High School Quality and the Inheritance of Disadvantage
Speaker
Jennifer Jennings
Sponsor
Center for Wealth and Inequality
Location
Time
2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Description
High School Quality and the Inheritance of Disadvantage
Jennifer Jennings, New York University Department of Sociology
David Deming, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Christopher Jencks, Harvard Kennedy School of Government
Abstract
Do
schools reduce or perpetuate inequality by race and class? We show that
lack of consensus on this question can be resolved by acknowledging
that its answer is sensitive to the choice of outcome. Using data for
three cohorts of Massachusetts high school students, we estimate each
school’s impact on students’ test scores and multiple educational
attainment measures. We show that high schools that are good at
graduating students are not especially good at raising either their math
scores or college attendance. Schools that are unusually good at
raising math scores are somewhat better than average at increasing
college attendance, but in schools serving high fractions of non-white
or low-income students this correlation is close to zero. These findings
suggest that school quality is multidimensional. Social scientists
concerned with the effects of schools on inequality should reconsider
the assumption that schools either reproduce or reduce all disparities
and instead make arguments about schools’ effects on specific outcomes.
