Roslyn Arlin Mickelson

University of North Carolina at Charlotte | UNC Charlotte · Department of Sociology and Public Policy Program

This article investigates whether attending a sequence of racially diverse schools predicts science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) college outcomes. Such a relationship is important because of the increasingly diverse population of school‐aged children who are likely to attend racially segregated K‐12 schools and colleges, the ben...

Background While the relationship between school socioeconomic composition and student academic outcomes is well established, knowledge about differential effects is not extensive. In particular, little is known whether the relationship differs for students with varying levels of academic performance. We examined whether the school socioeconomic co...

Female, Black, Latinx, Native American, low-income, and rural students remain underrepresented among computer science undergraduate degree recipients. Along with student, family, and secondary school characteristics, college organizational climate, curricula, and instructional practices shape undergraduates’ experiences that foster persistence unti...

Despite strong progress toward school desegregation in the late 20 th century, many locations in the Upper South have recently experienced school resegregation. The articles in this issue investigate similarities and differences across this region in attitudes underlying these developments. Individual papers treat factors including resident locatio...

The unanimous 1954 Brown v. Board of Education opinion is one of the most consequential legal decisions of the 20th century. Even though it concerned government sanctioned racial segregation of public schools, many legal scholars, policy makers, and citizens see Brown’s impact going well beyond ordering the dismantling of de jure segregated public...

School choice is an increasingly important feature of the US educational landscape. Numerous studies examine whether a particular form of school choice promotes student achievement or whether a type of school choice discourages or encourages diversity by race, ethnicity, and ability. Studies also examine attitudes toward school choice, but these st...

A renewed call for replications has emerged in social science research. An important form of replication involves exploring the extent to which findings from a given study hold in other contexts. This study draws on opinion polling data to replicate key findings across time and space based on an original study in one location analyzing attitudes to...

Racially minoritized students in the United States constitute 30% of the U.S. population, but students from these populations represent a smaller proportion of those who earn science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) undergraduate degrees. This disproportionality contributes to race/ethnic income, status, and power inequalities linke...

Many of the nation's school systems that were once desegregated have resegregated by race and socioeconomic status—some more so than others. We investigate the relationship between public opinion about school diversity and levels of resegregation in five Southern school districts with varying amounts of resegregation: Charlotte, NC; Louisville, KY;...

This article explores why some Flemish secondary school students’ study choices are content-wise not in line with their career aspirations and, to some extent, follow gender and ethnic patterns. We use 83 semi-structured interviews, conducted with students in academic and technical tracks in three Flemish secondary schools. Compared to female pupil...

Racial and ethnic differences in educational outcomes significantly narrowed during the 1970s and 1980s when K–12 public schools were desegregated. However, when schools resegregated starting roughly in the late 1980s, racial gaps in outcomes widened again. Because of literacy’s pivotal role in learning, the authors investigate if segregation contr...

This article investigates whether attending a community college is related to an increase in the number of students majoring and graduating with degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) at four‐year colleges. We follow a longitudinal sample of students in North Carolina from middle school through college graduation, includ...

The adoption of market theory as a guiding principle of education policy increased the need for assessments of school performance that families could use to compare academic benefits of attending one school to another. Prominent among measures used by states are the school proficiency and growth indicators resulting from high-stakes tests. Using a...

Using a multimethod approach, we investigate whether gender gaps in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) major declaration in college are explained by differences in the grades that students earn in STEM versus non-STEM subjects. With quantitative data, we find that relative advantages in college academic performance in STEM ver...

School choice typically refers to opportunities to enroll youth in public and/or private educational alternatives to traditional neighborhood public schools. While these options continue to grow in the United States under the umbrella of school choice, magnet and charter schools are the most common forms of public school choice. In this article, we...

This study examines whether secondary schools’ gender composition and levels of laddish attitudes influence the degree of ethnic prejudice among Flemish pupils. We hypothesize that in addition to pupil-level predictors of prejudice, the school’s gender composition and its laddish culture play roles in pupils’ attitudes toward ethnic minorities. We...

We analyze longitudinal data from students who spent their academic careers in North Carolina (NC) public secondary schools and attended NC public universities to investigate the importance of high school racial composition and opportunities to learn in secondary school for choosing a STEM major. We consider school racial composition and opportunit...

