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Comment: The Clouded Crystal Ball: Trends in Educational StratificationAuthor(s): Karl L. AlexanderSource: Sociology of Education, Vol. 74, Extra Issue: Current of Thought: Sociology ofEducation at the Dawn of the 21st Century (2001), pp. 169-177Published by: American Sociological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2673261 .

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Co ment The Clouded Crystal Ball:

Trends in Educational Stratification

Karl L. Alexander Johns Hopkins University

U _ appreciate this opportunity to react to the three thoughtful articles in this issue by distinguished

members of the sociology of education community of scholars: Alan C. Kerckhoff, Maureen T. Hallinan, and Adam Gamoran. I gather that the authors had a wide berth in selecting their "stocktaking" topics. That being the case, the mix in the three articles came as something of a surprise. Considering that Kerckhoff's mission for at least 20 years has been precisely to break through the parochialism of a U.S.-centric view of schools and stratification, it was not surprising that he chose comparative educational stratification as his focus. His was a lonely voice early on, but he persevered and brought forth a wealth of compelling evidence that stratification processes often differ as a function of national context, and suddenly comparative studies of the sort he has advocated are de rigueur.

No, the surprise in this set of articles was that both Hallinan and Gamoran elected to write on educational inequalities across social lines, primarily black-white differences. Of course, both authors have published on the topic-extensively and use- fully-but my mental map of the field asso- ciates their names primarily with studies of school organization and tracking. It intrigued me, therefore, that they chose a topic informed by their studies of tracking, not tracking itself. I took a similar tack not too long ago, opening my 1997 presidential address to the Southern Sociological Society with the following line: "I wonder how many of you would have guessed that the 'IQ' gap separating white and black

youngsters declined by almost a third between 1970 and 1990." The main body of my talk was about school effects and effectiveness, but I began with the declin- ing test score gap as an attention grabber.' And it worked-it is something people care about, and to be able to do something about things we care about is why many of us study schools.

Years ago, when I was a graduate student, I learned from Gerhard Lenski that the fundamental task of social stratification as a field of inquiry is to understand "who gets what and why." There are many life- times of work embedded in these five words, but for me, it is telling that the for- mulation leads with "who" and ends with "why." We sociologists study the workings of schools from a stratification perspective not because schools are inherently interest- ing, but owing to our shared intuition that schools as social institutions are centrally relevant to the unequal distribution of life chances across social lines. Their workings constitute part of the "why," and, in the present instance, blacks and whites constitute the "who" (to round out coverage, the "what" typically includes cognitive skills, educational credentials, and job opportunities).

Viewed against this backdrop, my "surprise," I suppose, says more about my fil- tering than about how Hallinan and Gamoran chose to use the latitude afford- ed them; as eminent educational stratifica- tionists, their "who" focus makes perfectly good sense. Now, to the business at hand. Try as I might, I could not come up with integrating themes that overlap all three

Sociology of Education Extra Issue 2001: 169-177 169



170 Alexander

articles. Instead, I discuss the articles serially, beginning with Kerckhoff's and then address- ing Hallinan's and Gamoran's together.

KERCKHOFF ON EDUCATIONAL STRATIFICATION COMPARATIVELY

I do not have many regrets about how my career has unfolded, but tucked away deep down inside, there is a sense of opportunity lost. I suppose it is my blue-collar, big-city background, but I have never really thought much about the world beyond our borders. That perspective limits my sociology, I know, but if I were to venture into this realm, I think I would want to do it exactly as Kerckhoff has done (along with a handful of others, includ- ing Michael Hout, Yossi Shavit, and their various collaborators)-data-based and quanti- tative, empirically rigorous, driven by fundamental questions of educational stratification.

