Immigration,ethnicity, and the loss of white students from California public schools, 1990–2000

This article investigates whether and the extent to which “white flight” from Hispanic and Limited English Proficient (LEP) students has been occurring in California’s public schools and further, examines the level (school or district) on which “white flight” may operate. Using school-level administrative data from the California Department of Education from 1990 to 2000, we estimate exponential growth rate models of white enrollment with school-level fixed effects. The results shed light on the implications of immigration for school segregation in the United States. The analysis indicates that white enrollment declined in response to increases in the number of Spanish-speaking LEP and Hispanic students, and that “white flight” from LEP or Hispanic students occurred more at the district than the school level in the case of primary schools, and at the school level for secondary schools. In addition, schools with higher percentages of Spanish LEP students in the school than the district, and with higher percentages in the district relative to the county, experienced greater losses in white enrollments than other schools, thus suggesting that higher levels of segregation in the wider metropolitan area accelerate white flight.     

American education: the challenge of change

The American education system is being challenged to raise the academic achievement of students to prepare them for the jobs of the future. Yet many demographic, as well as economic and social factors, are making the task more difficult. Low birth rates, especially among non-Hispanic whites, along with high immigration rates, have increased the share of minority and non-English students in public schools. The rise in single-parent families has increased the number of poor students and migration from the cities to the suburbs has concentrated poor and minority students in inner city schools. These same children will make up a greater share of the future labor force. At the same time, the aging of the general population may lessen the commitment of homeowners- -whose taxes pay between 1/3 and 1/2 of education costs. The aging labor force may bring a shortage of qualified teachers, particularly in specialized subject areas. Poor and minority students generally have below average academic skills and are more likely to drop out of high school than non-minority students. However, the skills of American students rank below those of most other industrialized nations, calling into question the ability of Americans to succeed in an increasingly international economic system. How can schools be improved and minority student achievement be enhanced? Reforms of education finance systems, court-ordered integration, and stiffer requirements for teachers and for graduation from high school are among many attempts to meet the immense challenges faced by American schools.     

Causal Effects of Single-Sex Schools on College Entrance Exams and College Attendance: Random Assignment in Seoul High Schools

Despite the voluminous literature on the potentials of single-sex schools, there is no consensus on the effects of single-sex schools because of student selection of school types. We exploit a unique feature of schooling in Seoul—the random assignment of students into single-sex versus coeducational high schools—to assess causal effects of single-sex schools on college entrance exam scores and college attendance. Our validation of the random assignment shows comparable socioeconomic backgrounds and prior academic achievement of students attending single-sex schools and coeducational schools, which increases the credibility of our causal estimates of single-sex school effects. The three-level hierarchical model shows that attending all-boys schools or all-girls schools, rather than coeducational schools, is significantly associated with higher average scores on Korean and English test scores. Applying the school district fixed-effects models, we find that single-sex schools produce a higher percentage of graduates who attended four-year colleges and a lower percentage of graduates who attended two-year junior colleges than do coeducational schools. The positive effects of single-sex schools remain substantial, even after we take into account various school-level variables, such as teacher quality, the student-teacher ratio, the proportion of students receiving lunch support, and whether the schools are public or private.     

Stratification and the formation of expectations in highly differentiated educational systems

Highly differentiated educational systems constitute a common organizational form of schooling in which youth are sorted into secondary schools that stress either vocational or academic training and between which movement is rare. With standardized data from five countries, we illuminate two important stratification processes in these systems: (1) social origins strongly influence students’ placement into different types of schools with high SES students most likely to attend academically oriented schools that provide a direct pathway to the university. (2) The types of schools students attend largely determine their educational and occupational expectations and impart a strong dose of realism in these expectations. Thus, the institutional arrangements of highly differentiated educational systems perpetuate socioeconomic inequalities quite early in the life course, well before students complete their education and enter the labor force.     

