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When 89% of high school graduates plan BA degrees, and low-achieving seniors who plan degrees have 80% failure rates, raising already high plans may be a poor strategy for improving college success. Using data on 7th-10th grade students, Domina et al. argue that higher plans are associated with success and suggest that my study of high school seniors is wrong. While their findings may indicate that MA plans are beneficial (although 7th-10th graders who know about MA degrees may be unusual), their research does not speak to my findings about seniors, whose plans are already very high. Contrary to Domina et al., I contend that effort may be reduced by poor articulation and information (not by high plans). I am pessimistic about poor articulation, not a "college for all ethos." I have shown that many seniors have high plans but poor information, and this leads to predictable failures in college. Further raising those plans may improve 7th-10th grade efforts, but will not improve seniors' college success.

Now in its third full school year of implementation, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has been drawing praise and blame. It has been praised for its goals of increasing all students' learning, requiring disaggregated data to monitor the progress of major subgroups of students, and having high-quality teachers in all schools. It has been criticized for overemphasizing the importance of standardized achievement tests, setting unrealistic time lines for clearly unreachable goals, and underfunding its requirements. Although most attention has been paid to NCLB's requirements for annual achievement tests and high-quality teachers, the law also includes important requirements for schools, districts, and states to organize programs of parental involvement and to communicate with parents and the public about students' achievement and the quality of schools. In this article, the author offers her perspectives on NCLB's requirements for family involvement; provides a few examples from the field; suggests modifications that are needed in the law; and encourages sociologists of education to take new directions in research on school, family, and community partnerships.

Social-capital explanations of school outcomes, particularly of the school outcomes of immigrant children and children of immigrants, have come into wide use in recent years. These explanations attempt to account for individual or group variations in school performance by viewing the family and community relations that surround children as forms of investments that yield payoffs in schools. These family and community relations are seen as specific to immigrant groups, or "ethnicity as social capital. The author believes that although this ethnicity-as-social-capital approach can be a valuable one, it runs the risk of overlooking the complex and contradictory nature of the association between immigrant social relations and the adaptation of immigrant children and children of immigrants. This article explores how a relatively high average level of achievement among Vietnamese American students has been maintained in recent years by cultural values that are conducive to achievement and by bounded social networks that maintain these values. The author and his colleague analyze the disadvantageous aspect of social capital as an investment of cultural values through social relations.

Argues that inadequate explanations about why academic performance is socially stratified lies with the failure to make sense of the complexity of social identity. Refers to articles in the 2001 theme issue of Sociology of Education to provide examples. Discusses need for further study on childrens' performance in U.S. schools. (CAJ)

This paper uses individual-level data to present new evidence on the impact of discrimination, class, family structure, and culture on black schooling. That evidence is used to reconsider several of the important conclusions of Lieberson's (1980) analysis of schooling. The paper confirms Lieberson's conclusions about the relative importance of economic well-being and the unimportance of family structure. When family background is controlled, Lieberson's conclusions concerning grade attainment in the early years of the century are confirmed. However, the use of the early attainment data to study the importance of cultural factors is complicated by an understanding of child labor opportunities. Measures of school performance less affected by that complication are offered. Finally, the appendix questions the evidence for Lieberson's contention that changes in the relative position of blacks were especially great in the 1925-35 birth cohort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jencks et al. (1983) provide two replications of the Wisconsin status attainment model, comparing their results closely to the results reported by Sewell and Hauser (1975). While concluding that the Wisconsin data are not seriously biased, they raise a number of questions regarding the interpretation of the model. Hauser et al. (1983), while not responding to the Jencks et al. paper directly, provide analyses which speak to the issues they raise. Using multiple indicators of most concepts in the model and the LISREL approach to estimation, they suggest a return to the basic causal chain interpretation originally posited by Sewell et al. (/970). The Hauser et al. estimation procedures are complex, and this paper attempts to explicate them. While the Hauser et al. analysis answers a number of questions and clarifies some important issues, many questions remain including the following: What is the meaning and interpretation of "unmeasured" family background? Should disaggregated measures of ability and performance be used rather than composites? Is a more elaborate model of the socialization process, particularly one which permits reciprocal effects, required to understand status attainment? Finally, what is required to deal effectively with charges that the status attainment model ignores