The social and genetic inheritance of educational attainment: Genes,parental education,and educational expansion

Recently, several genome-wide association studies of educational attainment have found education-related genetic variants and enabled the integration of human inheritance into social research. This study incorporates the newest education polygenic score (Lee et al., 2018) into sociological research, and tests three gene-environment interaction hypotheses on status attainment. Using the Health and Retirement Study (N = 7599), I report three findings. First, a standard deviation increase in the education polygenic score is associated with a 58% increase in the likelihood of advancing to the next level of education, while a standard deviation increase in parental education results in a 53% increase. Second, supporting the Saunders hypothesis, the genetic effect becomes 11% smaller when parental education is one standard deviation higher, indicating that highly educated parents are more able to preserve their family's elite status in the next generation. Finally, the genetic effect is slightly greater for the younger cohort (1942–59) than the older cohort (1920–41). The findings strengthen the existing literature on the social influences in helping children achieve their innate talents.     

Race, crime, and Republican strength: Minority politics in the post-civil rights era

This investigation assesses the relationships between racial threat and partisan dominance in state legislatures with tests of interactive hypotheses. The findings show that historically contingent expectations derived from racial threat theory, Republican law and order campaign appeals, and fundamentalist strength account for Republican strength in the legislatures. Two-way fixed-effects estimates based on pooled time-series analyses of 799 state-years in the post-civil rights era show that the percentage of Republicans in the state legislatures grew after increases in African American presence and the violent crime rates. The combined effects of a growth in African American and fundamentalist populations also account for increased Republican seats in these bodies. Statements by Republican campaign officials on how they deliberately used mass resentments against minorities to gain votes provide evidence about the intervening links between minority threat, the menace posed by high violent crime rates, and increased Republican strength in the state legislatures.     

A tangled web: The reciprocal relationship between depression and educational outcomes in China

Research on depression and education usually focuses on a unidirectional relationship. This paper proposes a reciprocal relationship, simultaneously estimating the effects of depression on education and of education on depression. China, which has the world's largest education system, is used as a case study. This paper applies structural equation modeling to three datasets: the China Family Panel Studies, the China Education Panel Survey, and the Gansu Survey of Children and Families. Analyses reveal a reciprocal and negative relationship between depression and educational outcomes. Specifically, early depression reduces later educational achievement, and higher educational achievement also lowers the level of subsequent depression by resulting in less peers' unfriendliness, less pressure from parents' expectations, and less teachers' criticism. More time spent on studies is not associated with higher educational achievement but significantly increases the level of depression. Children from lower SES families bear more pressure and spend more time on studies, which does not correspond to higher educational achievement but rather to higher levels of depression. In the long term, prior depression lowers educational attainment and, after controlling for prior depression, lower educational attainment is also associated with higher levels of subsequent depression. This paper shows that the lower achievers, not the high achievers, bear the major psychological burden of the education system's quest to produce high achievement. This situation reinforces these students' educational disadvantage.     

Family structure and the intergenerational transmission of educational advantage

I examine whether the effect of parents’ education on children’s educational achievement and attainment varies by family structure and, if so, whether this can be explained by differential parenting practices. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, I find that as parents’ education increases, children in single mother families experience a lower boost in their achievement test scores, likelihood of attending any post-secondary schooling, likelihood of completing a 4-year college degree, and years of completed schooling relative to children living with both biological parents. Differences in parents’ educational expectations, intergenerational closure, and children’s involvement in structured leisure activities partially explain these status transmission differences by family structure. The findings imply that, among children with highly educated parents, children of single mothers are less likely to be highly educated themselves relative to children who grow up with both biological parents.     

