Cultural Resources and School Success: Gender, Ethnicity, and Poverty Groups within an Urban School District

Abstract

This paper tests a resources/social interaction model of gatekeeping by school teachers using data for seventhand eighth-grade students in a city school district. Where previous investigations of cultural capital have focused on the rewards accruing to highbrow music and arts activities, we examine the informal academic standards by which teachers reward more general skills, habits, and styles. The result is a recursive causal model including the following blocks of variables: (a) student and teacher background characteristics, (b) student basic skills, absenteeism, and teacher judgments of student work habits, disruptiveness, and appearance; (c) coursework mastery; and (d) course grades. This model fits the data quite well, and almost completely accounts for the course-grade differentials observed for gender, ethnicity, and poverty groups. The most important predictor variable is the teacher's judgment of student work habits, followed by cognitive performance on both basic skills and coursework mastery. The results suggest that the standard (Wisconsin) status attainment model be modified to include culturallsocial-interactional-based measures of individual and gatekeeper behaviors and perceptions.