| Elizabeth Stearns
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
The relationship between school racial composition and dropout
FINAL REPORT:
How does school ethnic composition affect minority student outcomes in contemporary American public high schools? In my dissertation, I address the interrelationships among relative numbers of minority students, high school racial climate, and dropping out. I explore the determinants of dropping out, with a specific focus on racial climate and the relative numbers of minority students. I draw on literature about the behavioral consequences of being a "token" minority and the structural consequences of group size to ground theoretically my analysis. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study, I employ hierarchical logistic modeling to examine the dropout rate of students from the original 1988 cohort. At the student-level, I find that academic experiences, including grade point average and prior grade retention, have a significant association with dropout likelihood. In addition, ethnic differences in dropout likelihood are rendered statistically insignificant with prior academic experience and family socioeconomic status controlled.
At the school-level, I find some results consistent with prior research and some that are new. Consistent with prior research, there is a negative and significant relationship between the average socioeconomic status in the school and the dropout rate. My contribution centers, however, on the findings for racial climate, token minority status, and racial stratification. I discover that the school racial climate has a significant and positive relationship with the school's dropout rate; that is, a less hostile racial climate is associated with a lower dropout rate. I also find that being a token minority increases African-American student's dropout likelihood. With family structure, socioeconomic status, and academic achievement, as well as school capital and racial climate controlled, those African-American students who are token minorities are more likely to drop out than African-American students in schools with student bodies that are greater than 15 percent African-American. Finally, the degree of racial stratification in the school neighborhood is also significantly and positively associated with the dropout rate. The dropout rate in the school is higher when whites monopolize socioeconomic resources in the neighborhood to the detriment of nonwhite populations. With variation in school racial climate, school resources, and region and locality controlled, there is no significant variance in the between-school dropout rate left to be explained.
My findings regarding racial climate and token minority status are particularly important for their policy relevance. First, school administrators who recognize the fact that their students perceive the school racial climate to be conflictual have some recourse to improve this climate. For instance, they can introduce programs and curricula that encourage cooperative learning techniques in the classroom, where students can have the opportunity to work with and learn from one another. Examining the extent to which tracking students into different courses of study results in de facto segregation would also be beneficial in examining the determinants of the racial climate. Administrators and teachers in schools with token minority populations can be especially attuned to the needs of those students, recognizing their relatively higher likelihood of dropping out and targeting dropout prevention resources accordingly. These findings are also important in light of the overall neglect of the concept of racial climate in the literature on school factors that affect student dropout likelihood.
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