This article investigates whether attending a high school that offers a specialized science, technology, engineering, and/or mathematics program (high school with a STEM program) boosts the number of students majoring in STEM when they are in college. We use a longitudinal sample of students in North Carolina, whom we follow from middle school thro...

Studies have not conclusively established whether teacher job satisfaction improves student achievement or whether the advantages to students from having satisfied teachers vary with the broader school culture. In this article, we investigate two research questions: (1) Is there a relationship between teacher job satisfaction and students’ math and...

Latino/a students’ low mathematics achievement is a pressing issue given their increasing numbers in the United States. This study explores the relationship between teacher collaboration and Latino students’ math achievement, taking into account the great diversity of Latinos/as in America. Using multilevel growth models, we analyze Early Childhood...

In this study we investigate Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) high school graduates’ academic performance in the first year of college and test whether their exposure to racial segregation in high school at both the school and classroom levels affected their college freshman grade point averages. Utilizing administrative data from the Roots of S...

Given the prestige and compensation of science and math-related occupations, the underrepresentation of women and people of color in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics majors (STEM) perpetuates entrenched economic and social inequities. Explanations for this underrepresentation have largely focused on individual characteristics, incl...

The arc of my intellectual journey as a scholar is captured by the title of the chapter, The Accidental Sociologist of Education: How My Life in Schools Became My Research. For much of the journey I essentially stumbled along the pathway of a scholarly career. Until the last decade I rarely deliberately chose a direction. My research has always cri...

Research on the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) “pipeline” has charted the loss of potential STEM talent throughout students’ secondary and postsecondary trajectories. One source of STEM talent loss that has been commonly suggested throughout the literature is the lack of family friendly flexibility in STEM careers. This ex...

Middle schools are important because they launch students on trajectories that they are likely to follow throughout their formal educations. This study explored the relationship of first-generation segregation (elementary and middle school racial composition) and second-generation segregation (racially correlated academic tracks) to reading and mat...

Background/Context Teacher job satisfaction is critical to schools’ success. As organizations, schools need teachers who are satisfied with their jobs and who work with one another to build school community and increase student achievement. School organizational culture shapes teacher job satisfaction in many ways, but it is still unclear which fac...

Public education is a sphere of society in which distributive justice with respect to the allocation of opportunities to learn can have profound and lasting effects on students’ educational outcomes. We frame our study in the distributive justice literature, and define just outcomes specifically from a meritocratic and strict egalitarian perspectiv...

Schools are integral to augmenting and diversifying the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce. This is because K–12 schools can inspire and reinforce students’ interest in STEM, in addition to academically preparing them to pursue a STEM career. Previous literature emphasizes the importance of high-quality STEM academic...

Schools are integral to augmenting, diversifying, and equalizing the STEM workforce because schools can inspire and reinforce students’ interest in STEM in addition to academically prepare them to be able to follow a STEM career. This study examines the influence of high school exposure to basic STEM courses, high school exposure to STEM-related en...

This study examines the effect of attending a high school that offers a program focused towards science, technology, engineering and mathematics on students’ STEM college outcomes. Previous studies have looked at the impact of attending math and science focused schools mainly through qualitative analyses of isolated cases. In this study we look at...

We argue that Latino/a students are more likely to major in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) in college if they were educated in high schools where they studied with satisfied teachers who worked in collaborative professional communities. Quantitative results demonstrate that collaborative professional communities in high school ar...

Analyzing Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey Kindergarten (ECLS-K) data, we examine how exposure to instructional practices influences math test scores at the end of kindergarten for children from different racial/ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, and for children with different levels of math skills at kindergarten entry. We also analyze the...

Structural vulnerability theory proposes that educational outcomes emerge as organizational features of schools interact with students' individual characteristics. The organizational feature of interest in this paper is school racial, ethnic, and social class (SES) composition. This paper asks the following question: "Does school racial and SES com...

Schools play a crucial role in preparing children for their adult responsibilities as workers,parents, friends, neighbors, and citizens. Increasingly, in the US and other multiethnic democratic nations this responsibility is complicated by the growing demographic diversity among students, a diversity fueled by international migration. The central a...

Sociology in general, and the sociology of education area in particular, must get a better grasp on the fact that the demographics of race, ethnicity, and social class are far more complex than the black–white or brown–white binaries of the recent past. In this article, I consider several manifestations of the emergent contemporary color lines that...

