Support, Success and Race in High School: A quantitative investigation of California’s Central Valley

• In Event: 1255 - Section on Latina/o Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 3. Educational Challenges and Success

Abstract

It is generally believed that caring adults and friends can support young people to persist and succeed in school. Yet, there is little quantitative evidence to associate students’ perceptions of their peer, teacher, and community networks and their academic success. This paper seeks to provide quantitative evidence for understanding the concept of “caring” in the lives of adolescents by asking: How are student perceptions of “caring” friends, teachers, adults and parents associated with academic grades? Using the 2009-2010 California Healthy Kids Survey, this work examines a sample of 5,489 public high school student respondents living in four counties (Monterey, Fresno, Kern, and Sacramento) in California’s mostly rural Central Valley. Logistic regression is used to model how self-reported grades are associated with the support of parents, teachers, adults in the community, and friends. Results indicate that Parent Support and Teacher Support are associated strongly and positively with higher student grades, while no statistically significant association was found for other adults in the community and friends. This paper contributes new quantitative evidence for the importance of “caring” support networks at a population level, and gives new evidence for their importance in less urban areas and inside the specific and important institution of school.

Author

• Orlando Sanchez Zavala, University of California Berkeley