Completing advanced high school math coursework relates to better adulthood outcomes. Our understanding of why youth with learning disabilities (LDs) and/or ADHD have less access to high math course attainment is limited. Using data on around 20,000 adolescents from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, results indicate that, regardless of disability status, structural inequities in family social position are more salient for youth's math course attainment than formal disability programming, universal supports, or structural inequities in how students are sorted across schools. Among youth with the same disability status, youth from higher SES families, or whose parents have a STEM degree, have heightened access to high math course attainment even after accounting for prior achievement. Disparities in access to high math course attainment that persist net of controls for both youth with an LD and youth with ADHD present the possibility of disability-related stratification and stigma during high school.

Schools' overt or explicit practices are a dominant lens through which education researchers and policymakers attempt to understand how schools are racially inequitable. Yet, Lewis and Diamond argue that contemporary racial inequalities are largely sustained through implicit factors, like institutional practices and structural inequalities. Ray's framework on racialized organizations similarly outlines how our racialized sociopolitical structure becomes embedded in organizations, legitimating and perpetuating the racialized hierarchy. We apply illustrative cluster analysis techniques to rich data on schools, teachers, and students from the nationally representative High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 to find that structural inequities (e.g., student body, sector, average achievement) appear to be most salient in delineating the racialization of US high schools, whereas the characteristics of schools and teachers that are typically emphasized for closing racial inequities in educational outcomes (e.g., teacher qualifications, courses offered, stratification practices) are not salient differentiators across schools.

The literature linking adulthood criminality to cumulative disadvantage and early school misbehavior demonstrates that understanding the mechanisms underlying student behavior and the responses of teachers and administrators is crucial in comprehending racial/ethnic disparities in actual or perceived school misbehavior. We use data on 19,160 ninth graders from the nationally representative High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 to show that boys' and girls' negative achievement and negative experiences with teachers relate more closely to school misbehavior than the contextual measures (e.g., negative peer climate, proportion Black) that have often been emphasized as most salient for misbehavior. Differences in negative achievement and experiences completely explain Black boys', Latinx boys', and Black girls' heightened levels of school misbehavior relative to White youth, and Asian boys' and girls' lower levels of school misbehavior. In contrast, differences in negative achievement and experiences only partially explain Latinx girls' higher levels of school misbehavior relative to White girls.

This study contributes to research exploring social factors shaping gender identification. Informed by structural symbolic interactionism, social identity theory, and Levitt's psychosocial theory of gender, we explore how a key aspect of external social structure-adolescent family socioeconomic status-is associated with gender identification in emerging adulthood. We examine whether correlates of family socioeconomic status, including adolescent family and educational experiences and friend and high school characteristics, are associated with a cisgender, binary transgender, nonbinary, or gender unsure identification. Using data from High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09), we find a positive association between adolescent family socioeconomic status and a nonbinary gender identification. Analyses indicate that educational and family experiences account for the largest percentage of the association between adolescent family socioeconomic status and nonbinary gender identification, potentially representing higher SES youths' heightened access to middle- and upper-class cultural schemas and resources.

Amid the proliferation of state-level bans on race-based affirmative action in higher education, the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on June 29, 2023, dismantled race-conscious college admission policies, intensifying concerns about the persistence and potential increase of racial inequality in higher education. The authors analyze four restricted-use national survey datasets to investigate racial disparities in college attendance outcomes from the 1980s through the 2010s. Although college entrance rates increased for all racial groups, Black and Hispanic youth became increasingly less likely than their White peers to attend four-year selective colleges. In the 2010s cohort, Black and Hispanic youth were 8 and 7 percentage points, respectively, less likely than their White counterparts to secure admission to four-year selective colleges, even after controlling for parents' income, education, and other family background variables. The findings underscore the urgent need for proactive policy interventions to address the widening racial inequality in attending selective postsecondary institutions.

Using data on ninth graders, math teachers, and schools from the nationally representative High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, we investigate the following questions: (1) How do ninth graders’ perceptions of their math teachers as equitable relate to their math identity at the intersection of adolescents’ race and gender? and (2) Do differences in the percentage of students at the school who share the adolescent’s race moderate (i.e., differentiate) the salience of perceptions of math teachers for adolescents’ math identities? Our results suggest that adolescents who perceive their math teachers as equitable typically have higher levels of math identity regardless of their race or gender. Adolescents’ perceptions of their math teachers as equitable are most salient for adolescents’ math identity in racially diverse schools, where racial differences and stereotypes may be more visible. Findings also indicate the seeming resistance of Black youth to racist stereotypes, whose math identity remains high regardless of their perceptions of their teachers.

Math achievement in U.S. high schools is a consistent predictor of educational attainment. While emphasis on raising math achievement continues, school-level interventions often come at the expense of other subjects. Arts courses are particularly at risk of being cut, especially in schools serving lower socioeconomic status youth. Evidence suggests, however, that arts coursework is beneficial to many educational outcomes. We use data on 20,590 adolescents from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 to answer two research questions: (1) Does student accumulation of fine arts courses across different topic areas relate positively to math test scores in high school? (2) Does school SES differentiate this potential association? Results indicate that youth attending higher-SES schools take more art courses and taking music courses is related to higher math test scores. However, this benefit only seems to only apply to more socially advantaged student bodies. Results reveal a site of additional educational advantage for already privileged youth.

Despite the rapid expansion of higher education, many young adults still enter the labor market without a college education. However, little research has focused on racial/ethnic earnings disadvantages faced by non-college-educated youth. We analyze the restricted-use data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 to examine racial/ethnic earnings disparities among non-college-educated young men and women in their early 20s as of 2016, accounting for differences in premarket factors and occupation with an extensive set of controls. Results suggest striking earnings disadvantages for Black men relative to white, Latinx, and Asian men. Compared to white men, Latinx and Asian men do not earn significantly less, yet their earnings likely differ substantially by ethnic origin. While racial/ethnic earnings gaps are less prominent among women than men, women of all racial/ethnic groups have earnings disadvantages compared to white men. The results call for future studies into the heterogeneity within racial/ethnic groups and the intersectionality of race/ethnicity and gender among non-college-educated young adults.

This study integrates an intersectional framework with data on 15,000 U.S. ninth graders from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 to investigate differences in ninth-grade math course placement at the intersection of adolescents' learning disability status, race, and socioeconomic status (SES). Descriptive results support an increased liability perspective, with the negative relationship between a learning disability and math course placement larger for adolescents more privileged in terms of their race and/or SES. Adjusted results suggest that the lower math course placements of youth with learning disabilities are due to cumulative disadvantage rather than disability-related inequities in the transition to high school for youth of diverse racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. In addition to demonstrating the importance of intersectional perspectives, this study provides a roadmap for future studies by introducing the new perspective of increased liability to be used in conjunction with the widely employed perspective of multiple marginalization.

We investigate the possibility that Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital, ways of being that facilitate assimilation to the dominant culture, is field-specific in its manifestation and inter-generational transmission. We focus on a field of central economic and academic interest: STEM. Data on around 13,000 undergraduates from the large nationally representative High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 indicate that parents' STEM-specific cultural capital positively contributes to youth's selection of and persistence in STEM majors in the form of parents' STEM education. We find that transmission is enacted through youths' field-specific institutionalized cultural capital (e.g., STEM grades and test scores), field-specific embodied cultural capital (e.g., STEM attitudes), and characteristics of their educational institutions (e.g., four-year rather than two-year college). This study contributes to the theory of cultural capital by examining cultural capital through a field-specific lens, and then specifically elucidating how it is expressed and transmitted within that field.