Are Networks Great Equalizers? Intergenerational Closure, Cultural Capital, and Capital Conversion in Elementary Schools

“Concerted cultivation” and unequal achievement in elementary school

Building from the classic Wisconsin model of status attainment, this study examines whether a specific style of parenting, concerted cultivation, and a close friend’s school-related attitudes and behaviors mediate the relationship between a family’s socioeconomic status and their child’s academic achievement in the United States. Using a recursive path model on nationally representative panel data of high school students (N = 10,350), the results confirm a direct association between socioeconomic status and concerted cultivation. In addition, concerted cultivation and close friends are shown to mediate the relationship between a family’s socioeconomic status and their child’s academic achievement.

This article provides new estimates of the causal effect of cultural capital on academic achievement. The author analyzes data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth–Children and Young Adults and uses a fixed effect design to address the problem of omitted variable bias, which has resulted in too optimistic results in previous research. After controlling for family and individual fixed effects, the author reports that (1) six indicators of cultural capital have mostly positive direct effects on children’s reading and math test scores, (2) the effect of cultural capital is smaller than previously reported, and (3) the effect of cultural capital varies in high and low socioeconomic status (SES) environments. Results mostly support cultural reproduction theory (cultural capital more important in high SES environments) for cultural capital indicators capturing familiarity with legitimate culture and mostly support cultural mobility theory (cultural capital more important in low SES environments) for indicators capturing “concerted cultivation.”

Concerted cultivation in early childhood and social inequalities in cognitive skills: Evidence from a German panel study

This study extends recent tests of Bourdieu’s theory of sports as cultural capital using data from the 1998 US National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) on adult Americans’ frequency and intensity of participation in 15 sports. Most of the previous tests of Bourdieu’s theory have been limited to general measures of sport participation, and have provided general support for the thesis that sports operate as cultural capital. The NHIS data allow inferences about the principles of distinction dividing social classes in the field of participatory sports. More extensive tests of the ‘prole’ and ‘omnivore’ theses are also presented. The analysis shows that many sports are highly class exclusive and that the principles of exclusion fit closely with Bourdieu’s theory of the relational structure of the field of adult participation sports. The dominant classes use strenuous aerobic sports, moderate levels of weight-training, and competitive sports that restrict direct physical domination and/or are aerobically strenuous, in order to draw boundaries between themselves and the middle and lower classes. Competitiveness and demonstrating the ‘will to win’ within ‘civilized’ constraints on physical domination appear to be an important secondary principle of distinction. The evidence also supports a gendered ‘ascetic vs luxury’ divide between the culturally and economically weighted fractions of the dominant class. There is strong support for the cultural omnivore thesis, but the ‘prole’ thesis is not supported. These finding are also congruent with both Lareau’s description of the upper middle class cultural logic of ‘concerted cultivation’ and Lamont’s findings with regard to upper-middle-class boundary-making around ‘self-actualization’ and ‘moral character’.

Recognising the embedded child in child protection: Children’s participation, inequalities and cultural capital

Children’s development is a paramount concern of families and is also deeply influenced by them. Chapter 6, therefore, looks at child development and education in the context of family, beginning by first examining the form and function of families. As a ‘unity of interacting personalities’, a family enculturates children and needs to be supported towards this. Children’s education begins at home and most families prepare children to enter school, to varying degrees, and also support them at home as they begin school. The socio-economic status (SES) of the family affects the kind of educational service they are able to access for their children. It is also important for the school to respond and adapt to the family background of the students, especially by establishing community linkages, partnering with the families and foregrounding the funds of knowledge that children bring with them. Middle-class families not only exercise greater educational choice but also engage intensely with their children’s education, leading to a churning in the ‘educational market’. They seek to advantage their children through cultural capital enhanced by the ‘concerted cultivation’ they practice, which does indeed reflect in higher educational outcomes. Middle-class parenting styles become the gold standard; in comparison, other groups and cultures are unjustly viewed as lacking child-rearing skills. Parental anxieties and stress naturally affect children too. A supportive relationship that builds on children’s agency and their growing capabilities can help parents ensure children’s cognitive and social-emotional development at home.

The authors used the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999, to test ideas from Lareau’s qualitative study of social class differences in parenting. Consistent with Lareau, a confirmatory factor analysis supported the general concerted cultivation construct—a parenting strategy that subsumes parents’ school engagement, children’s participation in extracurricular activities, and the amount of educational materials in the home. The authors also found that socioeconomic status (SES) was the major correlate of parents’ use of concerted cultivation. Contrary to Lareau, however, the authors found that racial/ethnic differences in concerted cultivation are moderately strong, even with SES controlled. Finally, this study identified a variety of other family characteristics that are related to concerted cultivation, net of SES. The findings suggest the utility of combining qualitative and quantitative approaches to understand the intergenerational transmission of social status.

