This handbook provides holistic coverage of the role of the family and their children's education from pre-school through postsecondary education by focusing on understanding how education actions, interests, and sanctions are developed and reinforced in the home, community, and school, rather than concentrating on connections between the family and the school. It pays particular attention to the changes in the organization of schooling including variations in types of schools such as Charters, standards for learning, accountability systems, teacher performance assessment, and their links and consequences on various student outcomes. A special section is devoted to the work of sociologists of education who are undertaking methodological work for studying social systems including network analyses, impact of household resources on educational mobility, and school and teacher effects. The widening interest in higher education today needs a more comprehensive and deeper focus on the changing landscape of higher education institutions and their respective populations, and how labor market opportunities are enhanced or impeded by different postsecondary education, trainings, and occupational pathways. This handbook serves as a reference work for education stakeholders, as well as educational policy and sociology of education researchers.

Barbara Schneider is the John A. Hannah Chair and Distinguished Professor in the College of Education and Department of Sociology at MSU. She is the principal investigator of the College Ambition Program (CAP), a study that tests a model for promoting a STEM college-going culture in two high schools that encourages adolescents to pursue STEM majors in college and occupations in these fields. She worked for 18 years at University of Chicago, holding positions as a professor in Sociology and Human Development and senior researcher at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). She remains a senior fellow at NORC, where she is the principal investigator of the Center for Advancing Research and Communication in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. She uses a sociological lens to understand societal conditions and interpersonal interactions that create norms and values that enhance human and social capital. Her research focuses on how the social contexts of schools and families influence the academic and social well being of adolescents as they move into adulthood. Professor Schneider has published 15 books and over 100 articles and reports on family, social context of schooling, and sociology of knowledge. She recently was the editor of Sociology of Education.