Creating Classes: Within-Elementary-School Classroom Assignments and Their Implications for Student Access to High-Quality Teaching

This article builds on sociological research on categorical inequalities in middle and high school course placements to investigate the distribution of students across classrooms within North Carolina elementary schools. Consistent with qualitative evidence suggesting that educators seek to create demographically balanced classrooms, we find that students are distributed quite evenly across their schools’ classrooms based on race, ethnicity, and family economic background. However, we find that some elementary schools create classrooms in which students are clustered based on their prior achievement as well as their eligibility for gifted education or special education services. This clustering is most prominent in large schools, schools with highly experienced teachers, and schools in which parents have a high degree of influence. Skills-based classroom clustering is associated with inequalities in student access to high-quality teaching. Our findings suggest that in some contexts, the categorical inequality processes associated with curricular tracking emerge in elementary school.