Student engagement with school symbolizes efforts toward learning and is one of the strongest predictors of academic success. However, returns to engagement vary across racial and ethnic groups. Scholars have established that human agency is constrained by organizational environments, but they have not adequately assessed whether the advantages ass...

Teacher job satisfaction is critical to schools' successful functioning. Using a representative sample of kindergarten teachers from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, we investigate the association among professional learning community and teacher collaboration, teacher ethno-racial group, teacher-student ethno-racial mismatch, and teacher jo...

Scholars have not adequately assessed how organizational cultures in schools differentially influence students’ mathematics achievement by race and socioeconomic status (SES). We focus on what we term collective pedagogical teacher culture, highlighting the role of professional communities and teacher collaboration in influencing mathematics achiev...

Recently published social science research suggests that students attending schools with concentrations of disadvantaged racial minority populations achieve less academic progress than their otherwise comparable counterparts in more racially balanced or integrated schools, but to date no meta-analysis has estimated the effect size of school racial...

This article examines the role of parent involvement-its meaning and effects-among a determined group of African American parents. We focus on some of the characteristics of involvement of a subset of African American parents in a larger program designed to enhance the math and science course selection of middle and high school students. As one of...

Background/Context: Teacher job satisfaction is critical to schools' success. As organizations, schools need teachers who are satisfied with their jobs and who work with one another to buildschool community and increase student achievement. School organizational culture shapesteacher job satisfaction in many ways, but it is still unclear which face...

In this essay, Roslyn Arlin Mickelson introduces the set of three special issues about the effects of school and classroom composition on educational outcomes. The 22 articles in the set report new research on the relationship of racial and socioeconomic composition to math and science outcomes (Vol. 112, No. 4); to verbal achievement, discipline,...

Background/Context This article describes neotracking, a new form of tracking in North Carolina that is the outgrowth of the state's reformed curricular standards, the High School Courses of Study Framework (COS). Neotracking combines older versions of rigid, comprehensive tracking with the newer, more flexible within-subject area curricular differ...

Peer Power: Preadolescent Culture and Identity. Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998. 257 pp.Angels' Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday. Ralph Cintron. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. 264 pp.Everyday Courage: The Lives and Stories of Urban Teenagers. Niobe Way. New York: New York U...

This article reports the challenges of race and social class in an action research project to facilitate educational change through community collaboration with African American parents, community organizations, and public schools. This project was undertaken in Charlotte, North Carolina to enhance the participa-tion of African American parents in...

This article investigates how organizational features of high schools interact with students' ascriptive characteristics to shape opportunities to learn. It advances previous research by examining the intersection of students' gender-by-race cohort with their high schools' racial composition on their Grade 12 English track placement in the Charlott...

Public education in most contemporary ethnically and racially plural societies stratifies opportunities to learn by students’ social class and ethnic origins. The organisation of public education in racially and/or ethnically plural societies contributes to both the transformation and reproduction of the social order. During the last century, becau...

The United States has a long history of providing racially segregated and unequal public education to its children. Racially separate and unequal public education was not an accident; it was created by public laws and policies enacted and enforced by state governments and local school systems. After a series of Supreme Court decisions eliminated th...

In this article, the authors explore the sources of gender variations in African American middle school students' academic performance. The roots of Black males' underachievement are of particular interest. Because middle schools are essential links in the sequence of opportunities to learn, it is imperative to understand the social and educational...

Given the centrality of SAT scores to college admissions decisions, identifying the sources of race gaps in scores is essential for eliminating the gaps within the time frame established by Grutter v. Bollinger. 1 This Article uses data from an eighteen-year multimethod case study of educational reform in North Carolina's Charlotte-Mecklenburg Scho...

A key provision of No Child Left Behind is the opportunity for students to transfer from a low-performing school to a high-performing one. Drawing from a case study of school reform in Charlotte, North Carolina, this article examines the implementation and early outcomes of NCLB's voluntary transfer option for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School (CMS)...

Pourquoi, en depit de moins bonnes gratifications sur le plan professionnel (discriminations de statuts et de salaires) les femmes continuent-elles de s'investir dans les etudes et a obtenir de meilleurs resultats que les hommes ? Faisant reference aux travaux de Bourdieu, l'A. tente de repondre a cette question en termes d'habitus

In this article I seek to answer the question, ''When are racial disparities in education the result of racial discrimination?'' To answer it I synthesize the social science research on racially correlated disparities in education. My review draws from the sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, history, and education literatures. I...