Neighbourhood effects on educational attainment of adolescents,buffered by personality and educational commitment

Research has repeatedly shown that neighbourhood disadvantage negatively influences individual educational outcomes. However, the great variation in outcomes indicates substantial unobserved heterogeneity. Looking at the rates of obtaining a basic educational qualification, the hypothesis is that individual traits of adolescents can buffer neighbourhood effects. First, adolescents with a more resilient personality may be better able to cope with neighbourhood adversity. And second, educational commitments might buffer adolescents from negative neighbourhood influences. These hypotheses are tested employing survival analysis, using six wave panel data, containing information on ten years of adolescents’ lives. The results show that resilients experience no negative influence of neighbourhood disadvantage, while both undercontrollers and overcontrollers do. And, the stronger adolescents’ educational commitments, the less they experience the negative effect of neighbourhood adversity. In sum, neighbourhood effects are found, but not for everybody.     

Assessing the benefits of a rising tide: Educational attainment and increases in neighborhood socioeconomic advantage

An emerging approach to studying associations between neighborhood contexts and educational outcomes is to estimate the outcomes of adolescents growing up in neighborhoods that are experiencing economic growth in comparison to peers that reside in economically stable or declining communities. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), I examine the association between education attainment and changes in socioeconomic advantage in urban neighborhoods between 1990 and 2000. I find that residing in a neighborhood that experiences economic improvements has a positive association with educational attainment for urban adolescents. Furthermore, race-based analyses suggest consistently positive associations for all race subgroups, lending support to protective models of neighborhood effects that argue high neighborhood SES supports positive outcomes for adolescents residing in these contexts.     

父母非农就业、外出打工与子女的教育获得

文章把父母的工作状态分为在家务农、在外打工和本地非农就业三种,考察三者及其他家庭变量对子女教育获得（经济支持、家庭辅导和对子女的教育期望）的影响。结论认为：一方面虽然不同职业状态的父母其子女的教育获得有很大差异,但和务农相比,外出打工和非农就业都会通过提高家庭收入增加对子女的经济支持,从而更有利于子女获得高中和大学的教育机会。另一方面,子女的教育获得极大地受到父母受教育程度的影响。尤其是母亲拥有较高学历和非农工作的农村家庭,其子女会受到更高的期望和更多的家庭辅导。因此在引导农民向城镇有序流动的同时,政府应该公平分配教育资源,并加快农村地区发展、鼓励农民本地非农就业。     

Partner selection and social capital in the status attainment process

Why is individual success so strongly affected by parental socioeconomic status? We argue that parental socioeconomic status affects the socioeconomic status of one's romantic partner, thereby partially determining one's own social capital and socioeconomic status. Censored-inflated structural equation models using data from the NEtherlands Longitudinal Lifecourse Study (NELLS) and British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) confirm these relationships, while cross-lagged analyses suggest that they may be causal in nature. The strong tendency for people to have a romantic partner that reflects their socioeconomic origin shows how far the influence of the parental home stretches and why it does so.     

The declining influence of family background on educational attainment in Australia: The role of measured and unmeasured influences

The paper examines changes in the influence of family background, including socioeconomic and social background variables on educational attainment in Australia for cohorts born between 1890 and 1982. We test hypotheses from modernization theory on sibling data using random effects models and find: (i) substantial declines in the influence of family background on educational attainment (indicated by the sibling intraclass correlations); (ii) declines in the effects of both economic and cultural socioeconomic background variables; (iii) changes in the effects of some social background variables (e.g., family size); (iv) and declines in the extent that socioeconomic and social background factors account for variation in educational attainment. Unmeasured family background factors are more important, and proportionally increasingly so, for educational attainment than the measured socioeconomic and social background factors analyzed. Fixed effects models showed steeper declines in the effects of socioeconomic background variables than in standard analyses suggesting that unmeasured family factors associated with socioeconomic background obscure the full extent of the decline.     

