Rebecca Gleit

I am a PhD candidate in Sociology at Stanford University. I am a current Graduate Dissertation Fellow at the Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE). I have also been a Graduate Teaching Fellow at CCSRE, an Institute for Education Sciences (IES) fellow through the Stanford Center for Education Policy and Analysis (CEPA), and a Graduate Teaching Consultant with the Stanford Center for Teaching and Learning.

I hold a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Michigan and an M.Ed. in Educational Policy and Leadership from Marquette University. Before beginning my doctoral studies, I taught high school math in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Through both my research and my teaching, I aim to create more equitable spaces for young people.

In my free time, I like to experiment in the kitchen, sing along to musical theater soundtracks, and take walks with my dog Elgar.

Research

I study how social institutions shape life course trajectories. In my primary line of research, I examine how inter-institutional processes – the connections between institutions like schools, police, and healthcare – shape adolescents’ outcomes. In a secondary line of work, I examine teaching and learning as social processes, identifying mechanisms to reduce inequality in students’ educational trajectories. I deploy both qualitative and quantitative methods in my research, leveraging the strengths of each approach to address the methodological limitations and blind spots of the other.  My work contributes to sociological literatures on inequality, poverty governance, education, crime and punishment, law and society, and – going forward – medical sociology.

My dissertation addresses a pressing question: Why, despite systematic attempts to mitigate inequality, do institutions continue to produce disparate outcomes? I explore this question using the case of school punishment. Initiatives to reform school discipline have been increasingly common, yet disparities in students’ experiences with punishment on the basis of race, class, gender, and disability status remain. I investigate the mechanisms producing these patterns using three years of ethnographic data I collected at a diverse, suburban high school. I argue that inequality is maintained, in large part, because of the exact way that institutions often attempt to mitigate it: through the infusion of resources. As institutions shift towards non-punitiveness, their staff increasingly help to connect constituents with goods and services in what is known as resource brokering. I advance the literature by revealing two primary mechanisms through which institutions’ increasingly central role as resource broker can also maintain inequality.

Recent Publications

Gleit, R.D. 2022. "Cops on Campus: The Racial Patterning of Police in Schools." Socius.

Johnson, A.L. and R.D. Gleit. 2021. “Teaching for the Future: Intentionally Building Competency with Statistical Software.” Teaching Sociology.  

Wood, N.I., Gleit, R.D., and Levine, D.L. 2021. “Culinary Nutrition Course Equips Future Physicians to Educate Patients on Healthy Diet." BMC Medical Education.

Reardon, S.F., Doss, C., Gagné, J., Gleit, R.D., Johnson, A., & Sosina, V. 2018. “A Portrait of Educational Outcomes in California.” A report for the Getting Down to Facts II Project. Stanford University and Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE).