Roslyn Arlin Mickelson

Subverting Swann: First- and Second-Generation Segregation in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools

For more than 40 years, communities across the United States have grappled with Brown’s mandate to provide equality of educational opportunities to Black children by ending school segregation. Despite considerable unambiguous evidence that desegregation enhances students’ long-term outcomes such as educational and occupational attainment, the situation with respect to short-term outcomes is more ambiguous and more highly contested. Using survey data from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, a North Carolina district that used mandatory busing to desegregate its schools, the author demonstrates the direct and indirect negative effects of segregation on academic achievement in ways not employed previously. The distinctive research design includes a longitudinal measure of exposure to racially isolated Black elementary education, multiple indicators of educational outcomes, measures of track placement, and a large representative sample of grade 12 students from the entire school system. By demonstrating how both direct and indirect effects of segregated education impair Blacks’ academic outcomes, and how—even in an ostensibly desegregated school system—Whites retain privileged access to greater opportunities to learn, this article increases our understanding of the role of segregated schooling in maintaining the racial gap in academic achievement. Future research in other school districts once believed to be successfully desegregated will allow us to judge whether the situation in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School district reflects a more general pattern.

Integrated Schooling, Life Course Outcomes, and Social Cohesion in Multiethnic Democratic Societies

Schools have a seminal role in preparing a society’s children for their adult responsibilities as workers, parents, friends, neighbors, and citizens. The United States, countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Brazil, India, South Africa, and other multiethnic democratic nation-states have increasingly diverse demographic profiles that present challenges and opportunities for social cohesion. The focus of this chapter is the relationship between integrated schooling and social cohesion in nations such as these. The chapter’s central thesis is that schools that are racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse lead to educational outcomes that undergird the attitudinal antecedents to and structural conditions for social cohesion in multiethnic, democratic societies. Using the United States as a case study, the chapter synthesizes educational, social, and behavioral science research on the effects of school racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic status (SES) composition on various adult life course outcomes that are crucial to this condition. It is necessary to explore this topic using the United States as a case study because the English language literature on integrated schooling, life course outcomes, and social cohesion in other multiethnic democracies is rather limited. Before reviewing the relevant literature on this relationship, it is necessary to problematize the concepts of democracy and social cohesion, both of which have multiple contested meanings. We do not employ the constructs of democracy and social cohesion uncritically. Although a full explication of the nuanced and complicated nature of the debates surrounding social cohesion and democracy is not possible in this chapter, it is important to acknowledge that simplistic conceptualizations of either

Effects of School Racial Composition on K–12 Mathematics Outcomes A Metaregression Analysis

Recently published social science research suggests that students attending schools with concentrations of disadvantaged racial minority populations achieve less academic progress than their otherwise comparable counterparts in more racially balanced or integrated schools, but to date no meta-analysis has estimated the effect size of school racial composition on mathematics outcomes. This metaregression analysis reviewed the social science literature published in the past 20 years on the relationship between mathematics outcomes and the racial composition of the K–12 schools students attend. The authors employed a two-level hierarchical linear model to analyze the 25 primary studies with 98 regression effects. Results indicate that school racial isolation has a small statistically significant negative effect on overall building-level mathematics outcomes. This relationship is moderated by the size of the sample in the study and by the way the independent variable was operationalized. Although it is small, the effect size is substantively meaningful. The effects are stronger in secondary compared to elementary grades, and racial gaps widen as students age. The emergence and widening of the race gaps as students move through the grades suggest that the association of racial segregation with mathematics performance compounds over time. Implications for educational policy and future research are discussed.

International Business Machinations: A Case Study of Corporate Involvement in Local Educational Reform

This article examines several education reform programs supported by one corporation, IBM, in one community, Charlotte, North Carolina. By tracing how these initiatives were developed and implemented, we gain insights into the implications for educational equity and quality of intimate corporate sponsorship and direction of school restructuring. The case study of IBM in Charlotte highlights both the opportunities for and dangers of corporate philanthropy and educational reform leadership.

