Children who do Exceptionally Well in First Grade

Children's progress in the early years of school is thought to be important for understanding their later achievement, but most sociological research carried out at the primary level skirts a broadly inclusive accounting of the social and personal processes that underlie early achievement. The study reported in this article aimed to fill part of that gap. It used a modified school process model to examine factors that contribute to unexpectedly large gains in verbal competence (outlier status) among a diverse and representative sample of urban first graders. A set of logistic regression analyses indicated that exceptionally high growth over the first grade is associated prominently with the characteristics of teachers (especially their job conditions) and two characteristics of students (personality/maturity and academic self-image). Background/family variables had a negligible impact, as did the students' first-quarter marks. For policy purposes, these findings are encouraging because it is more feasible to make changes in classrooms and in the climate of a school than in a family's educational status or parents' attitudes. Patterns of advantage and disadvantage across generations seem to be perpetuated mainly by socioeconomic differences in achievement in school; that is, children of the well situated tend to go further in school than do those of the less well off and, as a consequence, fare better in the labor market. These fundamental insights from the early status-attainment literature (Blau and Duncan 1967; Duncan and Hodge 1963) caused scholars who were curious about the transmission of inequality across generations to become interested in schools and how they work. And it was by this path that students' performance in school and their parents, teachers, and peers as agents of academic socialization entered the mainstream of the discourse on stratification. The first, and still most elegant, integration of these themes is the school-process model that was developed by Sewell and his colleagues (see Sewell and Hauser, 1980, for an overview). This framework gives primacy to the individual as a goal-oriented actor and examines the interpersonal and situational processes through which individual differences in achievement in secondary school arise. The advantages of middleclass youngsters in the competition for high levels of schooling stem, in large measure, from