Calendar

Ross Wiener, Vice President at the Aspen Institute and Executive Director of the Education & Society Program

Dr. Michelle Jackson, Assistant Professor, Sociology, Stanford University
https://sociology.stanford.edu/people/michelle-jackson

Title: We ask so much: The division of rationalized labor in the education industry 

Abstract: A key prediction of classical theories of the division of labor is that, over time, specialized occupations are responsible for an ever-narrower range of tasks. In contrast to the predictions of classical theories, I show that the macro-level forces of scientific development and rationalization in fact work to complicate tasks and responsibilities. I use the case of the education industry to cast light on this general pattern. Using data from school yearbooks, academic journals, job task analyses, and government reports, I examine changes in the division of labor in the education industry over the past c.150 years. I show that teachers and schools are asked to take on more tasks today than in the past, and consider some of the possible consequences for teachers, schools, and societies.

Elly Field, Postdoctoral Fellow, Brown University

Title: Understanding the ‘Package Deal’: Disentangling Parents’Intertwined Preferences for Schools and Neighborhoods

Abstract: My research takes as a starting point theeducation policies that link schools and neighborhoods by assigning students toschools based on where they live. These policies, in effect, build segregatedschools from segregated neighborhoods. Qualitative work has documented thatparents often account for this link when deciding where to live, citing adesire to find the “package deal” of a good neighborhood with a good localschool. Yet, in studying how race shapes parents’ preferences, pastexperimental research has only examined these contexts in isolation. Using anoriginal stated-choice experiment, I propose and test two theoreticalframeworks for how the package deal influences parents’ joint preferences forschools and neighborhoods. I find that the package deal means that parents’preferences for neighborhoods are shaped by the characteristics of the localschools and that their preferences for schools are shaped by the surroundingneighborhood. Further, I find that White and Latino parents seek out raciallyisolated schools and neighborhoods together. For White families, this meansthat when considering a majority non-White neighborhood, the package dealremains unappealing even when the school is predominantly White. In contrast,Black parents prefer to avoid being a racial minority in both their schools andneighborhoods but are satisfied when just one context is majority Black. Idiscuss the implications of these intertwined, interactive preferences forresearch on racial segregation and inequality, in particular how individualpreferences shape racial segregation and how the link between schools andneighborhoods affects segregation dynamics.