"This highly accessible and engaging book is rich with sociological insight. While recognizing the inevitable sorting role of schools, the authors offer a creative road map towards a more equitable future in education—and in life."
—ADAM GAMORAN, president, William T. Grant Foundation

"We all know that schools sort kids into good and bad jobs. This elegant little book reminds us that schools are also relentless categorizers inside their gates: the free-lunch kids learn they’re poor, the honors kids learn they’re special, and the ‘first years’ learn they’re far from first. Schooled and Sorted makes a brilliant case for regaining control over the categories that define our children’s lives."
—DAVID B. GRUSKY, Edward Ames Edmond Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and director, Center on Poverty and Inequality, Stanford University

"Schooled and Sorted makes a convincing case that it takes more than just skill-building curricula and effective teachers for a school to provide its students with ladders to the middle class. When schools also make well-intentioned efforts to boost achievement and motivate students by grouping or categorizing them, the results can be counterproductive. This book explains why and what can be done about them."
—GREG J. DUNCAN, distinguished professor, School of Education and Departments of Economics (by courtesy) and Psychology and Social Behavior (by courtesy), University of California at Irvine

We tend to view education primarily as a way to teach students skills and knowledge that they will draw upon as they move into their adult lives. However, schools do more than educate students – they also place students into categories, such as kindergartner, English language learner, or honor roll student. In Schooled and Sorted, Thurston Domina, Andrew M. Penner, and Emily K. Penner, explore processes of educational categorization in order to explain the complex relationship between education and social inequality – and to identify strategies that can help build more just educational systems. 

Some educational categories have broadly egalitarian consequences. Indeed, Domina, Penner, and Penner argue that when societies enroll young people in school, making them students, they mark them as individuals who are worthy of rights. But other educational categories reinforce powerful social categories – including race, gender, and class – and ultimately reproduce social and economic inequality in society. Elite colleges, tracked high schools, and elementary school gifted programs provide not only different educational experiences, but also create merit and inequality by sorting students into categories that are defined by the students who are excluded.

Schooled & Sorted highlights that many of the decisions that define educational categories occur in school-based committee meetings and other relatively local settings. The local nature of these decisions provides many opportunities to define educational categories differently, and for school communities to bring about change. 

Schooled & Sorted is an illuminating investigation into the ways sorting within schools translates into inequality in the larger world. While some educational categorization may be unavoidable, the authors suggest ways to build a more equitable system – and thus a more equitable society.

THURSTON DOMINA is Robert Wendell Eaves Sr. Distinguished Professor in Educational Leadership, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
ANDREW M. PENNER is a professor of sociology, University of California, Irvine
EMILY K. PENNER is associate professor of education, University of California, Irvine

"An important and engaging book that is a ‘must read’ for anyone interested in U.S. poverty, whether they be general readers or people working in the poverty field. Perhaps the best new book on U.S. poverty this year."
—ROBERT GREENSTEIN, founder and president emeritus, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and visiting fellow, Economic Studies, the Brookings Institution

"Zachary Parolin has given us the most comprehensive and thoughtful summary of how the pandemic affected the poorest amongst us and the policy lessons that emerged from this experience. The sudden onset of COVID underlined how those who were most at risk of poverty were affected, by how much monthly poverty changed and how policy responded, and the lasting consequence of the pandemic for the poorest Americans. Whether the outcome was disparities in job loss, material hardship, income, assets, mental health consequences, or the effects of childcare and school closures on children and their families, it is all masterfully brought together in this compact and highly readable volume."
—TIMOTHY M. SMEEDING, Lee Rainwater Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs and Economics, La Follette School of Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin

"Despite our nation’s enormous wealth, the United States entered the pandemic with high rates of poverty and systematic inequities by race and ethnicity. The public health crisis led to enormous loss of life and economic vitality. The federal government, straddling two administrations, responded in kind with a massive policy response. Zachary Parolin’s comprehensive and readable book studies poverty and inequity in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. He assembles a wide range of evidence documenting how poverty acts as a preexisting risk factor for health and economic hardship experienced during this period. He also shows how a robust policy response mitigated the worst of the economic shock and how this can help point the way forward in the next generation of antipoverty policy. A must read for anyone wanting to understand the consequences of poverty and structural inequalities in America."
—HILARY HOYNES, professor of public policy and economics and Haas Distinguished Chair of Economic Disparities, University of California, Berkeley

At the close of 2019, the United States saw a record-low poverty rate. At the start of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic threatened to upend that trend and plunge millions of Americans into poverty. Contrary to such fears, and despite the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression, the poverty rate declined to the lowest in modern U.S. history. In Poverty in the Pandemic social policy scholar Zachary Parolin provides a data-rich account of how poverty influenced the economic, social, and health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., as well as how the country’s policy response led to historically low poverty rates.

