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S. Michael Gaddis
Feb13

Education Policy and The Separate Roles of Race and Social Class in Inequality

by S. Michael Gaddis on February 13th, 2013 at 12:10 pm
Posted In: Affirmative Action, Higher Education, Inequality, Policy, Race/Ethnicity, Social Class

In Monday morning’s Chronicle of Higher Education, Rick Kahlenberg makes a case for class-based affirmative action in U.S. colleges and universities.

Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at TCF, joins a number of political pundits, academics, and policymakers who see the writing on the wall: the Supreme Court’s ruling on Fisher v. University of Texas later this year is likely to dismantle race-based affirmative action in higher education. This would parallel a ruling in a 2007 case that prevents K-12 schools from reassigning students on the basis of race to achieve diversity.

Kahlenberg is a leading voice in an increasingly-common chorus arguing that social class is now a more important factor in inequality than race. Recent research in a number of areas supports this belief. In a 2011 article in the American Journal of Sociology, Sean Reardon at Stanford University and Kendra Bischoff at Cornell University found that over the past five decades residential segregation by income has sharply increased. Due to school assignment policies, this spatial arrangement potentially leads to more class similarities within schools but greater class differences between schools. Not surprisingly, Dr. Reardon has also found that while black-white test score gaps have declined and stabilized over this time period, such gaps based on social class have increased.

However, just because the U.S. elected its first-ever black president does not mean that racial inequality has disappeared. An unnerving number of research studies in the past few years have found strong evidence of continued racial discrimination. These experiments have found that politicians are less likely to respond to emails from black rather than white names, landlords discriminate against racial minorities in rental housing, and employers in low wage markets call back whites more often than blacks for job interviews.

My own research shows that racial discrimination exists even for those at the pinnacle of educational success: black job applicants with a Harvard degree are much less likely to receive responses from employers than white applicants with a Harvard degree. In other research with colleague Raj Ghoshal, we find that Craigslist users looking for a roommate are much less likely to respond to emails from black users, even after controlling for social class in a number of important ways.

The evidence is clear to me. Yes, social class background is a critically important factor driving inequality today. However, race still plays an independent role in shaping the opportunities of young people.

Nationally representative data from the past two decades show that blacks, Hispanics, and individuals from families in the bottom half of the income distribution are severely underrepresented at the most prestigious universities. Our education policies at all levels should be aimed at improving the opportunities for individuals in these groups. Affirmative action policy in higher education is a stopgap measure and one that is likely to disappear soon.

We must be prepared to address inequality earlier in the educational pipeline with aggressive education policy. However, to do so, we must first recognize that both race and social class still matter in our society.  Education policy at the PreK-12 level should provide all children with great teachers, adequate funding, maintained infrastructure, and a variety of resources to inspire them to go to college.  In response to possibly losing affirmative action in higher education, let’s do what we should have done all along: let’s repair the system from the ground up.

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S. Michael Gaddis
Feb06

Restricting Liberal Arts: A Dangerous Higher Education Policy

by S. Michael Gaddis on February 6th, 2013 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Higher Education, Horizontal Stratification, Inequality, Policy, Uncategorized

Last week, North Carolina governor Pat McCrory suggested that public funding for higher education should support only those academic programs that have clear paths to jobs. This comes on the heels of similar remarks by Florida governor Rick Scott, who wants a tiered tuition plan. The remarks of a number of conservative lawmakers portend either deep cuts in liberal arts programs at public universities, or higher tuition prices for students seeking such degrees.

History suggests that liberal arts degree programs cannot all be a waste of time and money.

Scores of great thinkers and successful individuals have obtained such degrees, including Governor McCrory himself. The last five U.S. presidents all obtained liberal arts degrees—in the fields of economics, foreign relations, history, political science, and sociology. Indeed, the only two presidents since Herbert Hoover (a geologist) to obtain a college degree with a clear employment path after graduation were Dwight D. Eisenhower and Jimmy Carter: graduates of West Point and the Naval Academy, respectively.

One of the most disturbing effects of eliminating funding for higher education in the liberal arts would be the potential increase in the inequality of opportunity. Although students would be free to major in political science, music, and literature at private institutions, not everyone can afford the tuition without extensive scholarship aid. In which case, only those with most means and the most access could be free to pursue their passions.  Public institutions provide an important service to students from a variety of backgrounds and do not put constraints on their pursuits. And this service has paid off in producing amazing individuals. In the past two years alone, over half a dozen Rhodes Scholars have come from public institutions in the United States, with degrees in liberal arts fields.

