Mindsets, contexts, and college enrollment: Taking the long view on growth mindset beliefs at the transition to high school.

Socioeconomic disparities in academic progress have persisted throughout the history of the United States, and growth mindset interventions-which shift beliefs about the malleability of intelligence-have shown promise in reducing these disparities. Both the study of such disparities and how to remedy them can benefit from taking the "long view" on adolescent development, following the tradition of John Schulenberg. To do so, this study focuses on the role of growth mindsets in short-term academic progress during the transition to high school as a contributor to longer-term educational attainment.

Blending in and standing out: College-going rates across charter and traditional public high schools.

Schools provide theoretical and methodological puzzles around complex stratification and organizational dynamics. Using organizational field theory, and the Schools and Staffing Survey, we study characteristics of charter and traditional high schools that are correlated with school rates of college-going. We first use Oaxaca-Blinder (OXB) models to decompose shifts in characteristics between charter and traditional public high schools.

Civil Society Goes to School: Parent-Teacher Associations and the Equality of Educational Opportunity.

Where do parent-teacher associations (PTAs) and other similar school-linked nonprofits form? What role do PTAs play in distributing educational opportunities between and within public schools? In this paper, we link IRS data describing nonprofit organizations associated with North Carolina public schools to school- and student-level administrative data in order to answer these questions. Our analyses suggest PTAs form in a wide variety of school contexts, but high-revenue PTAs form primarily in affluent, predominantly white schools. Students in schools with active PTAs enjoy relatively strong achievement growth compared to their peers in schools without active PTAs.