socioeconomic status, ethnicity is not a strong determinant of childhood friendships, but becomes increasingly potent with age. By high school, ethnically mixed cliques are rarely observed. This pattern of social segregation is strongest between black students and all other students and most prevalent in schools where students are divided into academic tracks. This is because various factors disadvantage black children, affecting performance in some cases and adult decisions in others so that in many cases black children are disproportionately likely to be placed in lower tracks, regardless of intelligence or performance resulting in uneven distribution between tracks in the majority of American high schools. Researchers suggest that because close friends in adolescence "usually have similar attitudes toward school, similar educational aspirations, and similar school achievement levels", early tracking may both decrease exposure to peers of other racial and socioeconomic backgrounds and decrease perceived similarity with the majority of those peers Racial divisions are most acute in tracked schools but are fundamental to crowd and clique composition in almost all American schools, and thus cannot be attributed to, nor changed by, any one educational program. More encouragingly, however, longitudinal observations suggest that interventions in early childhood may have the potential to influence social segregation: the more schools foster close cross-racial friendships in childhood the less peer group segregation manifests. Religion A well-established factor in clique composition is religious background, affiliation, and participation. This is somewhat confounded by overlap with socioeconomic status, but also relates to behavioral correlates of religion and selection by both individual and their peers. Reputation determinants and effects Cliques reputation is often determined by their most noticeable behavioral characteristic that is shared among their members. The characteristic might be so salient that it could dominate the way that members of that clique are perceived and treated by other peers regardless of the individual differences that each member has. For example, a clique group could be perceived as athletic, but say an individual in that group is very smart and gets good grades in school. That individual would be treated based on their athletic characteristics rather than their intellectual abilities. When people are treated based on a single characteristic it changes their self-image, resulting in a change in who they are. This phenomenon is known as the looking glass self; individuals become more like the way they think they are perceived by others. So for the example where the