In the past 30 years, two revolutions have fundamentally
transformed the way scholars view the educational attainment process,
and, amazingly, the work of scholars has transformed public understanding
and social policy. The first revolution had three components —
multivariate analysis, computerization, and large national datasets.
These were embodied in the status-attainment model that seeks
to identify which antecedent factors best explain outcomes and
what intervening factors may mediate these effects. The second
revolution was the development of new institutional and context
theories to understand underlying social processes — organizational
structures, social capital, social networks, and social context
influences. Both revolutions had a large impact on our understanding.
This paper outlines some accomplishments of each model. It focuses
on two topics to examine how our understanding of tracking was
transformed by each revolution, and how our understanding of educational
influences broadened to include neighborhood effects. I emphasize
the impact of research on public understanding and social policies,
both because they are important, and because thinking about concrete
actions and processes forces us to consider the real meaning of
our findings. Underlying this review is a recurrent theme: that
research can help us to understand the complexities of a rapidly
changing educational environment, to see aspects of social reality
that are largely invisible, and to see people’s capabilities
and the ways the social world can extend those capabilities. Social
structures are especially pernicious because they are so hard
to see and their impact is surreptitious — suppressing capabilities
so they cannot even be detected. Good social research enables
us to see these influences and to discover better alternatives.
Structures not only constrain, they also enable, and sometimes
they help bring out individuals’ capabilities. These results
suggest that we can design social structures that will enable
individuals to realize their capabilities more fully and to perform
beyond the stereotypes that poor social structures have imposed
on them.
James E. Rosenbaum, School
of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University
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