The economic segregation of U.S. schools undermines the academic performance of students, particularly students from low-income families who are often concentrated in high-poverty schools. Yet it also fuels the reproduction of inequality by harming their physical health. Integrating research on school effects with social psychological and ecological theories on how local contexts shape life course outcomes, we examined a conceptual model linking school poverty and adolescent students’ weight. Applying multilevel modeling techniques to the first wave of data (1994–1995) from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health; n = 18,924), the results revealed that individual students’ likelihood of being overweight increased as the concentration of students from low-income families in their schools increased, net of their own background characteristics. This linkage was connected to a key contextual factor: the exposure of students in high-poverty schools to other overweight students. This exposure may partly matter because of the lower prevalence of dieting norms in such schools, although future research should continue to examine potential mechanisms.

美国学校的经济隔离损害了学生的学习成绩，尤其是来自低收入家庭的学生往往集中在高贫困学校。然而，它也通过损害他们的身体健康来助长不平等的再现。我们将学校影响研究与当地环境如何塑造生命历程结果的社会心理学和生态学理论相结合，研究了一个将学校贫困与青少年学生体重联系起来的概念模型。将多层次建模技术应用于全国青少年到成人健康纵向研究的第一波数据（1994-1995）（Add Health；n= 18,924)，结果显示，扣除他们自身的背景特征后，随着学校中低收入家庭学生的集中度增加，个别学生超重的可能性增加。这种联系与一个关键的背景因素有关：高贫困学校的学生接触其他超重学生。这种暴露可能部分是因为这些学校节食规范的普及率较低，尽管未来的研究应该继续研究潜在的机制。