The work that I have done on teenagers and high schools, including the study that is the focus of this book, is grounded in a rich interdisciplinary field of research. That field goes by many different names, but I like a phrase that Sanford Dornbusch used in a review essay in two decades ago: the social structure of schools (Dornbusch, Glasgow, & Lin, 1996). In short, high schools have a social organization that is just as well defined as their academic curricula. As social and behavioral scientists have looked into this social organization and its links to schools' academic structures, they have uncovered useful insights into adolescent development, secondary education, and how the two relate to each other. In this chapter, I try to synthesize this vast literature as a way of laying out what is known, what is insufficiently known, what is unknown, and how the work that I have done on socially marginalized teenagers in high school grows out of and extends this literature.

MAPPING THE SOCIAL STRUCTURES OF HIGH SCHOOLS

If we deconstruct the high school into its most basic elements, we are left with two general sets of processes. The formal processes of schooling refer to the inputs and outputs of education – e.g., staffing, curricula, teaching materials, course offerings, grades, test scores, graduation rates – that are most concretely linked to the official mission of the educational system, which is to shape children and adolescents into skilled, well-informed adults who can take their places in and contribute to the labor market and the larger polity.