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Race, ethnicity and culture
In this paper I study how school desegregation by race following Brown v. Board of Education affected White individuals’ racial attitudes and politics in adulthood. I use geocoded nationwide data from the General Social Survey and differences-in-differences to identify causal impacts. Integration significantly reduced White individuals’ political conservatism as adults in the U.S. South but not elsewhere. I observe similar geographic impact heterogeneity for individuals’ attitudes towards Blacks and policies promoting racial equity, but positive effects emerge less consistently across specifications. Results suggest that this heterogeneity may depend on the effectiveness of integration policies. In the south, Black-White exposure was greater following desegregation, and White disenrollment was lower. My study provides the first causal evidence on how different theories concerning intergroup contact and racial attitudes (i.e., the contact and racial threat hypotheses) may have applied to school contexts following historic court mandates to desegregate.
The federal government and many individual organizations have invested in programs to support diversity in the STEM pipeline, including STEM summer programs for high school students, but there is little rigorous evidence of their efficacy. We fielded a randomized controlled trial to study a suite of such programs targeted to underrepresented high school students at an elite, technical institution. The STEM summer programs differ in their length (one week, six weeks, or six months) and modality (on-site or online). Students offered seats in the STEM summer programs are more likely to enroll in, persist through, and graduate from college, with gains in institutional quality coming from both the host institution and other elite universities. The programs also increase the likelihood that students graduate with a degree in a STEM field, with the most intensive program increasing four-year graduation with a STEM degree attainment by 33 percent. The shift to STEM degrees increases potential earnings by 2 to 6 percent. Program-induced gains in college quality fully account for the gains in graduation, but gains in STEM degree attainment are larger than predicted based on institutional differences.
Disparities in gifted representation across demographic subgroups represents a large and persistent challenge in U.S. public schools. In this paper, we measure the impacts of a school-wide curricular intervention designed to address such disparities. We implemented Nurturing for a Bright Tomorrow (NBT) as a cluster randomized trial across elementary schools with the low gifted identification rates in one of the nation’s largest school systems. NBT did not boost formal gifted identification or math achievement in the early elementary grades. It did increase reading achievement in select cohorts and broadly improved performance on a gifted identification measure that assesses nonverbal abilities distinct from those captured by more commonly used screeners. These impacts were driven by Hispanic and female students. Results suggest that policymakers consider a more diverse battery of qualifying exams to narrow disparity gaps in gifted representation and carefully weigh tradeoffs between universal interventions like NBT and more targeted approaches.
Every year millions of students seeking access to federal financial aid complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) application which grants an estimated $234 billion in federal aid in the 2020-21 academic year. Upon receiving students’ FAFSA, the U.S. Department of Education selects some students for income verification, a process in which educational institutions check the accuracy of the information students filled out on the FAFSA. I conducted semi-structured interviews with 17 Latinx community college students to identify barriers in the verification process. Using Critical Race Theory, I contend the verification process reflects and upholds institutional racism within the financial aid process through three barriers. Latinx students experience concern and confusion upon receiving notification of verification selection, difficulty locating requested documentation and acquiring parents’ signature, and undergo a lengthy review of their verification forms which delays receipt of their financial aid.
Over the past few decades, the U.S. has received a consistent and increasing influx of immigrants into the nation. Immigration poses challenges relating to diversity, inclusion and cohesion in education systems, including K-12 education. In the context of immigration, the theory of native flight argues that U.S. born populations move away from neighborhoods when an increasing number of immigrants move in. I test the theory of native flight in the context of K-12 school enrollments, by examining the impact of immigrant influx on public, private and public charter school enrollments, differentiating across U.S. born races and ethnicities. To do so, I merge yearly school enrollment measures from the common core of data (CCD) with immigration data from the American Community Survey (ACS) over the years 2005-2019. Using an instrumental variables approach (2SLS) to address potentially endogenous settlement patterns of immigrants into Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), I find that students of U.S. born race/ethnicities display heterogeneous enrollment responses to immigrant influx. Shares of White students and Black students in public non-charter schools decrease significantly in response to an increase in immigration. At the same time, the shares of Hispanic students and Asian students increase significantly in public non-charter schools. Analogous estimates for native flight into private schools lend further credence to public school estimates. Across private schools, the share of White students increases significantly in response to immigration. The share of Black students decreases across private schools as well, signaling a crowding-out effect. There are two key implications. First, significant White flight from the public-school system still exists over the past decade and a half. Second, while the increasing shares of White students in private schools might compensate for White students leaving the public school system, the shares of Black students are dropping across private and public schools.
