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We ask whether patterns of racial ethnic and socioeconomic stratification in educational attainment are amplified or attenuated when we take a longer view of educational careers. We propose a model of staged advantage to understand how educational inequalities evolve over the life course. Distinct from cumulative advantage, staged advantage asserts that inequalities in education ebb and flow over the life course as the population at risk of making each educational transition changes along with the constraints they confront in seeking more education. Results based on data from the 2014 follow up of the sophomore cohort of High School and Beyond offer partial support for our hypotheses. The educational attainment process was far from over for our respondents as they aged through their 30s and 40s: More than 6 of 10 continued their formal training during this period, and 4 of 10 earned an additional credential. Patterns of educational stratification at midlife became more pronounced in some ways as women pulled further ahead of men in their educational attainments and parental education (but not income), and high school academic achievement continued to shape educational trajectories at the bachelor's degree level and beyond. However, African Americans gained on whites during this life phase through continued formal (largely academic) training and slightly greater conditional probabilities of graduate or professional degree attainment; social background fails to predict earning an associate's degree. These results, showing educational changes and transitions far into adulthood, have implications for our understanding of the complex role of education in stratification processes.

Purpose: This study examines how resources and organizational decisions within seven geographically diverse elementary schools shape instructional coordination for Tier 2 interventions within the Response to Intervention (RtI) framework. Research Methods: This work is part of a larger, multiple-case study examining how schools support academic achievement for economically disadvantaged students. We draw on qualitative interview and observation data from seven purposively sampled public elementary schools in Wisconsin during the 2017-18 school year. In our analysis, we approach each school as an individual case to ascertain how resources and organizational decisions shaped instructional coordination for Tier 2 interventions within the RtI framework. Findings: We find that organizational contexts shape how schools approach the instructional coordination of staffing and schedules requisite for multitiered instruction. Specifically, local programming, delineation of staff roles, and availability and deployment of school resources influenced if and how schools coordinated staff and schedules to support RtI. These elements consequently informed student groupings for interventions, the extent of student access to Tier 1 and Tier 2 content, and staff engagement in data-driven discussions. Implications: By closely examining the everyday realities of diverse elementary schools, this study demonstrates that RtI is not a singular program but a context-contingent process. In tracing the relationships between school contexts, instructional coordination, and the practical implementation of RtI, we provide insight into the messy realities of schools and obstacles to RtI that past research overlooks. These findings emphasize the importance of systematic, school-wide coordination that extends beyond single grade levels and subjects.

State and national school accountability policies situate preventing chronic absenteeism on par with meeting state standardized test benchmarks. We question relying on school attendance as both a component of accountability policies and a means of enhancing equity in schools. Our research suggests out-of-school factors unrelated to missed instruction account for most of the associations between absences and test score achievement--with unexcused absences driving those associations. Excessive absences--and particularly unexcused absences--do not harm students mainly through missed instruction. Instead, they reflect out-of-school harms students endure that have produced inequalities for years--and will continue to do so even if students show up or parents call in.

Professional collaboration is widely seen as an important component in educator professional development, but we know little about the interactional processes that undergird teacher learning in collaborative workgroups. This paper focuses on four collaborative workgroups in a yearlong, mathematics-focused professional development series for pre-Kindergarten teachers. Using a communities of practice framework, we analyzed teacher workgroup conversations to understand how these interactions mediated teachers' learning. We identified three modes of participation that characterized workgroup conversations and influenced the availability and quality of learning opportunities afforded to participants: interpersonal management, validation, and collective reasoning. Findings provide insight into how interactional processes in teacher workgroups may advance or inhibit teachers' learning.

