Identification in Interaction: Racial Mirroring between Interviewers and Respondents.

Previous research has established that people shift their identities situationally and may come to subconsciously mirror one another. We explore this phenomenon among survey interviewers in the 2004-2018 General Social Survey by drawing on repeated measures of racial identification collected after each interview. We find not only that interviewers self-identify differently over time but also that their response changes cannot be fully explained by several measurement-error related expectations, either random or systematic. Rather, interviewers are significantly more likely to identify their race in ways that align with respondents' reports. The potential for affiliative identification, even if subconscious, has a range of implications for understanding race-of-interviewer effects, the social construction of homophily, and for how we consider causality in studies of race and racial inequality more broadly.

Within-job gender pay inequality in 15 countries.

Extant research on the gender pay gap suggests that men and women who do the same work for the same employer receive similar pay, so that processes sorting people into jobs are thought to account for the vast majority of the pay gap. Data that can identify women and men who do the same work for the same employer are rare, and research informing this crucial aspect of gender differences in pay is several decades old and from a limited number of countries. Here, using recent linked employer-employee data from 15 countries, we show that the processes sorting people into different jobs account for substantially less of the gender pay differences than was previously believed and that within-job pay differences remain consequential.

School Discipline and Racial Disparities in Early Adulthood.

Despite interest in the contributions of school discipline to the creation of racial inequality, previous research has been unable to identify how students who receive suspensions in school differ from unsuspended classmates on key young adult outcomes. We utilize novel data to document the links between high school discipline and important young adult outcomes related to criminal justice contact, social safety net program participation, post-secondary education, and the labor market. We show that the link between school discipline and young adult outcomes tends to be stronger for Black students than for White students, and that approximately 30 percent of the Black-White disparities in young adult criminal justice outcomes, SNAP receipt, and college completion can be traced back to inequalities in exposure to school discipline.

Rising between-workplace inequalities in high-income countries.

It is well documented that earnings inequalities have risen in many high-income countries. Less clear are the linkages between rising income inequality and workplace dynamics, how within- and between-workplace inequality varies across countries, and to what extent these inequalities are moderated by national labor market institutions. In order to describe changes in the initial between- and within-firm market income distribution we analyze administrative records for 2,000,000,000+ job years nested within 50,000,000+ workplace years for 14 high-income countries in North America, Scandinavia, Continental and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. We find that countries vary a great deal in their levels and trends in earnings inequality but that the between-workplace share of wage inequality is growing in almost all countries examined and is in no country declining. We also find that earnings inequalities and the share of between-workplace inequalities are lower and grew less strongly in countries with stronger institutional employment protections and rose faster when these labor market protections weakened. Our findings suggest that firm-level restructuring and increasing wage inequalities between workplaces are more central contributors to rising income inequality than previously recognized.

Heterogeneous Effects of Early Algebra across California Middle Schools.

How should schools assign students to more rigorous math courses so as best to help their academic outcomes? We identify several hundred California middle schools that used 7th-grade test scores to place students into 8th-grade algebra courses and use a regression discontinuity design to estimate average impacts and heterogeneity across schools. Enrolling in 8th-grade algebra boosts students' enrollment in advanced math in ninth grade by 30 percentage points and eleventh grade by 16 percentage points. Math scores in tenth grade rise by 0.05 standard deviations. Women, students of color, and English-language learners benefit disproportionately from placement into early algebra. Importantly, the benefits of 8th-grade algebra are substantially larger in schools that set their eligibility threshold higher in the baseline achievement distribution. This suggests a potential tradeoff between increased access and rates of subsequent math success.

Failing at Remediation? College Remedial Coursetaking, Failure and Long-term Student Outcomes.

Colleges offer remedial coursework to help students enrolling in post-secondary education who are not adequately prepared to succeed in college-level courses. Despite the prevalence of remediation, previous research presents contradictory findings regarding its short- and long-term effects. This paper uses a doubly robust inverse probability weighting strategy to examine whether the degree completion and wage outcomes associated with remedial education vary by passing or failing remedial coursework. Using the NLSY Postsecondary Transcript-1997 data, we find that almost 30% of remedial course takers fail a remedial course. Students who took and passed their remedial coursework at both two-year and four-year colleges were more likely to graduate from college than similar students who did not take remediation. For both two-year and four-year college entrants, students who failed remedial coursework were less likely to obtain a bachelor's degree and, among degree receivers, took longer to graduate. Students who entered two-year or four-year colleges and who failed remedial coursework earned lower wages over time compared to similar students who never took remediation. Among four-year college entrants, these wage differences seem to be explained completely by degree completion. However, wage differences for two-year college entrants still remain after accounting for degree receipt. Our findings thus suggest that while many students may benefit from remedial education, a substantial number of students struggle with remedial coursework and fail to realize the intended benefits.

Placing Racial Classification in Context.

