The Structure of Opportunity in School*

Official school records are used to analyze the opportunity structure and selection mechanisms within a school. Critics ' charges that tracking systems preclude choice and mobility are not entirely supported, but more complex and subtle mechanisms for restricting opportunity are found to operate. Moreover, the analysis discovers that even if college admissions committees wished to admit high-achieving lower-track students, the use by many high schools of a grade-weighting procedure by which lower-track students ' achievements are belittled reduces their post-graduate opportunities. These findings suggest that customary assumptions about the influence of choice ' and achievement may be too simple and customary conceptual models of contest and sponsored mobility may be less appropriate for describing actual track systems than a tournament model. Even after a decade of great progress in understanding the educational and occupational attainment process, we stil know very littie about the struc-ture of opportunity within schools and its influence on youths ' opportu-nities in society. Researchers have looked at school-wide effects, and they find much greater variance in educational attainment within schools than among different schools (Coleman et al.; Jencks et al.). This suggests that it is important to study selection systems within schools. Turner and Sorensen have proposed models of the opportunity struc-ture within schools, but no research has looked at such structures directly. A number of recent studies have considered the effects of high school curriculum tracks on post-school attainment, but they have been large-scale studies unable to examine selection processes within schools in detail (Alexander and Eckland; Alexander and McDill; Hauser et al.; Heyns; Jencks et al.). Cicourel and Kitsuse investigated in detail how a single school selects students for track placements, but they did not look at what kind of track mobility was permitted within the school