When you're thinking about educational attainment of American school children, what comes to mind as the most consequential variable that could help explain why some children earn better grades or graduate in higher percentages.

Conventional metrics include family structure, race, class, and gender,

and mountains of empirical study exist to help us understand which factors undermine educational attainment

and which ones bring it within the reach of more children.

Now, I perfectly understand why those metrics are relevant to this question.

We should want to know whether family structure or race or class or gender have any effect

on educational performance, and if they do, whether there are sensible things that can be

done to help America's children learn more effectively.

Conservatives and liberals will disagree over whose job it is to help and whether the help will do any good

and what sort of trade-offs and unintended consequences one should consider.

But the question of whether any of these things have a material effect does not automatically supply an answer

about what, if anything, should be done, and by whom? Still, I think it's a good thing to ask

the question, and scholars who go about their work dispassionately have a lot to teach policymakers

and educators alike. But now, why those particular markers of identity and not others? Why, for instance,

should the sociologists not ask whether the religious formation of the student and the religious

culture of the family have any bearing on whether children perform well in school? Well, that's just

the question animating today's guest.

Welcome to the Tikva podcast.

I'm your host, Jonathan Silver.

Ilana Horwitz is a young professor at Tulane University,

and her first book, God, Grades, and Graduation,

was published this year by Oxford University Press.

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