The Aspiration v. Achievement Gap: Evaluating the Impact of Race in Gun Violence in Schools

• In Event: 2484 - Section on Sociology of Education Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 19. Race and Ethnicity in Education 3

Abstract

This study seeks to sociologically consider the impact of race in gun violence at schools while adding race to the newly created large N dataset by Pah et. al (2017). We leverage educational theories about the cooling-out-effect and the school-to-work transition to quantitatively describe the aspiration v. achievement gap that unequally affects black college seeking students. We find that increases in school shooting are significantly different by race over two key changepoints. Specifically, we find that the increase in school shootings in the 1990s were primarily driven by white shooters at the K-12 level, while the more recent spate of shootings in the 2000s is driven by black shooters at the collegiate level. The impacts of recent policy decisions and larger trends in education are also discussed

Authors

• Kat Albrecht, Northwestern University

• Adam Pah, Northwestern University

• Luis Amaral, Northwestern University

• John Hagan, Northwestern University