How do we characterize the heterogeneity among students in the school choice process?
My first area of research focuses on understanding the heterogeneity among students in the school choice process. The prevailing literature often treats the school choice experience as homogeneous, or conditional on specific demographic characteristics, such as race, class, and gender. However, I argue that the presentation of school choices as averages (or conditional averages) obscures the full complexity underlying school choice decisions.
In one of my dissertation chapters, I use computational techniques on student-level administrative data to identify distinct clusters of school choosers based on their ranked school choices. This inductive approach reveals several categories of student choices, reflecting different preferences, constraints, and tradeoffs that students and families make when they choose schools. My findings suggest that different groups of students place varying emphasis on distance, selectivity, curricular foci, and safety, challenging the assumption of a single set of preferences. Moreover, my analyses show that school choices are stratified by student achievement, highlighting an understudied dimension of inequality in the extant literature.
Do all students benefit from seemingly advantageous school environments?
The assumption that advantageous school environments offer educational benefits to all students often overlooks how these supposed advantages are distributed among different student groups. For instance, while attending elite schools may confer symbolic benefits such as institutional prestige or status, the extent to which they affect material skills, such as math proficiency or access to advanced coursework, has not been empirically substantiated. Moreover, the conferral of these skills may vary based on the organizational structure of these institutions.
In one paper under review, I find that more selective schools do not necessarily provide more opportunities for advanced coursework. I use a regression-discontinuity design to identify the causal effect of attending a more selective high school on advanced math course-taking. In some cases, internal stratification processes within these schools can create barriers to advanced course-taking, even for students with high academic achievement. Moreover, these schools may artificially create a scarcity of course-taking opportunities, even when their students’ academic achievement is relatively homogeneous. This paper challenges the assumption that admission to selective schools inherently guarantees enhanced outcomes and suggests that the benefits of these institutions are more contingent than perceived at face value.
In a paper forthcoming at Sociology of Education, my coauthor Emily Miller and I examine the racial and gender dynamics of educational inequality in suburban public schools in the United States during an era of rapid demographic change. Using a longitudinal dataset of majority non-white, lower-income students (the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study), we explore how these students fare compared to urban counterparts during this transformative period. While our findings suggest that suburban schools are higher-resourced than their urban counterparts, there are minimal urban-suburban differences in educational outcomes after accounting for individual and family characteristics. Furthermore, we reveal disparities in urban-suburban differences by race and gender. Our research challenges narratives that treat suburban institutions as monoliths and suggests that the purported advantages of suburban schooling are not conferred uniformly to all students.
How do school admissions policies shape perceptions of fairness and legitimacy?
Scholars of educational inequality have thoroughly explored how diverse school environments shape the outcomes of students moving through education systems. While there is extensive literature on educational inequality, we know less about how people evaluate the fairness and legitimacy of the systems that sort students between unequal school contexts. Understanding these perceptions is crucial because they shape public support for educational policies and influence broader societal attitudes toward inequality. In my dissertation, I investigate these issues within the framework of school choice systems, wherein parents and students consider alternatives to their residentially assigned schools. I consider how the structure of school choice systems not only impacts educational access and outcomes but also acts as a powerful socialization agent that legitimizes inequality.
As part of ongoing work, I conducted a survey experiment to examine how different school admissions policies influence individuals' perceptions of fairness and their attitudes toward inequality. Conducting an experiment, as opposed to a simple survey, allows for causal inference by controlling for confounding variables and isolating the effects of specific admissions policies. Using a national sample of U.S. adults, I found that exposure to meritocratic admissions systems, provided through survey manipulation, increased perceptions of fairness, tolerance for inequality, and reduced support for redistribution policies. My results suggest that meritocratic frameworks can legitimize social hierarchies, even when they result in the same enrollment patterns as residential or lottery-based frameworks.