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What kind of child does well in school? The answer is hardly surprising: one who has respect for authority, an ability to get along with fellow students, a stable family, exposure to responsible adults and a feeling of hope. These days, in the U.S., such characteristics are more often found among middle- and upper-class children than among less-well-off students. What if there were one particular element in a child’s experience that could foster such characteristics in everyone, regardless of socioeconomic status?

For highly religious teens, being faithful involves more than praying often and attending church. It also entails being a good person and honoring God in all that you do.

“If you believe that God is watching you and evaluating whether you go to heaven, you’re going to try to be a conscientious, cooperative kid in all domains of your life,” said Ilana Horwitz, author of the new book, “God, Grades and Graduation: Religion’s Surprising Impact on Academic Success.”

I’m finding that one of the benefits of being retired (or, as I call myself “unretired,” because I’m a freelance writer and editor in retirement), is the free time I now have to go back to school and learn. It’s fun, good for my brain, offers a sense of purpose and keeps me busy.

Girls raised by Jewish parents are more likely to graduate college, according to a new academic sociology study published by the American Sociological Review.

The survey data reveal that girls with a Jewish upbringing have two distinct post-secondary patterns compared to girls with a non-Jewish upbringing, even after controlling for social origins: They are 23 percentage points more likely to graduate from college, and the colleges they graduate from are much more selective.

A new study shows that young women with a Jewish upbringing are 23 percentage points more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree than non-Jewish young women of similar socioeconomic status. Jewish women also attend more selective universities than women from other religions in the United States.

In her new book, “God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion’s Surprising Impact on Academic Success,” sociologist Ilana Horwitz examines the ways a religious upbringing shape the academic lives of teens. In one important finding, the subject of her recent op-ed in the New York Times, she found that working-class teenage boys raised in strongly religious homes were twice as likely to earn bachelor’s degrees than boys who were not.

If a Supreme Court justice, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and the secretary of the Treasury were not enough, Jewish girls can find plenty of other role models of professional success.

With the Supreme Court poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, college students in large swaths of the country are likely to lose access to abortion in their states. A draft of an opinion leaked earlier this month suggested that a majority of justices support the move to strike down the legal precedent that established abortion access as a constitutional right (along with Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 precedent that upheld Roe). Doing so would pave the way for roughly half of all states to outlaw the procedure.

Estimated 180,000 students – mostly low-income women – face disruption to academic careers as states allowed to forbid female healthcare

In the first part of her book God, Grades, and Graduation, Ilana Horwitz puts forward a simple argument: religious children do better at school than their nonreligious peers. Michal Leibowitz praises Horwitz’s “uncommonly good” research, which manages to disentangle religion from socioeconomic factors, and combines quantitative analysis with the qualitative data that come from numerous interviews. But Leibowitz is less convinced by Horwitz’s other conclusions:

Why do some young people thrive in school while others flounder? In her new book God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion’s Surprising Impact on Academic Success, Ilana Horwitz points to religion as one answer. Unlike previous studies, though, Horwitz is not examining whether a school is religious but whether the students are. For all the debate over the role of religion in the schools, Horwitz instead turns her attention to how religious belief and behavior outside of school can affect the success of students in school. Specifically, she draws on a wealth of data to make the case that working-class kids in particular are more likely to finish high school and attend college if they are “abiders”—that is, if they have strong religious beliefs and an active role in a religious community.

At points in the past half-century, many U.S. antisemitism experts thought this country could be aging out of it, that hostility and prejudice against Jews were fading in part because younger Americans held more accepting views than did older ones.