1. What lead you to do this research? 

A growing number of U.S. children are being suspended or expelled. Meanwhile, children are increasingly prescribed therapy and/or medication for medically diagnosed behavior problems. Moreover, these patterns are different for children from different racial/ethnic backgrounds. Do school punishment and therapy/medication influence criminal justice and mental health systems involvement later in life?

2. What should everybody know about what you found?

I use nationally-representative, prospective panel data following 3,274 males from childhood through young adulthood. I find that school punishment before the age of fifteen is associated with involvement in the criminal justice system, but not the mental health system. Using therapy/medication during childhood is associated with involvement in the mental health system, but not the criminal justice system. While the relationship between punishment and the criminal justice system is similar across racial/ethnic groups, the connection between medicalized social control during childhood and adulthood is stronger for Whites than non-Whites. Because young Black males have higher rates of suspension/expulsion, they disproportionately face the “school-to-prison pipeline,” in which forced school removal increases the risk of criminal involvement and incarceration later in life. Meanwhile, Whites may use medicalization during childhood to avoid the “school-to-prison pipeline” via the mental health system.

3. What are you going to do next on this topic?

I am comparing the effects of punishment and medicalization on short- and long-term academic performance and behavior. I hope to better understand the mechanisms through which suspension/expulsion and therapy/medication contribute to involvement in the criminal justice or mental health systems.  These may include school failure, changes in attitudes, and behavioral improvements or impairments.
You can read the full article here:

Ramey, David M. 2016. “The Influence of Early School Punishment and Therapy/Medication on Social Control Experiences During Young Adulthood.” Criminology 54(1).

1. What lead you to do this research?

Watching the proliferation of organizations for first-generation college students, it occurred to me that while I would be categorized as “first-generation” today, I was neither explicitly categorized as such when I was in college nor had I heard the label “first-generation” as a student. Intrigued, I found that many programs aimed explicitly at first-generation students, and intense academic interest in this group, did not emerge until the early 2000s. I became interested in this category as a social construction.

2. What should everybody know about what you found?

While there are potential benefits to categorizing students as first-generation (e.g., helping them to cope with academic and social expectations at college) there are also potential drawbacks. These drawbacks occur when schools attach cultural meanings to the first generation category, for example, by framing first-generation students as individuals who need to distance themselves from their families of origin and home communities in order to win the prize of upward mobility. As a consequence, first-generation students are positioned as having to choose between home and school. Faced with this decision, they are encouraged to think about themselves as upwardly mobile individuals who need to unburden themselves of the constraints of social class. This poses a threat to the development of a critical class consciousness. My research suggests that these are negative outcomes for students, but that they serve the interests of selective colleges, in particular.

I plan to explore the cultural meanings attached to the first generation category at other kinds of schools to see how meanings attached to this category may differ by type of postsecondary institution.
You can read the full article here:

Tina Wildhagen, “Not Your Typical Student”: The Social Construction of the “First-Generation” College Student, Qualitative Sociology, 2015.

1. What led you to do this research?

In the U.S., the College for All movement produced a cultural expectation that American youth will go to college. Yet millions of students do not earn a degree, and many students beginning at community colleges spend years making little or no progress toward a credential. Existing research about how disadvantaged students’ goals change over time largely relied on assumptions about the social-psychological process entailed in falling short of college aspirations. We wanted to understand the experiences of students who “hold steady,” continuing to plan a degree despite hitting roadblocks along the way.

2. What should everyone know about what you found?

While policy debates about the importance of college largely focus on returns in the labor market, our respondents also understood college-going as having moral and expressive value. Of course, seeking a degree reflects the pragmatic pursuit of middle-class jobs and lifestyles. However, the women we studied also used college plans to respond to a cultural imperative to strive and be ambitious. It is critically important to have strong community colleges that offer effective institutionalized pathways to realize ambition and provide students with socially-recognized identities.

3. What are you going to do next on this topic?

Kelly is interested in how young adults abandon their college aspirations. Holding steady provides a form of moral equity for disadvantaged students. Those who let go leave behind a valuable source of identity and worth.  Nicole will study how potential returners make decisions about re-enrollment. As for-profit institutions and distance learning technologies diversify programs available to returners, busy adults have new options to choose from. How do these choices affect their chances for success?

You can read the full articles here:

Kelly Nielsen, “Fake It’til You Make It”: Why Community College Students’ Aspirations ‘‘Hold Steady’. Sociology of Education, 2015.

Nicole M. Deterding, Instrumental and Expressive Education: College Planning in the Face of Poverty. Sociology of Education, 2015.

