Cultural Capital and School Success: The Impact of Status Culture Participation on the Grades of U.S. High School Students

Abstract

Ethnographers and other students of interaction have documented the impact of status factors on students' success in school. Yet survey research data consistently show the absence of family background measure effects on high school grades. It is argued that conventional measures of family background fail to capture those cultural elements of status that make a difference in school interactions. Drawing on Weber's work on status groups and status cultures, and on Bourdieu's work on cultural capital, this paper reports the findings of an effort to assess the impact of one component of 'status culture participation-cultural capital-on one aspect of life chances-students' high school grades. A composite measure of cultural capital has a significant impact on grades, controlling for family background and measured ability. The pattern of relationships, however, differs strikingly by gender. It takes more than measured ability to do well in school. From Warner et al. (1944) and Hollingshead (1949) to Coleman (1961) and Cicourel and Kitsuse (1963), ethnographers have chronicled the impact of class on almost every aspect of the experience of American high school students. More recently, ethnomethodologists and constituent ethnographers have documented the impact of cultural styles on students' relationships with counselors (Erickson, 1975), test scores (Mehan, 1974), and classroom instruction (McDermott, 1977). Similarly, recent work in the status attainment tradition finds that measured intelligence explains no more than 15 to 30 percent of the variation in students' high school grades (Crouse et al., 1979; Sewell and Hauser, 1975). At the same time, however, measures of family socioeconomic status have been found to have a negligible impact on grades when