NBN Book of the Day Jose Eos Trinidad, "Subtle Webs: How Local Organizations Shape US Education" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Jan 15, 2026
Jose Eos Trinidad, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley and author of "Subtle Webs," dives deep into how local organizations influence U.S. education. He discusses the role of early warning indicators in predicting student dropouts and shares insights from his extensive research in cities like Chicago and Philadelphia. Trinidad contrasts different approaches to educational change, highlighting the benefits and risks posed by outside organizations. His findings challenge conventional views on policy-making and advocate for a more nuanced understanding of educational transformation.
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Pandemic Contacts Sparked The Research
- Jose Eos Trinidad studied outside-school organizations after contacting research and philanthropic groups during the pandemic.
- That access led him to investigate early warning indicator systems and the people who developed them.
Dropout Rates Became Predictable And Preventable
- High school dropout rates fell dramatically from the 2000s to 2024 in major cities.
- Early warning indicators helped identify ninth-grade signals that enabled timely interventions to raise graduation rates.
Longitudinal Mixed Methods Expose Hidden Actors
- The book uses nearly 100 interviews and over 3,000 pages of documents across 25 years.
- Combining oral history with archival data reveals the hidden, long-run development of educational infrastructures.
