ABSTRACT
This chapter examines students' perceptions of school support for postsecondary participation and test alternative measures of school racial composition in order to account for the increasingly multiracial makeup of today's urban high schools. The provide support for the hypothesis that school racial composition and school support have an effect on students' reported educational aspirations, and that alternative specifications of school racial composition provide different interpretations of these important relationships. Given these concerns and approaches, it can be stated that we have three clear research questions: The major problem in measuring how school racial composition affects student outcomes is finding a reasonable way to measure school racial composition that properly characterizes the school. The chapter discusses the survey data on 15,800 high school students from 3 urban school districts to investigate the impact of school-level support for higher educational attainment and school racial composition on students’ actual educational aspirations.
