This study examined the affects on students of exposure to two types of background knowledge about a problem case that involved a disconnection between a foreign college professor and her students.

This article examines the difference in cultural flexibility, or the propensity to move across different cultural and social peer groups and environments, between black and white students enrolled in either majority-minority or majority-white schools. Results show associations among race, self-esteem, academic and extracurricular placement, and cultural flexibility by school context.

This study responds to a critical need for research that provides an evidentiary basis for policy, law, and social change. The premise for the current study is to provide new perspectives for understanding problems in California that policy and practices can target to improve educational opportunities and outcomes in the state. Whereas previous studies have been interested in the factors associated with attending either the University of California as a whole or a specific campus within the UC system, this study takes one step further by examining the extent to which both the UC system and individual UC campuses enroll first-time freshman from high schools that vary by racial composition.

Despite a powerful civil rights movement and legislation barring discrimination in housing markets, residential neighborhoods remain racially segregated. To a considerable extent, residential segregation is perpetuated across generations: people who grow up in segregated neighborhoods tend to also live in them as adults. I examine whether segregation in schools and colleges contributes to the intergenerational transmission of residential locations in terms of racial composition.

This study examines the relationship between social cohesion and social isolation at the institutional level in schools and neighborhoods using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen.

This article applies perpetuation theory to the study of workplace racial isolation. Findings suggest that exposure to other racial groups in high school for African American and White students reduces their racial isolation in the workplace in the years following high school.

This article explores the effect that the proportion of children of immigrants in a school has on all students’ expectations and examines the differential effects of school composition on the expectations of children of immigrants as compared with nonimmigrants.

The article discusses Justice Kennedy’s unique views in the Seattle school desegregation decision and tries to clarify the relationship between social science evidence on desegregation benefits and the requirements of narrowly tailored remedies.

Four decades after the pathbreaking Coleman report, researchers are still working to address its primary message: that school social composition and resources are not important for understanding and addressing educational inequality. Using the original Equality of Educational Opportunity data, this study applied a two-level hierarchical linear model to partition the variation in ninth-grade students’ verbal achievement into its within- and between-school components and to measure the associations among school-level social composition, resources, teacher characteristics, and peer characteristics and achievement. We estimated that 40% of the achievement variance was between schools, whereas Coleman and colleagues had originally estimated that only 8.5%–18% lay between schools. Explanatory analyses suggested that the racial/ethnic and social class composition of a student’s school was over 1 3/4 times more important than a student’s individual race/ethnicity or social class for understanding educational outcomes. Further, within-school Black-White achievement gaps and social class differences were explained in part by curricular differentiation and teachers’ preferences toward middle-class students. These findings are contrasted with those from a set of traditional ordinary least squares regression models and the past conclusions drawn from the Coleman report.

The author investigates the behavioral climate and teachers’ use of developmental instruction in predominantly black schools in three databases.

In this paper children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) provide a test case through which to investigate psychosocial school compositional effects.

This investigation is sparked by research findings on secondary education showing school segregation to be closely associated with homogeneous grouping practices, such as tracking and between-class ability grouping. We conduct secondary analyses of national data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study –Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) to investigate the degree to which the racial and ethnic composition of schools is associated with use of ability grouping practices as early as kindergarten.

This quantitative study employs a seasonal perspective to assess the importance of neighborhood and school contexts for reading achievement as of school entry and through the first 2 years of elementary school.

This article examines the effects of segregation, desegregation, and resegregation on minority and White dropout rates in urban high schools. Relying on multilevel techniques, it analyzes school- and student-level outcomes simultaneously. The results, based on longitudinal data from Cleveland, suggest that desegregated high schools aggravated dropout tendencies to a much lesser extent than did segregated ones, although the eventual rates at the student level changed only modestly, largely because of the worsening nonschool problems. Desegregation was particularly beneficial for high schools serving cohorts that were exposed to integration starting in first grade. Resegregation nullified many of the school-level benefits of desegregation. The overall results were similar for minorities and Whites.