Social multipliers in sexual initiation decisions among U.S. high school students

In this article, I use a national sample of high school students to test for several types of social influences on the decision to have sexual intercourse. I find evidence of endogenous social interactions (social multipliers), where the propensity of an individual choosing to have sex varies with the average behavior in his or her school. Additionally, the magnitude of the social multipliers and several other interesting risk factors differ by gender and by race. These findings might help explain the large variation in sexual initiation across schools in the United States. These results also add to the debate over school vouchers and ability grouping because social multipliers imply changes in school-wide rates of sexual behavior with moderate changes in school-body composition. In this way, school vouchers and ability grouping might exacerbate the situation of high rates of teenage pregnancy and out-of-wedlock births in some communities. To show the potential benefits and costs of public policies that cause students to change schools, I present the results of several simulation exercises that predict the school-level changes in rates of sexual initiation following changes in school composition.     

Quality of migrant schools in China: evidence from a longitudinal study in Shanghai

As spaces in public schools are limited, a substantial number of migrant children living in Chinese cities but without local hukou are enrolled in private migrant schools. This paper studies the quality of migrant schools using data collected in Shanghai in 2010 and 2012. Although students in migrant schools perform considerably worse than their counterparts in public schools, the test score difference in mathematics has almost been halved between 2010 and 2012, due to increased financial subsidy from the government. We rule out alternative explanations for the convergence in test scores. We also conduct a falsification test and find no relative changes in the performance of migrant school students based on a follow-up survey of a new cohort of students in 2015 and 2016, a period with no changes in financial subsidies to migrant schools.     

The Big Freak Out: Educator Fear in Response to the Presence of Transgender Elementary School Students

Increased visibility of transgender children requires elementary school professionals to take on issues of gender diversity, sex and sexuality, which are considered taboo in elementary school spaces. School professionals who have worked with transgender children were interviewed about their experience with these students, perceptions of their school's success in supporting them, and recommendations for information and resources needed by schools to provide support. Findings indicate that fear and anxiety are common educator responses to the presence of a transgender child and the disruption of the gender binary, and these emotions are limiting the possibilities for schools to affirm transgender identity.     

Equality of Educational Opportunities,Schools’ Characteristics and Resilient Students: An Empirical Study of EU-15 Countries Using OECD-PISA 2009 Data

In the existent literature, little attention has been paid to the characteristics of the schools attended by the “resilient” students, i.e. those that, despite their socioeconomic background, are able to obtain high academic results. The paper explores this topic by using OECD-PISA 2009 data for EU-15 countries; we estimate a statistical model to find those school-level variables that are correlated with the probability of a disadvantaged student being resilient, net of country-specific structural differences. A by-product of the study is a better understanding of the educational drivers that help disadvantaged students and this can be beneficial for a country’s educational system as a whole. In particular, the analysis reveals that schools attended by resilient students do offer more extracurricular activities and are characterized by a better positive school climate.     

The impact of high-stakes school admission exams on study achievements: quasi-experimental evidence from Slovakia

We explore whether and to what extent the presence of high-stakes admission exams to selective schools affects student achievement, presumably through more intensive study effort. Our identification strategy exploits a quasi-experimental feature of a reform in Slovakia that shifted the school grade during which high-stakes exams are taken by 1 year. This reform enables us to compare students at the moment when they pass these exams with students in the same grade 1 year ahead of the exams. Using data from the low-stakes international TIMSS skills survey and employing difference-in-difference methodology, we find that the occurrence of high-stakes admission exams increased 10-year-old students’ math test scores by 0.2 standard deviations, on average. This effect additionally accrues by around 0.05 standard deviations among students with the highest probability of being admitted to selective schools. Although we find similar effects for both genders, there are indications that high-stakes exams in more competitive environments affect girls more than boys.     

The Interactive Impacts of High School Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) on College Student Attitudes Toward LGBT Individuals: An Investigation of High School Characteristics

Although gay-straight alliances (GSAs) are becoming more popular in high schools across the U.S., empirical studies investigating GSAs and their impact are sparse. Utilizing a sample of college students drawn from a large Southern university (N = 805; 78% White; 61% female; average age 22), the current study investigates the ways that the presence of high school GSAs affect college student attitudes toward LGBT individuals and how these relationships may vary by high school GSA location (South vs. non-South), town type (rural/small town, suburban, large city), and high school student population size. Overall, results from the current study show that the presence of a GSA in high school is a robust positive predictor of supportive attitudes toward LGBT individuals, even when considering many control variables. Such results suggest that the presence of GSAs in high schools may have significant positive and potentially long-lasting effects on college students’ attitudes toward LGBT individuals.     