Critics have been quick to point out a number of other problems with this plan. For one, who should be in charge of deciding what is valuable and what is not? Additionally, fast-growing, high-demand fields often emerge without any one particular degree path feeding into them. Assigning an economic value to degrees is very difficult; predicting the future economic value of degrees is virtually impossible.

Perhaps more importantly, these plans assume that education is solely about the bottom line of a salary or a job. Certainly the significant rise in the number of individuals pursuing higher education over time has been fueled by young people looking to lock in their financial success with a credential. But there is more to a college degree than purely the economic side, and even students realize that. Some of our greatest leaders and scholars, figures such as Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann, believed that broad education for the masses was an important part of citizenship democracy, freedom, and happiness. Higher education builds good citizens by promoting critical thinking and teamwork, and providing valuable social experiences.

Unfortunately, these new plans would likely further erode these values. Important research during the past decade has found that higher education institutions are increasingly becoming a means to an end for students, and failing to instill important critical thinking skills. By removing or limiting the option of majoring in liberal arts fields, policymakers would also shrink the size of those programs and the number of students taking them as elective courses. The focus of higher education would narrow, along with the exposure of students to diverse ideas and ways of thinking.

We cannot afford to restrict so severely the options of students pursuing higher education at public institutions. Education policies that increase inequality, reduce the value of education, or limit the focus of education are simply bad policies. An education policy that does all of these things is public education suicide.

[cross-posted at Daily Kos and The Blog of the Century]

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S. Michael Gaddis
Oct04

The STEM Shortage and Educational Accountability Policy Solutions

by S. Michael Gaddis on October 4th, 2012 at 11:17 am
Posted In: ESEA Reauthorization, NCLB, Policy, STEM

Over the past few years, there has been much debate over a so-called “STEM shortage” — the idea that the United States higher education system fails to produce enough skilled workers in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and math.  National data suggest that although the percentage of graduates with a bachelor’s degree in a STEM field was quite consistent from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, STEM popularity has trailed off in recent years.  For instance, in the 2008-9 school year, only 15.1% of bachelor’s degrees were awarded in STEM fields, down from 16.7% in 2002-3 and well off the high of nearly 22% in the mid-1980s.(1)

The Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests that employment opportunities in STEM fields will grow over the next 6 years at a rate almost 1.75 times that of non-STEM fields.(2)  These are highly paid innovative jobs that need to be filled for the U.S. to grow economically, discover creative solutions in business, health care, and energy, and sustain global competitiveness.(3)  Even accounting for different education levels, workers in STEM jobs receive higher compensation and are better protected against unemployment.

President Obama has highlighted the importance of STEM education on multiple occasions and the administration has initiated a number of public-private partnerships to increase STEM awareness among youth.  These initiatives, which include media and business partnerships, national STEM competitions, and outreach programs, are certainly a step in the right direction.(4)  But could we do more inside K-12 classrooms to increase students’ interest in STEM and prepare them for the tough courses ahead in college?

Explaining the Shortage

Some researchers and policymakers point to a number of problems that arise both during and after college that have created the STEM shortage.  The percentage of students who choose a STEM major is quite low and more students switch out of than into STEM majors during their college career.(5)  Those college graduates who do obtain a STEM degree often do not stay in these fields after graduation.  Lucrative opportunities outside STEM fields, such as consulting in financial fields, await some of the top graduates and pull them away from STEM employment.  Another area of concern is foreign-born students, particularly in graduate STEM education.  These students often want to stay in the U.S. to work in STEM fields but are faced with immigration road-blocks.  With the Startup Act 2.0, the Senate is working on one part of the problem by attempting to give visas to foreign-born students with graduate STEM degrees.(6)

However, many of the current suggested solutions do not look far enough upstream.  Research suggests that the difficulties of early STEM courses and grade inflation occurring in non-STEM courses is a significant contributor to the STEM shortage.(7,8)  Prior factors and better preparation, in terms of AP courses and higher SAT scores, are great predictors of STEM persistence.(7,8,9,10,11)  Thus, it appears that a more focused solution to the STEM shortage would involve better science and math preparation of students before they get to college.