Collective Pedagogical Teacher Culture and Mathematics Achievement Differences by Race, Ethnicity, and Socioeconomic Status

Scholars have not adequately assessed how organizational cultures in schools differentially influence students’ mathematics achievement by race and socioeconomic status (SES). We focus on what we term collective pedagogical teacher culture, highlighting the role of professional communities and teacher collaboration in influencing mathematics achievement. Using cross-classified growth models, we analyze data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study and illustrate that schools where teachers perceive the presence of professional communities and teacher collaboration foster greater mathematics achievement throughout elementary school. Furthermore, achievement gaps by race and socioeconomic status are lessened in schools with professional communities and teacher collaboration.

Capitalist schools : explanation and ethics in radical studies of schooling

1. Studying Schools and Assessing Theories 2. Theoretical Debates and Explanatory Claims 3. The Logic and Assessment of Functional Explanations 4. Is there a Selective Tradition? 5. Ethical Values and Marxist Educational Critiques 6. Ethical Values and Marxist Educational Prescriptions 7. Explanatory Projects and Ethical Values.

When Opting Out is Not a Choice: Implications for NCLB's Transfer Option from Charlotte, North Carolina

A key provision of No Child Left Behind is the opportunity for students to transfer from a low-performing school to a high-performing one. Drawing from a case study of school reform in Charlotte, North Carolina, this article examines the implementation and early outcomes of NCLBs voluntary transfer option for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School (CMS) district. For the 2004–05 school year, fully 92% of the eligible families did not exercise their choice to exit from their low-performing schools. The experiences of CMS illustrate how larger social, economic, and political contexts constrain the implementation of standards-based reforms like NCLB in general and, in particular, the limitations of the transfer option for improving academic achievement and educational equity.

The Cumulative Disadvantages of First- and Second-Generation Segregation for Middle School Achievement

Middle schools are important because they launch students on trajectories that they are likely to follow throughout their formal educations. This study explored the relationship of first-generation segregation (elementary and middle school racial composition) and second-generation segregation (racially correlated academic tracks) to reading and mathematics test scores of Grade 8 students who attended the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) in 1997. At the time the data were collected, the district had been operating under a mandatory desegregation plan since the early 1970s, which it continued to do for another five years. While the majority of students attended desegregated schools for most of their CMS education, a portion of youth also experienced school- and classroom-level segregation. Survey data collected from 1,812 students in randomly selected language arts classes stratified by track from the district’s 24 middle schools were analyzed with multilevel modeling to examine the influence of school and classroom racial composition on standardized scores, controlling for student and family factors associated with school performance. Results indicate that school- and classroom-level racial segregation was negatively related to achievement. Beginning in elementary school, sequential experiences of first- and second-generation segregation likely triggered a cycle of cumulative disadvantage for respondents’ middle school educational outcomes. This article contributes to the literatures on the structural antecedents of school success and failure, the ways that many positive desegregation effects are undermined by tracking, and how first- and second-generation segregation contributes to maintaining the race gap in school outcomes.

The Problem of the Color Lines in Twenty-first-century Sociology of Education Researching and Theorizing Demographic Change, Segregation, and School Outcomes

Sociology in general, and the sociology of education area in particular, must get a better grasp on the fact that the demographics of race, ethnicity, and social class are far more complex than the black–white or brown–white binaries of the recent past. In this article, I consider several manifestations of the emergent contemporary color lines that require innovative research designs, qualitative as well as quantitative data collection, and vigorous policy analyses by sociologists of education. The color line, how we think about it, and how we take it into account in our analyses are all pertinent and pressing issues especially as we consider the changing demographics of the student population; the definitional fluidity of core concepts like minority, diversity, and segregation; the current resegregation of public education by race, ethnic, linguistic status, and family income; and the relationship of the latter to educational outcomes across the life course.

Perceptions of Future Career Family Flexibility as a Deterrent from Majoring in STEM

Research on the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) “pipeline” has charted the loss of potential STEM talent throughout students’ secondary and postsecondary trajectories. One source of STEM talent loss that has been commonly suggested throughout the literature is the lack of family friendly flexibility in STEM careers. This explanation has been offered as a reason why women are underrepresented in the STEM fields. We test this thesis using original survey data collected from 3,229 college students at each of the 16 North Carolina public universities. Our results indicate that a concern for the potential inflexibility of one’s future career is associated with a decreased likelihood of majoring in the “hard” STEM fields (physical sciences, engineering, and mathematics). However, we did not find gender differences in this effect, suggesting that men and women who are concerned with the family flexibility of their future career are equally likely to be deterred from STEM.