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As researchers continue to examine the growing number of charter schools in the United States, they have focused attention on the significant heterogeneity of charter effects on student achievement. Our article contributes to this agenda by examining the achievement effects of virtual charter schools vis-à-vis brick-and-mortar charters and traditional public schools and whether characteristics of teachers and classrooms explain the observed impacts. We found that students who switched to virtual charter schools experienced large, negative effects on mathematics and English/language arts achievement that persisted over time and that these effects could not be explained by observed teacher or classroom characteristics.

The UK government is planning to increase the number of pupils attending state-funded selective grammar schools, claiming that this will assist overall standards, reduce the poverty attainment gap and so aid social mobility. Using the full 2015 cohort of pupils in England, this article shows how the pupils attending grammar schools are stratified in terms of chronic poverty, ethnicity, language, special educational needs and even precise age within their year group. This kind of clustering of relative advantage is potentially dangerous for society. The article derives measures of chronic poverty and local socio-economic status segregation between schools, and uses these to show that the results from grammar schools are no better than expected, once these differences are accounted for. There is no evidence base for a policy of increasing selection, and so there are implications for early selection policies worldwide. The UK government should consider phasing the existing selective schools out.

Using data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, this study examines the association between high school socioeconomic segregation and student attainment outcomes and the mechanisms that mediate those relationships. The results show that socioeconomic segregation has a strong association with high school graduation and college enrollment. Controlling for an array of student and school factors, students who attend high socioeconomic composition (SEC) schools are 68% more likely to enroll at a 4-year college than students who attend low SEC schools. Two mediating mechanisms were examined, including socioeconomic-based peer influences and school effects. The results indicate the association between SEC and attainment is due more to peer influences, which tend to be negative in the low SEC setting. However, school practices that emphasize academics also play a major role, particularly in mediating the relationship between SEC and 4-year college enrollment. These findings suggest that integrating schools is likely necessary to fully addressing the negative consequences of attending a low SEC school.

Drawing on an advanced analysis of individual longitudinal register data of school careers of four cohorts of children in Amsterdam, this article suggests that school advice is highly differentiated between children of different migrant and socioeconomic backgrounds. Moreover, apart from these individual characteristics, we demonstrate that the socioeconomic composition of neighbourhoods and schools is important for understanding differences in school advice. The analysis shows that neighbourhood and school socioeconomic disadvantage negatively affects the school advice of children with highly educated parents, while socioeconomic advantage positively affects all children and especially children of lower- and intermediate-educated parents. The positive neighbourhood effects are, however, mediated by primary school context. We suggest that while most of the educational inequalities may be explained by individual characteristics, residential and school segregation intensify these inequalities, especially through the beneficial effects of neighbourhood and school advantage. 基于对阿姆斯特丹四个儿童群体的个人学校生涯纵向登记数据的高级分析，本文表明，不同移民和社会经济背景的儿童之间的学校建议差异很大。此外，除了这些个体特征之外，我们还证明了街区和学校的社会经济构成对于理解学校建议的差异非常重要。分析表明，街区和学校社会经济劣势对父母受过高等教育的儿童的学校建议产生负面影响，而社会经济优势对所有儿童，特别是父母受教育程度较低和中等的儿童产生正面影响。然而，正面的街区效应受小学环境的影响。我们认为，虽然大多数教育不平等可以用个人特征来解释，但居住和学校隔离加剧了这些不平等，特别是通过街区和学校优势的有益影响。

Scholars hypothesize that both neighborhood and school contexts influence educational attainment, but few have considered both contexts simultaneously. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, the author analyzes how school and neighborhood contexts are jointly related to high school and college graduation. She finds that the absolute level of neighborhood resources positively predicts earning a bachelor's degree, while relative neighborhood socioeconomic status (SES) compared to school peers' neighborhood SES predicts high school graduation. Interactions between school and neighborhood characteristics reveal that low odds of educational attainment among students from lower-SES neighborhoods are reduced even more when a student attends school with more white and high-SES peers. Conversely, the high odds of educational attainment among students from higher-SES neighborhoods are further enhanced by attending school with more white and high-SES peers. Findings suggest that neighborhood SES may be a basis for relative deprivation within schools. Policy makers need to determine how students from different neighborhoods are integrated into a school's structure and culture in order for policies that mix students from different neighborhood backgrounds to succeed. Attending a high-SES, largely white school does not eliminate (and may even exacerbate) the disadvantages of coming from a low-SES neighborhood.