The Failure of K-12 in Preparing Future STEM Majors

Data from NAEP tests and other research on achievement suggest that nearly all students simply are not prepared to enter the difficult sequences of science and math courses required of STEM majors.(12)  The NAEP patterns in science and math show that, since 1990, a larger percentage of 4th and 8th graders are proficient or advanced than 12th graders.  In other words, despite a high school dropout problem that should eliminate the most severely struggling students from these calculations, still woefully few high school seniors are prepared for college-level science and math courses.  Due to gifted programs, tracking, and the eventual high school prerequisites, students essentially move through a funneled system of science and math courses.  Once a student falls behind, they are unlikely to catch up and be prepared to pursue a STEM major in college.

Overall, science scores are dreadful.  In the most recent years of testing, only 1 in 5 twelfth graders (2009) and 1 in 3 eighth graders (2011) met the level of  proficiency in science.  Just 1-2% of students are at the advanced level in science.

But not all of the NAEP data portends doom and gloom for STEM.  The percentage of students in all tested grade levels who are proficient or advanced in math has been steadily increasing, particularly during the past decade.  Moreover, the percentage of students who are at the advanced level in math has increased to 7-8% for younger students, although it remains much lower, at 3%, for 12th graders.(13)

Often the questions at the proficient and advanced levels for the 12th grade tests are clearly topics that students need to understand before arriving at college to be in a position to succeed in STEM courses.  For instance, a proficient level science multiple choice question asks students to order the levels of organization in living systems from simple to complex (i.e. from elements to organs).  A similar example of an advanced level math question asks students to solve a relatively simple algebra equation to calculate an annual rate of population increase.(14)  Seemingly, students who miss these questions stand no chance of excelling in college biology or calculus, at least not without significant help from the very beginning of their college careers.

Even college students who are already STEM majors think the K-12 system is lacking.  In a 2011 survey commissioned by Microsoft of then-current STEM majors, only 1 in 5 students thought their K-12 education prepared them “extremely well” for college STEM courses.(15)  Nearly 2/3rds of the STEM majors thought the U.S. education system is doing a poor job of teaching STEM compared to education in other countries.  Still, 51% of males and 68% of females said that a teacher or class got them interested in STEM before college. Thus, there’s still hope that K-12 education can spark an interest in STEM under the right circumstances.

Policy Attempts to Improve K-12 Math (and Science?)

To date, federal educational accountability policy has focused mostly on math and reading/language arts as a means of improving the state of public education.  The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) gave states a significant amount of discretion in determining the level of standards students should be held to in these subjects.  NCLB also focused on sanctioning low performing schools instead of rewarding high performing schools.  In effect, states were incentivized to set low standards to minimize the number of schools failing NCLB’s Adequate Yearly Progress target (AYP).  Thus, we currently have a federal accountability system that suggests Mississippi is doing relatively well (77% of schools met AYP in 2010) and Massachusetts is doing poorly (34% of schools met AYP in 2010), while results from the rigorous NAEP test suggest quite the opposite (MS – 19% of 8th graders proficient in math in 2011; MA – 51% of 8th graders proficient in math in 2011).(16)

Although NCLB requires states to test students in science at least three times between 3rd and 12th grade, these test scores are not required in the calculation of AYP.  Conversely math and reading test scores always count towards the calculation of AYP.  Prior to 2011′s NCLB waivers, only 11 states used science test scores in any state or federal accountability system.(17)  Some research suggests these states performed better during the early period of NCLB than states where science was not linked to accountability.(17)  Other research suggests that the typical accountability focus on math and reading reduces time spent on and depth of science instruction.(18,19,20)

New Educational Accountability Policy Solutions

NCLB currently languishes in an interim state.  To date, thirty-three states have been granted waivers and given even more state-level flexibility in determining what counts, at what levels, and for whom.  We need a flexible but tough federal educational accountability system that aims to improve education for all students while avoiding the pitfalls from current and previous systems.  No educational accountability policy will be perfect, but there are clear and simple ways to help tailor policy to improve science and math preparation for K-12 students.  Here are four ways the next iteration of NCLB can work to improve science and math learning for all students:

1.  First and foremost, accountability policy should include science as a key subject area alongside math and reading/language arts.  The percentage of students who are proficient or advanced in science is likely to stay flat or decline without this change.