Seeing how things work elsewhere can give us a useful perspective on how things work in the United States. And if they are done with care, such comparisons can approximate a quasi-experiment. In an exclu- sively domestic perspective, it is easy to slip into the trap of thinking that "what is" also defines what "may be." So, for example, we study variability across schools in the United States and conclude that school differences are small and do not count for much in explaining differences in achievement. These conclusions hold here, and that is important, but it is also important that they are context bound and so do not necessarily hold in general. In his article, Kerckhoff limits his com- ments to comparative studies involving Western industrial societies, which I grant is plenty to digest. But the questions dictate the appropriate frame of reference. I have in mind Heyneman's (1977) and Heyneman and Loxley's (1 983) studies that showed large and powerful differences in the quality of schools when the universe was broadened to include nonindustrial societies.

Things look the way they do in the United States owing to a school-quality "floor" that comes with a high standard of living. Extend the range of natural variation, and a different

picture emerges. The logic of comparative studies has the potential to inform a whole host of domestic issues, and I believe that we have only just begun to realize their value. Schools do not provide effective vocational education? Check out how apprenticeships are structured in Germany (e.g., Hamilton 1990). No good models of the school-to- work transition? Let us try to understand how school-business partnerships work in Japan (e.g., Rosenbaum and Kariya 1989).

But the "logic" just alluded to is the logic of inference, and its ceteris paribus stipulation sets a high standard. Would German apprenticeships work the same way if they were used in, say, Detroit? Hardly, and so to exploit the potential of comparative studies requires a context sensitivity that can be difficult to achieve. Here is a small example from my own (limited) experience: In 1999, a staff member of the Cato Institute published an Op-Ed article in the Baltimore Sun questioning the usefulness of reducing class size as a school-reform strategy (Lartigue 1 999:9A). Among the points made was that the Japanese seem to do just fine with classes of 40 and more. That point may be true, but what does it tell us about the workability of large classes in the United States? Not much, I suspect. Here is how I put it in a letter to the editor (Alexander 1999:15A):

Lartigue tells you that Japan has much larger classes than do we and manages to achieve better test scores anyway, but he does not tell you that Japan also has a powerful central ministry of education, a national curriculum, a program of national testing and a culture that stresses obedience and conformity over indi- vidualism, all qualities that are anathema to political conservatives and libertarians who seem to so envy the educational successes realized by our friends in Asia.

That Kerckhoff's work is context sensitive is precisely what sets it apart and makes it good sociology. What is so hard about doing comparative educational stratification anyway? We have a natural metric-years of schooling-and the tools to run regressions. Not so fast, says Kerckhoff. Years of schooling may work as a proxy for academic progress in the United States, and possibly even for certification level attained, but a tally of years as an



The Clouded Crystal Ball 171

accounting scheme will not do for other places throughout the world. Different systems of certification involving examinations and licensing are embedded in different systems of schooling and must be understood by means of conceptualizations that respect the systemic context. For research to be gen- uinely comparative requires that the things being compared must be meaningfully com- parable, and therein lies the genius of Kerckhoff's work: Kerckhoff has shown us by way of example what is involved in doing comparative research on educational stratification well.

Kerckhoff's sketch of the relevant dimen- sionality for studying systems of educational stratification comparatively strikes me as sen- sible and useful: stratification, standardiza- tion, and (vocational) specificity. Indeed, his book Diverging Pathways (Kerckhoff 1993) is a masterful application of this perspective, demonstrating how within-school and between-school structural placements across students' careers construct different educational trajectories and so increase social differentiation (e.g., his structural deflections idea).

These three variable features of educational systems largely determine a system's capac- ity to structure young people's labor force entry, Kerckhoff notes, but then he introduces a fourth element: students' choice, that is, the amount of flexibility linking structural loca- tions at successive stages of attainment. It is a structural sense of choice-perhaps better thought of as "choice points"-but it is a sense of structure that builds in space for self- direction and personal agency and so has brought Kerckhoff full circle back to the debate he initiated more than 20 years ago (in 1 976) in his presidential address to the Southern Sociological Society: Is status attainment socialization or allocation?