Influential reports about the “learning crisis” in the global South generally pay insufficient attention to social inequalities in learning. In this study, we explore the association between family socioeconomic status and learning outcomes in 10 francophone African countries using data from the Programme for the Analysis of Education Systems, a standardized assessment of pupils’ mathematics and reading competence at the end of primary school. We start by showing that learning outcomes among grade 6 pupils are both poor and highly stratified. We then develop and test a conceptual framework that highlights three mechanisms through which family socioeconomic status might contribute to learning: (1) educational resources at home, (2) health and well-being, and (3) differences in school quality. We find that most of the effect of family background on learning outcomes operates through school quality, which results from a combination of the unequal distribution of resources (such as teachers and textbooks) across schools and high socioeconomic segregation between schools. On the basis of these results, we suggest that most countries in the region could improve equity as well as overall performance by “raising the floor” in school quality.

In recent years, research has brought attention to the heterogeneity of resources that first-generation students bring with them to higher education and the factors that assist in these students’ social and academic adjustment to university life. However, few studies have focused on how these students’ early socialization and experiences over the life course influence their adjustment experiences to university. Drawing on Bourdieu’s habitus concept to explore the life histories of first-generation students at a midranked Swedish university, we identify three types of adjustment profiles—Adjusters, Strangers, and Outsiders—and highlight five key factors over the life course that explain why they differ: family resources, early social environment, educational experiences and opportunities, peers, and partners. Our findings suggest that class-related adjustment challenges in college can be traced to different levels of cultural capital acquired during first-generation students’ early socialization but also to capital acquired through sustained contact with cultural capital–abundant social environments throughout their life course, resulting in subtle but consequential habitus adaptations. This study extends previous research in the field by exploring a broader set of social contexts that can spur first-generation students’ cultural capital acquisition before college and facilitate their adjustment to higher education.

Schools are often encouraged to foster a positive climate to reduce adolescent violence, but evidence on the effectiveness of this approach varies significantly. This study investigates the roots of this variation by testing alternative hypotheses about how positive school-level climate and school-level student friendship network density interact to shape adolescent violence perpetration. Research on informal social control and network closure suggests that the violence-reducing association of positive school climate will be enhanced among schools where students are more densely tied through their friendships. Research on youth conflict and subversion of control suggests the opposite. These hypotheses are tested with data from Waves I-II of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (n = 11,771; 49% Female; Age mean = 15.04, SD = 1.60). Consistent with the conflict/subversion hypothesis, analyses indicate that the inverse association between positive school climate and adolescent violence is only evident among schools with a very low density of friendship ties. Strikingly, however, there is evidence that a more positive school climate is associated with increases in violence among youth attending schools with a high density of friendship ties. These findings suggest that efforts to reduce violence by fostering cohesion among youth in their schools and other social contexts can be undermined by youth network processes.

Do schools reduce or perpetuate inequality by race and family income? Most studies conclude that schools play only a small role in explaining socioeconomic and racial disparities in educational outcomes, but they usually draw this conclusion based solely on test scores. We reconsider this finding using longitudinal data on test scores and four-year college attendance among high school students in Massachusetts and Texas.We show that unexplained differences between high schools are larger for college attendance than for test scores. These differences are arguably caused by differences between the schools themselves. Furthermore, while these apparent differences in high school effectiveness increase income disparities in college attendance, they reduce racial disparities. Social scientists concerned with schools' role in transmitting inequality across generations should reconsider the assumption that schools either increase or reduce all disparities and should direct attention to explaining why high schools' effects on specific outcomes and groups of students appear to vary so much.

Since the early 2000s, educational evaluation research has primarily centered on teachers', rather than schools', contributions to students' academic outcomes due to concerns that estimates of the latter were smaller, less stable, and more prone to measurement error. We argue that this disparity should be reduced. Using administrative data from three cohorts of Massachusetts public school students (N = 123,261) and two-level models, we estimate middle schools' value-added effects on eighth-grade and 10th-grade math scores and, importantly, a non-test score outcome: 4-year college enrollment. Comparing our results to teacher-centered studies, we find that school effects (encompassing both teaching- and nonteaching-related factors) are initially smaller but nearly as stable and perhaps more persistent than are individual teacher effects. Our study motivates future research estimating the long-term effects of both teachers and schools on a wide range of outcomes.