Drawing on dozens of data sources—ranging from debit and credit card spending, the first national databases of school and childcare center closures in the U.S., and bi-weekly Census-run surveys on well-being—Parolin finds that those already living in poverty at the start of the pandemic experienced a greater likelihood of contracting and dying from COVID, as well as losing their job. Additionally, he found that students from poor families suffered the greatest learning losses as a result of school closures and the shift to distance learning during the pandemic.

However, unprecedented legislative action by the U.S. government, including the passage of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA), the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, and the American Rescue Plan (ARP) helped mitigate the economic consequences of the pandemic and lifted around 18 million Americans out of poverty. Based on the success of these policies, Parolin concludes with policy suggestions that the U.S. can implement in more ‘normal’ times to improve the living conditions of low-income households after the pandemic subsides, including expanding access to Unemployment Insurance, permanently expanding the Child Tax Credit, promoting greater access to affordable, high-quality healthcare coverage, and investing more resources into the Census Bureau’s data-collection capabilities. He also details a method of producing a monthly measurement of poverty, to be used in conjunction with the traditional annual measurement, in order to better understand the intra-year volatility of poverty that many Americans experience.

Poverty in the Pandemic provides the most complete account to date of the unique challenges that low-income households in the U.S. faced during the COVID-19 pandemic and policies that have been proven to help them as we move forward.

ZACHARY PAROLIN is an assistant professor of social policy at Bocconi University and a senior research fellow at Columbia University.

"Patchwork Apartheid is a landmark study of racial capitalism and social inequality in the United States. By putting newly available data into dialogue with detailed local histories, Colin Gordon takes readers beyond the storylines and summary facts that typically guide discussions of residential segregation in America. More than any other work I know, this book brings residential segregation into focus as a social, economic, and political process in motion—and as a process in which private actors and market agreements played preeminent roles in constructing the nation’s racial and spatial boundaries. Beautifully written and powerfully argued, Patchwork Apartheid should appeal to public and academic audiences alike. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the origins, operations, and consequences of residential segregation in America."
—JOE SOSS, Cowles Chair for the Study of Public Service, University of Minnesota

"Colin Gordon is a singular historian, and this is a singular book. Patchwork Apartheid itemizes the schemes and evasions by which white homeowners continued to insist on their right to assert and convey their right to all-white neighborhoods (and an all-white sector of the housing market) long after the United States Supreme Court had ruled those rights to be legally unenforceable. Gordon is a master of summoning historical particulars into a dramatic refiguration of our understanding of the time and space of American history."
—WALTER JOHNSON, Winthrop Professor of History and professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University

"Patchwork Apartheid is a remarkable contribution to the rapidly evolving scholarship on the origins of segregation in America. Gordon marshals an unprecedented amount of data to document how private restrictions established racial barriers dividing neighborhoods, suburban subdivisions, and society as a whole. These individual agreements made in the first half of the twentieth century could not be more relevant today, as we collectively grapple with the legacy of our explicitly segregationist past."
—JACOB FABER, associate professor of sociology and public service, Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service, New York University

"Colin Gordon’s prodigious research results in a groundbreaking comparative study of the history, structure, and lasting impact of racially restrictive covenants in an important swath of Midwestern cities. In describing the experience of these central locations, Patchwork Apartheid illustrates important reasons for our national patterns of metropolitan-wide residential segregation."
—CAROL M. ROSE, Gordon Bradford Tweedy Professor Emeritus of Law and Organization and professorial lecturer in law, Yale Law School

For the first half of the twentieth century, private agreements to impose racial restrictions on who could occupy property decisively shaped the development of American cities and the distribution of people within them. Racial restrictions on the right to buy, sell, or occupy property also effectively truncated the political, social, and economic citizenship of those targeted for exclusion. In Patchwork Apartheid, historian Colin Gordon examines the history of such restrictions and how their consequences reverberate today. Drawing on a unique record of property restrictions excavated from local property records in five Midwestern counties, Gordon documents the prevalence of private property restriction in the era before zoning and building codes were widely employed and before federal redlining sanctioned the segregation of American cities and suburbs. This record of private restriction—documented and mapped to the parcel level in Greater Minneapolis, Greater St. Louis, and two Iowa counties—reveals the racial segregation process both on the ground, in the strategic deployment of restrictions throughout transitional central city neighborhoods and suburbs, and in the broader social and legal construction of racial categories and racial boundaries.

Gordon also explores the role of other policies and practices in sustaining segregation. Enforcement of private racial restrictions was held unconstitutional in 1948, and such agreements were prohibited outright in 1968. But their premises and assumptions, and the segregation they had accomplished, were carried forward by an array of private and public policies. Explicit racial restrictions were accompanied and sustained  by the discriminatory  business practices of real estate agents and developers, who characterized certain neighborhoods as white and desirable and others as black and undesirable, thereby hiding segregation behind the promotion of sound property investments, safe neighborhoods, and good schools. These practices were accompanied and sustained by local zoning, which systematically protected white neighborhoods while targeting “blighted” black neighborhoods for commercial and industrial redevelopment, and by a tangle of federal policies that reliably deferred to local and private interests with deep investments in local segregation. Private race restriction was thus a key element in the original segregation of American cities and a source of durable inequalities in housing wealth, housing opportunity, and economic mobility.