Von Hippel & Cañedo (2021) reported that US kindergarten teachers placed girls, Asian-Americans, and children from families of high socioeconomic status (SES) into higher ability groups than their test scores alone would warrant. The results fit the view that teachers were biased.
This comment asks whether parents’ lobbying for higher placement might explain these results. The answer, for the most part, is no. Measures of parent-teacher contact explained little variation in children’s ability group placement, and did not account for the higher placement of girls, Asian-Americans, or high-SES children. In fact, Asian-American parents had less teacher contact than did white children. It appears that the biases observed by von Hippel & Cañedo resided primarily in teachers, not in parents.
We also ask whether teachers who used more objective assessment techniques were less biased in placing children into higher and lower ability groups. The answer, again, was no. Unfortunately, biases persisted in the face of objective information about students’ skill. Fortunately, the biases were not terribly large.
Existing research indicates that racially minoritized students with similar academic preparation are less likely than their represented peers to persist in STEM, raising the question of factors that may contribute to racial disparities in STEM participation beyond academic preparation. We extend the current literature by first examining race-based differences in what students expect to receive and their actual grades in introductory STEM college courses, a phenomenon termed as overestimation. Then, we assess whether overestimation differentially influences STEM interest and persistence in college. Findings indicate that first-year STEM students tend to overestimate their performance in general, and the extent of overestimation is more pronounced among racially minoritized students. Subsequent analyses indicate that students who overestimate are more likely to switch out of STEM, net academic preparation. Results from regression models suggest that race-based differences in overestimation can be explained by pre-college academic and contextual factors, most notably the high school a student attended.
How do adult "culture wars" in education affect student learning in the classroom? I explore this question by combining information on nearly 500 school district political controversies with data on state test scores. Leveraging variation in the location and timing of these events as the basis for a difference-in-differences design, I show that student achievement declines in the wake of adult political battles. The effects are concentrated in math achievement -- the equivalent of approximately 10 days of lost learning -- and persist for at least four years. The declines are particularly pronounced for controversies surrounding racial issues and the teaching of evolution. These results suggest that well-intentioned education advocacy efforts focused on salient social justice issues may backfire, producing in unintended negative impacts on student achievement, and raise new questions about the adequacy of local democratic processes for the governance of public schools.
Public discussions of racial inclusion and equal opportunity initiatives in the U.S. are often met with claims that expanding access to an institution, space, or public good is likely to diminish its quality. Examples of this pattern include: anticipated (and real) property value declines when predominantly white neighborhoods become more racially diverse; fears that the excellence of white schools will decline when the population of Black and brown students grows; apprehensions that equitable hiring practices necessarily entail lower standards for job candidates. In this paper, we examine how a federal agency, the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), charged with addressing the aftermath of the ‘access wave’ of new college students promulgated by the Higher Education Act of 1965, came to reconcile its commitments to educational equity and quality. Through a novel examination of the historical development of what we term (e)quality politics in the administration of civil rights policy in higher education, we trace how two concepts - equity and quality – became discursively linked and contested in American politics. (E)quality politics refers to the introduction of a policy paradigm that reframes equity discussions and goals around the professed need to preserve and advance institutional “quality” using measures and standards that are, importantly, defined and instantiated under the era of segregation that precedes equal access policies. In particular, we uncover the discursive patterns by which the perceived threats to “quality” posed by racial diversity can prompt administrators to compensate, protect, and maintain the prerogatives of high-status institutions or groups that benefited under previous eras of exclusion. Understood as part of a backlash to egalitarian reforms, we argue, these quality measures undermine equity goals.