1. What led you to do this research?

“Everyone knows” that racial/ethnic minority students are over-represented in special education programs. We wondered whether this is actually true, especially given recent policy efforts to counter this perceived reality.

2. What should everybody know about what you found?

When you compare students who are the same with respect to family socioeconomic origins, test scores, and so on, racial/ethnic minority students actually have lower special education placement rates and lower rates of diagnosis for learning disabilities, speech/language impairments, intellectual disabilities, health impairments, emotional disturbances and ADHD.  This despite the fact that these students tend to experience less healthy environments growing up with respect to poverty, violence, segregation, exposure to lead and other toxins. Contrary to current policy initiatives, we need to seek to provide more — not fewer — special education services to these children.

3. What are you going to do next on this topic?

There are many things we’d like to study.  The data we analyzed come from a national sample of children who entered kindergarten in 1998.  Since then, the data collection has been replicated with a sample of children who entered kindergarten in 2010.  We want to see whether the patterns we found with the older data are still occurring recently.  We would also like to learn more about how environmental conditions lead to disability, and which characteristics of families, neighborhoods and schools are most likely to lead to under diagnosis of disabilities in minority children. We would also like to learn how special education services can become more effective in helping children to overcome disabilities.

You can read the full article here:

Paul L. Morgan, George Farkas, Marianne M. Hillemeier, Richard Mattison, Steve Maczuga, Hui Li, and Michael Cook. (2015). Minorities Are Disproportionately Underrepresented in Special Education: Longitudinal Evidence Across Five Disability Conditions. Educational Researcher.

1.     What led you to do this research?

I have been a huge fan and frequent user of NCES’s longitudinal student surveys for almost 20 years. They are an amazingly rich data resource for innumerable research purposes.

A few years ago Adam Gamoran — who should be on the Mt. Rushmore of education researchers if such a thing ever exists — asked if I would come to a National Academy of Education workshop on the future of NCES’s longitudinal surveys and write a paper reflecting on the panel discussion and the other papers. How could I resist?

2.    What should everybody know about what you found?

As I explain in the article, NCES’s longitudinal student surveys are extraordinarily valuable resources. Even if they continue as they have with few changes, that would be good thing.

At the workshop, many prominent researchers offered great ideas about changes that NCES might make to improve the surveys. Most described things like adding exciting new content modules (e.g., on immigrants’ experience and bullying) and employing cutting-edge modes of collecting data (e.g., via video or experience sampling).

However, I argue that NCES should consider more fundamental changes that would greatly enhance their utility without reducing current strengths. In my article, I propose and describe two major design changes. If implemented, NCES’s longitudinal surveys could be used for annual cross-sectional monitoring, would be more useful for evaluating policy and making international comparisons, and would be more useful for schools and districts.

3.    What are you going to do next on this topic?

I am going to continue to write papers using NCES’s longitudinal surveys, whether or not they implement my ideas!

You can read the full article here:

Warren, J. R. (2015). The Future of NCES’s Longitudinal Student Surveys. AERA Open, 1(2), 2332858415587910.

1. What led you to do this research?

Schools criminalize behavior problems through punishments that mirror sanctions in the criminal justice system, including suspension, expulsion, or arrest. At the same time, schools medicalize misbehavior through the implementation of federally mandated individualized behavior plans. I am interested in studying whether and why schools or districts are more likely to implement criminalized or medicalized strategies for controlling misbehavior.

2. What should everybody know about what you found?

I studied two criminalized (suspension/expulsion and arrest) and two medicalized (Section 504 and IDEA) outcomes. Schools and districts with relatively larger African-American populations had higher rates of criminalization and lower rates of medicalization. Importantly, the relationship between the size of the school-level African-American population and discipline varies across different concentrations of district-level disadvantage. The positive relationship between school-level racial composition and criminalized school discipline is less pronounced in high-disadvantage districts. While the negative relationship between school-level racial composition and IDEA is more pronounced in low-disadvantage districts, the negative relationship between racial composition and enrollment in Section 504 plans is more pronounced in high-disadvantage districts. Policymakers and scholars need to consider how schools and districts may be using their resources to implement fundamentally different school disciplinary environments.

3. What are you going to do next on this topic?

I am currently using individual-level data to test for racial disparities in criminalization versus medicalization in a nationally-representative sample of children. Additionally, I am studying short- and long-term consequences of punishment and medicalization. Overall, I want to know whether medicalization may provide a “better” means of addressing problem behavior than punishment and, if so, does this help contribute to racial disparities later in the life-course.

You can read the full article here:

David M. Ramey. (2015). The Social Structure of Criminalized and Medicalized School Discipline. Sociology of Education, 0038040715587114.