Recent efforts to understand aggregate student loan debt have shifted the focus away from undergraduate borrowing and toward dramatically rising debt among graduate and professional students. We suggest educational debt plays a key role in social stratification by either deterring bachelor's degree holders from disadvantaged and underrepresented backgrounds from pursuing lucrative careers through advanced degree programs or imposing a high cost for entry. We speculate that the ongoing personal financing of advanced degrees, changes to funding in higher education, and increasing returns to and demand for postbaccalaureate degrees have created a perfect storm for those seeking degrees beyond college. We find that aggregate increases in borrowing among advanced degree students between 1996 and 2016 can be explained in part by increasing enrollment rates, particularly among master's degree students, and large, secular increases in graduate and professional students' undergraduate and graduate borrowing. In contrast to undergraduate debt alone, the burden of educational debt among graduate borrowers appears to have fallen on students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and historically underserved students of color more so than their more advantaged counterparts and on women more so than men. However, we also find that median advanced degree wage premia over those of bachelor's degree holders are substantial for many who graduate with advanced degrees but are particularly high for African American and low socioeconomic status graduates, complicating simple conclusions about the stratification of debt at the postgraduate level.

Determining the effectiveness of core mathematics curricula is foundational to evidence-based practice. Examining effectiveness heterogeneity is also crucial to better understanding mathematics achievement among English language learners (ELLs). In this study, we used a quasi-experimental design (difference-in-differences) to examine the impact of a standards-based elementary mathematics curriculum ("Bridges in Mathematics") on fifth graders' annual gains in mathematics achievement in a large midwestern school district compared to the district's prior curriculum ("Investigations"). We also investigated whether the effect of "Bridges" varied across English language proficiency (ELP) levels of ELLs. Students in schools that implemented "Bridges" (n = 1,839) showed significantly greater mathematics gains compared to those receiving the prior curriculum (n = 3,354; g = 0.25 in change score standard deviations). This effect did not vary significantly across ELP levels. Limitations of this study as well as implications for research and practice with core curricula are discussed. [For the corresponding grantee submission, see ED616693.]

Teachers set the tone for their classrooms, but what teacher beliefs shape students' sense of belonging? We investigate how teachers' mindsets—or their beliefs about learning and school—relate to adolescents' individual and collective reports of classroom belonging. Our pre-registered analyses include a multilevel design of how 1,200 US middle school students (ages 11–13; 50% female; 49% low income; 40% White, 30% Latinx, 13% Black, 9% Asian) and their teachers responded to surveys on educational mindsets. We find teachers' growth mindset and confidence in teaching positively relate to students' math class belonging—explaining between 30 and 40% of belonging among classes. Our data suggest a teacher's own sense of school belonging is unrelated to the belonging students feel in class, suggesting teachers' broad feelings of belonging may not influence students' specific classroom feelings of belonging as anticipated. These findings reinforce the notion that what teachers think and believe influence how students feel when in class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using eighteen years of data from more than 1,300 four-year colleges and universities in the United States, we investigate the extent to which institutional characteristics and contextual factors influence the propensity of colleges to indicate that they consider race/ethnicity in their admissions decisions. Consideration of race/ethnicity in admissions declined sharply after the mid-1990s, especially at public institutions. Rather than being shaped by specific historical and political contexts, consideration of race/ethnicity in admissions appears to be a widely institutionalized practice in higher education that has been tempered by changes in the policy environment over time.

Parental income and wealth contribute to children's success but are at least partly endogenous to parents' cognitive and noncognitive skills. We estimate the degree to which mothers' skills measured in early adulthood confound the relationship between their economic resources and their children's postsecondary education outcomes. Analyses of National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 suggest that maternal cognitive and noncognitive skills attenuate half of parental income's association with child baccalaureate college attendance, a fifth of its association with elite college attendance, and a quarter of its association with bachelor's degree completion. Maternal skills likewise attenuate a third of parental wealth's association with children's baccalaureate college attendance, half of its association with elite college attendance, and a fifth of its association with bachelor's degree completion. Observational studies of the relationship between parents' economic resources and children's postsecondary attainments that fail to account for parental skills risk seriously overstating the benefits of parental income and wealth.

