God, Grades, and Graduation

It’s widely acknowledged that American parents from different class backgrounds take different approaches to raising their children. But missing from the discussion is the fact that millions of parents on both sides of the class divide are raising their children to listen to God. What impact does a religious upbringing have on their academic trajectories? Drawing on 10 years of survey data with over 3,000 teenagers and over 200 interviews, God, Grades, and Graduation offers a revealing and at times surprising account of how teenagers’ religious upbringing influences their educational pathways from high school to college. God, Grades, and Graduation introduces readers to a childrearing logic that cuts across social class groups and accounts for Americans’ deep relationship with God: religious restraint. This book takes us inside the lives of these teenagers to discover why they achieve higher grades than their peers, why they are more likely to graduate from college, and why boys from lower-middle-class families particularly benefit from religious restraint. But readers also learn how for middle-upper-class kids—and for girls especially—religious restraint recalibrates their academic ambitions after graduation, leading them to question the value of attending a selective college despite their stellar grades in high school. By illuminating the far-reaching effects of the childrearing logic of religious restraint, God, Grades, and Graduation offers a compelling new narrative about the role of religion in academic outcomes and educational inequality.

Fixed Trajectories: Race, Schooling, and Graduation from a Southern Ontario University

According to Statistics Canada, during this decade (2019–2028) about 75% of new jobs will require a post-secondary education (Government of Canada, 2017). This study explores a unique dataset that follows students (n = 11,417) from a large urban school district to a local university in Southern Ontario. Using both descriptive statistics and a binary logistic regression and a framework of categorical inequality (Domina et al., 2017), we examine the academic trajectories of students—particularly of Black students. Findings show that, compared to their peers, neither high school nor university programs provide Black students with the kinds of educational experiences needed for university graduation and academic success that wouldenable them to realize their fullest social and economic potentials.

Latinx Communities and Academic Trajectories

This chapter will focus on why the Latina experience is critical to understanding current efforts to diversify the academy in the United States. We discuss the demographic realities of Latinx representation in higher education, the various ways in which Latinx scholars are marginalized, and what’s currently known about “best practices” when seeking excellence and inclusion through institutional diversity. We stress the importance of intersectionality in understanding and addressing the underrepresentation of Latina scholars in STEM.

Evangelical Worship

Almost invariably, media stories with the word evangelical in their headlines are accompanied by a familiar stock photo: a mass of middle-class worshippers with eyes closed, faces tilted upward, and hands raised to the sky. Yet, despite the fact that worship has become symbolic of evangelicalism’s identity in the twenty-first century, it remains an understudied locus of academic inquiry. Historians of American evangelicalism tend to define the movement by its political entanglements (the “rise of the religious Right”), and academic trajectories (the formation of the “evangelical mind”), not its ecclesial practices. Theological scholars frequently dismiss evangelical worship as a reiteration of nineteenth-century revivalism or a derivative imitation of secular entertainment (three Christian rock songs and a spiritual TED talk). But by failing to engage this worship seriously, we miss vital insights into a form of Protestantism that exerts widespread influence in the United States and around the world. Evangelical Worship: An American Mosaic models a new way forward. Drawing together insights from American religious history and liturgical studies, and putting both in conversation with ethnographic fieldwork in seven congregations, this book argues that corporate worship is not a peripheral “extra” tacked onto a fully formed spiritual/political/cultural movement, but rather the crucible through which congregations forge and negotiate the contours of evangelicalism’s contested theological identity.

The form, rhythm, and orchestration of an academic career: Cultivating and navigating inner compasses within institutional terrains

The evolution of research careers is inherent to academic lives but rarely enters the research literature. In this autoethnographic paper, I reflect on composing, orchestrating, and performing my research journey. Shaped by intellectual and aesthetic pursuits, this journey is both experiential and conceptual, responsive to encounters with people and ideas that shaped my thinking and being. At the intersection of micro, macro, and meso contexts, the journey has been guided by inner compasses. While grounded within my own circumstances, the issues addressed in this article underlie academic trajectories. The article is written as an invitation to reflect on your own journeys and compasses; identify crossroads, blockages, and openings; and note evolving forms, changing rhythms, and nuanced orchestrations in the contrapuntal composition of life.

Primary education degree programs in Alicante, Barcelona and Helsinki: Could the differences in the mathematical knowledge of incoming students be explained by the access criteria?

This perspective paper draws on the interest in ensuring that students who enter primary teacher training programs have a solid background knowledge of mathematics. We describe the access criteria and requirements for admission to the primary education degree programs at the Universidad de Alicante and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, in Spain, and the University of Helsinki, in Finland. We present the results of an evaluation of the mathematical knowledge that students bring to their education as teachers at these three institutions. The results show that in each program, the subgroup of students who had followed the longer track of mathematics courses scored significantly higher on the mathematical test, although this was no longer as clear when we compared across universities. We also found that the students who had taken the mathematics section of the entrance examination or the matriculation examination scored higher on the test than those from the same program who had not, but this tendency broke down when cross-university comparisons were made. We also explored how the cap set on the number of students admitted to the three programs – this being the most striking difference in the admission policies – could be an explanatory variable for these discrepancies. The comparison between universities leads us to hypothesize that expecting applicants to have met certain requirements in their academic trajectories prior to university entrance and adjusting the cap set on the number of places could ensure a better mastery of mathematical knowledge among those students admitted to the Spanish programs.

Measuring Middle School Achievement Trajectories for College Readiness

This study identifies students’ academic trajectories in the middle grades relative to a set of college readiness benchmarks. We apply math and reading college readiness benchmarks to rich longitudinal data for more than 360,000 students across the nation. Student-level and school-level demographic characteristics significantly predict academic trajectories. Compared to White and Asian students, higher proportions of Black and Hispanic student are always off-track throughout middle school. Among students who started 6th grade on track, being male, Black, Hispanic, and attending schools with a higher percentage of low-income students are positively associated with falling off track.