New faces in new spaces in new places: Residential attainment among newly legalized immigrants in established,new, and minor destinations

Immigrants at the beginning of the twenty-first century are located in a more diverse set of metropolitan areas than at any point in U.S. history. Whether immigrants' residential prospects are helped or hindered in new versus established immigrant-receiving areas has been the subject of debate. Using multilevel models and data from the New Immigrant Survey (NIS), a nationally representative sample of newly legalized immigrants to the U.S., we move beyond aggregate-level analyses of residential segregation to specify the influence of destination type on individual-level immigrant residential outcomes. The findings indicate that immigrants in new and minor destinations are significantly more likely to live in tracts with relatively more non-Hispanic whites and relatively fewer immigrants and poor residents. These residential advantages persist net of individual-level controls but are largely accounted for by place-to-place differences in metropolitan composition and structure. Our exclusive focus on newly legalized immigrants means that our findings do not necessarily contradict the possibility of worse residential prospects in new areas of settlement, but rather qualifies it as not extending to the newly authorized population.     

The relationship between lifetime health trajectories and socioeconomic attainment in middle age

A large literature demonstrates the direct and indirect influence of health on socioeconomic attainment, and reveals the ways in which health and socioeconomic background simultaneously and dynamically affect opportunities for attainment and mobility. Despite an increasing understanding of the effects of health on social processes, research to date remains limited in its conceptualization and measurement of the temporal dimensions of health, especially in the presence of socioeconomic circumstances that covary with health over time. Guided by life course theory, we use data from the British National Child Development Study, an ongoing panel study of a cohort born in 1958, to examine the association between lifetime health trajectories and socioeconomic attainment in middle age. We apply finite mixture modeling to identify distinct trajectories of health that simultaneously account for timing, duration and stability. Moreover, we employ propensity score weighting models to account for the presence of time-varying socioeconomic factors in estimating the impact of health trajectories. We find that, when poor health is limited to the childhood years, the disadvantage in socioeconomic attainment relative to being continuously healthy is either insignificant or largely explained by time-varying socioeconomic confounders. The socioeconomic impact of continuously deteriorating health over the life course is more persistent, however. Our results suggest that accounting for the timing, duration and stability of poor health throughout both childhood and adulthood is important for understanding how health works to produce social stratification. In addition, the findings highlight the importance of distinguishing between confounding and mediating effects of time-varying socioeconomic circumstances.     

Age, period, cohort and educational attainment: The importance of considering gender

Over the past century, the United States has experienced substantial population-wide gains in educational attainment - increases driven largely by processes of cohort succession. Focusing on the adult population age 25-54, we show that there has been (1) a significant attenuation of the historical increases in educational attainment, and (2) a shift in the processes underlying educational change that differs by gender. Our analysis points to a significant turning point in population-wide educational levels, and from a research perspective, has implications for how one interprets findings when using education as a control variable.     

Social and behavioral skills and the gender gap in early educational achievement

Though many studies have suggested that social and behavioral skills play a central role in gender stratification processes, we know little about the extent to which these skills affect gender gaps in academic achievement. Analyzing data from the Early Child Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort, we demonstrate that social and behavioral skills have substantively important effects on academic outcomes from kindergarten through fifth grade. Gender differences in the acquisition of these skills, moreover, explain a considerable fraction of the gender gap in academic outcomes during early elementary school. Boys get roughly the same academic return to social and behavioral skills as their female peers, but girls begin school with more advanced social and behavioral skills and their skill advantage grows over time. While part of the effect may reflect an evaluation process that rewards students who better conform to school norms, our results imply that the acquisition of social and behavioral skills enhances learning as well. Our results call for a reconsideration of the family and school-level processes that produce gender gaps in social and behavioral skills and the advantages they confer for academic and later success.     

