     

Adoption as a Diversity Issue in Professional Preparation: Perceptions of Preservice Education Professionals

This research explored preservice teachers' and counselors' perceptions of the needs of adopted children in schools. Using a quasi-experimental survey design, this study examined the views of preservice teachers and counselors toward adoptive families before and after an educational intervention. Findings from this research support the effectiveness of a brief, standardized intervention in increasing preservice education professionals' awareness of particular challenges adopted children and their families may face in school settings. Qualitative data indicated preservice education professionals' awareness of adopted children and their families in their internship experiences. Learning about adoptive families can be part of sensitizing education professionals' to the growing diversity of families and children in U.S. schools.     

Crossing the finish line? A review of college completion inequality in the United States by race and class

Although most students graduate from high school and enroll in college the following fall, rates of entry into higher education and completion of a bachelor's degree continue to be stratified by race and class. Because of the potential returns that accrue to individuals and society overall when students complete their 4‐year degree, these disparate trends should motivate more policy‐relevant research in this area. In this review, I show how a longitudinal perspective of the path to a BA degree helps to reconcile competing theories of college completion by race and class across disciplinary boundaries. Both human capital theory and status attainment theory largely examine college completion as the long‐term process of BA attainment, although they differ in their focal stages and mechanisms. In contrast, the theory of categorical inequality, as applied in this review, focuses on the years in higher education and describes the ways in which colleges and universities as organizations create, legitimate, and reinforce categorical distinctions in postsecondary schooling and how these processes independently shape college completion inequality. As public interest grows in holding colleges accountable for their graduation rates, more research is needed on how the formal and informal organizational policies and practices of colleges produce inequality.     

Catholic Civics Education in the Early Cold War: Zeal for Democracy,Zeal for Christ

In the late 1940s and 1950s American Catholic educators faced the dilemma of how to transmit Catholic faith and culture to the next generation while also reassuring their non-Catholic neighbors that they were fully American in lifestyle and loyalties. This article examines one response to that dilemma: the convergence of public and Catholic school civics curricula through the widespread use of experiential pedagogy in Catholic civics education. Using a content analysis of civics textbooks and teacher's guides from both school systems, this article demonstrates how both kinds of schools converged on an experiential style of civics education, despite vocal opposition to “progressive” pedagogy at elite levels of Catholic educational discourse. The article then presents a partial explanation for this dissonance, demonstrating the moral certainty exhibited in the same Catholic-school textbooks, and suggesting that Catholic educationists understood American Catholics to be morally privileged in a way that gave them special insight into American democracy and protected them from the negative influences of secular educational philosophy. This case study speaks to larger questions of how organizations manage conflicts between abstract principles and practical action, and suggests the value of including religious schools in the sociological study of “loose coupling” in educational organizations.     

Performances of social class,race and gender through youth subculture: putting structure back in to youth subcultural studies

This paper aims to advance debates in youth studies about the contemporary relevance of social structures of class, race and gender to the formation of youth subcultures. I demonstrate how drawing on a cultural class analysis and education literature on learner identities and performativity can be productive in theorising the continued significance of class, and indeed also race and gender in young people's lives. In examining school-based friendships and (sub)cultural forms through empirical research in urban schools, I argue that not only are young people's subcultural groups structured by class, race and gender but also they are integral to the production of these identities. By examining the discursive productions of two school-based subcultures as examples: the ‘Smokers’ and the ‘Football’ crowd, I further argue that these identity positions embody resources or capitals which have differing value in the context of the urban school and thus demonstrate how race, class and gender privilege are maintained and reproduced through youth subculture.     

