However, when including effects of the school in our model the sexual minority
variable loses significance and its predictive power increases by nearly 3.5 percentage
points. It appears that a sense of belonging and investment in school explains much of
the discrepancy in aspirations between sexual minority and heterosexual youth. The full
model suggests that when considering demographic, family, school and self-image
measures sexual minority youth remain 16.5 percent less likely to aspire to a four-year
degree than their rural peers.
Conclusions
Practitioners, theorists and researchers can all take from this work. These
findings confirm the results of earlier studies suggesting that sexual minority youth have
depressed academic outcomes relative to their straight peers and have profound policy
implications for teachers, counselors and social workers. Equipped with the knowledge
that sexual minority students display low academic aspirations, and that positive feelings
toward the school and its agents can alleviate the problem, school-based support staff in
rural communities can now design targeted programs like those described by D’Augelli
(2006), Stapel (2006) and Phillips et al. (1997) for this unique and vulnerable population.
Community partnerships with cooperative extension youth development agents may too
prove fruitful. These actions are particularly important in this era of standards-based,
high-stakes academic expectations for all schools and students.
There are profound theoretical implications of this work, as well. Although our
findings can be read to support a social capital argument of social reproduction among
LGB individuals our variables are admittedly not optimal measures of network strength.
It is our hope that similar surveys will include even more measures of relationship quality
11
Convention