A randomized experiment of Comer's School Development Program was conducted in 23 middle schools in Prince George's County, Maryland. It showed that Comer schools implemented some of the program's central elements better than control schools, but not all or even most of them. This shortfall in...

This paper notes the very low incidence of randomized experiments in research on school reform and claims that the few that have been done are the product of researchers in fields other than education. It seeks to probe why scholars teaching in schools of education do not do experiments. Eight...

Sociological research on the disabled has for the past 25 years made extensive use of a social deviance model to characterize the status of the physically impaired. The present article, which is based on a three-year anthropological investigation of the social relations of paraplegics and...

This paper studies a possible link between two trends that have affected the labor market over the last decade: increases in wrongful termination litigation and increasing frequency of mass layoffs. We model the displacement strategy of a firm faced with concave displacement costs and employees...

Few of the current major efforts to improve urban schools adequately appreciate the extent to which the problematic social climate of urban schools can undermine the implementation of even very good ideas. Thus, program after program comes and goes with little lasting impact. This paper uses...

This paper uses longitudinal data to estimate cohort changes in earnings trajectories. Among male workers turning 21 before 1980, we find that more than six in ten (60%) of all male workers and seven in ten (71%) of college-educated male workers attained earnings levels by age 30 that were at...

Based on a case study of a manufacturing plant, this paper addresses weaknesses in the way that new structuralist theories and the literature on sex segregation in occupations treat barriers to womenÕs mobility. I examine the forces that prevent sex integration in occupations and the reasons...

Studies that attempt to measure the impact of neighborhoods on children's outcomes are susceptible to bias because families choose where to live. As a result, the effect of family unobservables, such as the importance parents place on their children's welfare, and other unobservables that are...

"Public" radio and television are industries that illustrate well the interplay of outputs and mechanisms to finance them. The collective goods aspects of their broadcast outputs are unusually large; the process of production and distribution of programs is such that the incremental costs of...

Recent research in environmental sociology indicates that environmental movement activists continue to engage in radical, disruptive, and adversarial tactics to achieve their goals. In this paper I propose that environmentalists are using a new form of protest, specifically consensus-based...