SUMI funds research to understand what helps people achieve upward mobility. Specifically, we work to identify the skills and competencies an individual should have to be on track for upward mobility (i.e., the “drivers” of upward mobility). But we know that a student can do everything right—work hard, get good grades that reflect marketable skills, cultivate social capital, and have executive functioning for days—and still not experience long-term success because of barriers like discrimination and segregation that keep them from opportunity.
This reality shapes our approach to funding research. When our grantees (and the broader field) study what drives success, we must consider these systemic barriers. Otherwise, we risk misidentifying what truly enables mobility. The amount of grit and determination a person might need to succeed, for example, will depend on how much adversity and structural obstruction they must overcome.
There’s a tension here that we’re learning to hold—and that we ask grantees and others in the growing education-to-mobility field to balance as well. Identifying drivers of mobility means centering individuals and their growth and development. But our approach to searching for those drivers must consider the systems and structures (i.e., the “context”) surrounding the individual that affect their chances of success.
Understanding Contextual Factors
We think of contextual factors much like a typical ecological model that describes how different environments shape people’s lives. The individual sits at the center of expanding circles of influence, like ripples in a pond. The closest ring contains our immediate personal relationships, expanding from there to our neighborhoods and schools, and even further out, to larger societal forces like government policies and social norms. By that definition, most of how we might think of describing a person could be contextual.
We focus on contextual factors that influence long-term mobility in three ways:
- Out-of-school factors that shape readiness and ability to learn, like food insecurity, having a long commute to school, and environmental lead exposure.
- Factors that affect schools and school systems’ effectiveness, like funding levels, teacher qualifications, and overly punitive school discipline policies.
- Factors that modify how success in school translates into long-term success, like discrimination, living in an education or employment desert, or occupational segregation.
In studying these areas, we also focus on formal structures—the policies, protocols, laws, and other formal mechanisms that control how resources and opportunities are distributed.
Some Examples from Scholarly Research Showing Why Context Matters
Most human capital development research tends to focus on the individual (reflecting our broader cultural narratives of individual responsibility and competitive individualism). But growing research shows the importance of considering contextual (especially structural) factors.
For instance, Jackson, Johnson, and Persico, using a structural approach to considering education resourcing, documented the connection between school funding and student and adult outcomes. Making use of the patchwork nature of state-level education finance reform, the team linked school spending shifts resulting from school finance reform to individual student-level data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Their findings were clear: When schools received sustained funding increases, their students—especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds—completed more years of education, earned higher wages, and experienced less poverty. They suggest these improvements could happen through intermediary school quality improvements, including lower student-to-teacher ratios and higher teacher salaries. The study provided strong positive and mechanistic evidence to the long-running debate over whether school spending matters for student outcomes, while bringing some nuance to the question of “for whom.”
In an earlier study focused on a more direct example of structural racism, Rucker Johnson studied the long-term effects of school desegregation orders and found positive effects on educational attainment, job status, earnings, and health for Black individuals. He found no effects for white individuals, underscoring the necessity of looking for heterogeneity of effects and of considering the historic and structural underpinnings of any findings.
Adopting a structural gender analysis, Richard Reeves recently published a book establishing that boys and men are experiencing worse outcomes across the life course and examining why that might be. Among his conclusions was the general observation that boys seem to be more sensitive to their environment than girls. Joining others who push back against the individualistic norm, Reeves argues that, when designing interventions and looking for root causes, structures matter.
Simultaneously, we see reminders that research that fails to consider context has a shortened shelf life and, worse, can reinforce harmful stereotypes and narratives. Consider the famous Marshmallow Test, which measures self-control by seeing whether children can resist eating a treat. This test was developed mainly with white, “Western” children. When used in different cultural contexts, it can be less salient and questionably valid. Because measures like the Marshmallow Test were developed in narrow settings, they don’t necessarily resonate elsewhere. Failing to consider context can reinforce deficit-based narratives—that other, often minoritized and marginalized groups have a shortcoming when the real problem is that our established measures aren’t capturing what they intended to. This kind of fallacy, of course, exists outside of measure development and education research. It demonstrates the importance of incorporating structural and contextual elements as we seek to improve economic mobility for those coming from economic disadvantage.
SUMI Grantees All Examine Context
We were intentional in our request for proposals: Every SUMI grantee must examine how contextual factors affect the individual-level skills and competencies that drive mobility. Our efforts to encourage (and require) consideration of context helped prospective applicants self-select into the initiative, pushed proposal teams to be more specific and structural about their treatment of context, and informed our review process.
The winning teams were able to describe how they would engage with context—imperfectly and incompletely but thoughtfully and additively. We were excited to see theory-based examinations of factors like segregation, job availability, and school composition incorporated into data collection and analytical plans in various ways.
As the teams set their plans in motion, we are creating opportunities for grantees to deepen and iterate on their individuals-in-context thinking. Stay tuned to the blog and SUMI’s other publications for what we learn about what works and doesn’t when it comes to considering individuals in context.