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God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion's Surprising Impact on Academic Success Ilana M. Horwitz full chapter instant download
God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion's Surprising Impact on Academic Success Ilana M. Horwitz full chapter instant download
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God, Grades, and Graduation
God, Grades, and
Graduation
Religion’s Surprising Impact
on Academic Success
I L A NA M . HO RW I T Z
1
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197534144.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
To my mom, Cecilia Straznik
Contents
List of Figures ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction 1
1. Living for God 24
2. Remarkable Report Cards 49
3. A Domino Effect 79
4. God’s Guardrails 88
5. Unexpected Destinations 125
6. The Road Less Taken 152
Conclusion 171
Some people write books about questions they have long wrestled with. In
her book When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical
Relationship with God, anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann describes her long-
standing curiosity about how people develop a God-centered existence stem-
ming from observing her deeply conservative Christian family members. “I
have lived these questions . . . my cousins played in a world I did not un-
derstand,” Luhrmann says. Similarly, sociologist Vern Bengtson also grew up
in a highly religious family, with 33 born-again Christian family members.
His own family story kindled his research interests, including his most recent
book, Families and Faith: How Religion Is Passed Down across Generations.
Many books about religion are written by people who are religious, experi-
enced a profound personal religious change, or feel so strongly opposed to
religion that they feel compelled to argue against it.
I do not fall into any of these camps. Having spent my childhood living
in Russia under a communist regime that forbade free expression of reli-
gion, I didn’t even know what religion was until I was an early adolescent.
I had no interest in the lives of Conservative Christians until I was well into
my thirties, having been born a Jew and growing up in a family that didn’t
openly practice their faith. I do not recall my family ever talking with me
about being Jewish or celebrating any Jewish holidays. The few Jewish rit-
uals my parents observed in Russia were done in secret, and I wasn’t aware of
them. It was only when we came to the United States that we started to slowly
engage in Jewish practices, largely because I started attending non-Orthodox
Jewish private schools and taught my parents about what we as Jews were
“supposed” to do. Consequently, I developed a social circle that was filled
with other Jewish teenagers, few of whom would have described themselves
as intensely religious. While my kids do attend a Jewish school, it is primarily
for social and cultural reasons rather than for religious ones. Like many Jews,
I feel fairly agnostic about God. How, then, did I come to write a book about
intensely religious Christian teenagers?
In 2013, I moved into Escondido Village, which houses many of Stanford’s
student families. It is an idyllic living arrangement, with attached houses
xii Preface
I am writing this book for both of these camps—those who either haven’t
thought about religion’s role in academic success and those who have been
too nervous to talk about it. Plenty of sociologists and education scholars
have written about other social factors like race, social class, and gender that
shape academic success. But how religious upbringing intersects with educa-
tional outcomes has gone largely unexplored.
I am also writing this book for those who are interested to learn how re-
ligion shapes the various facets of the lives of ordinary Americans. A great
deal of research has documented how religion influences people’s happiness,
health, labor market outcomes, and social networks. By focusing on reli-
gion and schooling, this book helps explain how many of the downstream
outcomes of being religious come to be.
I am also writing this book for the millions of Americans who work as re-
ligious leaders and teach at Christian schools and colleges. Understanding
the experiences of students with deeply held religious commitments is cen-
tral to their mission. Finally, I am also writing this book for parents who
are constantly thinking about how they want to raise their children reli-
giously and/or academically. They deserve a clear picture of what my subtitle
says: religion’s surprising impact on academic success.
How religion intersects with academic outcomes is surprising, or at least
it was to me. I suspect they will be for others, and that people will feel ei-
ther elated and livid—or both—about the conclusions that the data led me
to make. That I suspect won’t come as a surprise: religion, as is well known,
can be divisive. But my goal is neither to champion nor denigrate religion,
but rather to understand how it intersects with the educational journeys of
American teenagers and young adults. The results are fascinating and re-
vealing all at once. Because if there is one truth that shines clearly from my
research, it’s that despite the separation of church and state, teenagers don’t
check their religious commitments at the school door.
Acknowledgments
book to fruition. She has supported my research for several years, eventually
becoming an expert in the NSYR data herself.
