Racial and socioeconomic stratification have long governed patterns of residential sorting in the American metropolis. However, recent expansions of school choice policies that allow parents to select schools outside their neighborhood raise questions as to whether this weakening of the neighborhood–school connection might influence the residential decisions of higher-socioeconomic-status white households looking to relocate to central city neighborhoods. This study examines whether and the extent to which expanded school choice facilitates the gentrification of disinvested, racially segregated urban communities. Drawing data from the Decennial Census, the American Community Survey, the National Center for Educational Statistics, and the Schools and Staffing Survey, this study finds evidence that college-educated white households are far more likely to gentrify communities of color when school choice options expand. In particular, the expansion of school choice increases the likelihood of gentrification by up to 22 percentage points in the most racially isolated neighborhoods of color—more than twice the baseline likelihood for such communities.

Within urban elementary schools are Black students who continue to challenge the normative deficit characterization of the educational opportunities of students like them. This study attempts to provide a more holistic picture of the scholarly trajectories of 13 African American males who are particularly talented in mathematics and who attended urban schools. PVEST to used to explore stage-specific outcomes to identify dynamic and situational risk and protective factors, both internal and external, by which these young men operate and negotiate within multiple contexts to achieve success in and beyond their classrooms. Results identify major traits that foster mathematics identity development and academic achievement.

No abstract

Research in the neighborhood effects tradition has primarily concerned itself with understanding the consequences of growing up in high-poverty neighborhoods. In recent years, however, the in-migration of relatively affluent households into disinvested central city neighborhoods—commonly referred to as gentrification—has markedly risen, transforming the racial, socioeconomic, and institutional composition of many urban neighborhoods. This article examines what existing literature reveals about what these changes mean for children’s academic achievement, with particular attention paid to the impacts of gentrification-induced changes to the social ecology, institutional composition, residential stability, and environmental conditions of urban neighborhoods. The final section proposes a rigorous interdisciplinary research agenda for advancing this budding field of education research.

There is growing interest in the relation between the racial achievement gap and the racial discipline gap. However, few studies have examined this relation at the national level. This study combines data from the Stanford Education Data Archive and the Civil Rights Data Collection and employs a district fixed effects analysis to examine whether and the extent to which racial discipline gaps are related to racial achievement gaps in Grades 3 through 8 in districts across the United States. In bivariate models, we find evidence that districts with larger racial discipline gaps have larger racial achievement gaps (and vice versa). Though other district-level differences account for the positive association between the Hispanic-White discipline gap and the Hispanic-White achievement gap, we find robust evidence that the positive association between the Black-White discipline gap and the Black-White achievement gap persists after controlling for a multitude of confounding factors. We also find evidence that the mechanisms connecting achievement to disciplinary outcomes are more salient for Black than White students.

This study examines patterns and relations between gentrification and urban schooling across U.S. cities using longitudinal data from 2000 to 2014. The first section presents new statistics on the incidence and distribution of gentrification occurring around urban schools in the United States as a whole. Of the roughly 20% of urban schools located in divested neighborhoods in the year 2000, roughly one in five experienced gentrification in their surrounding neighborhood by 2014. However, there exists considerable heterogeneity in the prevalence of gentrification across U.S. cities, with exposure rates ranging from zero in some cities to over 50% in others. The second section finds evidence that gentrification is associated with declining enrollment at neighborhood schools, especially when gentrifiers are White.

Two trends play an increasing role in shaping the long-term prospects of children across the United States: a growing STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)-based economy and rising income segregation. Together, they suggest that the future well-being of U.S. children may be based increasingly on the contemporary interplay of mathematical learning and neighborhood environments. Drawing on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and a value-added design, this article provides a rigorous test of the hypothesis that exposure to high-poverty neighborhoods exerts a depressive effect on children’s mathematics achievement growth beyond that associated with individual-, family-, and school-level characteristics. Results indicate that exposure to higher-poverty neighborhoods reduces children’s mathematical growth, a treatment effect roughly equivalent to missing three quarters of a year of schooling over the 5-year treatment period. A formal sensitivity analysis suggests that these effects are remarkably robust to unobserved residual confounding.

Although many students feel unsafe at school, few malleable factors have been identified to increase students' feelings of safety. Drawing on criminological behavior control theories, this study posits authoritative school climate as one such factor. With data from two nationally representative datasets, this study uses path analysis to examine the relationship between authoritative school climate and feelings of safety, as well as the extent to which this relation is explained by exposure to violence and victimization. Across both datasets, a more authoritative school climate was associated with increased feelings of safety at school. Both models also indicated that this relationship was explained in part by reduced exposure to violence and victimization, although the strength of this indirect effect varied across models. These findings suggest that strengthening students' relationships with adults and increasing the fairness and consistency of rules in the school may both reduce exposure to violence and victimization and help students feel safer at school.