Leadership and Staff
Biography
Neighborhoods and schools shape a wide range of children’s life outcomes and reproduce race- and class-based inequities. However, these contexts are, of course, not randomly assigned. Which families gain access to environmental contexts most conducive to their children’s development? This question is critical to illuminating– and disrupting– the reproduction of intergenerational inequities. Most relevant studies employ a structural lens, and my research confirms their core findings: race and class continue to stratify children’s neighborhood and school conditions, well into the twenty-first century. But I also highlight rarely-examined factors – such as parental education, cognition, socioemotional health, and language facility – which are central to intergenerational reproduction accounts of inequality and may be increasingly salient in an era of choice-based policies and information saturation. In short, my primary research stream reveals how race, resources, skills, and health jointly shape children’s environments and in turn reproduce inequality. My secondary research stream complements the first by isolating the particular features of children’s neighborhood and school environments that explain their causal effects on children’s cognitive, socioemotional, and physical health outcomes.