In this paper, I evaluate the extent to which colleges and universities of varying degrees of selectivity engaged in racial, ethnic and socioeconomic affirmative action for cohorts of students who graduated in 1972, 1982 and 1992. I find that a much wider range of institutions engage in affirmative action for African American students than previous analysts reported, and that a growing number of institutions extend the benefits of affirmative action to Hispanic students. Colleges and universities are less enthusiastic about engaging in affirmative action for socioeconomically disadvantaged students. To understand why postsecondary institutions might prefer students from particular minority groups over otherwise comparable white students, I introduce the concept of compensatory sponsorship (buidling on Turner’s ideal type of sponsored mobility). In a contest system perceived by many to unfairly disdavantage some competititors, college personnel engage in affirmative action both to right a perceived wrong and to preserve the legitimacy of the contest. The beneficiaries of compensatory sponsorship, however, are determined by historical and social forces that constrain how postsecondary institutions recruit, admit and fund potential matriculants.

Patterns of postsecondary attendance in the United States continue to be stratified by socioeconomic background and race/ethnicity. We suggest that inequalities in knowledge of the costs of going to college contribute to persistent patterns of stratification. We hypothesize that disadvantaged parents who believe their child will attend college are less certain of the costs of college attendance. As a result, they are less able or willing to provide an estimate of the costs of college attendance, more likely to over-estimate those costs if they do provide an estimate, and make larger errors in estimation than comparable middle class or white parents. Using nationally representative data, we find mixed support for these hypotheses. Socioeconomically disadvantaged parents and minority parents are less likely to provide estimates of college tuition and, when they provide estimates, tend to make larger errors. On average, though, parents provide upwardly biased estimates of cost that are uniform across race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status. We discuss implications of these findings for sociological theory and for inequality in postsecondary education.

Although some scholars report that all students are better served by attending more prestigious postsecondary institutions, others have argued that students are better off attending colleges where they are about average in terms of academic ability and suffer worse outcomes if they attend schools that are "out of their league" at which they are "overmatched." The latter argument is most frequently deployed as a paternalistic justification for ending affirmative action. We take advantage of a natural admissions experiment at the University of California to test the effect of being overmatched for students on the margin of admission to elite universities. Consistent with the mismatch hypothesis, we find that students accumulate more credits when they attend less demanding institutions. However, students do not earn higher grades and are no more or less likely to drop out of schools where they are overmatched and are less likely to drop out than they would have been had they attended less demanding institutions.

Grades are the fundamental currency of our educational system; they signal academic achievement and noncognitive skills to parents, employers, postsecondary gatekeepers, and students themselves. Grade inflation compromises the signaling value of grades and undermines their capacity to achieve the functions for which they are intended. We challenge the "increases in grade point average" definition of grade inflation and argue that grade inflation must be understood in terms of the signaling power of grades. Analyzing data from four nationally representative samples, we find that in the decades following 1972: (a) grades have risen at high schools and dropped at 4-year colleges, in general, and selective 4-year institutions, in particular; and (b) the signaling power of grades has attenuated little, if at all. (Contains 2 tables and 5 notes.)

This article investigates the empirical basis for often-repeated arguments that gender differences in entrance into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors are largely explained by disparities in prior achievement. Analyses use data from three national cohorts of college matriculates across three decades to consider differences across several indicators of high school math and science achievement at the mean and also at the top of the test distribution. Analyses also examine the different comparative advantages men and women enjoy in math/science versus English/reading. Regardless of how prior achievement is measured, very little of the strong and persistent gender gap in physical science and engineering majors over time is explained. Findings highlight the limitations of theories focusing on gender differences in skills and suggest directions for future research. (Contains 2 figures, 2 tables and 13 notes.)

This exchange represents a follow-up to an article on the effects of state high school exit examinations that previously appeared in this journal (Warren, Grodsky, & Kalogrides 2009). That 2009 article was featured prominently in a report by the National Research Council (NRC) that evaluated the efficacy of test-based accountability systems. Hanushek (2012) was highly critical of the NRC's interpretation of the existing evidence, including Warren, Grodsky, & Kalogrides' 2009 piece. Here, Warren and Grodsky explain why they believe that Hanushek incorrectly evaluated their original article on state high school exit examinations. Hanushek then responds. (Contains 11 notes.)