Intergenerational effects of shifts in women’s educational distribution in South Korea: Transmission, differential fertility, and assortative mating

This study examines the intergenerational effects of changes in women’s education in South Korea. We define intergenerational effects as changes in the distribution of educational attainment in an offspring generation associated with the changes in a parental generation. Departing from the previous approach in research on social mobility that has focused on intergenerational association, we examine the changes in the distribution of educational attainment across generations. Using a simulation method based on Mare and Maralani’s recursive population renewal model, we examine how intergenerational transmission, assortative mating, and differential fertility influence intergenerational effects. The results point to the following conclusions. First, we find a positive intergenerational effect: improvement in women’s education leads to improvement in daughter’s education. Second, we find that the magnitude of intergenerational effects substantially depends on assortative marriage and differential fertility: assortative mating amplifies and differential fertility dampens the intergenerational effects. Third, intergenerational effects become bigger for the less educated and smaller for the better educated over time, which is a consequence of educational expansion. We compare our results with Mare and Maralani’s original Indonesian study to illustrate how the model of intergenerational effects works in different socioeconomic circumstances.     

A tale half told: State exclusionary and inclusionary regimes,incarceration of fathers,and the educational attainment of children

Paternal incarceration leads to educational disparities among children who are innocent of their fathers’ crimes. The scale and concentration of mass paternal incarceration thus harms millions of innocent American children. Current individuallevel analyses neglect the contribution of macro-level variation in responses of punitive state regimes to this social problem. We hypothesize that state as well as individual level investment in exclusionary paternal incarceration diminishes the educational attainment of children, although state inclusionary investment in welfare and education can offset some – and could potentially offset more - of this harm. Understanding intergenerational educational attainment therefore requires individual- and contextuallevel analyses. We use Hierarchical Generalized Linear Models to analyze the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent to Adult Health. Disparities in postsecondary educational outcomes are especially detrimental for children of incarcerated fathers located in state regimes with high levels of paternal incarceration and concentrated disadvantage. This has important implications for intergenerational occupational and status attainment.     

从《刮痧》看中西文化的差异

本文从对待子女的教育、中西医的认识和孕妇难产等角度，阐述了中西文化存在的差异。     

Cultural capital,teacher bias,and educational success: New evidence from monozygotic twins

In this paper we use new data on Danish monozygotic (MZ) twins to analyze the effect of cultural capital on educational success. We report three main findings. First, cultural capital has a positive direct effect on the likelihood of completing the college-bound track in Danish secondary education. Second, cultural capital leads teachers to form upwardly biased perceptions of children's academic ability, but only when their exposure to children's cultural capital is brief (as in oral and written exams) rather than long (as in grades awarded at the end of the school year). Third, we find that the positive direct effect of cultural capital on educational success is higher for children from high-socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds than for those from low-SES backgrounds. This result suggests that high-SES children are more likely to be in schooling contexts that enable them to convert cultural capital into educational success.     

高校二级学院教务管理高效运行机制研究

二级学院作为专业人才培养的基层单位是高校教育教学独立运行的主体。创新院（部）教务管理运行机制是高校优化校院两级教务管理体系的战略要务,是提升教育教学质量的组织保障。明晰二级学院教务管理要务,提出＂优构机制、理顺关系、强化意识、明确目标＂的高效有序的善治理念与运行机制,培育孵化教育质量提升的正能量,切实化解教学管理进程中的困难与问题。     

论《红楼梦》三种叙事层面中林黛玉的色彩形象

在中国文学史中女性色彩描写的背景下,<红楼梦>三种叙事层面中林黛玉色彩形象构成是立体的,不同层面中有微妙差别存在.特别是黛玉、宝钗在前八十回与后四十回中色彩类型的变化表现了曹雪芹、高鹗对她们的隐性评价.黛玉色彩与明清才子佳人小说女主人公的明显不同,昭示了黛玉形象在文学史上的独特地位.     

试论实物色彩词及其形成理据

"实物色彩词"以形象、具体、贴切的特点,广泛存在于各种语言中,反映了不同民族的生活方式、风土人情和价值观念.它的形成与发展与人类对客观世界的认识过程和改造过程相融相伴,其蕴涵的深层理据则是"取象比类"这一传统思维方式在语言学领域中的具体运用.