Browsing by Author "Fiel, Jeremy E."

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Opportunity Seeking Across Segregated Schools: Unintended Effects of Automatic Admission Policies on High School Segregation
    (Sage, 2022) Fiel, Jeremy E.
    Automatic admissions policies (AAPs, “percent plans”) redistribute college-going opportunities across segregated high schools to diversify college enrollments, increasing opportunities at predominantly minority high schools. If students “game” AAPs by attending schools with increased opportunities, AAPs could alter racial sorting across high schools. Comparative interrupted time series analyses provide evidence that Texas’s and California’s AAPs reduced Black–White segregation in highly segregated school districts. These effects were concentrated in sparsely populated areas in Texas, and they were modest in California, so it seems unlikely this significantly undermined AAPs’ ability to reduce racial disparities in college-going opportunities. It shows, however, that strategic responses to policies that redistribute opportunities in segregated contexts can create tension between segregation and inequality of opportunity
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    Reducing School Mobility A Randomized Trial of a Relationship-Building Intervention
    (Sage, 2014) Fiel, Jeremy E.; Haskins, Anna R.; Turley, Ruth N. Lopez
    Student turnover has many negative consequences for students and schools, and the high mobility rates of disadvantaged students may exacerbate inequality. Scholars have advised schools to reduce mobility by building and improving relationships with and among families, but such efforts are rarely tested rigorously. A cluster-randomized field experiment in 52 predominantly Hispanic elementary schools in San Antonio, TX, and Phoenix, AZ, tested whether student mobility in early elementary school was reduced through Families and Schools Together (FAST), an intervention that builds social capital among families, children, and schools. FAST failed to reduce mobility overall but substantially reduced the mobility of Black students, who were especially likely to change schools. Improved relationships among families help explain this finding.
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    Relational Segregation: A Structural View of Categorical Relations
    (Sage, 2021) Fiel, Jeremy E.
    This article builds a framework for a relational approach to segregation that emphasizes structures of interactions, transactions, and ties between and within social categories. Rather than explaining segregation with dominants imposing formal rules or homophilic people sorting themselves, I highlight segregation's emergence amid dueling control efforts among actors with malleable categorical identities. And rather than assuming segregation necessarily fuels cycles of inequality or persecution, I identify nuanced advantages and disadvantages for different actors in social conflict. I also explore an underappreciated role of institutions in segregation: They guide relations across different domains of activity that may have different degrees of segregation. An overarching theme is that segregation is not a specific thing with regular causes and effects but an inherently contradictory structural feature of relations that evolves as actors struggle for control.
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    Social Capital and Student Achievement: An Intervention-Based Test of Theory
    (Sage, 2021) Gamoran, Adam; Miller, Hannah K.; Fiel, Jeremy E.; Valentine, Jessa Lewis
    Social capital is widely cited as benefiting children’s school performance, but close inspection of existing research yields inconsistent findings. Focusing on intergenerational closure among parents of children in the same school, this article draws from a field experiment to test the effects of social capital on children’s achievement in reading and mathematics. When children were in first grade, their schools were randomly assigned to an after-school family-based intervention that boosts social capital. A total of 52 schools in Phoenix, Arizona, and San Antonio, Texas, containing over 3,000 first graders, participated in the study, with half the schools in each city assigned to the treatment group and half serving as no-treatment controls. Two years later, no differences in third-grade achievement were evident between children who had been in treatment schools versus control schools. By contrast, nonexperimental analyses of survey-based measures of social capital suggest positive effects on achievement, indicating that naïve estimates based on survey measures may be upwardly biased by unobserved conditions that lead to both stronger ties among parents and higher test scores. This article adds to a growing literature that raises doubts about the effects of this type of social capital for achievement outcomes among young children.