Power at a distance: Organizational power across boundaries

Organizational approaches can help to make sense of social phenomena, including inequality, politics, and culture. This is partly because large organizations exercise great power, both over employees and in their external environments. Revising Charles Perrow's classic account of the “society of organizations” in the 20th century, we argue that the organizational landscape has changed. There has been a dis‐embedding of individuals from organizations that contrasts with Perrow's idea of individuals being “absorbed” by organizations. Despite this hollowing out, there is a persistence of concentrated economic power or “concentration without centralization.” Organizational power in this landscape is increasingly exercised at a distance, not only geographically but also in the sense of moving across organizational boundaries and through technologies of valuation. Three bodies of research exemplify different types of power at a distance. (a) Research on global production networks shows how power travels across geographic and network distances. (b) Research on financialization and its consequences shows how power is mediated by frames and metrics. (c) Emerging research on big data and Artificial Intelligence shows how power is encoded into seemingly neutral technologies and made to seem inevitable. This work helps to update the sociology of organizations and opens up new research questions.     

Changes in the gender structure: Inequality at the individual,interactional, and macro dimensions

As a society, we've made tremendous progress toward gender equality over the past several decades. Yet there remains significant inequality between women and men. Furthermore, when we look closely at some of the progress made toward gender equality, we find it considerably less impressive than surface appearances. In this article, we review the updated framework of Risman's (2017) gender structure theory and argue that it can help us make sense of the progress we've made as well as analyzing inequality as it persists between women and men. Using gender structure theory, we then show how gender is simultaneously reproduced and contested across the individual, interactional, and macro levels of society within 3 major social domains: work, family, and gender identity.     

Schooling,tracking, and inequality

Being poor does not only mean that a child has less money and fewer toys. Poverty is pervasive. It affects diet, nutrition, employment, housing, self-concept, and the entire educational experience. Ironically, Americans have always looked to education as a means of breaking the seemingly endless cycle of poverty. But rather than serve as a great ladder carrying all who climb with concerted effort to social and economic equality, current research suggests some educational structures may actually limit opportunities for certain children. This paper focuses on education in American society and how it may influence inequality . It addresses the question of why students from various social classes differ significantly in academic achievement and it critiques the major theoretical explanations for this difference. Finally, it supports the idea that specific educational structures perpetuate the cycle of poverty by determining educational outcomes and limiting the economic life chances of children. One such educational structure, tracking, or separation by ability, is the focus of this paper. Tracking is a reality in the American school system. Considerable research has revealed class, gender, and race biases with less-advantaged children more often placed in the lower tracks. This paper examines tracking on a national and international basis. It explores various processes within the tracks that limit a child's development and, in turn, have an impact on future economic opportunities. In sum, it examines how tracking may perpetuate the endless cycle of poverty.     

School-Choice Stories: The Role of Culture

This article uses data from in-depth interviews conducted with the parents of a sample of 88 ninth-grade students from public, private, Catholic, and Christian high schools in two different suburban communities. This research investigates the ways in which parents understand education and how they make sense of schooling options for their children. It shows both how families who choose schools make the selection among various alternatives and why some families seem not to choose schools. This research finds that the financial and information resources of families are not enough in and of themselves to explain school-choice behavior. While these resources are indeed used by families as they make school choices, such measures do not capture the cultural dimension of school choice. In this context culture is understood as the lens through which people make sense of the social world. The decision to activate resources and the direction in which those resources will be activated are mediated by culture. In particular, as these school-choice stories show, the school-choice decision is influenced by the past educational experiences of the parents and by their religious faith.     

Perceptions of Equity,Balance of Support Exchange,and Mother–Adult Child Relations

Equity theory suggests that relationships are more harmonious when both members of a dyad believe that their exchanges are fair. However, the level and frequency of exchange, rather than perceptions of equity, have been the focus of most research on support and the quality of intergenerational relations. Using data from 1,426 mother–child dyads nested within 413 families collected as part of the Within‐Family Differences Study, the authors explored whether mothers' perceptions of equity are better predictors of closeness and tension than are mothers' reports of balanced exchanges of support. Mixed‐model analyses revealed that mothers' perceptions of equity were more consistent predictors of relationship quality than were the balanced exchanges of support, though the results varied somewhat by gender of adult child. These findings contribute to a growing body of research demonstrating that the psychological processes that shape intergenerational relationships mirror those of other ties.     

