Distributive Justice Antecedents of Race and Gender Disparities in First-Year College Performance

Abstract

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 perspectives in order to investigate how assignment to academic tracks and the availability of opportunities to learn during high school are associated with students' academic achievement during college. We examine the role of ''just'' placement into high school academic tracks, ''just'' access to high-quality teachers, and ''just'' assignment of secondary schools' resources in high school, in relation to college freshmen's grade point averages (GPA). We utilize longitudinal data from a unique dataset with over 15,000 students who spent their academic careers in North Carolina public secondary schools and then attended North Carolina public universities. Our results suggest that ''unjust'' assignment of students to certain high schools, access to high-quality teachers, and assignment to learn in specific academic tracks result in long-lasting consequences that are reflected in freshman college GPA. Importantly, findings also show that the direction and magnitude of the relationship between distributional injustice at schools and college performance is moderated by students' own gender and race. Race and gender interact with the high schools' institutional contexts operationalized by tracking practices, teacher quality, and by school racial and socioeconomic composition. Results show that similar settings do not affect all students in the same ways.

The role of high school racial composition and opportunities to learn in students' STEM college participation

“…Our findings suggest that there might be an interplay between students' race and the racial composition of the school context (consistent with Bottia, Mickelson, Giersch, Stearns, & Moller, ; Newton, ), which determines the timing of when the influence of attending a school with predominantly White students will come into effect. This finding is also consistent with previous literature that recognizes the major role race has in the STEM experiences of Black students and professionals involved in STEM fields (Brown et al, ).…”

School-to-School Differences in Instructional Practice: New Descriptive Evidence on Opportunity to Learn

“…Poor behavioral climates likely affect instruction directly by reducing time on task and engagement (Brophy, 1983;Simonsen et al, 2008) but also indirectly by eroding teacher commitment and effort (Collie et al, 2012). Second, curricular offerings and assignment processes can vary greatly across secondary schools (Bottia et al, 2015;Kelly & Price, 2011;Klopfenstein, 2004;Yun & Moreno, 2006). For example, comparing clusters of schools in California, Yun and Moreno (2006) found that schools serving low-poverty, predominantly Asian and White students offered an average of 11.6 AP courses compared to less than 5 in schools serving high poverty Latino and Black students.…”

Gender and Social Justice: An Examination of Attitudes and Behaviors Among Undergraduate Liberal Arts Students

“…Specifically, they found that girls were more likely to perceive gender and racial equality; however, they are less likely to observe educational inequities than boys. As Bottia, Giersch, Mickelson, Stearns, and Moller (2016) assert, understanding this precollege context is valuable in rethinking higher education’s role in social justice education.…”