social structure? This paper attempts to answer those questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following Sørensen (1974), this paper formulates two models for the process of occupational achievement over time. Unlike Sørensen, this paper considers models which explicitly include the effects of changes in education on changes in occupational achievement; that is, the models do not assume that resources are stable over the career. The first model uses data on educational and occupational attainment at two points in time to examine how changes in education affect the time path of occupation. The model is estimated by the inclusion of an adjustment mechanism in the form of educational aspirations and requires a distributed lag approach. After assuming that the system is "meritocratic," i.e. that changes in educational level translate directly into occupational achievement, the empirical results (based on a French mobility survey) demonstrate the adjustment mechanism quite effectively. The second model assumes simultaneity of effects between education and occupation and allows an estimate of the extent to which the time paths (rates of change over time) of education and occupation are stable. Sørensen found that the growth rate in occupation did not change over time, but the somewhat more complex model used here (again based on French mobility data) suggests that there is a slight increase in rates of change for both education and occupation over time. The results also suggest that the higher the level of one's education, the greater the gain in occupation status over time and vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the effects of parents' occupational status, teachers' encouragement for further study, and high school curriculum on girls' academic achievement in girls' schools and coeducational schools. Data on high school seniors were collected in two Australian states: Victoria and Queensland. We used multiple regression analysis to identify the most important predictors of year 12 academic success among girls at girls' schools and coed schools. In both states, we found that mother's education was the most important independent predictor of the type of school a girl attended. In one state, attendance at a girls' school was a significant predictor of a girl's exposure to key social influences, her enrollment in a science course in year 12, and her academic achievement. In the other state, however, the sex composition of the school did not affect academic achievement or selected antecedents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to clarify the effects of migration on the age-grade progress of children in school. The analysis is based on 3,334 teenagers living in the households sampled in the national 1967 Survey of Economic Opportunity. Results support the main hypothesis that the detrimental effect of a move on children's progress in school is a positive function of the cultural difference between the previous and the current places of residence, but only among teenagers with less-educated parents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between student misbehavior and academic performance and the effects of family structure and mother's employment on misbehavior and performance. Using panel data on high school sophomores from the High School and Beyond (HSB) survey, we estimate a number of linear panel models. The findings indicate that sophomores with low grades misbehave more as seniors than those with high grades. Academic achievement in the sophomore year has little effect on changes in misbehavior. Misbehavior, however, has negative effects on changes in grades and achievement test scores. Finally, living in a single-parent family and mother's employment negatively affect both achievement and behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to uncover the mechanisms through which stratification in schools differentiates student achievement. Two types of mechanisms are considered: (1) technical conditions of differentially allocated instruction, and (2) institutional processes operating through symbolically defined categories. Using data from twelve first-grade classrooms, I isolated the instructional effects and found that they are both large and stable. Institutional processes account at most for a small grouping effect, which occurs early in the year but fades as the year progresses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents new research on the effects of mother's employment and living in a one-parent family on children`s achievement. We take advantage of two nationally representative data bases of students from two age groups and demonstrate the importance of model specification to the determination of effects. Results show that mother's employment and living in a one-parent family can have negative effects on school achievement but that these effects differ by age, race, and family structure. The results also demonstrate the importance of mediating variables such as income and time use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a quantitative case study of the differences in academic behavior between public- and Catholic-school students. Using numerous measures of behavior, attitudes, and perceptions. I found that Catholic-school students differed from public-school students only in behavior that could be directly influenced by school practice: The Catholic-school students skipped school less often and spent more time on homework despite their greater nonconformity to other expectations. A school-effects model is more successful than competing models in predicting such specific differences. Prior-socialization, motivation, and parental-constraint models imply differences in a wide range of behaviors and attitudes. The most parsimonious explanation of the pattern of findings presented here is that academic differences between public- and Catholic-school students are due to the greater discipline and more rigorous requirements in the Catholic schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has