The High School as a Context of Adolescent Development
Saturday, 12:30 PM – 2:15 PM
Hynes CC 310

Speaker: Robert Crosnoe, University of Texas, Austin
Chair: Ruby Takanishi, Foundation for Child Development

Biographical Sketch
The 2004 winner of the SRCD Early Career Award, Robert Crosnoe is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Faculty Research Associate at the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to coming to this position, he received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Stanford University and completed post-doctoral fellowships at Carolina Population Center and Center for Developmental Science, both at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Crosnoe’s research primarily focuses on the ways in which the educational pathways of children and adolescents are connected to their general health, development, and personal relationships and how these connections can be leveraged to explain demographic inequalities related to race, immigration, and social class. His work, which has been published in Child Development, Journal of Marriage and Family, and American Educational Research Journal, is funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and by young scholar awards from the William T. Grant Foundation and the Foundation for Child Development. Dr. Crosnoe is also currently a Co-Principal Investigator of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development.

Abstract
This presentation delves into the power of the high school to serve as a setting of adolescent development by exploring how social experiences affect long-term educational trajectories, drawing on and integrating quantitative analysis of nationally representative data of American high schools with qualitative analysis of interview and ethnographic data from a local high school. As an illustrative case study, I focus specifically on what I refer to as the disruption of difference—the tendency for young people who have personal traits (e.g., obesity, homosexuality, poverty) that are stigmatized by their schoolmates to react to their distressing social situations in seemingly rational ways that ultimately interfere with their achievement in high school and college matriculation after high school. In other words, I detail how social position trumps scholastic abilities in ways that have disastrous long-term consequences. The end result is a story of adolescent development that hits home with everyone who can remember high school as well as a how to guide for policy-makers, teachers, and parents who are helping young people navigate through these years that are a quintessential rite of passage in American life.