Education for Mobility or Status Reproduction?
Title
Education for Mobility or Status Reproduction?
Author
Lacy, Karyn
Research Area
Class, Status and Power
Topic
Social Stratification
Abstract
Everyone is familiar with the popular phrase, “education levels the playing field.” However, does public schooling really provide opportunities for everyone who is willing to work hard to succeed? This essay examines the scholarly debate that has emerged around this long‐standing maxim. At one end of the continuum, scholars draw on the experiences of white ethnic immigrants to make the claim that education is the ticket to upward mobility for students from poor families. However, critics point to the experiences of marginalized blacks, and increasingly, Latinos, to reject this claim. At the other end of the continuum, scholars depart from traditional debates about racial disparities per se, shifting their focus to an understudied disparity—the growing gap in achievement between middle‐class students and poor students. These scholars point to an important new trend in class inequality, one that has gained momentum in recent years, namely, the rising significance of the acquisition of cultural capital as a necessary prerequisite for upward mobility. Analysis of this trend is a promising step in the right direction for scholars concerned with helping disadvantaged students to climb out of poverty.