Rsf-The Russell Sage Journal of the Social Sciences最新文献

Where do parent-teacher associations (PTAs) and other similar school-linked nonprofits form? What role do PTAs play in distributing educational opportunities between and within public schools? In this paper, we link IRS data describing nonprofit organizations associated with North Carolina public schools to school- and student-level administrative data in order to answer these questions. Our analyses suggest PTAs form in a wide variety of school contexts, but high-revenue PTAs form primarily in affluent, predominantly white schools. Students in schools with active PTAs enjoy relatively strong achievement growth compared to their peers in schools without active PTAs. However, our analyses suggest that in reading, the benefits associated with PTAs flow disproportionately to nonpoor students.

Does network recruitment contribute to the glass ceiling? We use administrative data from two companies to answer the question. In the presence of gender homophily, recruitment through employee referrals can disadvantage women when an old boys' network is in place. We calculate the segregating effects of network recruitment across multiple job levels in the two firms. If network recruitment is a factor, the segregating impact should disadvantage women more at higher levels. We find this pattern, but also find that network recruitment is a desegregating force overall. It promotes women's representation strongly at all levels, but less so at higher levels. This article shows how administrative data can be used to tackle the complex problem of gender inequality in organizations to counter the glass ceiling.

I use standardized test scores from roughly forty-five million students to describe the temporal structure of educational opportunity in more than eleven thousand school districts in the United States. Variation among school districts is considerable in both average third-grade scores and test score growth rates. The two measures are uncorrelated, indicating that the characteristics of communities that provide high levels of early childhood educational opportunity are not the same as those that provide high opportunities for growth from third to eighth grade. This suggests that the role of schools in shaping educational opportunity varies across school districts. Variation among districts in the two temporal opportunity dimensions implies that strategies to improve educational opportunity may need to target different age groups in different places.

We analyze the role of newly integrated data from the child support and child welfare systems in seeding a major policy change in Wisconsin. Parents are often ordered to pay child support to offset the costs of their children's stay in foster care. Policy allows for consideration of the "best interests of the child." Concerns that charging parents could delay or disrupt reunification motivated our analyses of integrated data to identify the impacts of current policy. We summarize the results of the analyses and then focus on the role of administrative data in supporting policy development. We discuss the potential and limitations of integrated data in supporting cross-system innovation and detail a series of complementary research efforts designed to support implementation.

We analyze Illinois families facing multiple barriers and their interactions with public-sector services. Using administrative data from five state agencies to identify families' receipt of child welfare, mental health, and substance abuse services as well as adult and juvenile incarcerations, we identify individuals across systems using probabilistic record-linkage techniques, defining family clusters based on networks of individuals who share child welfare and food stamp cases. We show that 23 percent receive services in two or more of these areas. This concentration accounts for 86 percent of the funding for these services used by the entire sample. They experience more and more severe problems. This population is otherwise heterogeneous, engaging with different types of services and clustered in certain parts of the state.

Poor children begin school with fewer academic skills than their nonpoor peers, and these disparities translate into lower achievement, educational attainment, and economic stability in adulthood. Child poverty research traditionally focuses on urban or rural poor, but a shifting spatial orientation of poverty necessitates a richer examination of how urbanicity intersects with economic disadvantage. Combining geospatial administrative data with longitudinal survey data on poor children from kindergarten through second grade (N ≈ 2,950), this project explored how differences in community-level resources and stressors across urbanicity explain variation in achievement. Resources and stressors increased in more urbanized communities and were associated with academic achievement. Both mediated differences in poor children's achievement. Mediation was both direct and indirect, operating through cognitive stimulation and parental warmth.

Sub-baccalaureate education accounts for most of the expansion in higher education over the last century. Nevertheless, relatively few studies have examined the related long-term financial benefits. Exploiting a rich dataset linking the Survey of Income and Program Participation and administrative earnings records, this study investigates these benefits over a person's early and mid-career and the heterogeneity of these patterns by field of study. We find substantial payoffs, net of an extensive set of demographic covariates and variables indicating high school courses taken. At the same time, we find considerable variation across degree types and fields of study. Several vocational diplomas, certificates, and associate degrees are associated with higher earnings than bachelor's degrees in social science, liberal arts, and education. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Does school climate ameliorate or exacerbate the impact of neighborhood violent crime on test scores? Using administrative data from the New York City Department of Education and the New York City Police Department, we find that exposure to violence in the residential neighborhood and an unsafe climate at school lead to substantial test score losses in English language arts (ELA). Middle school students exposed to neighborhood violent crime before the ELA exam who attend schools perceived to be less safe or to have a weak sense of community score 0.06 and 0.03 standard deviations lower, respectively. We find the largest negative effects for boys and Hispanic students in the least safe schools, and no effect of neighborhood crime for students attending schools with better climates.

Monetary sanctions mandated in state statutes include fines, fees, restitution, and other legal costs imposed on persons convicted of crimes and other legal violations. Drawing on content analysis of current legislative statutes in Illinois pertaining to monetary sanctions, we ask three questions: What are defendants expected to pay for and why? What accommodations exist for defendants' poverty? What are the consequences for nonpayment? We find that neoliberal logics of personal responsibility and carceral expansion suffuse these laws, establishing a basis for transferring public costs onto criminal defendants, offering little relief for poverty, and supporting severe additional penalties for unpaid debt. Statutory inequality legally authorizes further impoverishment of the poor, thereby increasing inequality. Major related organizing and advocacy work, however, has created an opening for significant changes toward greater fairness.