Secondary and post-secondary education: The impact of timing, differentiation, and second chances in Great Britain and the United States
Senior Researchers: Mary Waters (Harvard University) and Anthony Heath (University of Oxford)
Research Fellows: Sherri-Ann Butterfield (Rutgers University), Marco Gonzalez (Harvard University) and Vikki Boliver (University of Oxford)
The British-US team will compare the experiences of children of immigrants in English and American secondary schools and higher education. Our research will examine the large question of how the institutional structure of secondary schools and higher education in the two countries affects the differential academic achievement of natives and children of immigrants. We will do this through a macro comparison of the institutional structure of schooling, ideologies of multiculturalism, and patterns of institutional sorting in the two national systems, and then through focused and interrelated comparisons of three major intervening variables previous research has identified as important in shaping differential educational attainment-peer social networks in secondary schools, racial and ethnic identity development, and knowledge, information and decision making in regard to college choice. We will be using AddHealth national level data in the US, quantitative and in depth qualitative interview data from the New York Second Generation Study in New York City, Vikki Boliver's dataset on higher education. We will also collect new survey data and in depth interview data in London secondary schools and among young adults in London. We will use a mix of methods, including social network analysis, survey analysis, HLM modeling of contextual school and neighborhood effects on educational stratification and in depth qualitative interviewing. We will produce an overview paper comparing the English and American institutional education structure and its effects on children of immigrants, several academic journal articles, and a dissertation.
Macro-Institutional Comparison
If one compares the educational systems of western European countries and the United States, one might conclude that England and the US are least dissimilar from each other, especially if the focus is on the tradeoff between equity and excellence. Both England and the United States have a more open higher educational system with more routes to higher education and more second chances than many of the more rigid, but less variable in quality higher educational systems in countries such as France and the Netherlands. The recent histories of both the American and British systems are also bringing them even closer together. The English system has moved away from separate vocational and academic secondary schools towards the US system of combined comprehensive secondary schools. Meanwhile the American No Child Left Behind national law has led to the development of high stakes testing similar to that administered in Britain. These similarities mean that we will be able to concentrate on key differences in the system that could affect children of immigrants, including residential segregation (much higher in the US), specialization of curriculum (much earlier in Britain), and affirmative action in higher education (present in the United States). Heath and Waters will write an overview paper examining recent changes in the educational systems in both countries, identifying similarities and also focusing on the remaining differences in the systems, drawing out the differences that might differentially affect the children of immigrants, and articulating the similarities between the systems that might make the outcomes among immigrant children in Britain and the US different from the outcomes among the children in the larger six nation comparison of which we are a part. We will review the structure of primary, secondary and higher education, language and religious instruction, racial and ethnic segregation, school size, multiculturalist or assimilation ideologies, degree of local variation, and structure of language instruction and bilingual education. This comparative work will involve a literature review, a map of institutional change and some comparative statistical work. We will examine both primary effects on academic achievement-peer social networks and identity and aspirations, as well as tracing these into secondary effects-the sorting of individuals into different outcomes on higher education.
Peer Social Networks
One of the prevailing mechanisms said to influence integration, as commonly measured by labor market participation, educational attainment, and political incorporation, is social capital, or the resources embedded in an individual or group's web of social relations. The basic assumption behind this concept is that individuals or groups who are better connected are able to benefit from the resources embedded in their network of social relations more effectively. As such, disagreements about social capital are generally not based on what it is, but the "network mechanisms that define what it means to be 'better connected'" (Burt 2000 p. 350).
Using data from the longitudinal school-based study in the United States, Add Health , Marco Gonzalez, the pre-doctoral student participating in the project, has examined the network structure of second-generation Mexican-American and Chinese-American youth and its relation to their academic achievement, as measured by their GPA. Focusing on the difference between bridging and bonding social capital, he finds in the US that success is based on their ability to forge relationships that effectively provide access to resources lacking in their homes, communities, and schools-bridging social capital. For example, he found that second-generation Mexican-Americans who attend low-income schools and engage in diffuse, socio-economically diverse networks were more likely to have higher GPA's than those who participated in homogenous, highly-interwoven relationships. Gonzalez will gather sociocentric network data on two (at a minimum, 5 at a maximum) schools in Britain to examine the network structure of two comparable ethnic groups-Asian Indians and Afro Caribbeans. He will survey the entirety of each secondary school and will be able to look at network structures of students at different ages, asking whether the structure of the peer networks evolves differently over time for natives as opposed to children of immigrants. (One hypothesis is that the social networks of the children of immigrants might be more bounded by ethnicity and thus less likely to expand over time than is the case for native groups.) Additionally, he will request access to the Pupil Level Annual School Census (PLASC) from the Department for Education and Skills (DfES). This data set covers all primary and secondary schools in England and can be linked to each pupil's test score history and overall academic record. The PLASC also contains school-level and personal information, such as ethnicity, gender, age, native language, an indicator of family socio-economic status, and postal code, for each student. This information can be linked to the qualitative and ego-centric network data he will collect and will provide a more complete, time-series picture of the social worlds these students are embedded in.
