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Abstract:
Research consistently documents a strong, positive relationship between socio-economic status and academic achievement. Annette Lareau (2003) argues that parents' child-rearing practices have a profound effect on academic and later occupational success for children, even holding constant gender, race and school effects. In Unequal Childhoods, Lareau uses qualitative research to illustrate how a middle-class form of parenting she terms 'concerted cultivation' transmits cultural advantages to middle-class children, providing them vital cultural capital needed to effectively negotiate inside the educational system. Using the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS), the current study quantitatively tests the theoretical validity of concerted cultivation. Results show that concerted cultivation significantly predicts both student GPA and standardized test scores, with parent and student habitus, in the form of expectations, playing the largest roles.
Keywords: cultural capital; parenting; education; social class; inequality; academic achievement
Research consistently documents a strong, positive relationship between socio-economic status and academic achievement, students who come from upper income homes have higher academic achievement scores than do those who come from lower income homes across all ethnicities (Bowles & Gintis, 2003; Blair & Madamba, 1999; Entwisle et al., 2005). While explanations for the tenacity of this relationship have traditionally focused on the institutional structure of schools and school funding (Kozol, 1991) or home life of the child (Coleman, 1987), more recent work has begun to look at the ways in which these two institutions - family and education - align to produce and reproduce social inequality (Diamond & Gomez, 2004; Lucas, 200 1 ; Morris, 2005). Specifically, the work of Annette Lareau (2003; 2000) draws on Bourdieu's ( 1 986) notion of cultural capital to illustrate how social advantages are accrued to children whose parents share the same cultural repertoire about how children should be raised as the professionals who operate the educational system. Lareau (2003) argues that middle class parents, regardless of race, practice a form of parenting she terms "concerted cultivation," whereas working class and lower class parents practice the "accomplishment of natural growth." In the end, she argues that because concerted cultivation is culturally aligned with the educational system and its personnel, students whose parents practice this form of parenting are at a distinct advantage in that they are provided the necessary cultural capital to...