Since September 2020, a total of 206 local and state government entities across 43 states have adopted 301 measures, such as policies and resolutions, to prohibit teaching, curricula, and trainings about racism and critical race theory in K–12 education. Recent executive orders, including Executive Order No. 14190, have extended these measures at the federal level and originated from concerns that Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 seeded animosity and blame toward White youth for structural racism. These policies present challenges for culturally relevant education, which uses students’ customs and lived experiences to improve classroom instruction and foster their critical consciousness. This opposition to critical race theory and culturally relevant education underscores the need to review and synthesize existing research on how different forms of school-based racial/ethnic socialization affect adolescent development. We present an integrative framework describing the cognitive, biological, and psychosocial mechanisms linking school racial/ethnic socialization with promotive and resilient outcomes among adolescents irrespective of their own race/ethnicity. School racial/ethnic socialization facilitates adolescents’ identity development to understand and make meaning of their race/ethnicity, improves intergroup relationships, and supports their ongoing neurodevelopment that promotes executive functions. These interactions among mind, body, and context provide a comprehensive perspective on the multiple micro- and macropathways underlying the antecedents and consequences of school racial/ethnic socialization. This synthesis of multiple interrelated ecological processes provides concrete directions for future research and supports evidence-based arguments against educational policies that restrict racial/ethnic socialization in K–12 settings, as these restrictions may perpetuate existing racial/ethnic inequities in schools.

Historically, elite schools have selected students in ways that reproduce advantages for dominant groups and exclude groups deemed undesirable. The specific outgroup in question has changed over time, but the underlying logic used to exclude these groups is often related to disability. Yet, disability as a social category has received minimal attention in discussions of elite reproduction. In this article, we draw on qualitative data collected from elite independent pre-K–12 schools to show that disability is indeed a salient basis of selection into elite educational environments, one that begins at the earliest moments of educational sorting: admission to elite early childhood programs. Through interviews with admissions personnel, we show that elite independent schools explicitly structure their admissions processes to identify—and exclude—children who are perceived as having or being at risk of developing any type of disability, regardless of impairment type or support needs. We argue that admissions practices at elite independent schools (1) serve as a form of social closure intended to restrict enrollment to young children perceived as able-bodied and neurotypical, and (2) represent a case of essentializing merit, in which elite gatekeepers construct merit as an intrinsic, rather than achieved, property of individuals.