Although student engagement with the intellectual work of school is important to students' achievement and to their social and cognitive development, studies over a span of two decades have documented low levels of engagement, particularly in the classroom. Examining several theoretical perspectives that attempt to explain engagement through comprehensive frameworks, this study evaluates the effect on engagement of school reform initiatives that are consistent with the theories. The study also investigates whether patterns exist in students' engagement, whether the patterns are consistent across grade levels, and whether class subject matter (mathematics or social studies) differentially affects engagement. The sample includes 3,669 students representing 143 social studies and mathematics classrooms in a nationally selected sample of 24 restructuring elementary, middle, and high schools. Because of the nature of the nested data (students nested within classrooms nested within schools), the analysis is conducted using hierarchical linear modeling in its three-level application (HLM3L). The reform initiatives, which are consistent with the theories, eliminate personal background effects. Together with classroom subject matter, they substantially influence engagement. The results are generally consistent across grade levels.

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Student Engagement in Instructional Activity: Patterns in the Elementary, Middle, and High School Years

This article proposes a general explanation for social background‐related inequality. Educational attainment research indicates that the later an education transition, the lower the social background effect. While some suggest life course changes in the parent‐child relationship or between‐family competition explain this pattern, others contend the result is a statistical artifact, and that the analytic strategy presupposes agents are irrationally myopic. This article addresses these criticisms by framing educational transitions in terms of students' movement through the stratified curriculum. Students select their stratum, one of which is dropping out. To make these choices, they consider their most recent salient performance. Using time‐varying performance measures to predict students' track placement/school continuation sustains the validity of the educational transitions approach and suggests substantively important social background effects even for nearly universal transitions. Results are consisten...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/321300

Effectively Maintained Inequality: Education Transitions, Track Mobility, and Social Background Effects1

Why do reforms return again and again? To illustrate that the question is valid, I offer three examples drawn from instructional, curricular, and governance planned changes that have returned more than once. To answer the question, I first examine the dominant explanation presented by researchers and policymakers: the lack of rationality in proposing and implementing planned change. I explore why the dominant explanation is flawed in its frequently used metaphors and analysis. I then offer alternative explanations for recurring reforms—a political and an institutional perspective harnessed together—to explain the puzzle of why reforms return. The point of this analysis is to enlarge the repertoire of explanations that researchers and policymakers use to examine potential and past reforms. The policymaking stakes run high for expanding the range of explanations because the questions of why reforms failed in the past and why they return go to the heart of present policy debates over whether federal, state, ...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1176529.pdf

Reforming Again, Again, and Again

This article explores three alternative goals for American education that have been at the root of educational conflicts over the years: democratic equality (schools should focus on preparing citizens), social efficiency (they should focus on training workers), and social mobility (they should prepare individuals to compete for social positions). These goals represent, respectively, the educational perspective of the citizen, the taxpayer, and the consumer. Whereas the first two look on education as a public good, the third sees it as a private good. Historical conflict over these competing visions of education has resulted in a contradictory structure for the educational system that has sharply impaired its effectiveness. More important still has been the growing domination of the social mobility goal, which has reshaped education into a commodity for the purposes of status attainment and has elevated the pursuit of credentials over the acquisition of knowledge.

Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle Over Educational Goals

This review culls noneconomic literature on education-by sociologists, anthropologists, and practitioners to present a new economic theory of students and schools. This theory elaborates two themes that have eluded economic analysis. First is the student as decision-maker whose primary motivation is her identity. Second is a conception of the school as a social institution. This framework suggests a new perspective on questions such as resource allocation and school reform. It explains why some educational policies succeed and others fail. We show how sociological variables may affect outcomes, and suggest ways economists can incorporate them into theoretical and empirical research.

/pdf/identity-and-schooling-some-lessons-for-the-economics-of-290kg5n452.pdf

Identity and Schooling: Some Lessons for the Economics of Education

The Shopping Mall High School: Winners and Losers in the Educational Marketplace.

While a great deal of attention has been directed toward increasing segregation of schools in large metropolitan areas, relatively little research has focused on small towns and rural areas. Have the public schools of a state like North Carolina become more or less segregated in the past decade? This simple question sounds strangely out of focus today given the time that has elapsed since the civil-rights movement placed it high on the national policy agenda. In the 1960s there was considerable satisfaction that the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision had resulted in considerable change in de jure segregation, especially in the South, where the region had shifted from the most segregated districts in the nation to the least segregated. What was not immediately evident was that the positive changes had occurred within school districts rather than between school districts. By the 1970s it was clear that as some school districts desegregated, others were showing signs of increased segregation. White populations, for a variety of reasons, were moving to the suburbs and America's largest cities were becoming more segregated. In 1975 during testimony before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, James S. Coleman reported, "...the emerging problem with regard to school desegregation is the problem of segregation between central city and suburbs."I By the 1980s this cloud of concern had become an accepted American tragedy. Reynolds Farley summed up the demographic evidence saying, "Unless there are changes in the current policies that separate city and suburban students into different school

Joseph Di Bona

Papers

The Shopping Mall High School: Winners and Losers in the Educational Marketplace.

The Resegregation of Schools in Small Towns and Rural Areas of North Carolina