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The My Brothers Keeper (MBK) Challenge developed by President Obama supports communities that promote civic initiatives designed to improve the educational and economic opportunities specifically for young men of color. In Oakland, California, the MBK educational initiative features the African American Male Achievement (AAMA) program. The AAMA focuses on regularly scheduled classes exclusively for Black, male students and taught by Black, male teachers who focus on social-emotional training, African-American history, culturally relevant pedagogy, and academic supports. In this study, the authors present quasi-experimental evidence on the dropout effects of the AAMA by leveraging its staggered scale-up across high schools in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). They find that AAMA availability led to a significant reduction in the number of Black males who dropped out as well as smaller reductions among Black females, particularly in 9th grade. ; Annenberg Institute at Brown University

AbstractThe My Brother's Keeper (MBK) Challenge developed by President Obama supports communities that promote civic initiatives designed to improve the educational and economic opportunities specifically for young men of color. In Oakland, California, the MBK educational initiative features the African American Male Achievement (AAMA) program. The AAMA focuses on regularly scheduled classes exclusively for Black, male students and taught by Black, male teachers who focus on social‐emotional training, African‐American history, culturally relevant pedagogy, and academic supports. In this study, we present quasi‐experimental evidence on the dropout effects of the AAMA by leveraging its staggered scale‐up across high schools in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). We find that AAMA availability led to a significant reduction in the number of Black males who dropped out as well as smaller reductions among Black females, particularly in ninth grade.

Despite their egalitarian ethos, schools are social sorting machines, creating categories that serve as the foundation of later life inequalities. In this review, we apply the theory of categorical inequality to education, focusing particularly on contemporary American schools. We discuss the range of categories that schools create, adopt, and reinforce, as well as the mechanisms through which these categories contribute to production of inequalities within schools and beyond. We argue that this categorical inequality frame helps to resolve a fundamental tension in the sociology of education and inequality, shedding light on how schools can—at once—be egalitarian institutions and agents of inequality. By applying the notion of categorical inequality to schools, we provide a set of conceptual tools that can help researchers understand, measure, and evaluate the ways in which schools structure social inequality.

"The popular imagination views education primarily in terms of teaching and learning. Schools matter, in most tellings, because they give students skills that they draw upon as they move into the labor market, the public sphere, and other areas of their adult lives. But teaching and learning is only a part of what happens in schools. In this book, we want to advance a view of schools as category construction machines. We do not want to discount the importance of the skills and knowledge that students gain at school. But we argue that educational organizations are always and everywhere engaged in the production, manipulation, adaptation, and enactment of categories. This category work necessarily creates inequalities and is essential to the operation and social significance of educational systems in contemporary schooled societies. Schools construct social categories-kindergartener, English language learner, honor roll student, cheerleader, Ivy League material-that shape students' identities and their access to resources. In the process, schools also reflect, adapt, and reify powerful social categories- including categories related to race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and religion-that organize and divide the societies in which they operate. The categories that schools create, enforce, and even on occasion reimagine have far reaching consequences for people's lives. At the most basic level, we argue that exposure to any form of formal schooling marks a person's potential to be a full member of contemporary communities. Becoming a student, we argue, is a crucial step on the way toward becoming a citizen. Furthermore, we argue that the credentials that schools confer to students at the end of their educational careers play a central role as young adults move out of school and into a complex and highly specialized adult society. In the contemporary world, educational categories don't just influence where we work or what we earn. They influence where we live, who we live with, our civic participation, and even our longevity"--

Increased interest in anti-racist education has motivated the rapidly growing but politically contentious adoption of ethnic studies (ES) courses in US public schools. A long-standing rationale for ES courses is that their emphasis on culturally relevant and critically engaged content (e.g., social justice, anti-racism, stereotypes, contemporary social movements) has potent effects on student engagement and outcomes. However, the quantitative evidence supporting this claim is limited. In this preregistered regression-discontinuity study, we examine the longer-run impact of a grade 9 ES course offered in the San Francisco Unified School District. Our key confirmatory finding is that assignment to this course significantly increased the probability of high school graduation among students near the grade 8 2.0 grade point average (GPA) threshold used for assigning students to the course. Our exploratory analyses also indicate that assignment increased measures of engagement throughout high school (e.g., attendance) as well as the probability of postsecondary matriculation.

Linking K-12 data on students and teachers to Internal Revenue Service (IRS) information allows us to answer questions that are difficult to answer using survey data or educational administrative data alone. We describe two research projects that demonstrate the importance of using linked administrative data to further research on education and inform policy discussions. In the first research project, using linked IRS income tax data to school administrative records for all 8th graders in one California public school district and all K-12th graders in Oregon public schools, we examine how well free and reduced price lunch (FRPL) enrollment captures student disadvantage. We find that FRPL categories capture relatively little variation in household income. However, FRPL captures elements of educational disadvantage that IRS-reported household income data do not. In the second research project, using data on teachers from a large California school district linked to IRS records and the Business Register, we examine what teachers do after they leave teaching. Preliminary findings suggest that many teachers leave the workforce after they leave teaching. Teachers that continue to work after leaving our school district often do so in a nearby school district, and often see a modest increase in their earnings in their new positions.