2.  Focus more on rewards for schools, teachers, and students who perform well and less on punishment for those who do not.  Instead, we should seek to provide more assistance for those at the bottom of the distribution.

3.  Any new system should focus on gains and not levels.  Research suggests that a level system (a set passing target for all students, regardless of where they begin) encourages educational triage or a focus on students in the middle part of the distribution.(21,22,23)  A gains system would likely avoid this problem and encourage progress for all students, no matter how far ahead or behind they begin the school year.

4.  States should join together and adopt the Common Core Standards in math and the Next Generation Science Standards.  We need to set the bar high across the country with these rigorous standards and push teachers and students to engage in challenging content.

These steps are just the beginning to improving our K-12 public education system in science and math.  Once we start this journey, we should begin to develop better student measurement tools beyond standardized tests and improve our means to evaluate teachers.  Still, until we take at least the basic steps to move forward in improving the science, math, and general education of our K-12 students, we will not increase the number of STEM majors at the college level and make great progress in reducing the STEM shortage.

(cross-posted at The Century Foundation’s Blog of the Century)


Notes

1.  Author calculations from National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics: 2010, Table 282.

2.  Langdon, D., G. McKittrick, D. Beede, B. Khan, and M. Doms. 2011. STEM: Good Jobs Now and for the Future. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration.

3.  National Academy of Science. 2006. Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing Americans for a Brighter Future. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

4.  Educate to Innovate webpage, http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/education/educate-innovate

5.  Chen, X., and T. Weko. 2009. Stats in Brief: Students Who Study Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) in Postsecondary Education. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics.

6.  Harrison, J.D. 2012. “Senators Beckon Immigrant Entrepreneurs and Workers with Startup Act 2.0.” The Washington Post, May 22.

7.  Ost, B. 2010. “The Role of Peers and Grades in Determining Major Persistence in the Sciences.” Economics of Education Review, 29(6):923-34.

8.  Rask, K. 2010. “Attrition in STEM Fields at a Liberal Arts College: The Importance of Grades and Pre-Collegiate Preferences.” Economics of Education Review, 29(6):892-900.

9.  Griffith, A. 2010. “Persistence of Women and Minorities in STEM Field Majors: Is it the School that Matters?” Economics of Education Review, 29(6):911-22.

10.  Kokkelenberg, E., and E. Sinha. 2010. “Who Succeeds in STEM Studies: An Analysis of Binghamton University.” Economics of Education Review, 29(6):935-46.

11. Price, J. 2010. “The Effect of Instructor Race and Gender on Student Persistence in STEM Fields.” Economics of Education Review, 29(6):901-10.

12. Schmidt, W. H. 2011. STEM Reform: Which Way to Go. Working Paper available at http://www7.nationalacademies.org/bose/STEM_Schools_Schmidt_Paper_May2011.pdf

13.  Data from National Center for Education Statistics NAEP Data Explorer (available at http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/naepdata/dataset.aspx)

14.  see http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/itemmaps/index.asp for more sample questions

15.  2011. Stem Perceptions: Student and Parent Study. Harris Interactive and Microsoft Corporation.  Available at http://www.stemreports.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Microsoft-STEM-Report.pdf

16.  Data from Department of Education ED Data Express (available at http://eddataexpress.ed.gov/state-tables-main.cfm)

17.  Judson, E. 2010. “Science Education as a Contributor to Adequate Yearly Progress and Accountability Programs.” Science Education, 94(5):888-902.

18.  Anderson, K. 2012. “Science Education and Test-Based Accountability: Reviewing their Relationship and Exploring Implications for Future Policy.” Science Education, 96(1):104-29.

19.  Diamond, J. B., and J. P. Spillane. 2004. “High Stakes Accountability in Urban Elementary Schools: Challenging or Reproducing Inequality?” Teachers College Record, 106(6):1145-76.

20.  Jennings, J., and D. S. Rentner. 2006. “Ten Big Effects of the No Child Left Behind Act on Public Schools.” Phi Delta Kappan, 88(2):110-3.

21.  Booher-Jennings, J. 2005. “Below the Bubble: ‘Educational Triage’ and the Texas Accountability System.” American Educational Research Journal, 42(2):231-68.

22.  Ladd, H. F., and D. L. Lauen. 2010. “Status Versus Growth: The Distributional Effects of School Accountability Policies.” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 29(3):426-50.