concluded that mother`s employment has a small but consistent negative effect on students' reading and mathematics achievement and that this effect is cumulative and proportional to mother's time spent working (Milne et al. 1986, this issue). This paper provides a conceptual and methodological critique of this research and an alternative analysis of the data. We find that respecifying the model to include measures of the structural, attitudinal, and socioeconomic determinants of mother's employment substantially diminishes the effects. The source of the negative effect can be traced to the small number of mothers who worked full-time prior to 1970, before their child entered school. Retrospective reports of mother's labor force participation appear relatively unreliable for this period. Moreover, reformulating the concept of cumulative work experience suggests that significant negative effects exist only for women in the labor force for the shortest period of time or for women who decreased their labor force participation as their child matured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the educational attainment experiences of a cohort of young men in the Pacific Northwest between the ages of 16 and 31. The experiences of this cohort reveal that a college degree is the net result of movement through a complex series of steps. We traced the movement of the cohort through these steps and found that completion of a college degree and graduate school attendance required success at every stage in the process. In other words, though early academic success did not assure later success, early academic failure strongly predicted later failure. Rosenbaum (1976) compared this process to a single-elimination tournament. However, unlike Rosenbaum, we found that early academic losers did not abandon educational pursuits but continued to struggle. Education is not a tournament; once out, an individual does not necessarily stay out. At least some unsuccessful students work their way back into the success flow and attain high levels of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the effects of ability group systems on student achievement using data on fourth grade students in a single urban school district. Discussion focuses on two proposed explanations for the emergence of achievement differentials in grouping systems: The differential peers hypothesis and the differential instruction hypothesis. In the data analysis, processes of peer allocation and differential instruction were explored in the context of two types of instructional grouping systems: within-classroom grouping for reading instruction and across-classroom ability grouping. Both types of grouping arrangements had direct effects on reading achievement, demonstrating that-grouping systems reinforce initial inequalities in achievement. However, the two forms of grouping had different effects on processes of peer allocation and differential instruction. Instructional processes and peer group formation tended to disadvantage students in lower strata of the cross-classroom ability group system but to work in favor of students in lower strata of the within-classroom reading group system. The implications of these findings for a general theory of instructional grouping are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three types of analysis are carried out in this paper and provide strong evidence that there is, in vocabulary and mathematics, higher achievement for comparable students in Catholic and at her, private schools than in public; the results are less consistent in reading. The last portion of the analysis shows the elements of school policy that can account for these differences-account for them by showing that achievement is just as high in the public sector when the policies and the resulting student behavior are like those in the Catholic or other-private schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of tracking has provided an important tool for understanding stratification within educational systems and has been applied to higher education by distinguishing between two-year and four-year colleges. In this paper, we make use of a natural experiment from the open-admissions program at the City University of New York to determine whether two-year colleges function as a separate track within higher education. We compare students who applied and were accepted to four-year colleges with others who applied but were placed in two-year colleges. Controlling for differences in academic background, we find that community colleges generally deter students from attaining their educations ambitions, but the effect is modest overall and varies notably from one community college to another. From the year-by-year academic progress of students in the two different contexts, it does not appear that there are special academic hurdles in the community colleges. Rather, students placed in them appear to become discourages over time. Thus, the community colleges at CUNY do appear to function as a separate track, but their diversity persuades us that little is known about the specific mechanisms producing a community-college effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies of the impact of social context on academic achievement have focused primarily on across-school comparisons. However, given the frequent use of ability grouping, students are usually exposed to different learning environments within schools. This paper examines the nature and extent of differences in the learning contexts of ability groups in a first-grade classroom. Observation, interviewing, and analysis of video-taped interaction during group lessons were used to identify major behavioral differences across groups and crucial processes within groups. Thirty video-taped lessons were then coded to determine the relative frequency of certain behaviors across group levels. Lower ability groups were found to have more inattentiveness, teacher management, and reading turn disruptions and violations, contributing to lower levels of reading achievement. In