Social Class Privilege and Education

Education and the Reproduction of Social and Economic Inequalities

The workings of educational institutions help ensure the reproduction of social and economic inequalities by privileging those who are already privileged by virtue of educational and economic background, while denying key skills and academic outcomes to those who are less privileged to begin with.

A rich body of literature spans the ways that class and race stratification in families and educational institutions affect three sets of educationally related outcomes: academic achievement and attainment, college attendance patterns (postsecondary attendance, destinations, persistence, and graduation rates), and short- and long-term employment opportunities and income. Class- and race-based stratification, ultimately, privileges those already privileged, while denying the same opportunities to poor and working-class students. Literature that deals with familial and institutional stratification focuses on the following:

• Social and cultural capital embedded within families, and the extent to which such varying forms of capital are differentially valued by schools
• The class/raced nature of “official” school knowledge and the ways in which such knowledge works to benefit those already privileged
• Ability grouping in primary schools; forms of “pre-tracking” in middle schools; and formal academic tracking of students in secondary schools, including academic versus vocational tracks, and more complex forms of tracking such as regular, honors, and Advanced Placement, and International Baccalaureate classes and streams in secondary school
• High-stakes testing, which often determines one's initial and continued educational track and subsequent short- and long-term educational outcomes
• Differential class- and race-based access to academic knowledge in elementary school, which excludes many from academic placement and a range of educational opportunities in middle and secondary school
• Differential access to rigorous math and science courses in secondary school that are directly linked to college attendance patterns
• Dropout and push-out (encouraging a student to leave school) patterns that contribute to pipeline constriction
• Increased segregation and hyper-segregation resulting from the repeal of desegregation court orders

This robust and important body of research on the workings of K–12 institutions indicates that schools largely ensure that poor and working-class students, if they graduate from secondary school at all, are less well positioned than are their more privileged counterparts for college and university entrance, persistence, and graduation and, by extension, for relatively stable and high-paid positions in the increasingly competitive global economy.

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