| Vincent Roscigno
North Carolina State University
Families, friends, and schools: The Black-White achievement gap and its reproduction
FINAL REPORT: Research in the sociology of education has uncovered many influential factors and processes that serve to exacerbate, if not reproduce, racial disadvantage in educational opportunity and outcomes. Due to specialization in the field, however, little effort has been undertaken to combine these insights into a broader, more holistic approach to understanding racial edcuational disparity. Consequently, research focusing on inequalities by race tends to focus on specific family attribute or a particular educational process alone rather than the muti-tiered and often interconnected processes that reproduce disadvantage. Drawing and matching data from the restricted use National Educational Longitudinal Survey (first follow-up, 1990) and the Core of Educational Data, I address this concern and model the influence of family/peer background characteristics and institutional processes on the black-white gap in math and reading test outcomes simultaneously. Beyond uncovering relations already well established in the literature, the additive modeling strategy I offer presents a more comprehensive understanding of racial educational disadvantage, acknowledges the complex and often related nature of these processes, and suggests strong linkages between family/peer group influences and access to educational resources, all of which have implications for the contemporary black-white gap in achievement. I conclude by suggesting the need to extend this line of inquiry a step further still, developing a theoretically driven contextual and spatial understanding of these processes.
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