The dynamics of school attainment of England��s ethnic minorities

We exploit a universe dataset of state school students in England with linked test score records to document the evolution of attainment through school for different ethnic groups. The analysis yields a number of striking findings. First, we show that, controlling for personal characteristics, all minority groups make greater progress than White students over secondary schooling. Second, much of this improvement occurs in the high-stakes exams at the end of compulsory schooling. Third, we show that for most ethnic groups, this gain is pervasive, happening in almost all schools in which these students are found.     

Why are residential and school moves associated with poor school performance?

Most research on residential mobility has documented a clear pattern: Residential and school moves are associated with poor academic performance. Explanations for this relationship, however, remain speculative. Some researchers argue that moving affects social relationships that are important to academic achievement. But the association between moving and school performance may be spurious; the negative correlation may be a function of other characteristics of people who move often. We offer several conceptual and analytical refinements to these ideas, allowing us to produce more precise tests than past researchers. Using longitudinal data, we find that differences in achievement between movers and nonmovers are partially a result of declines in social relationships experienced by students who move. Most of the negative effect of moving, however, is due to preexisting differences between the two groups.     

Lighting the Pathway to Adulthood Experience of a teacher from a rural primary school

The Model Primary School is a rural school located in a region joining the town and country in Jiamusi City,Heilongjiang Province.Sex education is a new idea and has never been taught there before. Two years ago,I had my first experience teaching a sex education class.During the first class,I blushed with embarrassment and found it difficult to talk about     

Sexuality and school shootings: what role does teasing play in school massacres?

Conventional explanations - lax gun control laws, media violence, single and working parents - do not adequately explain the recent spate of school shootings, and neither does bullying by itself, an explanation recently gaining more traction. A certain type of bullying, however, is revealed as particularly culpable. Many of the recent shootings share a disturbing component: The perpetrators were repeatedly, even relentlessly, accused by "preps and jocks" of being gay. Gay harassment is proposed as a point of departure for understanding the causes of school shootings. When boys who believe on some level that they warrant privilege, are instead harassed, they may feel driven to avenge the "wrong," and re-assert a more dominant, powerful, and victorious masculinity. These circumstances call for a cultural transformation such that "boys will be boys" is no longer used as an alibi for violence. The author presents implications for school-based social work practice, teacher and administrator interventions, as well as other prevention strategies.     

A comparative study of ethnic residential segregation in Ghana’s two largest cities,Accra and Kumasi

The rate of urbanization is far more rapid in sub-Saharan Africa than in any other major region of the world. However, little is known about patterns of ethnic residential segregation in rapidly urbanizing African cities. This paper is crafted to make an important contribution through its focus on Ghana’s two largest cities: Accra and Kumasi. Making use of the most recent population and housing census data of 2000 to generate a Location Quotient index, the analyses explore the cities’ degree of ethnic diversity and concentration for comparative purposes. In relative terms, the study reveals that the level of residential ethnic segregation is fairly balanced in Accra compared to Kumasi. However, there are important differences between the findings of this Ghanaian case study and findings from research in the West, where the residential segregation is heavily determined by cultural/racial factors in addition to socio-economic factors. In the absence of institutional and ethnic discrimination, the most fundamental underlying cause of segregation in the Ghanaian case appears to be the socio-economic circumstance of ethnic groups present in the cities. The paper concludes by exploring the implications of the study for urban and national development in Ghana as well as the future patterns of ethnic clustering likely to emerge in Accra and Kumasi.     

Distinguishing the geographic levels and social dimensions of U.S. metropolitan segregation, 1960–2000

In this article, we assess trends in residential segregation in the United States from 1960 to 2000 along several dimensions of race and ethnicity, class, and life cycle and present a method for attributing segregation to nested geographic levels. We measured segregation for metropolitan America using the Theil index, which is additively decomposed into contributions of regional, metropolitan, center city-suburban, place, and tract segregation. This procedure distinguishes whether groups live apart because members cluster in different neighborhoods, communities, metropolitan areas, or regions. Substantively, we found that the segregation of blacks decreased considerably after 1960 largely because neighborhoods became more integrated, but the foreign born became more segregated largely because they concentrated in particular metropolitan areas. Class segregation increased between 1970 and 1990 mainly because the affluent increasingly clustered in specific metropolitan areas and in specific municipalities within metropolitan areas. The unmarried increasingly congregated in center cities. The main purpose of this article is to describe and illustrate this multilevel approach to studying segregation.     

Are black workers missing the connection? The effect of spatial distance and employee referrals on interfirm racial segregation

I use data on the hiring practices and spatial location of firms in four cities to model the process of interfirm racial segregation. When I control for the spatial location of the firm, the use of employee referrals reduced the probability of hiring a black worker by 75% in firms that are less than 10% black. Among all firms, the results suggest that employee referrals are just as important as the geographic location of the firm in generating employment segregation: both increase the predicted level of interfirm racial segregation among blue-collar workers in the cities studied by about 10%.     

How low can it go? declining black-white segregation in A multiethnic context

We extend research on whites’ neighborhood contact with blacks, population composition, and prospects for desegregation by developing a new measure of the floor of racial residential segregation under conditions of low black-white contact. The measure incorporates the way in which multi ethnic contexts further constrain levels of black-white segregation. The results show that black-white desegregation is likely when the black population is small, but is unlikely otherwise. Yet, when multiple ethnic groups are sufficiently large, a moderate level of black-white segregation is necessary for whites to maintain low neighborhood contact with blacks, even when the proportion of African Americans is small.     