Patchwork Apartheid exhaustively documents the history of private restriction in urban settings and demonstrates its crucial role in the ideas and assumptions that have sustained racial segregation in the United States into the twenty-first century.

COLIN GORDON is a professor of history at the University of Iowa

***

Interactive maps, datasets, and codebooks

The datasets linked below show the spatial location of racial restrictions on property in the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County in Missouri, and in Black Hawk and Johnson Counties in Iowa. Each zipped file contains a Geographic Information System (GIS) shapefile, and a codebook (describing the shapefile attributes) in CSV format. The data for Hennepin County, Minnesota was collected by the Mapping Prejudice project.
 

A Volume in the American Sociological Association’s Rose Series in Sociology

"With the latest surge in critics questioning the value of college degrees, Overcoming the Odds couldn’t come at a better time. Jennie E. Brand’s book considers the transformative effects of college from a holistic perspective—not just the earnings premium but all the nonpecuniary benefits of earning a degree. Her research is an important contribution to the conversation: yes, a college degree is ‘worth it,’ both for the individual and society at large."
—ANTHONY P. CARNEVALE, research professor and director, Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW), McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University

"In Overcoming the Odds Jennie E. Brand solves one of the great social science puzzles of our time: Would young people who are unlikely to graduate from college get anything out of it if they were lucky enough to get a degree? Brand applied advances in modern statistical inference to arrive at the answer, and it is YES! She illustrates her conclusions with real case studies that reveal the lived experiences behind the statistics."
—MICHAEL HOUT, professor of sociology, New York University

Each year, millions of high school students consider whether to continue their schooling and attend and complete college. Despite strong evidence that a college degree yields far-reaching benefits, some critics of higher education increasingly argue that college “does not pay off” and that some students—namely, disadvantaged prospective college students—would be better served by forgoing higher education to immediately enter the workforce or pursue vocational training instead. But debates about the value of college often fail to consider what each individual’s life would look like had they not completed college, or what is known as a person’s college counterfactual. In Overcoming the Odds sociologist Jennie E. Brand reveals the benefits of completing college by comparing life outcomes of college graduates with their college counterfactuals.

Drawing on two cohorts of nationally representative data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics National Longitudinal Surveys program, Brand uses matching and machine learning methods to estimate the effects of college completion across students with varying likelihoods of completing four-year degrees. To illustrate her findings, Brand describes outcomes using matched vignettes of college and noncollege graduates. Brand shows that four-year college completion enables graduates to increase wages and household income, while also circumventing unemployment, low-wage work, job instability, poverty, and social assistance. Completing college also increases civic engagement. Most of these benefits are larger for disadvantaged than for more advantaged students, rendering arguments that college has limited benefits for unlikely graduates as flawed. Brand concludes that greater long-term earnings, and less job instability and unemployment, and thus more tax revenue, less reliance on public assistance, and high levels of volunteering indicate that public investment in higher education for students from disadvantaged backgrounds yields far-reaching collective benefits.

Overcoming the Odds is an innovative and enlightening exploration of how college can transform lives. Brand’s novel research convincingly demonstrates that it is better for our society when more people complete college.

JENNIE E. BRAND is professor of sociology and statistics, University of California, Los Angeles.

This bibliography comprises two main sections: first, writings on relief problems and issues immediately preceding or arising from World War II, and second, publications dealing with relief programs instituted to deal with problems that arose during, or as a result of, World War I.

SIGRID HOLT was the librarian in the Charity Organization Department at the Russell Sage Foundation.

This booklet presents a picture of the aims of those responsible for work-relief programs in Germany. Topics include types of service, wages and hours, the Bureau for Work Relief, personnel practices, planning and selection of projects, special projects, and possibilities and limitations of work relief.

HERTHA KRAUS was director of the Department of Welfare of Cologne, Germany.

This booklet offers a digest of pertinent material for those interested in planning or administering relief abroad. Topics include launching the program, political difficulties, personnel and fiscal policies, and ending the enterprise.

JOHN VAN GELDER FORBES received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951 and taught at Blackburn College in Carlinville, Illinois.

DONALD S. HOWARD was assistant director of the Charity Organization Department of the Russell Sage Foundation.

This booklet suggests how religious, moral, economic, recreational, and social training can help children in orphanages grow up to be effective citizens.

C. SPENCER RICHARDSON worked in the Department of Child-Helping at the Russell Sage Foundation.

This booklet offers guidance to relief committees that may be promoting subsistence gardens. Appendix I contains a questionnaire and a list of cites and states that replied. Appendix II contains forms used in various garden projects.

JOANNA C. COLCORD and MARY JOHNSTON worked in the Charity Organization Department of the Russell Sage Foundation.

This booklet brings together recommendations for community action to meet emergent unemployment. It includes a list of the books and pamphlets quoted.

JOANNA C. COLCORD was the director of the Charity Organization Department at the Russell Sage Foundation.