This study analyzes differences in the time elementary school students living in metropolitan areas in the United States spend traveling to schools. Building on existing literature on adults’ commuting patterns and educational literature on school districts, school segergation, and school choice. I suggest a model of students’ commuting that considers the interaction of students’ family and school district characteristics in shaping the trip to school. I use a unique multilevel dataset nesting elementary school students’ daily trip to school and their family characteristics in their school district to show that nationally, Black students and students whose mothers are least educated travel the longest to school. These differences are accounted for by mode of transportation and Black students’ reliance of public transportation. But comparing students to their peers within their school districts, students whose mother has higher …

This study explores mechanisms underlying processes of educational policy formation. Previous studies have given much attention to processes of diffusion when accounting for educational policy formation. Less account has been given to the day-to-day institutional dynamics through which educational policies develop and change. Building on extensive governmental archival data, complemented with interviews and media analysis, I study the development and transformation of school violence policies in Israel. I argue that diffusion of global policy ideas and practices provides the menu of possible policies, while within-country struggles over legitimacy in the policy domain serve as a mechanism shaping which items on the menu becomes actual policy. Specifically, in the Israeli case, the interest in and action toward school violence were influenced by a global trend, but the actions of Psychological-Counseling …

Symbolic boundaries, understood as the conceptual distinctions used to demarcate in-groups and out-groups, are fundamental to social inequality. While we know a great deal about how groups and individuals construct and contest symbolic boundaries along lines of class, race, ethnicity, religion, and nationality, less attention is given to (a) national belonging as a component of symbolic boundaries distinct from citizenship and (b) comparing how distinct symbolic boundaries shape individuals perceptions of, and reactions to, instances of stigmatization and discrimination. To examine these issues we compared two marginalized groups in Israel, Arab Palestinian citizens and Ethiopian Jewish immigrants. Analyzing 90 in-depth interviews, we find that exclusion based on boundaries of nationality engenders different ways of interpretating and responding to stigmatizing and discriminatory behavior, compared with …