David E. Rangel, assistant professor of education, has been awarded a Large Education Research Grant from the Spencer Foundation. The Large Research Grants on Education Program supports education research projects that will contribute to the improvement of education, broadly conceived, with budgets ranging from $125,000 up to $500,000 for projects ranging from one to five years. 

Professor Rangel's research project is titled, "Unequal Childhoods?: The Complex Logics of Childrearing in Latinx Families." It will aim to address whether middle-class Latinx children benefit from their parent’s socialization practices, and how class, race, ethnicity, and context intersect to shape parenting and school involvement practices. 

"Sociologists have long sought to explain class-based inequalities in educational outcomes and schooling experiences," he says in the project abstract. "One theoretical perspective points to how students from different class backgrounds inherit distinct cultural and social resources that function as 'capital' within schools. This work has identified childrearing as a key and early mechanism in the transmission of class advantage from adults to children with educational consequences and argues that social class is the primary driver of parenting practices and beliefs." 

The Spencer Foundation has been funding educational research since 1971. Its Large Research Grants on Education Program supports education research projects that will contribute to the improvement of education.

At Brown University, Professor Rangel's research examines the relationship between education and social inequality. In particular, his work examines how race, ethnicity, social class, and educational level intersect to shape parents’ socialization and school involvement practices and structure the educational advantages (and disadvantages) parents transmit to their children. Building upon theoretical insights from the stratification tradition in sociology, his work makes substantive contributions to scholarship on Latinx parenting, family-school relations, social class, race and racism, and population health.