My dissertation reflects my broad interest in how schools impact both the individual and the collective.

INDIVIDUAL
How do unique episodes of exclusionary discipline accumulate over a K-12 educational career to impact a child’s likelihood of criminal legal contact in early adulthood?

The third chapter of my dissertation is a standalone project that bridges my prior graduate school work in criminology with the sociology of education field. Using the most recent wave of data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS), I calculate the various patterns of out-of-school suspensions (OSS) and in-school suspensions (ISS) students experience over the course of K-12. Drawing on poverty spell theory from social mobility literature, I offer the sociology of education field a novel approach to considering a student's history of ISS and OSS as disciplinary spells, or episodic trajectories of exclusionary discipline throughout elementary, middle, and high school. Using latent profile and sequence analyses, this paper offers a new lens for researchers and policymakers to better understand the transition to adulthood by highlighting the cumulative and heterogenous experiences of suspensions over an educational career. Additionally, this paper works to further understand these disciplinary spells through logistic regression analyses that identify the social, structural, and individual forces that relate to these pathways, and show how these spells are associated with the experience of police contact, arrest, or detainment in early adulthood. 

COLLECTIVE
How does school choice reconfigure neighborhood and school ties throughout a city, and what does this reality mean for the culture and operations of a traditional neighborhood school?

The idea for the core project of my dissertation originated from my own experience as a high school teacher and administrator in Philadelphia; in this two-hatted role, I understood - and had a seat at the table for - the political, financial, and philosophical limitations and opportunities of school leadership, while also feeling the impact of those decisions on my day-to-day classroom experiences. From patterns of differential 9th grade preparation, to persistent issues with West Philadelphia trolleys creating attendance issues for many students, I witnessed the particularly powerful impact place has on students and school operations. But our school was not a "neighborhood" school - we were an independent school that actively recruited students from across the Greater Philadelphia area, so in many ways we had an obligation to anticipate and respond to the place-based needs and challenges of our students from our inception. But in this modern era of robust school choice policy, what does it mean for a traditional public school - designed to serve a specific neighborhood of families - to serve many non-neighborhood families? This is the question at the heart of my dissertation.

I work to answer this question through the case of the School District of Philadelphia (SDP). SDP is one of the largest school districts in the county and has a long history of embracing school choice initiatives; since 2014, students have the option to apply online for a seat in another district school. In the 2024-2025 school year, more than half of all K-8 students enrolled in a school other than their assigned catchment school, though the distribution of in-catchment enrollment is unevenly distributed. Given the prevalence of catchment mobility in school enrollment, SDP is an ideal case through which to conduct a sequential mixed-methods study that examines neighborhood school enrollment patterns across a large urban district and how teachers and administrators function in schools with geographically dispersed enrollment.

In the first half of this study, I use multivariate regression analyses to identify neighborhood and school characteristics that predict a neighborhood’s out-of-catchment mobility and enrollment ties, or the connections formed between a catchment neighborhood and non-catchment schools. Early results find that neighborhood levels of disadvantage and violent crime, along with evaluative metrics and racialized perceptions of neighborhood schools, play important roles in encouraging local families to enroll in or opt out of their catchment school and determining how wide a net to cast in consideration of alternative school options. Then, in a novel contribution to the field, I explore this relationship between neighborhoods and schools through a neighborhood networks approach. I test whether the enrollment factors of proximate neighborhoods and schools influence a catchment neighborhood’s out-of-catchment mobility and the kinds of enrollment ties it forms. Generating, analyzing, and mapping enrollment ties and neighbor impacts on the number and strength of these ties shed light on how neighborhoods and traditional public schools are differentially impacted by school choice. This study contributes to both the inequality and urban sociology literatures by emphasizing how the city is shaped by school choice via the catchment neighborhood serving as a key actor in the policy implementation.

While these quantitative analyses are key to understanding the social and structural forces influencing the geographic dispersion of students in a school choice landscape, they do not explain how this dispersion influences the day-to-day operation of schools. To contribute to this knowledge gap, I am recruiting teachers, staff, and school leaders from four schools in SDP that serve primarily non-neighborhood families to participate in semi-structured in-depth interviews. The interviews uncover how geographic dispersion impacts the work of school personnel and the operational and cultural priorities of a school and whether there are differences in approach based on strength of the school’s enrollment ties. These findings offer new insight into the community-level ramifications of state and local education policy. The increasingly interconnected landscape of schools and neighborhoods may have important implications for the work of educators in urban districts and the overall student and family experiences of school and community.

Working Papers & Presentations

Dodderidge, Lillian. “Catchment Connections: Neighborhood Ties within a School Choice System.” Dissertation Chapter.
*Draft available upon request

Catchment Connections: Neighborhood Ties within a School Choice System

• Flash session, Population Association of America Annual Meeting (St. Louis, MO May 2026)
  *Poster portion of the session available to view here

• Paper presentation, Sociology of Education Association Annual Conference (Pacific Grove, CA February 2026)

• Paper presentation, RC28 Online Meeting on Educational Inequalities (Virtual January 2026)

Episodic Exclusionary Discipline in K-12 & Its Impact on Criminal Legal Contact in Young Adulthood

• Roundtable session, American Sociological Association Annual Meeting (New York, NY August 2026)