Stratification through Educational Ideology: How Charter Schools' Organizational Identities Reflect Race and Class

• In Event: 2484 - Section on Sociology of Education Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 21. Schools and Classrooms 1

Abstract

Are charter schools heterogeneous and embedded in local ethnic- and class-specific niches, as class stratification scholars assert? Or are they isomorphic, ritually circumscribed, and disconnected from local conditions, as organizational institutionalists argue? My project adjudicates this debate by examining ideological differentiation among charter schools, an organizational domain with under-studied performance effects and political/social contingencies. In a two-stage research design, I first analyze charters’ publicly visible identities through cutting-edge text analysis (deductive dictionary methods with a validity check using inductive topic models) of all mission statements (MSs) for all charter schools operating in the 2014-15 school year. I then estimate fixed-effects regression models that test the impact of charter missions on educational outcomes. I thereby transcend persistent methodological problems in the study of charter-school identities (due to inconsistent hand-coding of data limited by geography, history, and validity) by collecting contemporary, valid, and population-wide data, as well as by blending induction (through text analysis of identities) and deduction (through statistical testing of hypotheses).

Author

• Jaren Randell Haber, University of California-Berkeley