This study examines the conditions under which minorities will face policy inequity within the educational system. It turns to the theory of representative bureaucracy as one possible explanation, and extends the literature by considering whether African-American students benefit from the presence of Latinos on teaching faculties and vice versa. This study also tests competing theories of how racial context influences minority educational policy outcomes. Copyright (c) 2009 by the Southwestern Social Science Association.

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Administrative reforms encode a set of behavioral expectations for bureaucrats to follow. The authors argue that scholars can usefully contribute to understanding accountability by studying whether bureaucrats follow these expectations and what factors encourage such responsiveness to reform values. To demonstrate this approach, the authors examine performance infor‐mation use as a behavioral measure of responsiveness to results‐based reforms. Using a sample of Texas school superintendents, they find that general openness to the environment goes hand in hand with responsiveness to reform values. The authors propose that such a pattern will hold when reform values align with environmental preferences. The perceived influence of stakeholders, networking with stakeholders, and reliance on partnerships all positively predict performance information use. Environments marked by student diversity and stakeholder conflict also correlate with higher use of performance data, while capacity, less managerial experience, and a unified organizational culture correlate positively with higher reported performance information use.

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This article examines the differential effects of social capital on policy equity in state outcomes. Specifically, it explores the relationship between social capital and incarceration rates in the American states paying particular attention to racial disparities in incarceration rates. Building on work by Hero, I present a theoretical explanation and empirical support for how social capital operates differently under different racial contexts. I argue that social capital enhances social empathy in homogeneous contexts and social controls in diverse contexts. Using state-level longitudinal data on the contiguous states, I find that social capital is positively associated with incarcerations, but only for African Americans. Furthermore, the effects of social capital appear to be conditional on racial context where this relationship is stronger as minority group size increases.