Remote School Parenting: Assessing Home-School Contexts and Parent Practices Aimed at Engaging Children in Learning

Social Currents · 2025-05-13 · 1 citations

In this study, we examine the practices parents adopted to engage their elementary school-aged children in academically and socioemotionally nurturing activities during the 2020 to 2021 school year, when the pandemic forced schools to pivot to remote-only instruction. Analyzing parenting practices during this profoundly unsettled time, we argue, provides a window into potential mechanisms to narrow persistent class-based inequalities. Both socioeconomically advantaged and disadvantaged parents adapted a variety of resources to facilitate their children’s engagement. However, parents’ ability to ensure their children’s consistent learning engagement varied with the degree to which the resources available to them at home aligned with remote school expectations. Congruence between family resources and school expectations enabled both class advantaged and disadvantaged parents to adapt those resources in ways that facilitated their children’s learning engagement. This finding elucidates the role social context plays in conditioning the link between family resources and children’s academic engagement, highlighting opportunities for educators to interrupt the reproduction of inequality by placing a greater premium on resources that are broadly accessible to parents across social classes.

Peer income exposure across the income distribution

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-02-12 · 3 citations

Children from families across the income distribution attend public schools, making schools and classrooms potential sites for interaction between more- and less-affluent children. However, limited information exists regarding the extent of economic integration in these contexts. We merge educational administrative data from Oregon with measures of family income derived from IRS records to document student exposure to economically diverse school and classroom peers. Our findings indicate that affluent children in public schools are relatively isolated from their less affluent peers, while low- and middle-income students experience relatively even peer income distributions. Students from families in the top percentile of the income distribution attend schools where 20 percent of their peers, on average, come from the top five income percentiles. A large majority of the differences in peer exposure that we observe arise from the sorting of students across schools; sorting across classrooms within schools plays a substantially smaller role.

'Membership Has Its Privileges': Status Incentives and Categorical Inequality in Education

2025-09-19

Prizes - formal systems that publicly allocate rewards for exemplary behavior - play an increasingly important role in a wide array of social settings, including education. In this paper, we evaluate a prize system designed to boost achievement at two high schools by assigning students color-coded ID cards based on a previously low stakes test. Average student achievement on this test increased in the ID card schools beyond what one would expect from contemporaneous changes in neighboring schools. However, regression discontinuity analyses indicate that the program created new inequalities between students who received low-status and high-status ID cards. These findings indicate that status-based incentives create categorical inequalities between prize winners and others even as they reorient behavior toward the goals they reward.

The Links Between Youth Employment and Educational Attainment Across Racial Groups

UNC Libraries · 2025-09-18

Research suggests that the relations between adolescent employment and youth development vary by socioeconomic status (SES) and race/ethnicity. However, it is unclear whether the links between paid work and college outcomes vary by either SES or race/ethnicity, or both. Using data from the Educational Longitudinal Study, we find that low-intensity work during high school is associated with positive college outcomes for almost all students, whereas the associations between high-intensity work and negative postsecondary outcomes are mostly limited to White students. Our results suggest that both differential selections into youth employment and differential consequences of youth employment contribute to these varying links between paid work and educational outcomes across different racial groups.

Virtual charter students have worse labor market outcomes as young adults

Social Science Research · 2025-09-16

Virtual charter schools are increasingly popular, yet there is little research on the long-term outcomes of virtual charter students. In this research note, we link statewide education records from 9th grade students in Oregon with information on criminal legal contact and IRS records containing earnings information housed at the U.S. Census Bureau to provide evidence on how virtual charter students fare as young adults. Virtual charter students have substantially worse high school graduation rates, college enrollment rates, bachelor's degree attainment, employment rates, and earnings than observationally similar students in traditional public schools, but similar rates of contact with the criminal legal system. Although there is growing demand for virtual charter schools, our results suggest that students who enroll in virtual charters may face negative long-term consequences.

Is Second Grade a Zone of Instructional Development for Teachers? Rethinking Strategic Staffing With a Mixed-Methods Study of Elementary Principals’ Assignment Decisions

Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis · 2025-08-30

Prior research suggests that elementary school principals assign their strongest teachers to tested grades. As accountability frameworks have softened and principals’ experiences with them have matured, does the pattern still hold? We employ a convergent mixed-methods design to consider, at once, multiple explanations for how school leaders implement teacher assignments by combining data from surveys, interviews, and administrative records from North Carolina. Results reveal a reassignment pattern into second grade, with principals more likely to reassign teachers with lower scores on observation rubrics or value-added ratings to second grade than teachers with higher scores or ratings. Pushing beyond the literature that documents conventional notions of accountability-based staffing, we reveal a more nuanced story about how and why principals assign their teachers within schools.

Structuring Choice Policy, School Segregation and the Two-Staged School Choice Process

UNC Libraries · 2025-08-28

School choice is both an important tool for school desegregation policy and an enabler of racial segregation. In this paper, we used a two-stage model of complex decision making to illustrate the relationship between school choice policy structure and school segregation. Our analyses draw on data describing the choices available to kindergarteners entering the Wake County Public School System between 2000 and 2010. As it pursued school diversity goals, the Wake County Public School System constructed school choice sets that included geographically proximal and relatively racially diverse default “base” schools as well as a range of segregating and desegregating options. While most families selected the base school, White and Asian families disproportionately used the choice system to avoid schools with large concentrations of Black students.

Structuring Choice Policy, School Segregation and the Two-Staged School Choice Process

American Educational Research Journal · 2025-08-21

School choice is both an important tool for school desegregation policy and an enabler of racial segregation. In this paper, we used a two-stage model of complex decision making to illustrate the relationship between school choice policy structure and school segregation. Our analyses draw on data describing the choices available to kindergarteners entering the Wake County Public School System between 2000 and 2010. As it pursued school diversity goals, the Wake County Public School System constructed school choice sets that included geographically proximal and relatively racially diverse default “base” schools as well as a range of segregating and desegregating options. While most families selected the base school, White and Asian families disproportionately used the choice system to avoid schools with large concentrations of Black students.

Evaluating Promising Practices in Undergraduate STEM Lecture Courses

UNC Libraries · 2024-07-26

Over the course of one year, we systematically observed instruction in nearly all large gateway STEM courses at the University of California, Irvine to assess the prevalence of promising instructional practices and their implications for student success. More than half of the courses included promising instructional practices. Our most conservative student fixed-effects models suggest that students earn slightly higher grades in courses where instructors use explicit epistemological instruction, frequent assessment, and interactive instruction. Although we find no evidence to suggest that these strategies have lasting effects for the average UC Irvine student, we do find they have unique positive effects on the achievement of first-generation college students.