Examining the School-to-Prison Pipeline through Juvenile Public Policy Initiatives and Prison Expenditures

The 21st century has brought a stark reality to American society: young people are becoming increasingly disillusioned with the opportunities provided to them through school systems that perpetuate racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps. Generations that were once lauded as future leaders are now completely unconvinced that they will ever have opportunities to assume leadership, and droves are failing to complete compulsory courses of education as a result. Many are turning to lives of crime out of necessity and frustration over the stark realities they face as children of color in an increasingly divided nation. To understand the current issues impacting young people and creating what has become known as the school-to-prison pipeline, an in-depth examination of the social, economic, and educational factors creating increased numbers of incarcerated youth must be undertaken and connections between systemic dysfunction and racial disparities investigated.

Racial Disparities in Health among College Educated African-Americans: Can HBCU Attendance Reduce the Risk of Metabolic Syndrome in Midlife?

We expand on existing understandings of health disparities among middle-class African-Americans by examining how the postsecondary educational context gives rise to the unequal distribution of health. We use panel data (1994-2009) from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to estimate if the risk of developing metabolic syndrome by midlife significantly differs for African-Americans who attended Historically Black College or Universities (HBCUs) vs. predominantly White institutions (PWIs). We find that HBCU enrollment is associated with a 35% reduction in the odds of metabolic syndrome. Furthermore, we demonstrate that HBCU attendees who grew up in more segregated environments experienced the greatest reductions in the likelihood of developing metabolic syndrome. Our results underscore the important role that HBCUs play in the lives of African-Americans and suggest their impacts go far beyond traditional benchmarks of socioeconomic achievement to include key health outcomes.

Racial Disparities in Health among College Educated African-Americans: Can HBCU Attendance Reduce the Risk of Metabolic Syndrome in Midlife?

We expand on existing understandings of health disparities among middle-class African-Americans by examining how the postsecondary educational context gives rise to the unequal distribution of health. We use panel data (1994-2009) from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to estimate if the risk of developing metabolic syndrome by midlife significantly differs for African-Americans who attended Historically Black College or Universities (HBCUs) vs. predominantly White institutions (PWIs). We find that HBCU enrollment is associated with a 35% reduction in the odds of metabolic syndrome. Furthermore, we demonstrate that HBCU attendees who grew up in more segregated environments experienced the greatest reductions in the likelihood of developing metabolic syndrome. Our results underscore the important role that HBCUs play in the lives of African-Americans and suggest their impacts go far beyond traditional benchmarks of socioeconomic achievement to include key health outcomes.

Do Education System Characteristics Moderate the Socioeconomic, Gender and Immigrant Gaps in Math and Science Achievement?

Using data from the 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study for 45 countries, we examined the size of socioeconomic, gender, and immigrant status related gaps, and their relationships with education system characteristics, such as differentiation, standardization, and proportion of governmental spending on education. We find that higher socioeconomic status is positively and significantly associated with higher math and science achievement; immigrant students lag behind their native peers in both math and science, with first generation students faring worse than second generation; and girls show lower math performance than boys. A higher degree of differentiation makes socioeconomic gaps larger in both math and science achievement, whereas higher governmental spending reduces socioeconomic achievement gaps.

States as Sites of Educational (In)Equality: State Contexts and the Socioeconomic Achievement Gradient

Socioeconomic achievement gaps have long been a central focus of educational research. However, not much is known about how (and why) between-district gaps vary among states, even though states are a primary organizational level in the decentralized education system in the United States. Using data from the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), this study describes state-level socioeconomic achievement gradients and the growth of these gradients from Grades 3 to 8. We also examine state-level correlates of the gradients and their growth, including school system funding equity, preschool enrollment patterns, the distribution of teachers, income inequality, and segregation. We find that socioeconomic gradients and their growth rates vary considerably among states, and that between-district income segregation is positively associated with the socioeconomic achievement gradient.

Do Student Mindsets Differ by Socioeconomic Status and Explain Disparities in Academic Achievement in the United States?

Students from higher–socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds show a persistent advantage in academic outcomes over lower-SES students. It is possible that students’ beliefs about academic ability, or mindsets, play some role in contributing to these disparities. Data from a recent nationally representative sample of ninth-grade students in U.S. public schools provided evidence that higher SES was associated with fewer fixed beliefs about academic ability (a group difference of .22 standard deviations). Also, there was a negative association between a fixed mindset and grades that was similar regardless of a student’s SES. Finally, student mindsets were a significant but small factor in explaining the existing relationship between SES and achievement. Altogether, mindsets appear to be associated with socioeconomic circumstances and academic achievement; however, the vast majority of the existing socioeconomic achievement gap in the U.S. is likely driven by the root causes of inequality.

The Global Increase in the Socioeconomic Achievement Gap, 1964 to 2015

The “socioeconomic achievement gap”—the disparity in academic achievement between students from high- and low-socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds—is well-known in the sociology of education. The SES achievement gap has been documented across a wide range of countries. Yet in most countries, we do not know whether the SES achievement gap has been changing over time. This study combines 30 international large-scale assessments over 50 years, representing 100 countries and about 5.8 million students. SES achievement gaps are computed between the 90th and 10th percentiles of three available measures of family SES: parents’ education, parents’ occupation, and the number of books in the home. Results indicate that, for each of the three SES variables examined, achievement gaps increased in a majority of sample countries. Yet there is substantial cross-national variation in the size of increases in SES achievement gaps. The largest increases are observed in countries with rapidly increasing school enrollments, implying that expanding access reveals educational inequality that was previously hidden outside the school system. However, gaps also increased in many countries with consistently high enrollments, suggesting that cognitive skills are an increasingly important dimension of educational stratification worldwide.

A quantitative program evaluation of the impact of a three-teacher act preparatory model at a midwestern suburban high school

The purpose of this study was to determine whether an ACT prep program taught by three teachers at a Midwestern U.S. high school, each with certification in the ACT subtest topic they taught, generated statistically significant results in the ACT scores of its participants. The secondary purpose of this study was also to determine whether the three-teacher ACT prep course effectively served underrepresented students, helping to close multiple ethnic and socioeconomic achievement gaps (Darling-Hammond, 2000). Ultimately, the three-teacher model did not demonstrate statistically significant differences in scores for its participants, including underrepresented students. Using the economics of schooling as a conceptual framework that "views the schooling process as an input-output model, where the inputs are students, teachers, and school resources and the outputs are student learning achievements" (Qiu and Wu, 2011, p. 65), it was revealed that the inputs of the three-teacher model were not worth the outputs, when outputs can be considered statistically significant differences in scores.