Rejoinder: Shadow Education: Theory, Analysis and Future Directions: A Rejoinder

Abstract

Commentaries and replies on a given article, especially those appearing in the pages of an academic journal like Social Forces, cut to the very heart of intellectual exchange and area-specific development in the field. Such conversations and any debates embedded within them also expose analytic decision-making and potentially promising conceptual and empirical developments to current and future scholars. For these reasons, we welcome and appreciate the comments of Eric Grodsky and Sigal Alon on our article Shadow Education, American Style: Test Preparation, the SAT and College Enrollment. Both provide insightful arguments and extensions that, in conjunction with our reply, should be of broad interest to stratification and scholars. Our article builds on education, a concept most often utilized in the comparative literature. We extend its theoretical utility to the U.S. case, with a substantive and empirical focus on college test preparation. Our analyses show that background inequalities in family income and parental shape the likelihood that students engage in various forms of SAT preparation, and that these education activities have important implications for both test performance and selective college enrollment. For example, students from the most advantaged families are significantly more likely to enroll in private courses, such as those offered by Princeton Review and Kaplan -a strategy that corresponds to significant SAT score gains. Higher SAT scores, in turn, increase the chances of getting into the nations most selective colleges and universities. In their comments, Eric Grodsky takes issue with several important theoretical and methodological aspects of our article and Sigal Alon highlights key processes pertaining to race/ethnicity. Grodsky's and Alon's emphases on theoretical conception, measurement and process, when taken together, offer fertile ground for contemplation and future research. We respond accordingly here. Beginning with theoretical issues, we restate and stand by our definition of shadow relative to the alternative, narrower definition that Grodsky prefers. Our measurement and modeling strategy follows directly from our theoretical discussion and captures -more effectively than Grodsky's dichotomous approach -the interconnected and overlapping nature of student test preparation. We then turn to Alon's response and analyses, which elaborate on our results in important ways with respect to racial/ethnic minorities and suggest differential processes in the course