Search Results

This chapter focuses on how socioeconomic status (SES) can influence sleep health. The chapter overviews traditional SES factors, which include education, income, and employment. Beyond this, the chapter discusses other (less studied) SES factors such as financial hardship and subjective social status among various populations. Socioeconomic sleep disparities in the context of racial/ethnic sleep disparities are considered, and a social ecological model of sleep is discussed, which includes (a) individual-level socioeconomic drivers, which are embedded within (b) social-level socioeconomic drivers, which themselves are embedded within (c) societal-level socioeconomic drivers. The chapter concludes with thoughts for future directions in research.

Richard Rothsteinputs schooling inequalities within the larger context of disadvantages linked to poverty. When the nation essentially abandoned antipoverty policies, it effectively locked in vast learning disadvantages that it then asked schools to overcome. He describes how social class characteristics operate to produce differences in achievement. Rothstein discusses why when lower social class characteristics are highly concentrated in particular neighborhoods,achievement is depressed even further. He notes that better schools can elicit higher achievement from disadvantaged children than worse schools, but no matter how good school quality may be, the achievement gap will remain. He describes some practical programs—such as high-quality early childhood care and education, health clinics in schools, high-quality afterschool and summer programs, and policies to promote residential integration by race and class—that could help narrow the achievement gap. Each of these is politically difficult, Rothstein acknowledges, but none is out of reach.

Chapter 4 profiles the migration stories and integration processes of three individuals from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean who have settled in different parts of the state, forming transnational communities linking North Carolina to cities and towns in Latin America. We observe how Latinos are building communities in North Carolina. We also witness how the migration process leaves an indelible imprint on immigrants’ communities of origin. These stories are emblematic of the challenges and opportunities that people face moving to the United States, settling and integrating into a community that may or may not be receptive to migrants, maintaining connection with home countries, and raising children in a new society. They highlight the diverse experiences of migrants that are shaped by circumstances in their countries of origin, their socioeconomic status and level of education, their experiences living in other parts of the United States, and their legal status.

The rising cost of publicly provided social services had led many analysts to conclude that government agencies are inefficient suppliers of services, both because they do not maximize output from existing resources and because they respond only very sluggishly to changes in the level and composition of demand. These analysts often couple this diagnosis with the prescription that private nonprofit organizations should play a larger role in delivering many social services. In debates over the wisdom of this type of reform, advocates often introduce statistical evidence on the comparative performance of public and private organizations, concluding as a rule that the performance of the private providers is superior. The central theme of this chapter is that much of the performance differences between public and private providers of social services stems from differences in the regulations they face, and the resulting differences in the characteristics of the clients they serve. The evidence in support of that conclusion presented here focuses on one social service, education. The reasons are twofold: The data on the determinants of performance in that sector are of relatively high quality and the issue of governmental policy toward private sector providers of educational services is currently a topic of much public interest. But, as I intend to show, the themes developed in the context of the education sector have relevance in other sectors as well, especially as one confronts the problem of designing an appropriate set of regulatory policies. A recent, highly publicized study reported that the education offered in private high schools is of higher average quality than the education offered in public high schools. The analysis in this section demonstrates that a large part of the observed quality difference is due to differences in the composition of student bodies, and that these differences stem to a significant extent from differences in the regulations pertaining to public and private schools.

Although Iran is one of the most diverse nations in the Middle East, the state historically has been reluctant to adapt a pluralistic approach to both socio-political and economic development. This chapter focuses on the Sunni population in Iran, which is often overlooked in studies dealing with state-minority relations in Iran. It examines the socio-economic challenges of the Sunni population under both the Pahlavi dynasty and the Islamic Republic. Although the Islamic Republic based its ideology both on redistribution of wealth and empowerment of the impoverished, the ethnic Sunni Iranians who lived in the most impoverished regions of the country received very little attention from the new post-revolutionary order.

I explore lesbian mothers’ narratives of pregnancy, birth, and adoption in relation to the fertility and adoption industries. I use the stories of these mothers to explore the scaffolding of power regulating motherhood, and the ways that it varies from state to state, as well as the conflictual terrain of public representations of lesbian-headed families. Stratified reproduction between lesbians and heterosexual women, and between lesbians of different races and socioeconomic statuses, fundamentally shaped these mothers’ family-making experiences. Whatever their responses to mainstream expectations regarding motherhood, their family-making practices were articulated and evaluated—by themselves and others in their social worlds—in reference to heteronormative social practices. Whether rejected or embraced, pervasive mainstream representations of motherhood and family shaped responses and social interactions. Laws and policies also shaped the ways that families were formed and understood, yet families carved out creative family structures and understandings of kinship relations.