This article uses mixed methods to explore the relationship between housing and school opportunities for low-income families given the chance to move to less poor communities through the federal Moving to Opportunity (MTO) housing voucher experiment. Quantitative analyses suggest that new housing opportunities did not generally translate into a larger increase in school quality because families did not secure housing in communities with the highest-performing schools. Qualitative findings explore how structural constraints and parenting practices interact to affect where children attend school.

This article reviews international research on the connection between various forms of ability grouping with curriculum differentiation and the achievement gap. It concludes that such practices are likely to increase the gap between initially high- and low-achieving students, as well as between those from more and less privileged social backgrounds.

In this essay, Roslyn Arlin Mickelson introduces the set of three special issues about the effects of school and classroom composition on educational outcomes. The 22 articles in the set report new research on the relationship of racial and socioeconomic composition to math and science outcomes (Vol. 112, No. 4); to verbal achievement, discipline, and high school graduation (Vol. 112, No. 5); and to intergroup relations and adult life course trajectories (Vol. 112, No. 6). She suggests why the findings have implications for public policy and educational practice.

We analyze nationally representative data from 1972, 1982, 1992, and 2004, examining the mathematics achievement of four high school senior cohorts, and several school and family background characteristics. We examine how changes in these measures (in terms of means and coefficients) relate to the black-white and Latino-white test score gaps and to changes in school minority composition

Findings from several international studies have shown that in every country, there is a significant relationship between literacy skills and socioeconomic status. This relationship, called a socioeconomic gradient or “learning bar,” is a useful policy device because it provides a framework that emphasizes levels of schooling outcomes and the equality of outcomes among advantaged and disadvantaged groups. Research has also shown that schools differ considerably in their student outcomes, even after taking account of students’ ability and family background. The context or learning environment of a school or classroom is an important determinant of the rate at which children learn. The academic literature has traditionally used school composition, particularly the mean socioeconomic status (SES) of the school, as a proxy for context. This article uses data from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to show that school composition is correlated with several aspects of school and classroom context and that many of these contextual factors are associated with students’ science literacy. School composition is also associated with the extent to which school systems are segregated “horizontally,” based on the distribution among schools of students from differing SES backgrounds, or “vertically,” due mainly to mechanisms that select students into different types of schools. The findings have implications for educational policy that concern the differential allocation of human and material resources, the stratification of students into different types of schools and school programs, and the segregation of students from different family backgrounds.

This article examines the mathematics course-taking of White, African American, and Latino students in racially diverse schools and the effects of different opportunity structures in those schools on college preparation and college-going using data from the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement Study (AHAA) and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health).

This study examines how high school graduates got to where they were in terms of mathematics attainment from a social-psychological perspective. The study uses a three-level longitudinal and multilevel modeling framework to address the key research questions.

The percentages of free/reduced price lunch students and minority students are important factors in predicting science proficiency in high school and also moderate relationships by interacting with school composition factors. This study suggests that teacher quality in high poverty, majority-minority school settings remains an important policy target for reform and improvement.

This study examines the relationships among student socioeconomic status (SES), school SES, and academic achievement using data from the 2003 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for Australia. The study finds that increases in the mean SES of the school are associated with increases in a student's academic achievement and that this relationship is similar for all students regardless of their individual SES. The article concludes with a discussion of policy implications and possible strategies for mitigating the influence of school socioeconomic composition on student outcomes.

This study describes and compares theories from multiple disciplines about how peers (classmates) influence one another. It then compares the empirical predictions of the theories with empirical evidence about peer influences on student achievement, draws tentative conclusions about which theories are most consistent with the evidence, and proposes a new hybrid theory, group-based contagion, that seems most consistent with the evidence.

There is much current interest in the impact of early childhood education programs on preschoolers and, in particular, on the magnitude of cognitive and affective gains. To address this issue comprehensively, a meta-analysis was conducted for the purpose of synthesizing the outcomes of comparative studies in this area. Consistent with the accrued research base on the effects of preschool education, significant effects were found in this study for children who attend a preschool program prior to entering kindergarten. Although the largest effect sizes were observed for cognitive outcomes, a preschool education was also found to impact children’s social skills and school progress. Specific aspects of the treatments that positively correlated with gains included teacher-directed instruction and small-group instruction; provision of additional services tended to be associated with smaller gains.