Fertility differences in Peru: A reconsideration

Abstract In a series of articles by Stycos, Heer and W. H. James, predominantly Indian areas of Peru were reported to have significantly lower levels of fertility than the economically better developed Spanish-speaking areas. Heer and James reported similar findings for Bolivia and Ecuador as well as Peru.     

Sexual orientation and education politics: gay and lesbian representation in American schools

In what has sometimes provoked a "culture war" over America's schools, gays and lesbians have sought an expanded voice in the making of education policy. This paper explores the factors that promote gay representation on school boards, how this variable in turn influences gay representation in both administrative and teaching positions, and how all three forms of gay representation relate to school board policies regarding sexual orientation education. Three of the four models drawn from the social movement literature help to explain gay school board representation. In a manner similar to other minority groups, gay representation on school boards directly or indirectly promotes the appointment of gays to administrative and teaching positions and the adoption of policies that address the problems faced by gay and lesbian students in the public schools.     

The Impact of Sense of Community in the School,Social Skills,and Exposure to Aggression and Victimization on Students’ Well-Being

Research suggests that sense of community in the school is a promising construct in terms of its ability to promote students’ well-being. However, mechanisms behind and the potential benefits of school sense of community have not been studied in detail. This cross-sectional study tested a model which examined the role of sense of community in the school, social skills, exposure to aggression, and victimization in shaping students’ well-being. The sample consisted of 1076 students from 22 public middle schools and 724 students from 22 public high schools located in the Italian Region of Liguria. Using a Bayesian estimation for a structural equation model, results showed that sense of community in the school directly predicted students’ social skills, exposure to aggression, and well-being and, indirectly (through social skills and exposure to aggression), victimization. In addition, we found that social skills were related to victimization. Finally, results showed that victimization was predicted by exposure to aggression and predicted well-being. The current study suggests that sense of community in the school and social skills are key variables for interventions that aim to prevent aggressive behaviors at school and to increase students’ well-being.     

The Role of Catchment Areas on School Segregation by Economic,Social and Cultural Characteristics

This research analyses the socioeconomic and cultural segregation of students across school catchment areas using census data for the students in their second year of secondary education in Andalusia (the most populated region in Spain). The main methodology used is the Mutual Information Index, which satisfies all the desirable properties for measuring segregation. Concretely, we draw upon the additive decomposability property, which decomposes the segregation of students across schools into the different levels in which schools can be grouped, that is, catchment areas and, within catchment areas, by source of funding (public and semiprivate schools). We found that school segregation is greater than catchment areas’ segregation. Additionally, statistically significant correlations are found between the level of segregation within the catchment areas and factors such as size of the catchment area, parental level of education and size of the municipality where the school is located.

     

Schulqualität, Schulerfolg und Gesundheit. Ergebnisse aus der österreichischen „Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children“-Studie

Based on the question, how school quality, academic achievement and health are linked to each other, the paper presents a research model that regards students’ health as a central educational resource that mediates between school quality and students’ academic achievement. The empirical test is based on the most recent data of the “Health Behaviour in School-aged Children” (HBSC) survey by using a structural equation model. The results indicate, that school quality influences students’ academic achievement as well as their health. According to our model, students’ health acts as a mediator between the quality of schools and students’ academic achievement.     

The Quality of School Life: Teacher-Student Trust Relationships and the Organizational School Context

In exploring the quality of schools’ social system, this study provides insight into in which types of schools students may encounter barriers in developing supportive teacher-student relationships because of teachers exposing low levels of trust in students. Student culture and teachability perceptions are assessed as incentives for teachers’ perceptions of students’ trustworthiness. Information was gathered from 2,104 teachers across a representative sample of 84 secondary schools in Flanders (Belgium). A measure for trust in students was derived from the trust scales developed by Hoy and Tschannen-Moran. Multilevel analyses reveal that teacher perceptions of students’ teachability strongly predict teacher trust. This underscores the importance of teacher perceptions of students’ ability to meet the expectations imposed on them with regard to the formation of trust. Additionally, we show that teacher trust is affected by the organizational school context, although the academic orientation of the student culture plays no role.     