The obvious answer is that it is a little bit of both, and I find it clever that Kerckhoff has integrated the two in this way. Systems of structural constraints vary in their conse- quences, partly as a function of the amount of latitude they allow. Where linkages are loose- ly coupled, they are less determinant. But to say that the structure and functioning of an educational system is less determinant does not necessarily mean that individuals are freer

to choose their own fate or that the stratification system within which that educational system is embedded is less rigid for that rea- son. The language of "choice" is easily mis- construed in these ways, though, so let me explain what I have in mind.

The exercise of choice itself is socially con- strained, as Kerckhoff (1 977) and I and my colleague (Alexander and Cook 1979) both pointed out in the context of status attainment research. If the choices young people (and their families) make are determined by their social class, race, gender, or any number of other socially constructed "tags" (dare I say "habitus"?), then flexibility within the educational system may simply give freer rein to the play of stratifying forces that are external to the educational system (think about the school-choice debate in this country).

We need to allow space for personal agency in our models of educational stratification and somehow to keep young people's orientations toward the future distinct from the press of social context that frames the development of these orientations. That much is clear conceptually, but I am not sure that even today we have the empirical tools to be true to that vision. For a good discussion (if not resolution) of this conundrum, see Gambetta (1 987).

In the concluding section of his article, Kerckhoff wrestles with the boundaries of the transition from school to work. To determine life-stage boundaries rigorously is deceptively hard, and I can well imagine Kerckhoff's sigh of resignation when he finally fell back on age grading-the "action," he tells us, is in the 1 6-25 age range. As a rationale, Kerckhoff states that the lower bound is the age of mandatory school attendance in most industrial societies, whereas by age 25, most people have completed their schooling and entered the labor force. These benchmarks seem about as reasonable as any, but the offi- cial school-leaving age across states in the United States ranges up to 18; in 1992-93, one in six bachelor's-degree recipients was aged 30 or older at graduation (National Center for Education Statistics 1 996); many youths begin acquiring significant workplace experience as early as the middle grades (Entwisle, Alexander, and Olson 2000); and



172 Alexander

almost all high school students today juggle school and work at some point (see, e.g., Light 1995; Steinberg and Cauffman 1995).

Against this reality, any attempt to define life stage by age must be understood as approximate, at best. The transition from school to work is one benchmark for bracket- ing the transition to adulthood, but modern life may have gotten ahead of our ability to conceptualize what it means to be an "adult." The old-timey notion of an orderly progres- sion from school to work to marriage to par- enthood is just that-an old-timey notion. The intersection of roles across institutional settings-school, workplace, and family-in the modern era has gotten increasingly compli- cated, and, correspondingly, "age is less relevant in defining life experience. With children having babies, most young people juggling school and work at an early age, and elderly people returning to school in increasing num- bers, an educational stratification agenda for the new millennium may need a new orient- ing imagery. Though it still rolls easily off the tongue, "transitioning from this to that" has a decidedly 20th-century feel to it.

HALLINAN AND GAMORAN ON BLACK-WHITE INEQUALITIES

Hallinan's and Gamoran's articles are nicely complementary. Together, they provide a well-rounded picture of what is known and thought about the social context of black- white differences, with a strong tilt, as expected, toward the schooling side of things. Hallinan delves more broadly and deeply into the "why and wherefore" of black-white differences in achievement and attainment.2 Her article, largely a review-of perspectives, interpretations, and evidence- stays on safer ground. Gamoran's article does a bit of review also, but in his case the stocktaking is a backdrop to prognostication. The forward-looking thrust of Gamoran's article makes his the more ambitious of the two.

I have never been much of a futurist. For me, it is challenge enough to make sense of what has already happened, so I admire Gamoran's chutzpah. Gamoran foresees a

world in which blacks will achieve parity with whites on key educational outcomes (net of whatever disparities fall out from persistent socioeconomic differences across racial lines). It is a pleasing vision, and I hope that he is correct, but....

