In the past two decades, a great deal of energy has been dedicated to improving children's education by increasing parents' involvement in school. However, the evidence on the effectiveness of parental involvement is uneven. Whereas policy makers and theorists have assumed that parental involvement has wide-ranging positive consequences, many studies have shown that it is negatively associated with some children's outcomes. This article uses data from the children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 to estimate time-lagged growth models of the effect of several types of parental involvement on scores on elementary school achievement tests and the Behavioral Problems Index. The findings suggest that parental involvement does not independently improve children's learning, but some involvement activities do prevent behavioral problems. Interaction analyses suggest that the involvement of parents with low socioeconomic status may be more effective than that of parents with high socioeconomic status.

The nature and organization of segregation shifted profoundly in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. During the first two-thirds of the century, segregation was defined by the spatial separation of whites and blacks. What changed over time was the level at which this racial separation occurred, as macro-level segregation between states and counties gave way steadily to micro-level segregation between cities and neighborhoods. During the last third of the twentieth century, the United States moved toward a new regime of residential segregation characterized by moderating racial-ethnic segregation and rising class segregation, yielding a world in which the spatial organization of cities and the location of groups and people within them will increasingly be determined by an interaction of race and class and in which segregation will stem less from overt prejudice and discrimination than from political decisions about land use, such as density zoning.

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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.