1. What led you to do this research?

There is limited research on the impact of community traumatic events on educational outcomes, perhaps because it is impossible to manipulate exposure to traumatic events in experimental settings. The 2002 Beltway Sniper Attacks serve as a natural experiment for assessing the impact of community traumatic events because they were unexpected and generated extreme amounts of stress and confusion over a three week period. The natural experiment is that schools farther away from the attacks serve as a control group, which we evaluate relative to the treatment group of schools closer to attacks.

2. What should everybody know about what you found?

The attacks significantly reduced school-level proficiency rates in schools within five miles of an attack, especially for 3rd and 5th grade mathematics. The harmful effects were larger in disadvantaged schools that serve larger shares of racial minority and low income students. Intuitively, such schools have fewer resources with which to respond to unexpected shocks. The effects are large enough to have impacted many schools’ standing under the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) provision of the No Child Left Behind Act, which was in effect at the time.

3. What are you going to do next on this topic?

The biggest limitation of our study, which we hope to address in future research should we find sufficient data, is that we cannot isolate the exact mechanisms through which the trauma associated with the sniper attacks harmed student achievement. Given the current data, we can only speculate about the mechanisms, which likely include some combination of school closures, disruptions to routines, stress at home and in school, and student and teacher absences.

You can read the full article here:

Seth Gershenson and Erdal Tekin. 2015. “The Effect of Community Traumatic Events on Student Achievement: Evidence from the Beltway Sniper Attacks.” NBER Working Paper No. 21055.

We posed three questions to the author. Here’s what he said:

1. What led you to do this research?

Whether the U.S. has become a society more or less open to class mobility is not only of great scientific interest but also subject to much public debate. While many agree that class mobility depends greatly on education, it has been difficult to establish exactly how education influences class mobility and how large-scale social trends in education and mobility relate to each other.

2. What should everybody know about what you found?

We found a gradual but modest increase in men’s social class mobility across the 20^th and early 21^st centuries. Educational expansion has contributed to this positive trend, although educational inequality was not reduced. Instead, a larger share of people attained a college degree, and these degrees continue to help “disconnect” family class background from individuals’ social class attainment. Once you make it to college graduation, where you come from does not greatly predict where you’ll end up on the social class ladder. And that effect explains the positive influence of educational expansion on class mobility.

Our analyses also reveal less positive developments. Unlike social class background, the importance of educational background has not decreased. In fact, parental education has become more important for one’s own educational attainment. The production of more college graduates has counteracted this trend, but the stalling of educational expansion in recent decades raises concerns about future trends in social mobility.

3. What are you going to do next on this topic?

Data limitations forced us to study these questions for men only. We are currently working on using additional data to extend this study to women. This is important because women’s education in the U.S. has expanded more broadly and rapidly. Also, I am working on projects that assess the relationship between social mobility and education by comparing a large set of countries to each other and by comparing states within the US.

You can read the full article here:

Pfeffer, F. T., & Hertel, F. R. How Has Educational Expansion Shaped Social Mobility Trends in the United States? Social Forces Advance Access published March 5, 2015, doi:10.1093/sf/sov045

We posed three questions to the author. Here’s what she said:

1. What led you to do this research?

No-excuses charter schools feature extended instructional time, frequent formative testing, and a highly structured and widely criticized disciplinary system. They are boosting achievement at unprecedented levels. But missing from this conversation is what everyday life looks like inside these controversial urban schools. I went inside one school—for 18 months—to understand what success looks and feels like on the ground.

2. What should everybody know about what you found?

I found that success creates a paradox. No-excuses schools, while aiming to prepare students academically for college, may fail to provide students with the social and behavioral skills they need to be successful in college. Colleges expect students to be independent—to do their homework, to go to office hours, to ask for help—yet no-excuses schools reward compliance and orderliness. Students thus do not feel trusted to make decisions or able to speak up for themselves. No-excuses school leaders know this but they feel stuck between two aims—the need to establish order to promote learning, and the need to prepare students to eventually manage their own freedoms.

3. What are you going to do next on this topic?

I’m now looking at teachers’ experiences inside no-excuses schools. No-excuses schools believe that effective teachers can be created; all teachers can learn to “Teach Like a Champion.” Yet these schools have high rates of teacher turnover. How do teachers’ own experiences, attitudes, and personalities influence their ability to adapt to a new disciplinary role? Can schools create successful teachers, or do they need a certain type of raw material to mold?

You can read the full article here:

Golann, J. W. 2015. The Paradox of Success at a No-Excuses School. Sociology of Education.