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In recent decades, the black–white test score disparity has decreased, and the test score disparity between children of high- versus low-income parents has increased. This study focuses on a comparison that has, to date, fallen between the separate literatures on these diverging trends: black and white students whose parents have similarly low, middle, or high incomes (i.e., same income or race within income). To do so, I draw on three nationally representative data sets on 9th or 10th graders, covering 1960 to 2009, that contain information on students’ math test scores. I find that math test score disparities between black and white students with same-income parents are to black students’ disadvantage. Although these disparities have decreased since 1960, in 2009 they remained substantively large, statistically significant, and largest between children of the highest-income parents. Furthermore, family and school characteristics that scholars commonly use to explain test score disparities by race or income account for markedly decreasing shares of race-within-income disparities over time. The study integrates the literatures on test score disparities by race and income with attention to the historical and continued structural influence of race, net of parental income, on students’ educational experiences and test score outcomes.

This article investigates White, Black, and Hispanic men’s and women’s access and midlife labor market returns to college quality. To do so, we use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1979 Cohort (NLSY-79), merged with college quality information from the Barron’s Admissions Competitiveness Index. Although prior research has investigated similar dynamics in access and returns to higher education, this work typically excludes Hispanics and does not assess enrollments at community colleges and other less competitive colleges where Black and Hispanic enrollments tend to cluster. We find that Black–White and Hispanic–White differences in college quality, to Whites’ advantage, were fully explained or reversed once we accounted for differences in students’ backgrounds. At midlife, Hispanic and especially Black men had lower rates of labor force participation than White men who attended colleges of the same quality. Including such differences (i.e., years of no or part-time work) in assessing the earnings returns to college quality demonstrated striking disadvantages facing college-educated Black men relative to White men, which were not fully accounted for by background characteristics. Employment and earnings returns to college quality were not as disparate by race for women. Relative to White women, we find earnings advantages for Hispanic women among those who attended community colleges. This article demonstrates the utility of taking an intersectional and life course approach to the study of higher education and the economic returns to schooling.

This article assesses the relationships between race, gender, and parental college savings. Some prior studies have investigated race differences in parental college savings, yet none have taken an intersectional approach, and most of these studies were conducted with cohorts of students who predate key demographic changes among U.S. college goers (e.g., the reversal of the gender gap in college completion). Drawing on theories of parental investment and data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09), we show that both race and gender are associated with whether parents save for college, as well as how much they save. Both black boys and black girls experience savings disadvantages relative to their white peers. However, black girls experience particularly striking disparities: Black girls with the strongest academic credentials receive savings equivalent to black girls with the weakest academic credentials. Results suggest this is due, at least in part, to the fact that high-achieving black girls tend to come from families that are much less well-off than high achievers in other race-gender groups. As a result, parents of black girls frequently rely on funding sources other than their own earnings or savings to pay for their children’s college. These funding sources include private loans that may pose financial challenges for black girls and their families across generations, thus deepening inequalities along the lines of gender, race, and class. These findings demonstrate the power of taking an intersectional approach to the study of higher education in general and college funding in particular.

We conducted an inductive analysis of 166 interviews from a longitudinal study of 26 Chicago Public School principals. Test-based accountability pressures played a visible role in principals’ views of and relations with parents. Some principals reported banning parents from classrooms based on the need to protect instructional time to raise test scores; others thought more parental involvement would help their school reach its academic goals. Viewing principals in urban schools as street-level bureaucrats who have discretion in how they implement policy demands offers a way to understand variation in principals’ decisions about parent involvement.

Studies of when youth classify academic achievement in racial terms have focused on the racial classification of behaviors and individuals. However, institutions—including schools—may also be racially classified. Drawing on a comparative interview study, we examine the school contexts that prompt urban black students to classify schools in racial terms. Through Diversify, a busing program, one group of black students attended affluent suburban schools with white-dominated achievement hierarchies ( n = 38). Diversify students assigned schools to categories of whiteness or blackness that equated whiteness with achievement and blackness with academic deficiency. Students waitlisted for Diversify ( n = 16) attended urban schools without white-dominated achievement hierarchies. These students did not classify schools as white or black, based on academic quality. We assert that scholars may productively conceive of schools, not just individual students, as sites of potential racial classification. Furthermore, the racial classification of schools reinforces antagonism between black students attending ‘‘white’’ and ‘‘black’’ schools and perpetuates harmful racial stereotypes.

INTRODUCTIONBlacks are generally disadvantaged at both the macro and micro levels of U.S. society. At the macro level, Blacks have historically suffered from low rates of social mobility. This holds whether mobility is measured as educational attainment (Kao & Thompson, 2003), residential mobility (Massey & Denton, 1993), or wealth accumulation (Oliver & Shapiro, 2006). At the micro level, Black students in U.S. schools are more likely than students from other backgrounds to have negative interactions with peers, teachers, and other school authority figures (Solorzano, Ceja, & Yosso, 2000). Both levels of inequality contribute to racial disparities in educational experiences and outcomes (Diamond, 2006). How should sociologists of education conceptualize these dual processes?As early as 1898, Du Bois argued that Blacks' micro level educational realities-number and condition of schools, illiteracy rates, and being unwelcome in schools and colleges with Whites - were inseparable from a macro level "peculiar environment" (Du Bois, 1898). Denials of Black humanity, anti-Black discrimination, fear of large scale Black socioeconomic mobility, and resistance to widespread educational opportunities for Blacks characterized this environment. Paradoxically, it would take education for Blacks to fully recognize the extent of their oppression. Because Du Bois articulated the interplay between education and oppression in this way, his writings and speeches on education reveal an innovative conceptualization of the macro-micro link. His work, therefore, also presents one resolution to the macro-micro issue within the sociology of education (Hammersley, 1984; Mehan, 1992; O'Connor, Lewis, & Mueller, 2007; Shilling, 1992; Willmott, 1999).In this article, the author outlines a Du Boisian framework for the sociology of education. The framework is based on Du Bois's numerous writings and speeches about the education of Black students. Also considered are sections of his major works (e.g., The Souls of Black Folk, 1994) that touch on education. The author uses Du Bois's work as qualitative data from which to generate a grounded theoretical framework (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Doing so demonstrates one way to connect Du Bois's broader educational philosophy to the investigation of specific educational realities facing Black students today. Du Bois is quoted at length whenever possible to enter his own words into the lexicon of the sociology of education, from which he currently remains largely absent.The Du Boisian framework's central problematic is the macro-micro feedback loop between racial inequalities in the U.S. political economy (Marable, 2000) and discriminatory treatment of Black students in schools (see Figure 1). The feedback loop perpetuates multigenerational educational inequality. That is, discriminatory treatment of Black students in schools is made possible by, and reinforces for another generation, racial inequalities in political economy. Du Bois's theoretical points of view on education will be identified as neo-Marxism (Bowles & Gintis, 1972, 2002, 2013) at the macro level and structuration theory (Giddens, 1984) at the micro level. Given the framework's central problematic of the macro-micro feedback loop, it is not surprising that both points of view focus on the bidirectional relationship between individuals and society, or agents and structures.The Du Boisian framework reconceptualizes issues currently facing Black students, who are the focus of much sociological and educational research (see O'Connor, Lewis, & Mueller, 2007). Issues are seen as ways in which political economic inequalities affect another generation of Black youth through or by way of the institution of schooling. This new intuition applies both within and between schools. Individual schools, even racially integrated ones, can be internally organized on the basis of race. Furthermore, the distribution of educational opportunity between schools and neighborhoods in the U. …