On Pierre Bourdieu<i>Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture.</i>Pierre Bourdieu , Jean-Claude Passeron , Richard Nice<i>Outline of a Theory of Practice.</i>Pierre Bourdieu , Richard Nice

RESEARCH HAS FOUND THAT the cognitive and developmental foundations laid down in the first two to three years of a child's life are very significant in determining future educational outcomes and life chances. These first few years, when most children spend the majority of their time at home, usually with their mothers, are vital in determining whether or not a child will be ‘school-ready’ when it is time for them to make the transition to formal schooling. The relationships between socioeconomic disadvantage, parenting practices, ‘school-readiness’ and future educational outcomes for children has been well researched. Understanding the factors that influence these relationships, particularly the role played by the mother's perceptions, attitudes and beliefs, is an area where further study will be of benefit. Bourdieu's (1984) theories linking ‘habitus’ to the reproduction of class and disadvantage through education provides the framework for this study, informed by Annette Lareau's (2003) work detailing two distinct class-based parenting styles, ‘concerted cultivation’ and ‘accomplishment of natural growth’. The research informing this paper employed qualitative interviews with five mothers living in regional Australia to gain some insights into their attitudes and practices in preparing their children for the important early life transition to school. The findings highlight the important role of a mother's own life experiences and socioeconomic status in determining these attitudes and practices and indicate a need for further study to understand how this impacts on children's school-readiness and future life course.

This qualitative study employs a Bourdieusian framework to explore how urban middle-class parents in Pakistan support their daughters’ education while transmitting cultural capital. Parents emphasize talim-o-tarbiyat, referring to education and nurturing. I argue that, owing to the availability of educational resources and the recognition of the cultural capital conferred by Western qualifications, middle-class, educated urban parents choose Western education as talim. Additionally, Tarbiyat motivates their aspirations for their daughter’s education with specific cognitive references, notably Ashraaf values. Through boundary work and concerted cultivation, they reproduce cultural capital, influencing career choices and networks. Nevertheless, educated working women, experiencing a transformation of their habitus, foster new cognitive and social structures for themselves and their daughters. The study identifies desirable cultural capital, suggesting future research on exploring the conversion strategies of educated women’s capital by considering diverse sociocultural factors that intersect with gender dynamics within both private and public spheres.

This article reexamines the conjecture of James S. Coleman that intergenerational social closure promotes student achievement in high schools, analyzing the best national data on academic achievement and social networks: the 2002 and 2004 waves of the Education Longitudinal Study. The results show that within the Catholic school sector, schools that are characterized by dense parental networks have substantially higher average student achievement. This association can be reduced but not eliminated by conditioning on available measures of student network structure and standard measures of family background. In contrast, in the public school sector, a similarly strong bivariate association between dense parental networks and student achievement can be attributed almost entirely to these basic conditioning variables. These results represent, at best, a mixed verdict for Coleman's predictions. Intergenerational closure in its currently observed form does not increase achievement in public schools, suggesting that parental monitoring of discipline does not outweigh some of the costs of parental closure. However, intergenerational closure may increase achievement in Catholic schools to a modest degree because Catholic schools are affiliated with religious communities that have appropriable norms.

A large, nationally representative database of American elementary school students was used to quantitatively assess the complex ways in which race intersects with social class, affecting parenting strategies that in turn produce various educational outcomes among children. The determinants and consequences of parental practices associated with middle‐class families – what Lareau terms ‘concerted cultivation’ – among White and African American students were examined. The findings reveal that cultural differences in child‐rearing occur along class, race, and gender boundaries.

Sociologists have investigated the importance of social capital for many outcomes, but the influence of various types of social capital—particularly intergenerational closure—on inequality in students' academic skills remains unclear. In this study, the authors draw on and extend theoretical perspectives rooted in Coleman and Bourdieu to assess the impact of both strong and weak ties on children's learning. Analyzing data on first graders from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K), the authors show that multiple types of social capital are distributed unequally by social class, and that these disparities in social capital partially mediate the relationship between social class and gains in math skills. Intergenerational closure, however, does not promote learning net of other factors. Supporting primarily Bourdieu's perspective on social capital, the authors conclude that weak ties in particular are critical in explaining class inequality in learning, even during the early years of a child's education.

Students of different socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds are sorted into different schools. While integrating schools seems an easy solution to enhance inter-group interaction, this is yet an empirical question as we know little about how networks structure along SES lines in school. We examine the tendency for friendship and parental networks in primary school to structure by SES. We furthermore explore the role of the local school context. To do so, we collected multiplex classroom network data among Dutch students in 68 classrooms (55 schools) in their final year of primary school (grade 6; age 11–12). We link these sociometric data to register data, and test our hypotheses using cross-sectional exponential random graph models and meta-analysis techniques. Findings show that the networks of primary school students and their parents display a tendency for same-SES over cross-SES ties, net of opportunity structures. We do not find evidence for SES differences in the strength of SES homophily. Descriptive analyses show SES disparities in the extent to which parents have ties with the parents of their children’s friends (i.e., intergenerational closure), but these disparities disappear when controlling for other tie-generating mechanisms using ERGMs.