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The current paper focuses on White British students in lower secondary education and investigates the effect of school ethnic diversity on their levels of trust and inclusive attitudes towards immigrants. Use is made of panel data of the Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study (CELS) to explore these relationships. Ethnic diversity is measured with the proportion of students in a grade identifying with a minority. In agreement with contact theory, the paper initially finds a positive relation between diversity and inclusive attitudes on immigrants. However, this link disappears once controls for social background, gender and prior levels of the outcome are included in the model. This indicates that students with particular pre-enrollment characteristics have self-selected in diverse schools and that inclusive attitudes have stabilized before secondary education. Diversity further appears to have a negative impact on trust, irrespective of the number of controls added to the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Societal variations in the organization of educational institutions are thought to affect the distribution of students into levels of educational achievement. This paper analyzes the diverging achievements of British and American cohorts as they pass through secondary and post-secondary education. The ways students' locations in the systems' structures deflect their achievements are charted, and the cumulative effects of those deflections between the ages of 16 and 28 are estimated. Despite the more stratified and standardized organization of the British educational system, and despite its sharper differentiation between academic and vocational credentials, the cumulative deflections during these years are greater in the United States. Explaining this outcome requires an understanding of both organizational and normative differences between the two systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]