The racial/ethnic composition of elementary schools and young children’s academic and socioemotional functioning

Benner, Aprile D., & Crosnoe, Robert. (2011). The racial/ethnic composition of elementary schools and young children’s academic and socioemotional functioning. American Educational Research Journal, 48(3), 621-646.

This article felt “heavy”, in more ways than one. In one sense, the issues surrounding ethnic diversity in schools, and its benefits and risks, are heavy ones with no easy or simple answers. In another sense, the article was heavy in terms of the way the research was designed; multiple variables and multiple analyses were conducted and reported, and as can happen when I read the Results sections of such studies, my head began to spin. When that occurs, I have to alter my reading strategies, and do some skimming of the highly technical portions along with simultaneous scanning for intelligible nuggets of meaning that can help me make sense of what all the models and analyses revealed. The authors here do provide some good help by occasionally summarizing what the findings mean, and I was grateful for that.

If someone is looking for thick descriptive data or suggestions for how to promote young children’s academic and socioemotional functioning in diverse elementary schools, that kind of thing will not be found here. The study described here involves complex statistical analyses of an already existing set of longitudinal data. The kindergarten year’s data alone were analyzed here, and 22,782 children from 23 schools were represented in the sample. The authors did not collect these data; they accessed the numbers that were already available and ran analyses on them. This kind of study is useful in looking at national patterns because of the large sample and massive data set, but it probably won’t be practically useful to teachers trying to manage diverse classrooms. That kind of article is several steps ahead of this one in the process of inquiry.

What I garnered from the article that was useful to me was the idea that the benefits or risks of ethnic diversity in schools are not always clear-cut. Ethnic diversity has been positively related to academic achievement overall, but there may be other factors that keep that relationship from operating for all students. Here, the authors point to another relationship: the relationship between how many students there are in a school who are part of one’s own ethnic group (belongingness) and one’s socioemotional adjustment. The authors documented interactions between school diversity and the proportion of racial/ethnic group peers in the school. In other words, diversity provides for beneficial cognitive activity, but that benefit may be suppressed if one does not have enough ethnic group peers to feel a sense of belonging. Conversely, belongingness related to having ethnic group peers is a good thing for socioemotional adjustment, which in turn affects achievement, but if there is not enough diversity in the school, the cognitive benefits are minimized. Achieving a certain balance, with enough diversity but also enough belongingness, is rare in the United States, and would be incredibly difficult to make happen. I think about the patchwork of highly segregated districts in my own metropolitan area, which straddles a state line, and the task seems nearly impossible. In most schools in my area, one group clearly dominates the population, and that tends to be white children in suburbia and children of color in the urban core. How can we reform the system to create the balance that will best benefit ALL children? In my area, the desegregation plans did not work. What could make it happen?