"How Schools Really Matter is impressively short and even more impressively readable: it’s an ideal text for anyone who’d rather not pretend to understand equations as they try to figure out what sociologists of education are up to. But most impressive are Downey’s findings: schools, he tells us, don’t actually matter as much as people seem to think they do."

American Journal of Sociology

"It's not often that a publication changes the way we think the world works. Communicated in remarkably clear prose, Downey's incisive empirically based analysis reveals that inequality increases significantly when children are out of, not while they are in, school. How School’s Really Matter is an eye-opener, as well as a call to action—that is, a more focused endeavor to reduce the large disparities in children’s social and physical environments, including those of their early childhood."

William Julius Wilson, Harvard University

“Downey challenges the ideas that schools are engines of inequality and that schools can be effectively transformed to substantially reduce inequality. Having completed some of the most influential recent work on the topic, he shows that most of the inequalities we observe are rooted in skills children do and do not possess on their very first day of school., and the evidence suggests that For the most part, schools keep differences from getting bigger. Schools can only get you part of the way If you want to have to a more equal opportunity structure for kids. If equality of opportunity is your goal, then you have to invest more heavily in solutions outside rather than inside of schools.”

Eric Grodsky, University of Wisconsin–Madison

“This book is a must-read for anyone interested in education equality and policy. How Schools Really Matter offers a much-needed corrective to the assumption that student achievement gaps are the product of woefully inadequate schools and teachers. Downey shows that schools compensate for out of school inequality much more than we give them credit for.“

Janice Aurini, University of Waterloo

“Downey’s book takes on the widely held belief that our public schools are failing our neediest children, most especially children of low-income background. Critics on the left invoke underfunded schools, underqualified and undermotivated teachers, and hyper-segregation; for those on the right, and some on the left, it is the opening for charter schools and vouchers.  Wrong, says Downey: our schools, on the whole, lift up poor children, not hold them back, implicating instead inequities experienced over the preschool years and in children’s home lives outside of school. Read this important book with an open mind. It could very well change how you—how we all—think about schools and inequality.”
 

Karl Alexander, co-editor of The Summer Slide: What We Know and Can Do About Summer Learning Loss

"Considers inequality in American schools, providing a reexamination of the traditional view that schools are an engine of inequality to help accurately identify when and why achievement gaps emerge. Addresses the large amount of time children spend outside of school and why this makes it difficult to understand the role of school in their lives."

Journal of Economic Literature