Gonzalez will add questions to Sherri Ann's in-depth interview study in the same schools to ask Afro Caribbean students about the educational aspirations they have, the choices they make about choosing their friends and peer networks. In turn Gonzalez will ask questions in his school wide survey that will replicate some of the questions in the NY second generation study
Racial and Ethnic Identity and Formation of Educational Aspirations
Sherri-Ann Butterfield will examine the role of identity and perceptions of group boundaries in the development of educational aspirations and in the shape of networks that provide information on how to navigate the educational system. She will examine the ways in which the presence of (or lack thereof) native-born groups shape Caribbean and South Asian immigrant youth's perceptions of opportunity in both countries. In the United States, due to phenotype, the African American population serves as a social group that Black Caribbeans are assumed to be members of, and thus treated accordingly, which is oftentimes problematic. However, there is no such comparable group for Caribbeans in Britain. How does this affect their level of integration into larger American or British society when they are assumed to be members of an immigrant and racial minority group? Given these factors, what do role do schools play in assimilating these youth? And how are Caribbean and South Asian immigrant youth's perceptions of opportunity impacted by their experiences both in and out of school?
Butterfield will examine the ways in which within-group variation, such as class and gender, as well as school context, family histories, and access to resources shape the educational aspirations and outcomes of the children of immigrants in Britain and the United States. This research seeks to address the gaps in the literature by examining how second generation immigrant youth navigate the educational system and utilize various resources at their disposal that brings about academic success or failure. She will conduct in-depth qualitative interviews with students at the end of secondary school in the London schools that Gonzalez will also survey and she will ask about decision making about application to higher education. This material will also be useful to Boliver in her questions about stratification in higher education.
The other data source is the quantitative survey and qualitative in-depth data collected as part of the New York Second Generation project. These data contains extensive information on the educational choices and outcomes of children of immigrants in New York. The telephone survey and the in-depth interviews with native minorities and the young adult children of immigrants include comprehensive detail on how young people learn about and make decisions about post-secondary education, and also include information on how the institutions of higher education fit the circumstances of the young people, many of whom also work full time and have begun families. Butterfield will use these interviews to contrast with the London sample.
Higher Educational Stratification
Most studies of higher education in the United States and Britain look at years of schooling and degrees across different ethnic groups, but both countries have a widely differentiated higher education system, with elite highly selective universities on the one end, and much less prestigious open-access institutions on the other, with a continuum in between. Waters (together with co-authors Holdaway, Kasinitz and Mollenkopf) has collected the first systematic data on the quality of higher education institution by country of origin of the second generation in the New York Second Generation study. Serendipitously, in her dissertation at Oxford, Boliver had collected and analyzed similar data of quality of higher education institution attended by ethnic minority status in Britain. The pattern of stratification is striking and similar across the two countries-Chinese do exceptionally well and are concentrated in highly selective universities, as are native-born whites in both the US and Britain. Other second-generation minority groups are concentrated in lower quality, less selective institutions. Boliver and Waters will work on exploring the reasons for this stratification. This will involve a three-prong approach. First, contextual data on school and neighborhood class and ethnic composition will be examined for both the New York and the British data using HLM modeling. We will look at how much of the variation in stratification in higher education can be explained by school and neighborhood composition, holding constant the individual-level characteristics of the students. Second, Boliver will analyze the qualitative data we collected for the second generation in New York to uncover the decision making process of different young people who choose to apply to and attend different kinds of higher education systems. Waters will work with Boliver to develop skills in analyzing qualitative data. This data set should yield interesting hypotheses about how the sorting of the second generation actually works with respect to higher education. Third, based on these analyses Boliver will suggest some questions that can be added to the surveys Gonzalez will administer in London secondary schools, and in-depth interview questions that Butterfield will ask Caribbean origin children of immigrants in the same school.
Timetable
Waters and Gonzalez will go to England this July to meet with Heath and Boliver to further refine the research design, to gain access to survey data and to begin the process of choosing schools in London. Waters and Heath will define the statistical data needed to conduct their comparisons of the macro structure of US/British differences.
Butterfield will go to London and Oxford in September and will spend the academic year there. Boliver will go to Harvard in September and spend the academic year there. Gonzalez and Boliver will overlap at Harvard during the fall semester. Gonzalez will go to Oxford in January and remain until August. The group will meet all together at the projectwide meeting in the spring in Europe.