short, those students who were likely to have more difficulty learning were assigned to groups whose social contexts were much less conducive for learning. These results question the utility of ability grouping for instructing low ability students and indicate the importance of examining the impact of differential learning environments within schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much non-experimental educational research has relied upon cross-sectional designs, while many of the theories which motivate such inquiry imply some sort of developmental sequencing of the relationships of interest. This paper explores the practical implications of this disjuncture between perspective and practice by comparing the conclusions reached in the estimation of a recursive school process model of educational goal formation across several design options. Selecting out appropriate subsets of students from the repeated cross-sectional samples obtained in the Educational Testing Service's Study of Academic Prediction and Growth, we contrast: parallel cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses: longitudinal analyses which vary in the grade-level at which key independent variables are measured; and longitudinal analyses which do and do not take account of inter-temporal stability in the dependent variable(s). In general, we find that longitudinal results differ from cross-sectional: longitudinal differ from longitudinal depending upon the timing of variable measurement: and longitudinal differ from longitudinal depending on the adequacy of the controls employed. In typical research practice only one such set of results would he presented and, judging from the available literature, this most often would derive from the conceptually least adequate of the designs considered in our exercises. These comparisons urge caution in the uncritical acceptance of cross-sectional school process research. More generally, they underscore the complexity of design decisions in educational research and the importance of the investigators framing of the issues in informing those decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integration, perhaps one of the most important issues in education today, has never been examined from the framework of the status attainment model. This paper utilizes a national longitudinal sample of black and white male youths to assess this question: How does the educational attainment process differ for blacks in segregated and integrated schools? I find that the model improves substantially as a prediction instrument for blacks in integrated schools, thus adding yet another argument to the many that already exist for the worth of integration for black education. In the course of the analysis, a deeper, equally important issue for black education, emerges. I find strong evidence for a class split within the black population which exists independently of integration or segregation. Furthermore, this class split has ill effects for lower class black educational attainment. Evidence for any similar split in the white sample is not uncovered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effects of a private school education on educational, occupational, and earnings attainments. Specifically, using subsamples of respondents who attended private schools only and public schools only from the "Occupational Changes in a Generation" survey, the so-called private school advantage and its function in transmitting background-related advantages is analyzed. Although it was found that educational and occupational attainments are not significantly affected by private school attendance, earnings for those who attended private schools only are considerably greater than for those who attended public schools only when appropriate background characteristics are controlled. This seems to be due not only to a ceiling effect on earnings, but also to a substantial amount of status inheritance in the lives of private school graduates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Single equation models of educational achievement that have been estimated by OLS have tended to ignore the effects of omitting relevant variables. These omitted variables may lead to biased and inconsistent estimates. Further, past research frequently obscures the correct interpretation of the estimated coefficients. This paper considers three frequently estimated models of educational achievement: the case when only cross-sectional data are available, the case when "pre" and "post" measures of achievement are available, and the case where one has more complete panel data. Starting from a general cumulative model of achievement, we outline sufficient assumptions to produce readily interpretible OLS estimates which have good statistical properties. With only cross-sectional data, these assumptions are almost certainly not met in most research. With two measures of achievement, useful estimates with good statistical properties can be obtained if we make quite restrictive assumptions concerning the relationships among the explanatory variables. With panel data, simple OLS can produce coefficients with good statistical properties under fairly general conditions. The use of multiple measures, however, may lead to multicollinearity which one must balance off against the gain in efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies of the effects of classroom characteristics on educational outcomes have been concerned primarily with cognitive outcomes, such as academic achievement. In this paper we examine effects of classroom variables on children's social development. We argue that the way teachers group students for instructional purposes and their pedagogical techniques affect children's proximity and similarity within the classroom, and that these in turn affect their interpersonal relationships. We use longitudinal data from fourth, fifth, and sixth grade children to test several hypotheses predicting influences of instructional organization on the formation and stability of children's friendships. The