In this article I seek to answer the question, “When are racial disparities in education the result of racial discrimination?” To answer it I synthesize the social science research on racially correlated disparities in education. My review draws from the sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, history, and education literatures. I o...

For more than 40 yeah, communities across the United States have grappled with Browns mandate to provide equality of educational opportunities to Black children by ending school segregation. Despite considerable unambiguous evidence that desegregation enhances students' long-term outcomes such as educational and occupational attainment, the situati...

Dans cet article, les auteurs effectuent une comparaison entre Israel et l'Afrique du Sud, sur le plan social, educatif, afin de determiner si le developpement de l'education dans ces pays a contribue aux transformations sociales des stratifications ethniques et a l'attenuation des differences de sexe. Le statut des femmes est ainsi l'objet d'une a...

This study examines the relationship between segregated education and school outcomes for African American adolescents in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, school district (CMS), regarded as a model of successful desegregated public schooling. Using 1997 survey data, it investigates the effects of segregated elementary education and racial...

In the early 1990s, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system (CMS) began a sweeping program of school reform that involved revamped standards, a comprehensive system of benchmark goals, increased autonomy for principals, and a high-stakes accountability system. This program has been lauded in prestigious education journals, praised by reform advocat...

In the early 1990s, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system (CMS) began a sweeping program of school reform that involved revamped standards, a comprehensive system of benchmark goals, increased autonomy for principals, and a high-stakes accountability system. This program has been lauded in prestigious education journals, praised by reform advocat...

This article examines several education reform programs supported by one corporation, IBM. in one community, Charlotte, North Carolina. By tracing how these initiatives were developed and implemented, we gain insights into the implications for educational equity and quality of intimate corporate sponsorship and direction of school restructuring. Th...

The 1992 award of a New American Schools Development Corporation (NASDC) grant to Gaston County Schools for the design and implementation of the Odyssey Project began a period of intense school reform and community activism in this semirural, working-class White county in North Carolina. The Odyssey Project was to be a comprehensive school restruct...

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The U.S. business community charges that the education, discipline, and motivation of non-college-bound students and young workers are poor because of defects in the public schools and the lack of proper family socialization. A direct outgrowth of these charges has been the greater involvement of business in schools and educational reform efforts a...

This paper reports on a 1988 field study of a chamber of commerce Task Force on Education and Jobs in a southern U. S. city we call Sunbelt City. It highlights a local controversy among business and education leaders over school reform. We argue that this local problem reflects a growing national trend of business intervention in public schools aro...

1. Studying Schools and Assessing Theories 2. Theoretical Debates and Explanatory Claims 3. The Logic and Assessment of Functional Explanations 4. Is there a Selective Tradition? 5. Ethical Values and Marxist Educational Critiques 6. Ethical Values and Marxist Educational Prescriptions 7. Explanatory Projects and Ethical Values.

Many black youths and adults express a high regard for education even though their academic performance is poor. Utilizing a sample of 1,193 high school seniors, this article resolves the attitude-achievement paradox by demonstrating that attitudes toward education are multidimensional. The first dimension is composed of abstract attitudes that ref...

Numerous studies have found that women's academic achievement not only equals but often surpasses that of men. In this society, in which educational credentials are linked to jobs, promotions, wages, and status, women's educational accomplishments appear anomalous because women continue to receive far fewer rewards for their educational credentials...

Researchers have established the existence of class-based hidden curricula and their role in social reproduction. However, critics of reproduction theories argue that models of reproduction are often mechanistic and that they overlook the resistance and contradiction in schools. Previous research on social reproduction in the schools, by and large,...

This article explores the academic and social experiences of Chicago and black students at UCLA. The analysis proceeds by examining differences in social backgrounds, high school and college experiences, and explores the relationship between these factors and college adjustment and achievement (GPA). Drawing upon recent theory on class reproduction...

By examining two suburban high schools (one in a wealthy White community and the other in a racially mixed working class community), explores the ways schools integrate adolescents into the economic system through a structured correspondence between the social relations of the school and those of production. (Author/GC)

T he goals of promoting integration and avoiding racial isolation in K-12 education were recently reaffirmed as compelling government interests by five Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District #1 (2007). That decision did strike down specific elements of voluntary plans in Seattle and Lo...