This article extends previous research on place-based patterns of racial categorization by linking it to sociological theory that posits subnational variation in cultural schemas and applying regression techniques that allow for spatial variation in model estimates. We use data from a U.S. restricted-use geocoded longitudinal survey to predict racial classification as a function of both individual and county characteristics. We first estimate national average associations, then turn to spatial-regime models and geographically weighted regression to explore how these relationships vary across the country. We find that individual characteristics matter most for classification as "Black," while contextual characteristics are important predictors of classification as "White" or "Other," but some predictors also vary across space, as expected. These results affirm the importance of place in defining racial boundaries and suggest that U.S. racial schemas operate at different spatial scales, with some being national in scope while others are more locally situated.

Weeded Out? Gendered Responses to Failing Calculus.

Although women graduate from college at higher rates than men, they remain underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. This study examines whether women react to failing a STEM weed-out course by switching to a non-STEM major and graduating with a bachelor's degree in a non-STEM field. While competitive courses designed to weed out potential STEM majors are often invoked in discussions around why students exit the STEM pipeline, relatively little is known about how women and men react to failing these courses. We use detailed individual-level data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS) Postsecondary Transcript Study (PETS): 1988-2000 to show that women who failed an introductory calculus course are substantially less likely to earn a bachelor's degree in STEM. In doing so, we provide evidence that weed-out course failure might help us to better understand why women are less likely to earn degrees.

Categorical Inequality: Schools As Sorting Machines.

Despite their egalitarian ethos, schools are social sorting machines, creating categories that serve as the foundation of later life inequalities. In this review, we apply the theory of categorical inequality to education, focusing particularly on contemporary American schools. We discuss the range of categories that schools create, adopt, and reinforce, as well as the mechanisms through which these categories contribute to production of inequalities within schools and beyond. We argue that this categorical inequality frame helps to resolve a fundamental tension in the sociology of education and inequality, shedding light on how schools can-at once-be egalitarian institutions and agents of inequality. By applying the notion of categorical inequality to schools, we provide a set of conceptual tools that can help researchers understand, measure, and evaluate the ways in which schools structure social inequality.

Exploring international gender differences in mathematics self-concept.

This study provides an international perspective on mathematics by examnnng mathematics self-concept, achievement, and the desire to enter a career involving mathematics among eighth graders in 49 countries. Using data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, this study shows that self-concept in mathematics is more closely related to the desire to enter a career using mathematics than achievement is. Further, while gender differences in mathematics self-concept are smaller in more egalitarian countries, both girls and boys have lower mathematics self-concepts and less interest in mathematics careers in these countries. These findings reveal a policy paradox: policies aimed at training the next generation of STEM professionals often highlight the need to close the gender gap, but countries with smaller gender gaps have fewer boys and girls interested in mathematics-intensive careers. We conclude by highlighting the importance of disentangling instrumental and expressive aspects of gender inequality in STEM fields.

`Membership Has Its Privileges': Status Incentives and Categorical Inequality in Education.

Prizes - formal systems that publicly allocate rewards for exemplary behavior - play an increasingly important role in a wide array of social settings, including education. In this paper, we evaluate a prize system designed to boost achievement at two high schools by assigning students color-coded ID cards based on a previously low stakes test. Average student achievement on this test increased in the ID card schools beyond what one would expect from contemporaneous changes in neighboring schools. However, regression discontinuity analyses indicate that the program created new inequalities between students who received low-status and high-status ID cards. These findings indicate that status-based incentives create categorical inequalities between prize winners and others even as they reorient behavior toward the goals they reward.

Disentangling the Effects of Racial Self-identification and Classification by Others: The Case of Arrest.

Scholars of race have stressed the importance of thinking about race as a multidimensional construct, yet research on racial inequality does not routinely take this multidimensionality into account. We draw on data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to disentangle the effects of self-identifying as black and being classified by others as black on subsequently being arrested. Results reveal that the odds of arrest are nearly three times higher for people who were classified by others as black, even if they did not identify themselves as black. By contrast, we find no effect of self-identifying as black among people who were not seen by others as black. These results suggest that racial perceptions play an important role in racial disparities in arrest rates and provide a useful analytical approach for disentangling the effects of race on other outcomes.

Curricular policy as a collective effects problem: A distributional approach.

Current educational policies in the United States attempt to boost student achievement and promote equality by intensifying the curriculum and exposing students to more advanced coursework. This paper investigates the relationship between one such effort - California's push to enroll all 8th grade students in Algebra - and the distribution of student achievement. We suggest that this effort is an instance of a "collective effects" problem, where the population-level effects of a policy are different from its effects at the individual level. In such contexts, we argue that it is important to consider broader population effects as well as the difference between "treated" and "untreated" individuals. To do so, we present differences in inverse propensity score weighted distributions investigating how this curricular policy changed the distribution of student achievement. We find that California's attempt to intensify the curriculum did not raise test scores at the bottom of the distribution, but did lower scores at the top of the distribution. These results highlight the efficacy of inverse propensity score weighting approaches for examining distributional differences, and provide a cautionary tale for curricular intensification efforts and other policies with collective effects.