findings provide evidence that selected classroom variables have a positive impact on the stability of children's existing friendships and on the likelihood that children become more friendly. The results also indicate that weak friendships are more easily influenced by classroom characteristics than close friendships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a conceptual framework for the analysis of school effects on learning. A differential equation model for change in academic achievement is derived from the conceptual framework. Numerous implications for the evaluation of existing research are derived and preliminary analysis using the proposed model is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper replicates in several ways an analysis carried out by Wiley and Harnischfeger on the effects of quantity of schooling on achievement. In contrast to their findings, the replications do not conclude that quantity of schooling, as they operationalize it, is of great practical importance for achievement. This conclusion is not pressed very far because specific additional factors must be incorporated before firm conclusions regarding the effect of quantity of schooling are possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In American society most chances for upward social mobility are connected to some aspect of education, specifically, higher education. Some occupations, moreover, may not be achieved without an advanced degree such as the occupations of lawyer or medical doctor. The academic profession is also a "high education" occupation, and especially since about 1950, most institutions offering the baccalaureate and higher degrees campaigned to increase the percentage of their faculty holding the doctorate. One concern in the sociology of education is the connection between education and social structure. Much of this literature has dealt with the effects of social class on schooling. One important question is whether or not the effects of social class continue to haunt people after they go through the educational system and end up with the highest degree possible. In this paper authors of this article revisit social scientist Diana Crane's data and use an appropriate statistic to examine her data and to reevaluate her hypotheses.

Taking into account the differences in societal context and system of educational tracking, this paper explores the interrelated influences of social class origins and parental interest on the educational plans of American high school and Norwegian ungdomsskole students. Data were obtained from 1396 Norwegian and 2313 Kentucky-West Virginia graduating seniors with the American phase focusing on college plans and the Norwegian on gymnas plans. Perceived parental interest is measured by a summated scale, and academic achievement level is introduced as a control. Although the educational plans of girls appear to be only slightly affected by parental interest, this variable emerges as an especially important factor among lower-class Norwegian boys and among high achiever American boys. The findings shed so the light on the structuring of educational opportunities in both countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the April/July 1982 issue of the journal Sociology of Education, the management of the journal inaugurates a practice, which they hope proves valuable and worthy of repetition. They have devoted the entire issue to one important topic and have invited papers from social scientists whose contributions they hoped would be especially compelling and interesting to the readers. This issue treats social scientists James Coleman, Thomas Hoffer and Sally Kilgore's report, "Public and Private Schools," which, when released in Spring 1981, provoked considerable public and academic controversy over its conclusions that private high schools enhanced academic achievement more than public schools did, and that utilization of private schools did not aggravate racial segregation. It is hoped that Sociology of Education will become a forum for continued debate on this important, policy-relevant topic. Management of the journal would like to encourage the submission of reanalysis of the data from the study, especially longitudinal analyses after the next data wave is available. They would also be happy to receive and consider for publication comments and critiques of the papers in this issue.

The research literature has clearly shown that family background variables are related to children's achievement. Among these background variables are parents' occupations, parents' education, family income, race, family structure, and parents' work patterns. This paper presents new evidence on the effect of two of these background variables family structure and parents' work patterns, on students' achievement. These two variables are particularly interesting in light of recent increases in the proportions of one-parent families and working mothers. Between 1970 and 1980, the proportion of children living in one-parent families increased from 11 .9 percent to 19.7 percent. The literature on one-parent families almost exclusively addresses father absence and relates it to a number of child outcomes, including cognitive performance. Other intervening variables that mediate the effect of mother's employment, e.g., mother's attitude toward her work, her degree of professionalism, or the quality of alternative day care-were not available in the data bases used here.

This paper finds a significant relationship between a non-traditional, personal-fulfillment-("masculine") oriented female sex-role perception and ability. With IQ controlled, however, the more non-traditional the orientation of girls' sex-role perception, the lower the academic achievement (class standing). Conversely, the more traditional the sex-role identification, the higher the class rank. Moreover, the data suggest a positive relationship between a non-traditional, personal-fulfillment orientation and higher educational aspirations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]