A large body of research identifies the critical role of early-life social contexts such as neighborhoods and households in shaping life course trajectories of health. Less is known about whether and how school characteristics affect individual health and contribute to population health inequality. However, recent scholarship argues that some school environments are so stressful due to high levels of violence, disorder, and poverty that they may be “toxic” to student health, but this hypothesis has not been tested using population data. Integrating insights from the life course perspective and stress process model, we use rich longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (n = 11,382), diverse markers of physiological functioning and psychological well-being, and multilevel regression models to examine whether and how school characteristics shape trajectories of physiological dysregulation and depressive risk from adolescence through early adulthood. Findings reveal that, across multiple measures of physiological functioning and psychological well-being, the social and structural characteristics of schools play an essential role in shaping health risk from adolescence through young adulthood—long after students left school. In particular, indicators of school-level violence and perceptions of safety and school social disconnectedness had especially strong associations with health risk in both the short- and long-term. School socioeconomic composition was also strongly associated with physiological dysregulation in young adulthood, net of individual and neighborhood socioeconomic exposures. Together, findings from this study suggest that school environments can serve as early-life stressors in the lives of young people that unequally shape health trajectories and contribute to broader patterns of health inequality.
Students commonly hold erroneous notions of a “post-racial” world and individualistic worldviews that discount the role of structure in social outcomes. Jointly, these two preconceived beliefs can be powerful barriers to effective teaching of racial segregation: Students may be skeptical that racial segregation continues to exist, and abstract statistical representations or other sociological research may not be sufficiently vivid or compelling to dissuade students from their prior beliefs. In this article, we present an exercise that uses an interactive map of racial residence patterns to help students see evidence of racial segregation for themselves. Qualitative and quantitative findings, from testing this exercise in Introduction to Sociology courses at two distinct schools by separate instructors, suggest that this exercise is effective at helping college students grasp the extent of racial segregation in America.
Background Policy makers are increasingly adopting performance incentives to spur under-performing teachers as a way to improve teaching and student performance. However, much of the experimental research fails to find meaningful effects of performance incentives on either student achievement or teacher practice. Purpose/Objective Using the “principal–agent problem” as the theoretical motivation for the study, this research examines why performance incentives have not worked in American schools. The principal–agent problem suggests that in the absence of a perfect system to monitor agents, (e.g., teachers), there must be an incentive based on some measurable outcome to ensure maximal effort. The underlying assumptions about why performance incentives should work for teachers are that (1) teachers are primarily motivated by money, (2) teachers are not currently working hard enough, and (3) teachers know how to be more effective but are choosing not to put forth the necessary effort to do so. The purpose of this research is to examine whether these assumptions hold for teachers. Research Design We conducted qualitative analysis of interviews and focus groups with approximately 150 teachers and 20 administrators from 13 of the lowest performing school districts in North Carolina to understand how educators perceived performance incentives in the context of their own practice. Findings Three key themes emerged from our study. First, teachers report being motivated by service to their students instead of opportunities to maximize income. Second, teachers think they are already working as hard as they can and find little room in their practice to work harder, whatever the financial reward. Third, when teachers do improve their practice, it comes from opportunities to learn new strategies and techniques. Conclusions The empirical research presented in this paper suggests that performance incentive programs rest on a set of flawed theoretical assumptions. Performance incentives assume that teachers (1) are primarily motivated by financial rewards, (2) are not working as hard as they can, and (3) know how to be more effective. However, these assumptions do not comport with what teachers and administrators report about their motivation and practice. Therefore, performance incentives will likely do little to improve teacher effectiveness overall.
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