Socioeconomic inequality in education across the early life course

Socioeconomic inequality is one of the most intransigent forms of educational inequality in the United States. This remains true despite massive federal and state investments in education, well-intended initiatives funded by multi-million-dollar foundations, and rigorous empirical scholarship investigating causes and possible interventions. In this dissertation, I argue for the importance of shifting the lens in how socioeconomic inequality might be addressed. The first chapter suggests widening the lens to consider not only how resources are allocated to places with the greatest need, but also how resource distribution changes over time and how highly resourced places maintain their resource advantages. The second chapter suggests shifting the lens from remediating the immaterial resources of low-SES families to understanding the different lenses through which parents from different social backgrounds make meaning of college. The third chapter suggests focusing the lens on specific groups at the intersection of multiple identities—in this chapter's case, low-SES women—to better understand how to meet low-SES students' needs. The first chapter examines state- and district-level patterns in school funding. I merge two publicly available datasets, the Stanford Education Data Archive and the F-33 School Finance Survey, and use hierarchical linear modeling to describe recent trends in school district funding and achievement. I identify declining per pupil funding, an increasingly regressive distribution of funding, and increasing achievement disparities between low- and high-SES districts. Further, quasi-experimental instrumental variables and difference-in-difference analyses suggest equity-oriented finance reforms (intended to allocate more funding to poorer districts) may be thwarted by high-SES districts' compensatory increases in local revenues. The second chapter draws on the first wave of an original longitudinal interview study with 81 parents of 9th grade students to investigate how parents understand the meaning of college. I find that parents envision the purpose of college through two semiotic axes, or dimensions of meaning: professional development and personal development. Low-SES parents more often envision college as a site for professional development. For them, college is a place children go to learn skills to succeed in a career. Because not all careers require college attendance, I argue college is a contingent part of the life course in low-SES families. In contrast, the professional development purpose is almost an afterthought for high-SES families. For them, college is best understood through the personal development lens, meaning that it is where children transition to adulthood. The third chapter draws on the National Survey of Youth and Religion (NSYR), a nationally representative, longitudinal survey with a matched interview subsample. Co-authors and I merge these data with the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) to identify semester-level enrollment patterns for low-SES women. While low-SES women's college completion is increasingly taken for granted compared to low-SES men's, we find low-SES women's "advantage" operates at the level of enrollment and nearly disappears conditional on starting college. Further, low-SES women are more likely to temporarily disenroll, and do so more often, than low-SES men and high-SES women. Interview analyses reveal low-SES women exit college for parenting and caretaking. We argue the motherhood penalty, often considered a labor market phenomenon, begins in college

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: Stevens Mitchell L.
Reardon Sean F.
Grusky David B.