Barbara Schneider to Edit Sociology of Education

by Chandra Muller, University of Texas-Austin

The ASA Council’s appointment of Barbara Schneider as the editor of Sociology of Education gives the thriving journal a talented and dynamic new leader. Barbara brings an expertise along with an energy and enthusiasm to elicit outstanding research from a community of scholars with diverse perspectives and methodologies. Education is important to many areas of sociological inquiry—from aging, family, health, and immigration, to race and ethnicity, sex and gender, and theory—and it will only gain in significance with societal change. Under Barbara’s stewardship the journal will flourish as a top resource for research in the sociology of education.

In 1979 Barbara earned her PhD from Northwestern University, with a dissertation that analyzed gains in academic achievement, while, with her husband Lewis, she raised two young daughters. Family considerations kept her in the Chicago area as an assistant professor at Northwestern where she actively pursued her research. Fortuitously, her work during the early 1980s paralleled the interests that Jim Coleman was developing on the effects of family, schools, and communities on students’ learning and achievement. When Jim became aware of Barbara’s research contributions in the mid 1980s, he brought her to the University of Chicago to collaborate on a major study with the new National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS). This was a partnership that produced important insights into sociology of education, while providing a rich opportunity for students to learn the art of first-rate sociological research.

It was in the context of this project that I first met Barbara. I remember receiving a phone call from her inviting me to work on the NELS study. I was in the middle of feeding my toddler breakfast and was concerned about how I would ever manage to juggle the demands of family and academic work. Barbara’s passion for research and can-do approach to balancing work with family has been a constant source of inspiration for me. She and Lewis raised two wonderful, athletic, brilliant, and successful daughters. She and others of her generation fought battles over professional roles and opportunities that will be only stories for today’s generation of new scholars. Fortunately, now we can laugh about it, as I did uproariously when I learned that she and Linda Waite were collaborating on a study of housework; perhaps she was destined to develop a more domestic side in one form or another.

At the University of Chicago, where Barbara eventually became a professor of sociology, her research contributions became increasingly influential as she assumed a leadership position on the NELS study. She developed several major research projects that have shaped the field. In addition to the NELS study, which produced significant books and articles about students, families, and school restructuring, she began to collaborate with David Stevenson on adolescents and their transition to adulthood. With David, Barbara wrote the award-winning book, The Ambitious Generation: America’s Teenagers, Motivated but Directionless, that articulated how today’s youth with their lofty ambitions needed more guidance from adults at home and in schools and the community about how to achieve their goals. The impact of their work is broad, as illustrated by The University of Chicago Medical School’s new “Teach Research” study, a major random assignment project that uses the principles from The Ambitious Generation to help young urban youth develop more realistic and informed ideas of college and career.

Barbara continued her research on adolescence and work in her collaboration with Mike Csikszentmihalyi. Together they wrote Becoming Adult: How Teenagers Prepare for the World of Work based on innovative national data they collected, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She wrote the ground-breaking Trust in Schools with Tony Bryk about structuring schools for the emergence and maintenance of trust in relations among teachers, administrators, students, and their parents, which are essential for successful schools. During this time she has also been collaborating with Linda Waite on a major study, funded by the Sloan Foundation, of dual career families, which just produced the book Being Together, Working Apart: Dual-Career Families and the Work-Life Balance. Each of these books represents a larger study and related journal articles authored by Barbara.

Any one of these studies alone would have been enough to solidify a scholar’s reputation in the academic world. Taken together they begin to capture Barbara’s intellectual strength, leadership, and vision. Each involves a seamless integration of qualitative and quantitative approaches at its best, gaining leverage from an interdisciplinary approach. Each study has also produced a cadre of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows who began to build their knowledge base and careers influenced by an unfailing pursuit of knowledge and deep insights about education. These are strengths she will bring with her as editor of Sociology of Education.

She will be joined by Rubén Rumbaut, Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Center for Research on Immigration, Population, and Public Policy at the University of California-Irvine, as deputy editor. A highly regarded scholar, Rubén is the recipient of the 2002 Distinguished Book Award of the ASA for Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation, co-authored with Alejandro Portes. Rubén and Barbara offer complementary strengths and share a high regard for quality research to improve our world.

Barbara is not a stranger to the editorial world, and she fully understands the influential roles and responsibilities of top-tier peer-reviewed journals. She has recently completed a successful three-year term as editor of the American Educational Research Association’s Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis (EEPA) where she produced issue after issue of highly cited and influential articles. In addition, she holds positions on boards that set social science policy and new standards for the use and sharing of data. She is principal investigator of the Data Research and Development Center, an interdisciplinary center that promotes the improvement of capacity for research on education. In this and other roles she regularly participates in the design of new policy to improve research in the social sciences.