23.  Lauen, D. L., and S. M. Gaddis. 2012. “Shining a Light or Fumbling in the Dark? The Effects of NCLB’s Subgroup-Specific Accountability on Student Achievement.” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 34(2):185-208.

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S. Michael Gaddis
Aug22

ESEA Reauthorization Should Include Subgroup Accountability Pressure

by S. Michael Gaddis on August 22nd, 2012 at 10:50 am
Posted In: ESEA Reauthorization, Inequality, NCLB, Policy, Race/Ethnicity, Social Class

Since last fall, the education world has been abuzz with discussion of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and the overdue reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).  Both rumors and actual text from different versions of House and Senate bills have circulated throughout the internet and ignited a number of debates over key parts of the proposed legislation.  There has been some talk of removing the requirement for schools to disaggregate results for a number of subgroups, including racial minority and poor students.  Indeed, at least one ESEA draft from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce does not put pressure on schools to meet achievement goals for these subgroups.  Doug Lauen and I have published research findings from an analysis of over ten years of administrative data on all third through eighth grade students in North Carolina that suggest that this is a grave mistake that may increase educational inequality.

NCLB was designed to avoid some of the unintended effects of prior accountability systems and reduce opportunities for states, administrators, and teachers to game the system.  One key feature of NCLB is subgroup accountability, which requires racial and ethnic subgroups, students with disabilities, limited English proficiency students, and poor students to pass proficiency standards for a school to avoid sanctions.  Lawmakers specifically included subgroup accountability to force schools to pay attention to traditionally under-served populations that were sometimes ignored or even harmed under state accountability systems.

Earlier this year, a group of 38 organizations sent a joint letter to the chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce raising their concerns about the lack of subgroup accountability in the latest ESEA draft.  This group suggests that removing subgroup accountability could be detrimental to students and hinder our progress towards educational equality.  But has subgroup accountability really helped the intended groups of students?

A number of scholars have examined the effects of NCLB accountability pressure and generally have found positive effects on student test scores.  However, subgroup-specific accountability is a critical component of education policy in reducing achievement gaps.  In a research article published in the June 2012 issue of the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, we find that subgroup-specific accountability increases black, Hispanic, and poor students’ test scores on state math and reading tests.  When these students are in a school that fails Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for their subgroup in the prior year their test scores increase more in the next year than their peers in schools that did not fail AYP for their subgroup.  In other research, we find that subgroup-specific accountability pressure also reduces black/white and poor/non-poor test-score gaps.  For instance, when a school fails AYP for the black subgroup both average black and white student achievement increases within the school during the next year, but overall black students gain more than white students, leading to a reduction in test-score gaps.

It is difficult to generalize our results to the entire nation, but there are reasons to believe that subgroup accountability has been beneficial outside of North Carolina.  Our state had a strong accountability program in place prior to NCLB and our results would likely appear more conservative in comparison to states with weak or no state accountability systems prior to NCLB.

Although NCLB certainly has its flaws, our research demonstrates that subgroup-specific accountability has helped black, Hispanic, and poor students in North Carolina.  These findings lead me to agree with the aforementioned group of 38 organizations that removal of subgroup accountability could be quite devastating to educational equality.  We now know that many states are including subgroup accountability in their NCLB waiver applications.  Education policy should continue to work towards reducing achievement gaps, but lawmakers would certainly take a step backwards if they remove subgroup-specific accountability pressure from the ESEA reauthorization.

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S. Michael Gaddis
Jul02

Race- and Class-Based Naming Practices: Consequences for Education and the Labor Market

by S. Michael Gaddis on July 2nd, 2012 at 4:06 pm
Posted In: Higher Education, Horizontal Stratification, Inequality, Labor Market, Social Class

With today’s post, I thought I would provide a brief review of research and some thoughts on a topic that has been in the forefront of my mind ever since I began my dissertation research:  the association between names and education.  Simply put, names have consequences for individuals in our society.  There are distinct racial and educational patterns to parental naming practices, although these patterns may change over time. Moreover, individuals have conscious or sub-conscious beliefs about what these names (and patterns) indicate, in turn leading to a number of educational inequalities.

