arXiv subjects

João M. Souto-Maior

Publications and source records attributed to João M. Souto-Maior.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Conceptualizing educational opportunity hoarding: the emergence of hoarding without hoarders

Social scientists increasingly use the concept of opportunity hoarding to explain the formation of Black-White educational inequalities. However, this concept is often loosely defined, leading to varied interpretations of the inequality-producing mechanisms it captures. To bring clarity to this valuable sociological concept, this theoretical paper, informed by the concept's original definition and existing empirical research, proposes a more precise definition of opportunity hoarding and formalizes it through a computational model. For concreteness, the model focuses on one context: how White families can hoard access to advanced high school coursework from Black students attending the same school. Through simulations, the paper highlights the necessary and sufficient conditions under which the hoarding of advanced course-taking opportunities emerges. Results demonstrate that, in contrast to traditional accounts, White actors do not need to engage in exclusionary behaviors to hoard valuable resources. Rather, through the byproduct of network segregation and class inequalities, opportunity hoarding can emerge even when individuals act in race-neutral ways -- a process I conceptualize as hoarding without hoarders.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2024

Differences in academic preparedness do not fully explain Black-White enrollment disparities in advanced high school coursework

Whether racial disparities in enrollment in advanced high school coursework can be attributed to differences in prior academic preparation is a central question in sociological research and education policy. However, previous investigations face methodological limitations, for they compare race-specific enrollment rates of students after adjusting for characteristics only partially related to their academic preparedness for advanced coursework. Informed by a recently-developed statistical technique, we propose and estimate a novel measure of students' academic preparedness and use administrative data from the New York City Department of Education to measure differences in AP mathematics enrollment rates among similarly prepared students of different races. We find that preexisting differences in academic preparation do not fully explain the under-representation of Black students relative to White students in AP mathematics. Our results imply that achieving equal opportunities for AP enrollment not only requires equalizing earlier academic experiences, but also addressing inequities that emerge from coursework placement processes.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2023

The presence of White students and the emergence of Black-White within-school inequalities: two interaction-based mechanisms

This article investigates mechanism-based explanations for a well-known empirical pattern in sociology of education, namely, that Black-White unequal access to school resources -- defined as advanced coursework -- is the highest in racially diverse and majority-White schools. Through an empirically calibrated and validated agent-based model, this study explores the dynamics of two qualitatively informed mechanisms, showing (1) that we have reason to believe that the presence of White students in school can influence the emergence of Black-White advanced enrollment disparities and (2) that such influence can represent another possible explanation for the macro-level pattern of interest. Results contribute to current scholarly accounts of within-school inequalities, shedding light into policy strategies to improve the educational experiences of Black students in racially integrated settings.

physics.soc-ph↗