In the summer of 2020, 12 of my undergraduate researchers worked with
me full time. In addition to writing memos, they helped me analyze data
that were specific to several key questions that this book tackles. Working in
teams, they dove into one of three substantive areas and analyzed data for a
particular subset of interviewees. Minha Khan, Lora Supandi, Corey Lamb,
and Muhammad Dhafer Muhammad Faishal helped me understand why
working-class abiders fared better academically than nonabiders (Chapter 4).
Forrest Dollins, Sarah Lee, and Lucero Carrasco helped me understand why
the academic performance of atheists was not significantly different from
abiders (Chapter 5). Saray Bedoya, Michael Massey, Michelle Ibarra, Casie
Chavez, and Adam Acevedo helped me understand how abiders’ religious
commitments changed as they entered adulthood (Chapter 6). Natalie Milan
and Jennifer Osugi also helped me see that poor abiders do not see as much
of an academic boost because they face overwhelmingly difficult obstacles
in several domains of their life that spill over into the academic domain. My
research assistants also read earlier drafts of book chapters and provided ex-
ceptionally insightful input. A special thank you to Saray Bedoya, Sarah Lee,
and Forrest Dollins, who read the entire manuscript and provided invaluable
feedback.
Presenting this research at several conferences each year helped me
sharpen my thinking and arguments. I am especially grateful to the American
Educational Research Association (AERA), the Society for the Scientific
Study of Religion (SSSR), the Association for the Sociology of Religion
(ASR), the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS), the Association for Studies
in Higher Education (ASHE), Sociology of Education Association (SEA), the
American Sociological Association (ASA), and the Notre Dame Scholars of
Religion conference for providing space for me to work out my ideas and
helping me connect with colleagues outside of Stanford.
My officemates during graduate school, the “five-fifths” team, including
Angela Johnson, Ericka Weathers, David Song, Ben Stenhaug, and Diana
Mercado- Garcia, provided much needed social and emotional support
during the early years of this research. I am grateful to my colleagues at
the GSE, especially CEPA, the Race and Religion and Ethnicity Group that
I cofounded with Tamara Gilkes, and the Sociology and Education net-
work, where I workshopped many of these ideas. My colleagues in Jewish
Studies— Elayne Weissler-Martello, Jeremiah Lockwood, Erin Johnston,
Acknowledgments xix
Abiya Ahmed, Marva Marom, Caitlyn Brust, Hannah Kober, and Shoshana
Olidort—have also cheered me along every step of the way and helped me
wrestle with many ideas.
Over the years, I received funding from several organizations that
made this book project possible: the Jim Joseph Foundation, the Wexner
Foundation, the Stanford Graduate School of Education, and the Institute of
Education Sciences.
As I conclude this book project, I am also wrapping up a decade-long ad-
venture at Stanford University. Stanford has taught me a great deal about
what good education looks like, and the great insights that come from
student-faculty collaborations. I will carry these lessons with me into my new
role as an Assistant Professor and the Fields-Rayant Chair in Contemporary
Jewish Life at the Suzanne and Stuart Grant Center for the American Jewish
Experience at Tulane University.
Much of this book was written during the COVID-19 pandemic. Working
from my small Stanford apartment proved to be quite difficult. I am grateful
to Ivor and Jess Castelino, who welcomed me into their farm cottage for sev-
eral weekends of uninterrupted writing (and biking!). On top of the pan-
demic, the California wildfires in fall 2020 forced us to pull our children out
of school and leave the Bay Area. I am beyond grateful to my in-laws, Liz
and Allan Horwitz, my mother, Cecilia Straznik, and my stepfather, Vitaly
Fridman, who provided housing and took care of my children so that I could
focus on writing significant chunks of this book.
Cynthia Read, my editor at Oxford University Press, believed in this pro-
ject from the very beginning. I am fortunate to have found such a fantastic
press to work with.
My editor, Olson, went above and beyond to see this book through, from
start to finish. He helped me organize my thoughts, made my arguments
clearer, and trimmed unnecessary details. Olson, thank you for making my
ideas shine.
My children have grown up with one central idea of what their mom does
all day: “Mommy writes.” Araya (now 8) and Mikayla (5) have been incred-
ibly supportive and patient, often saying to my husband, “Let’s give Mommy
time to write! She needs to finish her book!” While they are disappointed by
the lack of pictures and abundance of big words, I hope that they come to find
as much joy in writing as I do.
And finally, to my husband, Robbie, who has been my biggest cheerleader.
From the very beginning when I got into Stanford, Robbie encouraged me to
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