Gamoran anticipates that over roughly the next 100 years, the fundamental organizational structure of U.S. schooling will remain pretty much as we know it today. This premise is key to his reasoning; it is what allows him to extrapolate recent trends to the future. I believe that Gamoran is correct that surface changes do not always cut to the core. Today's K-12 schools indeed look and work much like those we inherited from our Progressive Era forebears, whose legacy includes big bureaucracy, specialization, pro- fessionalism, efficiency, sorting, and certifying.

Educational fashions (e.g., the open school movement) come and go, and sometimes it is true that the more things change, the more they stay the same (how different, after all, are middle schools from junior high schools?). But I do not think that Gamoran is right in saying that schooling at the start of the 21st century is little different from the way it was at the beginning of the 20th, at least not if we expand our horizons beyond K-12 schooling. Community colleges, for example, are an organizational invention of the 20th century, and when was the last time any of us attended a PTA meeting at a "normal school"?-normal schools have gone the way of the dinosaur. Furthermore, I believe that the extension of schooling's embrace to ever younger and ever older students qualifies as a fundamental change. I have already com- mented on "overage" college students, a vast pool that has supported the continued expansion of the postsecondary sector beyond the baby-boomer era. But to tap into this pool, colleges and universities have had to be nimble and creative, as evidenced by the growth of graduate offerings, part-time baccalaureate programs, continuing studies divisions, distance curricula, virtual universities conferring virtual degrees, and now elder hostels.

This upward spiral at the postsecondary level has considerable democratizing potential, but it can also give a somewhat Pyrrhic



The Clouded Cr stal Ball 173

cast to seeming victories. Hallinan and Gamoran both acknowledge that the picture is mixed. The good news is that nowadays, blacks and whites are at near parity in high school completion and that college attendance rates are closer than ever before. These hard-won victories represent real accomplish- ments, yet the college-completion gap remains large, and the graduate-degree gap is larger still, especially disparities involving men (for an overview see Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute 1 997). In his article, Gamoran alludes to the distinction between school practices that contribute to educational effectiveness (boosting attainments/achievements) and school practices that contribute to educational equality (reducing disparities across social lines). The modern era of educational expansion that began midcentury has certainly boosted attainments (that is definitional, I suppose) and at certain benchmarks has furthered the cause of educational equality across social lines, but it remains to be seen whether this equalizing dynamic will win out over the long haul. Gamoran mentioned that the upward spiral of credentialism is supporting persistent socioeconomic-based inequalities (e.g., Raftery and Hout's 1993 "maximally maintained inequality"). With overt racial privilege in retreat, it would not surprise me to see such an unequalizing dynamic also play out across racial and ethnic lines in the 21st century. Indeed, recent attacks on affirmative action programs in higher education suggest to me that the battle has already com- menced.

The expansion of schooling beyond high school is one organizational revolution of the modern era. Another is the extension of school-like experiences in out-of-home settings to younger and younger children. With kindergarten now practically universal throughout the United States (and full-day programs in the majority), can universal preschool be far behind? In 1998, about half the 3- and 4 year olds attended nursery school (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2000), and the idea that preschool should be an entitlement has wide support.

This early education movement, which is redefining the meaning of "childhood," also

has great democratizing potential. We know from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (National Center for Education Statistics 2000), for example, that low-income and minority children start school already badly disadvantaged-their cognitive skills in kindergarten lag behind those of their more advantaged age-mates. But we know, too, from projects like High/Scope Perry Preschool (Schweinhart and Weikart 1998) and the Abecedarian project (Ramey, Campbell, and Blair 1998) that high-quality preschools can help close the gap, especially if continuing supports are provided later (Reynolds 1 994).

