Socioeconomic school composition effects on student outcomes

Research in the sociology of education has long identified that school socioeconomic composition is the most important school-level attribute in explaining student outcomes, and that the strength of this effect varies across schools and countries. Yet research has not fully explained how and why these effects vary across schools and countries. This dissertation analyses school socioeconomic composition effects by decomposing them into contagion and frog-pond effects and analyzes how the strength of these composition effects varies according to the way schools and school systems organize themselves by promoting cross-status relationships, differentiating opportunities to learn and providing information about students' possibilities of greater educational attainment.

I find that the decomposition of socioeconomic composition effects is a useful way to understand the dynamics of composition effects: a student benefits from attending an advantaged school, but is simultaneously hurt by his lower relative status position. The positive effect of attending an advantaged school is generally greater than the negative effect of the relative disadvantage for outcomes such as reading performance and status expectations; yet the negative effect is greater for academic self-concept. In other words, for status expectations and achievement, it is better to be a smaller frog in a high-status pond than a big frog in a low-status pond.

I also find that organizational attributes that promote cross-status relationships within the school promote positive contagion effects, that the differentiation of opportunities to learn and practices that increase the saliency of socioeconomic status strengthen frog-pond effects for all three educational outcomes.

I use these results to explore the contexts of successful socioeconomic integration in schools and find that no organizational attribute in the study unequivocally helps produce successfully integrated learning environments. However, there are a handful of national contexts where socioeconomic integration is successful in promoting disadvantaged students' achievement while not harming advantaged students' achievement.

These results speak to the importance of socioeconomic composition in shaping students' educational experience and outcomes, and suggests that this dimension of schooling may be more effective in reducing educational inequality and, if developed and implemented correctly, in promoting overall achievement in the school system.