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Buchmann, Condron and Roscigno argue in their article, "Shadow Education, American Style: Test Preparation, the SAT and College Enrollment," that the activities in which students engage to prepare for college entrance exams are forms of shadow education, a means by which more advantaged parents seek to pass their privileged status along to their children. By providing their children with shadow education, advantaged parents help them achieve higher scores than they otherwise would have achieved and further increase the differences between the exam scores of more advantaged and less advantaged children. In this commentary, the author focuses on the main contribution of BCR's article: the application of the concept of shadow education to SAT and ACT test preparation. He argues that BCR's conception of shadow education is flawed in two important ways. First, some of the activities they consider as "shadow education" are not shadowy at all; they are widely available free of charge to most students. The only true forms of shadow education here are private test preparation courses and private tutors. Second, the way they operationalize the concept of shadow education makes it impossible to discern the extent to which these true forms of shadow education contribute to student test scores or postsecondary destinations. The author offers an alternative interpretation of BCR's results. He suggests that shadow education in preparation for college entrance exams is a relatively ineffective means of improving test scores but nonetheless quite important in terms of its psychic benefits. (Contains 5 notes.)

Despite increases in the representation of African American and Hispanic youth in advanced math courses in high school over the past two decades, recent national reports indicate that substantial inequality in achievement remains. These inequalities can temper one's optimism about the degree to which the United States has made real progress toward educational equity. Using data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS), the authors find that the math achievement gap is most pronounced among those students who take the most demanding high school math classes, such as precalculus and calculus. The authors explore the roles of family socioeconomic status and school composition in explaining this pattern. Findings suggest that among those students reaching the advanced math high school stratum, Hispanic youth from low-income families and African American youth from segregated schools fare the worst in terms of closing the achievement gap with their white peers. The authors discuss potential explanations for the achievement differences observed and stress the need for more research that focuses explicitly on the factors that inhibit minority/majority parity at the top of the secondary curricular structure. (Contains 2 figures, 3 tables, and 14 notes.)

In this paper we investigate how participation in the Early Assessment Program, which provides California high school juniors with information about their academic readiness for college-level work at California State University campuses, affects their college-going behavior and need for remediation in college. Using administrative records from California State University,-Sacramento and the California Department of Education, we find that participation in the Early Assessment Program reduces the average student's probability of needing remediation at California State University by 6.1 percentage points in English and 4.1 percentage points in mathematics. Rather than discouraging poorly prepared students from applying to Sacramento State, EAP appears to lead students to increase their academic preparation while still in high school. (Contains 9 tables, 5 figures and 25 footnotes.)

In 23 states, members of the high school class of 2008 were required to pass a state high school exit examination (HSEE) to earn regular high school diplomas. Proponents of these policies claim that they improve student academic achievement, although critics argue that they reduce the quality of instruction without raising academic achievement. Using nationally representative data collected to facilitate the analysis of temporal achievement trends, the effects of minimum competency and more difficult state HSEEs on student achievement in mathematics and reading between 1971 and 2004 are evaluated. The potential disparate impacts of state HSEEs on the achievement of students by race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and prior academic achievement are examined in this study. No evidence is found for any effects of state HSEEs on achievement in either reading or mathematics at the mean or at the 10th, 20th, 80th, or 90th percentiles of the achievement distribution. (Contains 10 notes and 4 tables.)

This article explores how the structure of higher education in the United States and Israel mediates the relationship among race/ethnicity, social origins, and postsecondary outcomes. On the basis of differences in how the two systems of higher education have developed, the authors anticipated that inequality in college attendance will be greater in Israel, while inequality in the type of college or university one attends will be greater in the United States. They found that students in the United States are more likely to attend college than are their Israeli counterparts. Contrary to their expectations, however, inequality in the chances of attendance is similar across these nations, if not slightly greater in the United States. Inequality in the types of institutions that students attend appears greater in the United States, but the contours of ethnic inequality in college destinations are markedly different across these two contexts. (Contains 7 tables, 4 figures, and 19 footnotes.)

Since the late 1970s, an increasing number of states have required students to pass statewide high school exit examinations (HSEEs) in order to graduate. States have usually adopted HSEEs in response to the perception that a substantial number of graduates lack skills that are required for success in the modern economy. What do these educational reforms mean for students' postsecondary economic and labor market prospects? The central hypothesis of the study presented here was that state HSEE policies have the effect of widening gaps in labor force status and earnings between young people who have high school diplomas and those who do not. To test this hypothesis, the authors modeled the association between state HSEE policies and these labor market outcomes using data from the 1980-2000 U.S. censuses and the 1984-2002 Outgoing Rotation Groups of the Current Population Survey. The results revealed no evidence that state HSEEs positively affect labor force status or earnings or that the connections between state HSEE policies and these outcomes vary by students' race/ethnicity or the level of difficulty of state HSEEs. (Contains 6 tables and 18 notes.)

Research on adolescent responsibilities outside of school rarely considers how schools and teachers mitigate the adverse consequences of those responsibilities on academic outcomes. We seek to understand when, and for whom, teachers and administrators accommodate students' out‐of‐school commitments. Analysing 61 interviews with teachers and staff at five high schools that serve predominantly low‐income students and survey responses from teachers across Wisconsin (N = 601), we find that staff identify responsibilities as connected to students' social class. Teacher responses to student responsibilities are largely individual and ad hoc, whilst administrators report accommodating students' paid work through structural changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on interviews with first‐generation (FG) college students in their first year attending two distinct public colleges (a rural state university and an urban flagship) to show how these students framed college in terms of place, how different place frames shaped students' college choices and experiences, and how place served as a proxy for students' feelings of belonging. Some students wanted place continuity: to attend college in a place that felt proximate and symbolically similar to the place where they were from. Other students, however, wanted place change: to attend college in a place that felt markedly different from where they grew up. The extent to which students' place desires matched their choice of college shaped students' sense of fit in college by determining students' access to relevant cultural and network resources. Students experienced steady belonging, forged belonging, reluctant belonging, or interrupted belonging on these bases. Our findings provide support for the role of place broadly understood in FG college students' adaptation to college, and we consider implications for higher education outcomes and improving institutional support for FG students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on interviews with first‐generation (FG) college students in their first year attending two distinct public colleges (a rural state university and an urban flagship) to show how these students framed college in terms of place, how different place frames shaped students' college choices and experiences, and how place served as a proxy for students' feelings of belonging. Some students wanted place continuity: to attend college in a place that felt proximate and symbolically similar to the place where they were from. Other students, however, wanted place change: to attend college in a place that felt markedly different from where they grew up. The extent to which students' place desires matched their choice of college shaped students' sense of fit in college by determining students' access to relevant cultural and network resources. Students experienced steady belonging, forged belonging, reluctant belonging, or interrupted belonging on these bases. Our findings provide support for the role of place broadly understood in FG college students' adaptation to college, and we consider implications for higher education outcomes and improving institutional support for FG students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An examination of California State University-Sacramento's Early Assessment Program (EAP) found that participation in the program reduces the probability that an average student will need remediation. The EAP gives high school juniors in information about their readiness for college-level work at CSU campuses. EAP was found to help students prepare academically while still in high school.