Richard Arum

Do private schools force public schools to compete

Since the 1980s, public policy analysts and sociologists of education have increasingly focused on differences in school performance between public and private school, but ignored the effect on public school student performance of the wide variation among states in the size of the private school sector. The A. demonstrate that public school students in states with large private school sectors have improved educational outcomes. Contrary to assumtions underlying the school choice movement, however, the improved performance of public school students is not the result of increased resources provided to public schools. The state thus takes an active role in protecting public sector providers. Institutional forces of inertia are less salient predictors of organizational behavior than are dynamic political processes and public school resource dependency on state financial sources of support

The Reemergence of Self-Employment: A Comparative Study of Self-Employment Dynamics and Social Inequality

This book presents results of a cross-national research project on self-employment in eleven advanced economies and demonstrates how and why the practice is reemerging in modern societies. While traditional forms of self-employment, such as skilled crafts work and shop keeping, are in decline, they are being replaced by self-employment in both professional and unskilled occupations. Differences in self- employment across societies depend on the extent to which labor markets are regulated and the degree to which intergenerational family relationships are a primary factor structuring social organization.|For each of the eleven countries analyzed, the book highlights the extent to which social background, educational attainment, work history, family status, and gender affect the likelihood that an individual will enter -and continue- a particular type of selfemployment. While involvement with self-employment is becoming more common, it is occurring for individuals in activities that are more diverse, unstable, and transitory than in years past.

The State of Undergraduate Learning

35 H ow much are students learning in college? That question begs another one: What should students be learning in college? In Our Underachieving Colleges, former president of Harvard, Derek Bok, proposed a range of goals, from learning to communicate to developing character and learning to live in a diverse and global society. He also pointed out that while faculty rarely agree on the purposes of higher education and tend to shy away from discussions of values and morals, they overwhelmingly agree that their students should learn how to think critically. Indeed, a recent study by the Higher Education Research Institute noted that virtually all faculty report that developing students’ ability to think critically is a very important or essential goal of undergraduate education, as is promoting students’ ability to write effectively. But even if faculty concur that students should develop critical thinking and writing skills (among many others) during college, the question remains of how those skills should be assessed. In its critique of higher education, the Spellings’ Commission claimed, based on findings from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, that “the quality of student learning at U.S. colleges and universities is inadequate and, in some cases, declining.” The Commission also highlighted some promising attempts to assess collegiate learning, including the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). Since then, the CLA, along with the Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (CAAP) and the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress (MAPP), has been adopted by the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA) as a measure that institutions may use to report on the learning of their students in the VSA’s College Portrait. The CLA focuses on general skills such as critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and written communication. It consists of three components: a performance task and two analytical writing exercises (make an argument and break an argument). The performance task is the CLA’s most innovative component. Students have 90 minutes to respond to a writing prompt representing a “real-world” scenario, in which they are presented with a task or a dilemma and need to use a range of background documents (from memos and newspaper articles to reports, journal articles, and graphic representations) to solve it. The testing materials, including the background documents, are accessed through a computer. (Go to the CLA website at http:// www.collegiatelearningassessment.org for examples of representative performance tasks and scoring rubrics). By Josipa Roksa and RichaRd aRum

Labor Market Regulation and the Growth of Self-Employment

Abstract: This research utilizes state-level measures of labor market regulation and Panel Study of Income Dynamics data to demonstrate the effects of state-level labor market regulation on self-employment growth from 1980 to 1992. Discrete time event history analysis is conducted with controls for state-level fixed effects to generate reliable estimates of the effects of labor market regulation on individual-level self-employment entry and exit. Our findings indicate that increasing labor market regulation has encouraged the growth of self-employment over this period.

The political economy of inequality in the "age of extremes"

Massey spresidential address correctly points to growing economic inequality as one of the pressing issues of our day, but his analysis gives short shrift to the political institutions that underlie the economic trends. We supplement his analysis with a review of some of those institutions. In particular we point out how politics mediates between computerized production and inequality, between the segregation of education and inequality, and (drawing directly from American Apartheid) between housing markets and residential segregation.

Improve Relationships to Improve Student Performance.

Reformers have ignored one factor that could propel student learning: Restoring moral authority to relationships between students and educators.

Life after College: The Challenging Transitions of the "Academically Adrift" Cohort.

Change • July/August 2012 Josipa Roksa (jroksa@virginia.edu) is an associate professor of sociology and education at the University of Virginia and associate director of the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Richard Arum (richard.arum@nyu.edu) is a professor of sociology and education at New York University and director of the educational research program at the Social Science Research Council. They are co-authors of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (2011, University of Chicago Press).They have followed the cohort of students from Academically Adrift into life after college and are currently preparing a book manuscript exploring graduates’ transitions to adulthood. By Josipa Roksa and Richard Arum LIFE AFTER COLLEGE

The More You Talk, the Worse It Is Student Perceptions of Law and Authority in Schools

Prior works have established the association between students’ perceptions of school discipline and both behavioral and academic outcomes. The interplay between disciplinary fairness and students’ perceptions of their rights, however, warrants further investigation. In an effort to better understand the development of students’ perceptions of school disciplinary climates amid variation in school legal environments, we identified students’ perceptions of their due process rights based on 5,490 student surveys and 86 in-depth interviews in New York, North Carolina, and California high schools. We then examine the link between students’ perceptions of their due process rights, their past experiences with school discipline, and their perceptions of school disciplinary fairness. While quantitative results reveal a negative relationship between students’ perceptions of their rights and perceptions of disciplinary fairness, our qualitative data bolster this finding and deepen our understanding of students’ perceptions, illustrating students’ complex, varied, and often vague understandings of their due process rights when faced with disciplinary sanctions. As prior work has underscored the critical relationship between students’ perceptions of their schooling experiences and educational outcomes, uncovering this negative relationship is an important step toward understanding how variation in perceptions of rights may have consequences for students’ educational outcomes.

Student Experiences in College

We review research on the “experiential core of college life” for contemporary students at four-year colleges in the United States. We argue that student academic and social experiences need to be understood in the context of broader historical and institutional factors that have structured these organizational settings. As sociologists, we focus attention on variation in college experiences for students from different socioeconomic and racial/ethnic groups, as well as consider issues related to gender, which today include prominent attention to sexuality and sexual violence. We conclude our review by calling for additional research on topics including explicating the relationship between academic and social collegiate experiences, intersectionality, family influences, sexual violence, student political discourse, as well as increased attention to students at two-year colleges and other broad-access institutions.

Chapter Thirteen. The Reemergence of Self-Employment: Comparative Findings and Empirical Propositions

The findings of a series of cross-national studies of self-employment are synthesized.Using a theoretical framework that assumes individuals become and stay self-employed when the relative advantages are higher than in dependent employment, the cross-national similarities and differences among the findings are discussed, and several empirical propositions are advanced in order to summarize those findings. According to the first proposition, self-employment has developed into a more heterogeneous employment category and is marked by increases in professional-managerial and unskilled occupations.Another proposition suggests that education, particularly post-secondary and vocational, facilitates movement into desirable forms of self-employment, while still another suggests that entry into self-employment is generally a midcareer move.Among the other propositions is the suggestion that women differ from men in their relative resources, opportunities, and constraints and therefore have different patterns and determinants of self-employment. Finally, unemployed individuals have higher incentives to move into self-employment than dependent employees with similar characteristics.The theoretical and policy implications of these generalizations are also discussed. (SAA)