My research focuses on the production of educational inequality in the United States and how it can be addressed. I have studied the role of two main mechanisms—social relationships and culture—in generating unequal schooling experiences for children.
In particular, I seek to understand racial/ethnic disparities and the experiences of Latinos in U.S. schools.
The Role of Social Relationships
One strand of my research considers the development of social relationships as a site of inequality production in schools. In my dissertation, “Nice to Meet You? Exploring the Development of Supportive Parent-School Relationships in Low-Income Latino Communities,” I use mixed methods to examine how parent-school connections develop (or fail to develop) in predominantly low-income Latino communities during early elementary school, and how a particular family engagement program intervenes on this process. I draw on parents’ own words collected through 50 in-depth interviews with parents from 30 Latino families to explore the processes by which Latino parents develop relationships with their children’s schools. I also examine patterns of growth in parent-school relationships and the impact of a family engagement program using survey data from the Children, Families, and Schools (CFS) study, a cluster randomized controlled trial of a popular family engagement program in 52 predominantly low-income Latino schools.
In a series of collaborative papers using CFS data, I also investigate how the family engagement program may address different educational inequalities. Drawing on a variety of methods, both qualitative and quantitative, these papers explore how social capital developed in schools serving historically marginalized populations, variation across local contexts in how the program affected grade retention, and implications of the program for gender inequalities in social resources.
Another strand of my research considers cultural mechanisms in the (re)production of inequality in schools. In my paper, “Ethnic Culture and Schools: The Role of Student-Teacher Relationships,” I examine the link between ethnic culture and achievement among junior high school students. I find that, for both Black and White students, the effect of ethnic identity on achievement operates more so through teacher perceptions than students’ attitudes about school.
In other on-going collaborative work, I am examining the role of another cultural mechanism—parenting practices—in the production of inequality at the intersection of ethnicity and social class. My co-author and I explore the link between class background and childrearing using interview data on immigrant and U.S.-born Mexican-origin parents. We find that parenting is responsive to experiences of intragenerational class mobility, and within-family variation in parenting strategies can arise when mothers and fathers have different class backgrounds.