Do magnet and charter schools exacerbate or ameliorate inequality?

School choice typically refers to opportunities to enroll youth in public and/or private educational alternatives to traditional neighborhood public schools. While these options continue to grow in the United States under the umbrella of school choice, magnet and charter schools are the most common forms of public school choice. In this article, we review the development of school choice and the differing historical and philosophical origins of magnet and charter schools. We then summarize what we know about the extent to which these public choice options exacerbate or ameliorate two forms of inequality—academic achievement and school segregation by race and class. Research suggests that magnet schools often encourage racial and class diversity, while charters contribute to racial and socioeconomic isolation. While low‐income minority students may benefit academically from attending magnet schools, it is unclear whether charter schools have any effect on achievement when comparing charter school students to their counterparts in traditional public school. We expect that continued growth of magnet schools will likely promote school diversity both within and between districts, though some types of magnets may also inadvertently promote segregation. However, expansion of the charter school sector will heighten school segregation and exacerbate racial and socioeconomic isolation.     

Meaning-Making,Negotiation, and Change in School Accountability,Or What Sociology Can Offer Policy Studies

In school systems around the world, countless reform strategies have focused on school and teacher accountability—the process of evaluating schools’ performance on the basis of student measures. Policy and education research has been dominated by debates on its effectiveness, where advocates highlight the positive effects on achievement while critics emphasize the negative consequences on pressure, morale, and autonomy. Yet the question is not so much whether to have accountability, but what form it should take. To answer this, sociologists contribute through their study of accountability’s organizational and ecological dynamics—key facets that are sidelined when researchers only focus on quantitative program evaluation. An organizational perspective highlights the meaning-making school actors and the general public have of the policy, viewing it through technical-rationalist and institutional-performative lenses. An ecological perspective highlights how the form of accountability is a negotiated outcome of larger macrosocial forces, and how accountability is itself contributive to larger social changes. This review suggests a broader conceptualization of accountability regimes, and the unique contribution of critical, organizational, and sociological perspectives to the study of public policies.     

Middle‐Class Parents and Urban Public Schools: Current Research and Future Directions

Middle‐class flight from urban public schools to suburban districts or private schools is a key source of educational inequality. Recently, however, a number of studies have focused on middle‐class and upper‐middle‐class families who have made a different choice, opting to remain in the city and send their children to neighborhood public schools. While the movement of advantaged families into urban public schools has received positive attention in the media, this growing body of research tells a more complicated story. Middle‐class families – with their economic, cultural, and social capital – can bring important resources to schools, resulting in widespread benefits. However, their engagement in urban public schools can also lead to marginalization and exclusion. We review the emergent literature on this topic, highlighting four themes: (i) parent preferences, identities, and values; (ii) the role of marketing campaigns and informal networks in attracting the middle class; (iii) the nature and consequences of middle‐class parent engagement in urban schooling; and (iv) the relationship between neighborhood change and school change. We conclude by outlining a research agenda aimed at deepening our understanding of the mechanisms by which middle‐class parent engagement in urban schooling may serve to mitigate, reproduce, or exacerbate educational inequalities.     

Doing It All? Mothers' College Enrollment,Time Use,and Affective Well‐being

The rising share of women in college with dependent children and growing emphasis on two‐generation policies for reducing socioeconomic inequality have galvanized research aimed at determining whether mothers' increased education can improve their and their children's well‐being. Yet as part of this effort, scholars have overlooked signs that mothers' college enrollment may not be unequivocally good for families. This research brief aims to bring greater attention to this side of the story. The authors analyze time diary (2003–2015) and well‐being data (2010, 2011, 2013) from the American Time Use Survey. The authors find that mothers in college experience a time squeeze that limits their time in caregiving, self‐care, and work, on one hand, and school‐related activities, on the other. This time squeeze may explain why mothers enrolled in college (compared with mothers who were not in school) also reported less happiness and more fatigue during activities with their children.