Since the 1970s the U.S. has developed a distinctively racial pattern between black and white parents’ naming practices (Fryer and Levitt 2004; Lieberson 2000; Lieberson and Mikelson 1995). This pattern stems from black parents choosing unique and nearly unique names for their children at rates much higher than whites, while at the same time often not using many popular white names (Fryer and Levitt 2004).  An important factor in determining uniqueness in choice of a child’s name is SES.  Fryer and Levitt (2004) found that “[b]lacker names are associated with lower-income zip codes [and] lower levels of parental education” (p 786). Moreover, although there are fewer instances of unique naming among white parents, there are SES patterns among whites.  Thus, there are both race and class components to parental naming practices (also see Aura and Hess 2010).

In my own research, I obtained access to New York state birth records over a series of years during the late 1990s and early 2000s.  These records include information on mother’s education level and race.  Male names like Jalen, Lamar, and DaQuan were all distinctively black (>75% of all births with these names had mothers who were black) but represented different class backgrounds (see Table A1 below).  Female names like Aubrey, Erica, and Lesly were all distinctively white but with different average levels of mother’s education.

Researchers find consequences to having a race- or class-based distinctive name in school.  Even after controlling for important background factors, students with low-SES names have lower test scores, are less likely to be labeled as gifted, and more likely to be retained, perhaps due to teacher expectations (Figlio 2005).  A recent psychology study uses an experiment to examine whether teachers respond to student essays in different ways based on the name on a paper (Harber et al. Forthcoming).  Although each fabricated student essay was designed to be a C paper, teachers gave more critical feedback to essays written by students with white sounding names than black or Hispanic sounding names.  This may serve to harm the self-esteem of minority students — if a child realizes that a teacher is pandering to them — and almost certainly reduces their ability to learn from writing exercises through the lack of critical feedback.

Beyond school, race- and class-based names have negative consequences on the labor market (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004; Cotton, O’Neill, and Griffin 2008; Watson, Appiah, and Thornton 2011) and in access to political power (Butler and Broockman 2011).  To explore the effects of race, class, and college selectivity in the labor market, I selected various distinctive race- and class-based names (from above) and applied to jobs over the internet.  My findings suggest that there are penalties to both race- and class-based names in applying for jobs in terms of getting called back for an interview as well as the posted salary range of the jobs for which candidates receive call-backs.  Moreover, the race- and class- based penalties compound for low-SES black males.  In other words, Jalen and DaQuan are both disadvantaged on the job market compared to Caleb and Ronny, but DaQuan is by far the most severely disadvantaged.  Worse yet:  the situation between white and black candidates does not change whether they are graduates from less selective schools like UMass and UC Riverside or highly selective schools like Harvard and Stanford.

Unfortunately, this line of research suggests that there are long-term consequences to the race- and class-based parental naming practices prevalent in the U.S. today.  As a whole, this literature suggests that intergenerational mobility may be more difficult for lower-class blacks than lower-class whites even with the same educational attainment levels.

 

Aura, S., and G. D. Hess. 2010. “What’s in a Name?” Economic Inquiry, 48(1):214-27.

Bertrand, M., and S. Mullainathan. 2004. “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination.” American Economic Review, 94:991-1013.

Butler, D.M., and D. E. Broockman. 2011. “Do Politicians Racially Discriminate Against Constituents? A Field Experiment on State Legislators.” American Journal of Political Science, 55(3):463-77.

Cotton, J. L., B. S. O’Neill, and A. Griffin. 2008. “The ‘Name Game’: Affective and Hiring Reactions to First Names.” Journal of Managerial Psychology, 23(1):18-39.

Fryer, R., and S. Levitt. 2004. “The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 119:767-805.

Gaddis, S. Michael. The Effects of College Selectivity on Labor Market Success: Race, Gender, Class, and Horizontal Stratification in Higher Education.

Harber, K.D., J. L. Gorman, F. P. Gengaro, S. Butisingh, W. Tsang, and R. Ouellette. Forthcoming. “Students’ Race and Teachers’ Social Support Affect the Positive Feedback Bias in Public Schools.” Journal of Educational Psychology.

Lieberson, S. 2000. A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Lieberson. S., and K. Mikelson. 1995. “Distinctive African American Names: An Experimental, Historical and Linguistic Analysis of Innovation.” American Sociological Review, 60:928-46.

Watson, S., O. Appiah, and C. G. Thornton. 2011. “The Effect of Name on Pre-Interview Impressions and Occupational Stereotypes: The Case of Black Sales Job Applicants.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 41(10):2405-20.

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