Sociology of Education SCHOOL SES INFLUENCES-COMPOSITION OR CONTEXT?*

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. After reviewing several lines of sociological theorizing and research on the ways in which the average student SES level in a school may influence the educational plans of individual students, we develop and specify a formal model of such influences incorporating three major themes from the extant literature. Using data on 3050 students from 18 high schools, appropriate technical analyses were performed on this model to distinguish the "contextual" effects of average SES levelfrom the strictly "compositional" consequences of the distribution of SES levels across schools. Our results indicate that after compositional differences are taken into account, the "contextual" effects of average SES level are trivial. Hence, many of the questions concerning proposed mediating mechanisms of such influences become moot. Additional analyses demonstrate how some common methodological misunderstandings can lead to improper calculations and conclusions in studies of this general character.