Child labour or school attendance? Evidence from Zambia

In this paper we investigate what affects school attendance and child labour in an LDC, using data for Zambia. Since the data comes from a household survey with information on all household members it allows us to take account of unobserved household effects by introducing household-specific effects in a logit model. The empirical analysis suggests that both economic and sociological variables are important determinants for the choice between school attendance and child labour. In particular, we find some support for the hypothesis that poverty forces households to keep their children away from school. JEL classification: J24, I21, O15 Received May 20, 1996/Accepted January 2, 1997     

Immigrant residential segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas, 1990–2000

This paper examines the extent of spatial assimilation among immigrants of different racial and ethnic origins. We use restricted data from the 1990 and 2000 censuses to calculate the levels of dissimilarity by race and Hispanic origin, nativity, and year of entry, and then run multivariate models to examine these relationships. The findings provide broad support for spatial assimilation theory. Foreign-born Hispanics, Asians, and blacks are more segregated from native-born non-Hispanic whites than are the U.S.-born of these groups. The patterns for Hispanics and Asians can be explained by the average characteristics of the foreign-born that are generally associated with higher levels of segregation, such as lower levels of income, English language ability, and home ownership. We also find that immigrants who have been in the United States for longer periods are generally less segregated than new arrivals, and once again, much of this difference can be attributed to the characteristics of immigrants. However, patterns also vary across groups. Levels of segregation are much higher for black immigrants than for Asian, Hispanic, and white immigrants. In addition, because black immigrants are, on average, of higher socioeconomic status than native-born blacks, such characteristics do not help explain their very high levels of segregation.     

Do anti-bullying laws work? New evidence on school safety and youth violence

This study is the first to comprehensively examine the effect of state anti-bullying laws (ABLs) on school safety and youth violence. Using existing data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveys and the Uniform Crime Reports, and newly-collected data on school shootings, we find little evidence that the typical state ABL is effective in improving school safety and student well-being. However, this null finding masks substantial policy heterogeneity. State mandates that require school districts to implement strong, comprehensive anti-bullying policies are associated with a 7 to 13 % reduction in school violence and an 8 to 12 % reduction in bullying. In addition, our results show that strong anti-bullying policy mandates are associated with a reduction in minor teen school shooting deaths and violent crime arrests, suggesting potentially important spillover effects.     

Economic transition,school expansion and educational inequality in China, 1990–2000

This paper examines the trends in educational stratification during China's economic reforms in the 1990s. Based on the sample data of population censuses in 1990 and 2000, school-age children were matched to their parents’ background information, and the effects of family background on their school enrollment and continuation were investigated. Results show that despite the substantial expansion of educational opportunities in the decade, family background continues to play an important role in determining school enrollment status and school transitions. During the decade, children of rural-hukou status became more disadvantaged compared to their urban counterparts, and the effect of their father's socioeconomic status on school enrollment was enhanced. Despite the fact that children of rural-hukou status gained relatively more opportunities at junior high school level, as a result of nationwide saturation at the 9-year compulsory education, the rural–urban gap in the likelihood of transition to senior high school level enlarged, and the effect of their father's socioeconomic status increased—even after controlling for regional variations in economic development.     

Cyberbullying,conflict management or just messing? Teenage girls’ understandings and experiences of gender,friendship, and conflict on Facebook in an Irish second-level school

In recent years, there have been growing concerns worldwide about young people’s safety online, much of which focuses on social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram. Moral panics about sexting and cyberbullying have constructed public discourses about social media as dangerous to adolescents’ safety and relationships. In the academic literature, there are conflicting perspectives on the nature of online relationships, behaviour, and risks, and on the causes and nature of cyberbullying. Less attention is paid—in both public and academic debates—to the role played by gender in online aggression, in spite of the fact that existing scholarship demonstrates that it is an important factor in the dynamics of young people’s online friendships and conflicts. This article presents the findings of an empirical, qualitative and quantitative study of teenage girls’ experiences and understandings of online friendship, conflict, and bullying in an Irish, single-sex secondary school. Questionnaires (n=116), individual in-depth interviews with students (n=26), and a focus group with teachers were used. Our study indicates that significant communicative phenomena within girls’ everyday lives remain unreported and frequently misunderstood.     

Role of Women Subject of Debate in China

Anational debate has been raging on over whether women should work periodically or even go home to take care of the family. The debate was touched off in October 2000, when a government document, called 揜ecommendations of the Chinese Communist Party on the Formulation of the 10th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development, mentioned 搕he creation of a mechanism for periodic employment? The All-China Women抯 Federation, the country抯 chief watchdog for women抯 rights, h…     

The Process of Familization of Migration in China

China is a transitional and developing country with the largest population and number of farmers in the world, and shows a striking feature of urban-rural dual structure. The major content in China＇s rising modernization is the process of urbanization transformation, urbanization of small and middle-sized city in China should become the basic path selection. Which involves three important issues： concept, people, and institution. Only based on the modernization of concept, people and institution, there will automatically generate the modernization of industry, agriculture, technology and national defense, and thus consistently developing prosperous of both the country and the citizens.     

Summary of the Bulletin on the State of the Environment of China in 1993

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A Structural Equation Model Estimation of the Role of Social Vulnerability as a Predictor of People’s Feelings of Unsafety

Social Indicators Research - People’s perception of insecurity is linked to a wide range of factors and up-to-date sources stress the impact of socially constructed concerns on feelings of...     

Availability of Contraceptives

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