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Race, ethnicity and culture

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Across the United States, suspension bans have become a popular policy response to address excessive and inequitable use of suspension in schools. However, there is little research that examines what strategies school staff employ when suspension is no longer permitted. I examine the effect of New York City’s suspension ban on the use of a potential unintended substitute for suspension: special education classification. Using a dosage difference-in-differences strategy, I find that the ban induced an increase in disability classifications at high risk for classroom exclusion. I show that, on average, students with these classifications in schools with high pre-policy reliance on suspension experienced large declines in test scores, whereas general education students experienced slight test score improvements. Notably, I show that these declines are not due to new, ban-induced classifications actively harming student achievement. These results underscore the importance of considering unintended consequences and vulnerable groups when employing a seemingly "costless" and popular policy lever to reduce schools’ reliance on suspension.

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During the 2015-16 academic year, racial protests swept across college campuses in the U.S. These protests were followed by large university investments in initiatives to promote diversity, which combined with existing diversity dynamics, have helped to shape recent faculty diversity trends. We document diversity trends among faculty in STEM and non-STEM fields since the protests in 2015-16. We find that recent diversity trends are narrowing the gender gap among faculty in STEM and non-STEM fields, but widening racial-ethnic gaps, especially among Black faculty. A large body of prior research suggests these trends will affect students’ college experiences and how they choose majors.

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Inequality in college has both structural and psychological causes; these include the presence of self-defeating beliefs about the potential for growth and belonging. Such beliefs can be addressed through large-scale interventions in the college transition (Walton & Cohen, 2011; Walton et al., 2023) but are hard to measure. In our pre-registered study, we provide the strongest evidence to date that the belief that belonging challenges are common and tend to improve with time (“a process-oriented perspective”), the primary target of social-belonging interventions, is critical. We did so by developing and applying computational language measures to 25,000 essays written during a randomized trial of this intervention across 22 broadly representative US colleges and universities (Walton et al., 2023). We compare the hypothesized mediator to one of simple optimism, which includes positive expectations without recognizing that challenges are common. Examining the active control condition, we find that socially disadvantaged students are, indeed, significantly less likely to express a process-oriented perspective spontaneously, and more likely to express simple optimism. This matters: Students who convey a process-oriented perspective, both in control and treatment conditions, are significantly more likely to complete their first year of college full-time enrolled and have higher first-year GPAs, while simple optimism predicts worse academic progress. The social-belonging intervention helped distribute a process-oriented perspective more equitably, though disparities remained. These computational methods enable the scalable and unobtrusive assessment of subtle student beliefs that help or hinder college success.

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Paraeducators are among the largest categories of public education employees and are increasingly seen as a pool of potential teachers. However, little is known about paraeducator-to-teacher transitions. Using statewide administrative data, we show that while paraeducators may be more racially/ethnically diverse than the teacher workforce, Black and Hispanic paraeducators are less likely than White paraeducators to transition into teaching. We additionally show that teachers with paraeducator experience are similarly effective to teachers without paraeducator experience. Lastly, we use simulations to show that the potential for the paraeducator-to-teacher pipeline to diversify the teaching profession may be limited unless they are highly targeted. Our results have policy design implications for efforts to expand the paraeducator-to-teacher pipeline or to diversify the teacher workforce.

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We examine the impact of local labor market shocks and state unemployment insurance (UI) policies on student discipline in U.S. public schools. Analyzing school-level discipline data and firm-level layoffs in 23 states, we find that layoffs have little effect on discipline rates on average. However, effects differ across the UI benefit distribution. At the lowest benefit level ($265/week), a mass layoff increases outof- school suspensions by 5.1%, with effects dissipating as UI benefits increase. Effects are consistently largest for Black students —especially in predominantly White schools —resulting in increased racial disproportionality in school discipline following layoffs in low-UI states.

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Briana Ballis.

Racial disparities in infant health conditions have persisted for decades. However, there is surprisingly limited evidence regarding the long-term consequences of these disparities. Using novel linked administrative data from Texas and the shift to Medicaid Managed Care (MMC), I show that MMC-driven declines in infant health worsened cognitive and noncognitive outcomes for Black children, while MMC-driven enhancements in infant health improved noncognitive outcomes and educational attainment for Hispanics. Effects concentrate in low-value added districts for either demographic, suggesting that the long run impacts of changes to early life health conditions are more pronounced in less effective schools for one’s demographic. 

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High-achieving minority students have fewer friends than their majority counterparts. Exploring patterns of friendship formation in the Add Health data, we find strong racial homophily in friendship formations as well as strong achievement homophily within race. However, we find that achievement matters less in cross-racial friendships. As a result, high-achieving Black students lose Black friends as they move away from the mean achievement of their group, but do not gain high-achieving White friends in offsetting fashion. We find that high-achieving Black students have 0.9 fewer friends, mainly attributable to the fact that they are exposed to fewer high-achieving peers within their own race. We find that this could account for as much as 5 to 9 percent of the racial wage gap observed among high achievers.

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A digital information explosion has transformed cities’ residential and educational markets in ways that are still being uncovered. Although urban stratification scholars have increasingly scrutinized whether emerging digital platforms disrupt or reproduce longstanding segregation patterns, direct links between one theoretically important form of digital information– school quality data– and neighborhood and school segregation are rarely drawn. To clarify these dynamics, we leverage an exogenous digital information shock, in which the Los Angeles Times’ website revealed measures of a particularly important school quality proxy– schools’ value-added effectiveness– for nearly all elementary schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Results suggest that although the information shock had no detectable effects on residential sorting or neighborhood racial segregation, it did exert modest effects on school sorting—particularly for Latino and Asian students— albeit not in ways that materially diminished school racial segregation because the racial compositions of high- and low value-added schools were broadly similar both before and after the information shock. We conclude that the urban stratification implications of digital information may be more nuanced than often appreciated, with effects shaped by racial heterogeneity in both constraints and preferences vis-à-vis specific types of information and operating through mechanisms beyond residential segregation.

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This quasi-experimental study examined the effectiveness of a one-time emergency financial relief program among Pell Grant eligible undergraduate students in Spring 2015 pursuing their first bachelor’s degree across academic and financial outcomes. The academic outcomes included retention to the next semester, degree completion, attempted credit hours, and grade point average. The financial outcome captured whether students received a stop registration hold due to an unpaid financial balance in the semester after receiving the emergency relief. The results reveal that financial relief applied to low-income students’ accounts can improve their retention and graduation rates. The financial relief was most effective among first-generation college students, resulting in a complete elimination of the retention gap for first-generation students. The emergency relief did not improve GPA or substantially change the number of credits earned. A concerning finding was that students receiving this emergency support were more likely to receive a financial hold in a subsequent semester and that effect was stronger among students of color (Black/African American, Hispanic/Latine, Asian, Multiracial, American Indian/Alaska Native), males, and first-generation college students.

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This paper investigates how teachers learn about race in the school context, with a particular focus on teachers’ development of racial competency. Using in-depth, semi-structured interviews we find that teachers learn through three sources: from their peers, from years of experience, and from teacher preparation and in-service experiences. Furthermore, we find that learning occurs both informally and formally and that these sources of learning are moderated by three contextual factors: career status, school culture, and out-of-school factors We find that teachers rely most on informal avenues and encounters to develop racial competency.

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