Jared N. Schachner
Sociologist of Stratification in Cities, Schools, and Neighborhoods
News & Updates
PUBLICATIONS
An article on which I am lead author, "The Implications of Digital School Quality Information for Neighborhood and School Segregation," (with Gary D. Painter and Ann Owens) has been conditionally accepted for a special issue of Urban Studies on digital technology and urban inequality.
A research letter entitled, "Adolescent Neurodevelopmental Variance across Social Strata," on which I am coauthor with my Herting Neuroimaging Lab colleagues, has been accepted for publication in JAMA Network Open.
An article describing a cross-disciplinary effort of which I am a part to integrate linked external data on neighborhoods schools with the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development longitudinal survey has been published in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.
My sole-authored article, "Racial Stratification and School Segregation in the Suburbs: Evidence from Los Angeles County," (Social Forces) received Honorable Mention for the ASA Section on Sociology of Education's James C. Coleman Best Article Award.
FUNDING
The Weingart Foundation has funded a two-year $150K project supporting community-engaged research with homelessness services providers, on which I am PI
The National Science Foundation has funded two three-year research projects (total of ~$1.3M) examining how to conceptualize and measure city- and neighborhood-level disparities in broadband access on which I am a co-PI, with Nicole Marwell and Nick Feamster (University of Chicago).
The National Alliance to End Homelessness and the Conrad R. Hilton Foundation have awarded ~$400K total for two research projects on which I am PI related to age and race inequalities in adults' homelessness experiences. NAEH press release covering this work is here.
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Primary Research Affiliate
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Affiliated Researcher
Current Affiliations
Previous Affiliations
Postdoctoral Scholar/Mansueto Fellow
Ph.D., Sociology & Social Policy
I am currently a Research Scientist at the USC Price School of Public Policy and an affiliated researcher with the UChicago Consortium on School Research and the Los Angeles Education Research Institute.
Before USC, I completed a postdoc at UChicago and a Ph.D. in Sociology & Social Policy at Harvard, where I was also a doctoral fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy and a Meyer Fellow in the Joint Center for Housing Studies.
My research examines whether and how neighborhoods and schools mediate the intergenerational transmission of skills, health, and status. I draw on literature from urban sociology, inequality/stratification, sociology of education, and social policy, and use my hometown of L.A. as a theoretically strategic case.
My work has been published or is forthcoming in Annual Review of Sociology, Demography, Social Forces, Child Development, Journal of Health & Social Behavior, American Educational Research Journal, Urban Studies, Urban Affairs Review, Housing Policy Debate, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, JAMA Network Open, and RSF: Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences.
As a Principal Investigator, I have secured over $500,000 of external funding from sources that include the National Science Foundation, the National Alliance to End Homelessness, Conrad R. Hilton Foundation, Weingart Foundation, the United Way of Greater Los Angeles and the Joint Center for Housing Studies.
Prior to my doctoral studies, I attended Harvard’s Kennedy School, worked at the New York City Department of Education, consulted several national nonprofits, including the United Negro College Fund and National Audubon Society on their social impact strategies, and received a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics & Economics and Urban Studies from the University of Pennsylvania (summa cum laude).
Biography
Journal of Health and Social Behavior
Overall Research Agenda
Neighborhoods, schools, and housing conditions shape a wide range of children’s life outcomes and reproduce race- and class-based inequities. However, these contexts are, of course, not randomly assigned. Which families gain access to environmental contexts most conducive to their children’s development? This question is critical to illuminating– and disrupting– the reproduction of intergenerational inequities.
Most relevant studies employ a structural lens, and my research confirms their core findings: race and class continue to stratify children’s neighborhood, school, and housing conditions, well into the 21st century. But I also highlight rarely-examined factors – such as parental education, cognition, socioemotional health, and language facility – which are central to intergenerational reproduction accounts of inequality and may be increasingly salient in an era of choice-based policies and digital information saturation. Because these factors not only stratify children’s contexts but also reflect the contexts in which parents themselves grew up, cognitive and socioemotional processes emerge as mechanisms fueling the intergenerational transmission of context and urban inequalities.
In short, my primary research stream reveals how race, resources, skills, and health jointly shape children’s environments and in turn reproduce inequality. My secondary research stream complements the first by isolating the particular features of children’s neighborhood, school, and housing environments that explain their causal effects on children’s cognitive, socioemotional, and physical health outcomes. Through another set of studies, I take a more macro view, examining whether and why the relative importance of race, class, skills, and health to neighborhood and school sorting processes varies over time and across metropolitan areas.
Public Engagement
Presentations: Mansueto Institute Lunch Colloquium Series
Media: Local/University News Coverage
Partners
For several of my upcoming papers, I will be using Texas A&M University Geoservices support to geocode administrative data to census tracts. See https://geoservices.tamu.edu/Services/ for more details on their services.