William Carbonaro

After the Bell: Participation in Extracurricular Activities, Classroom Behavior, and Academic Achievement

Prior research has not examined how much of the socioeconomic status (SES) advantage on schooling outcomes is related to participation in extracurricular activities. The authors explore the SES advantage and extracurricular participation in elementary school–aged children, with a focus on noncognitive skills. The authors argue that noncognitive skills mediate the influence of SES and extracurricular activities on academic skills. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten Class of 1998–99, theauthors find that extracurricular participation explains a modest portion of the SES advantage in noncognitive and cognitive skills. In addition, the influence of extracurricular participation on both noncognitive and cognitive skills varies by children’s SES.

The Production of Achievement Inequality in High School English

Does unequal access to high quality English instruction lead to unequal achievement outcomes for students? Four key aspects of high quality instruction—quantity of assignments, coherence of instruction, student voice in curricular and pedagogical issues, and the content of instruction—are examined to see whether each aspect affects growth in reading achievement from grades 8 to 12. Analyses indicate that some aspects of student voice enhance achievement growth, but quantity and coherence do not. Content has the most substantial impact on achievement growth: greater emphasis on analytical writing is associated with greater growth in reading scores. Overall, these measures of instructional practices partially explain why students’ track position and reading achievement are related.

School Sector and Student Achievement in the Era of Standards Based Reforms.

The authors examine whether standards based accountability reforms of the past two decades have closed the achievement gap among public and private high school students. They analyzed data from the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) to examine sector differences in high school achievement in the era of standards based reforms. The authors found that students in Catholic and private secular schools enjoy greater math gains from 10th to 12th grade than comparable public school students. However, they found that these advantages are largely concentrated among more advanced math skills. Moreover, private school students took more academic math courses than public school students, even after controlling for family background and prior achievement. These differences in course taking accounted for most of the public-private difference in achievement gains.

High School English: A National Portrait

What sorts of instruction do students experience in high school English? Most research findings rely on small-scale, localized contexts. The purpose of this study is to provide a national portrait of high school English by documenting its overall quality on several dimensions that are theoretically important. In addition, the study examines individual and structural sources of inequality in the types of English instruction that occur in different types of classes and to which different types of students are exposed. Nystrands (1997) and Applebees (1996) conceptual frameworks were used to identify four essential aspects of classroom instruction in English: quantity, coherence, student voice, and content. Data from teachers and students in the 1990 wave of the National Educational Longitudinal Survey provide evidence. The results show that most students do not receive English instruction that meets the standards suggested by these authors. This finding comes from reports by teachers as well as students. There is also evidence of unequal access to high quality instruction: students in honors classes have greater access to high quality instruction, and students in general-track classes have the least access on several indicators. The study provides a useful baseline for understanding how far we have to go in the reform of high school English.

Opportunities and Challenges in Designing and Conducting a Labor Market Resume Study

In this chapter, we summarize the results of an audit study that we conducted in the city of Chicago. Our study examined how race, high school credentials, and academic grades were related to call backs for jobs. We briefly describe the design and results of our study, and then discuss numerous broader issues about audit studies. Our main goal is to help researchers who plan to conduct similar studies in the future by highlighting and reflecting upon challenges, obstacles, and unexplored opportunities in our work. We conclude with several recommendations for future researchers who plan to use an audit design to study labor market stratification.

How School Socioeconomic Status Affects Achievement Growth across School Transitions in Early Educational Careers

Our study investigates how changing socioeconomic status (SES) composition, measured as percentage free and reduced priced lunch (FRL), affects students’ math achievement growth after the transition to middle school. Using the life course framework of cumulative advantage, we investigate how timing, individual FRL status, and legacy effects of a student’s elementary school SES composition each affect a student’s math achievement growth. We advance research on school transitions by considering how changing contexts affect achievement growth across school transitions. Furthermore, we improve on school context research by measuring the ways that SES compositions across school transitions may be interconnected. Using state administrative panel data for third through eighth graders from 2009 to 2015, we use fixed effects to estimate math achievement growth by the end of eighth grade. Findings suggest that a student’s elementary SES composition has a legacy effect on middle school achievement growth net of his or her own achievement growth and middle school SES composition. In addition, SES composition effects differ depending on the timing of exposure and a student’s individual FRL status. Our study has important implications for both educational transition research and school effects research, which are discussed.