My crystal ball shows a future in which more and more young children will spend more and more time in school-like settings. But it clouds over when I try to discern the equity implications of such an extension of schooling's embrace. If near-universal preschool means that almost all needy children will have access to high-quality preschool programs constructed on best- practice principles, then certainly they will begin "real school" better positioned for success. However, if children of privilege find their way to even better preschools or profit more from the same-quality preschools, as seems likely if universal preschool becomes a reality, what then? The result may well be increased educational effectiveness (higher achievement for all), but coupled with increased educational inequality (larger gaps across social lines at the start of kindergarten or first grade).

That is the problem with intuiting possible equity implications of educational reforms- the devil is in the details, but, at best, we can foresee the broad outlines. Gamoran came to the same conclusion in his discussion of high- stakes testing-it could work this way or that. Here is an example that is a bit more imme- diate. We know from Project Star that children learn better in smaller classes and that lower-income children benefit the most from smaller classes (Mosteller, Light, and Sachs 1996; Nye, Hedges, and Konstantopoulos 2000). Armed with this knowledge, California embarked on an ambitious program to reduce the size of classes in the primary grades, only in the rush to reform, a few details got lost-like finding the space and



174 Alexander

qualified teachers for all those smaller classes. It will come as no surprise, I am sure, that smaller classes do not work well when paired with space shortages and a reliance on uncer- tified teachers. And guess what kind of schools are most prone to suffer these problems-those serving low-income and minority children, naturally (Stecher and Bohrnstedt 2000).

My point here is not that California's plan- ners are inept-I hope they will learn from experience and get it right eventually-but that implementation holds the key, and effective implementation of even the most inspired idea cannot be taken for granted (nor can the political will be taken for granted, witness the resistance to recent detracking initiatives; for a discussion, see, Loveless 1995; Oakes et al. 1997). Gamoran and Hallinan both observe that schools are the most promising venue for corrective action, and I think they are correct-the relevant characteristics of families and communities are probably harder to change, and the col- lective mandate for attempting to do so is less secure. That is too bad, but it is a fact of life. I say "too bad" because the evidence is clear from research in the Beginning School Study (Entwisle, Alexander, and Olson 1997) and other studies of summer learning (Cooper et al. 1 996; Heyns 1 978, 1 987) that it is the out- of-school environment that holds back disadvantaged children-the home and community conditions of their upbringing. "Compensatory education" is compensating for something, after all, but for various rea- sons, a frontal attack on the problem is often not practical.

Gamoran is hopeful that rising levels of educational attainment in minority communities will trigger a "virtuous cycle," such that the problem will be substantially self-correct- ing. African Americans' levels of educational attainment are indeed rising, and that no doubt will help, but as I already mentioned, the educational gap at higher levels remains large, while other trends in family life, such as the concentration of wealth, the concentration of poverty, and the prevalence of single- parent households, are less clearly favorable. In addition, we know that African American children lag behind white children, at least in

achievement scores, when their parents' education and income are equivalent. That being the case, then "simply" equating socioeco- nomics will not yield parity of schooling outcomes (this is the opening for explanations that invoke the minority experience specifi- cally-e.g., Fordham and Ogbu's, 1 986, "cultural inversion" thesis).

But even if schools are the second-best option for reform, they at least are an option, and we probably know more than is general- ly appreciated about how to make the educational process work better for disadvantaged children. Hallinan reviews the new received wisdom on "effective schools" that has emerged from the public-private debate initiated by Coleman (e.g., Coleman, Hoffer, and Kilgore 1982)-schools work best when they embody a genuine sense of community, a commitment to high levels of achievement for all, and a rigorous common core curriculum with minimal curricular differentiation. These kinds of schools work well in the private sector, and public schools that embody these features also work well. And there are other whole-school reform models that likewise have proved effective-"Success for All" and "Talent Development," to mention just two homegrown examples. The problem is not so much to find or construct a handful of "model" schools, but to diffuse those models, taking them on the road and making them work where they have not appeared naturally (sometimes referred to as "scaling up"). And there's the rub.