The previous chapter argues that comparisons of the performance of public and private schools can be misleading. This chapter examines in detail recent research providing such comparisons with the goal of clarifying what lessons can be drawn. The chapter also explains why the recent comparisons have puzzled, and in some cases infuriated, many public school educators. I begin by providing background on the best known of the recent studies. On April 7, 1981, at a conference attended by more than four hundred educators and the press, James Coleman announced the findings of research that he had conducted with Thomas Hoffer and Sally Kilgore on public and private high schools in the United States. Their principal finding was that Catholic schools and non-Catholic private schools are more effective in helping students to acquire cognitive skills than public schools are. Coming at a time of widespread criticism of public education and presidential support for tuition tax credits for families that use private schools, this finding was widely reported in the press and evoked a range of spirited reactions. Critics and supporters responded to Coleman, Hoffer, and Kilgore’s (henceforth CHK) work with articles and editorials with lively titles such as: “Coleman Goes Private (in Public),” “Lessons for the Public Schools,” “Coleman’s Bad Report,” and “Private Schools Win a Public Vote.” Over the succeeding months CHK’s work remained visible as critiques of their research and reanalyses of the data they used appeared in a variety of journals, in some cases accompanied by lengthy responses by CHK. Another wave of interest was sparked by the publication and subsequent reviews of CHK’s High School Achievement: Public, Catholic, and Private Schools Compared, in which they presented their final research findings. As a result of the wide range of responses to CHK’s work and the numerous symposia in which CHK have debated their critics in print, there is now ample material available to any reader interested in forming a judgment about the quality of the research that produced their main conclusion.

Several of the preceding pieces in this volume have analyzed policy debates concerning the financing of school systems. The policy debates are no less intense when the focus turns to higher education. Many arguments run in parallel fashion between educational levels. Some differ by matters of degree, while others differ fundamentally. Whatever the parallels in argumentation, there are striking differences in actual practice between levels. In the United States, private schools depend much more on private finance than private higher education does, while public schools depend much more exclusively on public finance than public higher education does. The panorama appears to be different in many other nations that have both private and public sectors. Their private schools seem more likely than private universities to receive public funds and their public universities seem nearly as likely as public schools to depend almost exclusively on public funds. In U.S. higher education there is considerable debate concerning the appropriate blend of private and public financing for each sector. The problem has become especially acute as enrollments decline, federal and state governments seek to cut costs, and concern spreads about higher education's equity effects in serving privileged groups out of general revenues. There is a good deal of reference to different economic theories, social values, and political constraints. But there is almost no consideration of how policymakers elsewhere have approached the problem. Of course, financial policy outside the United States is made within private-public parameters that are different from those faced by U.S. policymakers, but cross-national comparisons may help stimulate, or even orient, crossstate comparisons within the United States. More importantly, cross-national experience could at least help put our policy choices into perspective. For example, few in the United States support either 100% private or 100% public funding. An economic theory that tends to favor private over public funding may simply tell us to increase our present private share if that share is “low.”

The possibility of “privatizing” education and other quasi-public services has been widely discussed in the United States today, and in other chapters of this volume. Policies such as a voucher or tax credit system, which would give public subsidies to private schools, are examples of privatization proposals. Many people feel that such policies would bring variety, choice, consumer responsiveness, and greater efficiency to our schools. Others fear that they would increase social segmentation, damage the public schools, and enable wealthy people to receive a better education for their children privately, but (partially) at the public expense. To expore these issues, this chapter examines the experience of the Netherlands, a country which, in effect, has had a voucher system in education for many years. In Holland, education and most health and social services are financed by the government but delivered by private nonprofit organizations, often religious in nature. As shall become evident below, the Dutch educational system avoids many of the possible pitfalls of privatization. This is due partially to particular mechanisms the Dutch have adopted to avoid these problems, which could conceivably be replicated here, and partially to broader structural features of the Dutch educational system and its role within society, which could not readily be replicated. The chapter proceeds as follows: The first section summarizes the historical background of the public-private division of responsibility for education in the Netherlands. The policy of privatization is seen as a response to diverse tastes about education, stemming from basic cultural (religious) differences, in a political setting where no one group was in a position to impose its preferred product variety on the others. This is consistent with a hypothesis I am testing in a multicountry study: that degree of reliance on private provision of quasi-public goods is positively related to cultural (particularly religious and linguistic) heterogeneity in democratic societies. It also is relevant to the discussions, found in several previous chapters, of why families choose private schooling.