Learning,Interaction and Relationships as Components of Student Well-being: Differences Between Classes from Student and Teacher Perspective

The attitudes of students to their school, teachers and peers were investigated with 1,540 students in grade six from 30 schools and 78 classes. Using structural equation modelling, the students’ perceptions of well-being were investigated at class level using seven items with high reliability. Their well-being was dependent on at least three factors: students’ learning (seven items), student-to-student interaction (six items) and teacher–student relationships as described by students (ten items). Together, these factors explained 72 % of the variability of well-being between classes. The students’ well-being appeared to be significantly different between schools and between classes in the same school. The teachers’ opinions of their classes with the highest class score for well-being were compared with the lowest. The differences in the evaluation of the teachers’ own classes explain a number of critical issues which impact on educational outcomes. Students need to be aware of the combined effects of learning and socialisation.     

青少年学生自杀意愿和行为的家庭阶层特征差异研究——以对湖南省的调研为例

通过对湖南省六个城市九所大、中小学的1775名青少年学生实证调查发现,青少年学生的自杀意愿和非致命性自杀行为因青少年学生家庭阶层特征的不同而呈现明显的差异性。对青少年学生的自杀意愿有着显著影响的家庭阶层因素主要是家庭声望,对青少年学生的非致命性自杀行为有着显著影响的家庭阶层因素主要是家庭权力。由于家庭系统的阶层位置过低或过高,都有可能导致青少年学生自杀意愿或非致命性自杀行为的升高,因此,必须采取有效措施,缩小家庭系统之间日益扩大的阶层差别。     

Equality and Diversity in the Classroom: A Comparison of Students’ and Teachers’ Attitudes in Six European Countries

Globalisation and increased mobility of people within the EU have led to increased immigration and greater diversity within many EU countries, which have affected the composition of workplaces and classrooms. This includes diversity in terms of nationality, as well as ethnic, racial and religious diversity. This article expands awareness of diversity issues in the workplace to classrooms. It is based on a crosscultural comparative study of the attitudes of secondary school students and their teachers in six European countries: Ireland, the UK, France, Latvia, Italy and Spain. The sample included 320 students and 208 teachers for a total of 528 respondents. The article compares and contrasts attitudes towards non-national students, ethnic and religious minorities and disabled students, as well as gender issues, bullying and general perceptions of equality and diversity. The findings demonstrate generally positive attitudes among young people towards the increasing diversity in their classrooms. Moreover, the study revealed that in countries where there is greater diversity, the perception of difficulties is lower than in countries with less experience of diversity, suggesting that greater diversity and intergroup contact is resulting in more inclusive attitudes in schools. However, results comparing students with teachers identified consistent gaps in perceptions, with teachers having greater estimates of difficulties posed by diversity, together with smaller estimates of bullying behaviour. The study demonstrated that there is a need for teachers to have enhanced skills and competencies to deal effectively with this new environment in order to facilitate a more inclusive classroom.     

LGBT-Competence in Social Work Education: The Relationship of School Contexts to Student Sexual Minority Competence

This study examined the relationship between master of social work programs’ (MSW) support of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people (LGBT-competence) and the sexual minority competence (LGB-competence) of social work students. Data were gathered from a sample of MSW program directors, faculty members, and students (N = 1385) within 34 MSW programs in the United States. A series of hierarchical linear models tested if a MSW program’s LGBT-competence was associated with the LGB-competence of its students. Results showed a significant relationship between organizational LGBT-competence and individual LGB-competence within schools of social work, and that programs with greater LGBT-competence also had students who felt more competent to work with sexual minorities. These findings suggest schools of social work can take substantive action at an organizational level to improve the professional LGB-competence of future social workers. Implications for social work education are discussed.