In a sense, effective school reform is an attempt to impose the unnatural, and that poses formidable challenges. Schooling works best in a receptive environment, and failing schools are, almost by definition, lacking in some aspects of "receptiveness." Let me share with you a well-kept secret: Schools are quintessentially middle-class institutions. Their professional staffs are solidly middle class, their operating principles embody the ways of the middle class, and they are charged with passing along middle-class culture. Is it any surprise, then, that children of the middle (and upper) classes realize the greatest success at school and that schools work best when they enroll solidly middle-class students?




A recent article in Forbes Magazine (Carnahan 2001) identified tax-subsidized suburban public schools as "best buys," and it was correct. The public school "crisis" is substantially a crisis of high-poverty schools (rural and urban), many of which also have mainly minority enrollments. The challenge is to make these schools work well in the absence of a middle-class core. It is the old school-climate notion revisited, laced with a bit of "person-environment fit" imagery. Coleman understood this fact before his inter- ests turned elsewhere; the findings presented in Equality of Educational Opportunity (Coleman et al. 1966) that minority youths achieve at a higher level in schools with greater enrollments of students from families with high socioeconomic status, in my opin- ion, revealed a fundamental truth (Rutter et al.'s 1979 study of London high schools pointed in much the same direction).

A solid middle-class presence sets a tone that can elevate all children, and middle-class parents will not tolerate failing schools for long. It is easier to address problems in a school where most students are disposed to the school's agenda and have the requisite tools, but we have retreated from a public policy commitment to socioeconomic and racial-ethnic mixing, so nowadays no one is talking about that kind of "fix"-well, almost no one (see, e.g., Kahlenberg 2001; Orfield and Eaton 1996).

There is much more that could be said,3 but let me conclude by yet again invoking Coleman (1990). Being obliged to counteract the unequalizing press of social stratification through school-based reform is a rearguard action. In a family-based meritocracy, most parents of privilege want to see their children succeed, and their being privileged implies that they have resources to deploy toward that end. Altruistic instincts toward the less fortunate are real and often powerful, too, but the first instinct is to protect one's own. The compensatory school reform movement amounts to pitting public resources in the cause of equalization against private resources that are committed to preserving privilege. It is a contest among unequals, and as long as race confers privilege outside schools, I have to assume it will continue to

do so inside them as well. I suppose that is my prediction. I do not claim it is empirically grounded, but it certainly reflects my sense of how the world works, and it is, sad to say, at odds with Gamoran's.

NOTES

1. The wording in the published version (Alexander 1 997) is a bit different, but the point is the same. My purpose was to estab- lish that such differences are far from immutable and to use that as a springboard for developing my argument that schools have likely played a constructive role in achieving this reduction in cognitive inequality between blacks and whites.

2. The distinction used to be meaningful in educational stratification circles, and it ought to be still. By attainment, I mean criteria that reflect persistence through the educational system to various certification benchmarks (e.g., high school dropout, college attendance, and college completion); by achievement, I mean criteria that reflect the quality of a student's school performance (e.g., marks on report cards and test scores).

3. 1 am convinced, for example, that age grading (e.g., Tyack and Cuban 1995; Tyack and Tobin 1994) and the constraints of clock and calendar that oblige children to move ahead at the same pace (see, e.g., National Education Commission on Time and Learning 1 994) are fundamental obstacles to effective school reform.

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Tyack, David, and Larry Cuban. 1995. Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Tyack, David, and William Tobin. 1994. "The Grammar of Schooling: Why Has It Been So Hard to Change?" American Educational Research Journal 31:453-79.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 2000. Trends in the Well-Being of America's Children and Youth: 2000. Washington, DC: Author.

Karl L. Alexander, Ph.D., is John Dewey Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland. His main fields of interest are sociology of education and life-course development. His current work with the Beginning School Study is examining the effects of grade retention on cognitive and affective outcomes, the social patterning and dynamics of high school dropout and completion, and early adult life paths in the years after graduation.

Address all correspondence to Professor Karl L. Alexander, Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218; e-mail: [email protected].



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