Heterogeneous middle-class and disparate educational advantage: parental investment in their children’s schooling in Dehradun,India

Abstract

The heterogeneity of the contemporary Indian middle-class has been discussed widely. However, the effect of its internal differences on the distribution of educational resources needs to be examined systematically. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with parents in 53 middle-class families in Dehradun, India, this paper explores three aspects of the home-school relationship: how socioeconomic transformations shape parents’ aspirations for their children’s future, educational decisions parents make to realise those aspirations, and mothers’ engagement in their children’s everyday schooling. The tripartite analysis reveals that despite sharing common educational goals and strategies with the population in general, middle-class families in India use their class privilege to gain valuable educational resources. The paper argues that the discrepancy in the mobilisation of accumulated resources in the heterogeneous middle-class results in disparate educational advantages across families. It critiques the binary construction of social classes when explaining the processes of social reproduction in contemporary Indian society.     

‘We raised it with the Head’: the educational practices of minority ethnic,middle‐class families

This paper discusses findings from a small‐scale empirical exploration of the views, experiences and educational practices of middle‐class minority ethnic families in the United Kingdom. It draws on semi‐structured interviews conducted with 36 parents, pupils and ‘young professionals’. Analyses consider to what extent generic class resources, as identified by the US work of Lareau, are evident within the educational practices of British middle‐class, minority ethnic families. It is argued that generic class resources and practices were evident to the extent that parents expressed a desire for personalised education, felt comfortable voicing their opinions and concerns to schools, and were willing to climb the ladder of authority to get their voices heard. However, it is also argued that ‘race’ plays a significant and complicating role that calls for a qualification (but not a negation) of Lareau’s theorisation.     

Book reviews

Whilst there is now clearly an expectation upon parents to become more involved in schools and to take a greater part in their children's education, there is still little attempt to address the constraints upon achieving such aims. These constraints have been shown to include social class factors, gender relations, ethnicity and power relationships. This paper will take the analysis of some of these constraints further and, in particular, will focus on the views of working‐class parents on their relationships with, and role in relation to, their children's secondary school. The paper will explore the reasons for the orientation by working‐class parents which would seem to differ markedly from that of middle‐class parents. It will be shown that working‐class parents are committed to their children achieving educational success, and that they perceive their own role as supportive in a variety of ways. However, their position in relation to schools is to view the school as separate from their everyday social and cultural world and that the parent‐teacher role comprises a division of labour. It will be argued that teachers tend to adopt the same strategies for promoting parental involvement irrespective of class, parental needs, individual circumstances, and so on. Hence, because they take no account of differences, and because their strategies are constructed essentially from a logocentric position, then they serve to reinforce the parents’ perception of teachers as the professional ‘who knows best’: as the powerful knower which thus reinforces working‐class parents’ fatalistic view of schooling and their role as passive. The paper draws on data from a three‐year research project into the parents’ relationship with their children's secondary school. The data set which formed the basis of the analysis presented here comprises interviews with 58 parents from one of the case‐study schools which will be known as Acre Lane, and 15 of the school's teachers.     

Choosing the arts: the moral regulation of parents in the educational marketplace

The neoliberal turn in public education positions the parent as a consumer within an expanding educational marketplace. This shift is premised on the notion that the free market is best suited to promote equity. Critics of this claim highlight how a larger choice arena creates additional opportunities for privileged parents to mobilize their resources to further their child’s advantages. While extremely important, this framework of analysis ignores the role that educational choice plays in producing parent subjectivities. In this article, we explore how parents at one specialized arts high school construct notions of the ‘good/moral’ parent around the decision to ‘choose the arts,’ and how these categories work to reinforce dominant race, class, and gender hierarchies within the school. We hope to illuminate how educational choice is not solely about shaping the material and symbolic conditions of the child; it is about producing parent subjectivities as well.     

School choice as ‘motherwork’: valuing African‐American women’s educational advocacy and resistance

This study draws on in‐depth interview data to discuss the school choices and educational advocacy roles of 14 African‐American mothers. The narratives of the study’s participants, who have low‐income or working‐class status, show how race, class and gender factors influence their school choice‐making and their value of education. The author asserts that the mothers’ school choice‐making constitutes an important act of cultural resistance and empowerment called motherwork. Analysis of the study’s findings challenges conventional notions of parent involvement and counters prevalent stereotypes that portray African‐American mothers as uncaring. Attention is given to the inequities that the mothers face in the educational marketplace and how they seek agency. Educators are urged to consider how the mothers perceive themselves and construct their educational involvement roles in order to engage parents in empowering and meaningful ways.     

Family strategies to support and develop resilience in early childhood

Early childhood is an important time for the development of resilience. A recently completed study has followed three cohorts of resilient children and young people living in disadvantaged areas in Victoria, Australia, through different transitions in their educational careers. This paper focuses on the early childhood cohort, where we have followed children from kindergarten/preschool into primary school. Using data gathered primarily through interviews with parents (mothers in each case), this paper presents a qualitative naturalistic sub-study that used deductive thematic analysis to explore the different strategies used by families to support their child’s resilience. Our findings highlight that resilience was a salient concept for all of the mothers in the study and each mother articulated a range of strategies they used within the family to try and support their child’s development and resilience. These strategies were constrained by the settings in which the families lived.     

Gender,community and education: cultures of resistance in Socialist Sunday Schools and Black Supplementary Schools

This paper compares the ways in which gender was articulated and experienced through the construction of children’s education in two very different community-led educational initiatives in Britain: turn-of-the-century Socialist Sunday Schools and late-twentieth-century Black Supplementary Schools. Exploration of these historical examples of practice assist to challenge dominant representations of inactive working-class and Black parents, and provide content and form to the complex cultural processes involved in the development of counter-education. Whilst responding to markedly distinct social circumstances, a comparison of the experiences of teachers and students in both of these historical cases reveal powerful uses of gender, class and ‘race’ narratives in which to build and defend their respective school movements. Drawing on oral-history interviews and textual accounts of practice I examine the ways in which normative constructions of femininity and masculinity were both challenged and confirmed in the development of these alternative educational practices. In particular, both of these school movements blur and redefine the public/private distinction through the interpellation of their educational practice into the political field and the relationships they established between children’s education and the challenge to social, educational and economic inequality.     

Markets,schools and the convertibility of economic capital: the complex dynamics of class choice

While economic capital is not synonymous with cultural, social or symbolic capital in either its constitutional or organizational form, it nevertheless remains the more flexible and convertible form of capital. The convertibility of economic capital has particular resonance within ‘Celtic Tiger’ Ireland. The state’s reluctance to fully endorse an internal market between schools has resulted in middle‐class parents using their private wealth to create an educational market in the private sector to help secure the class futures of their children. Using data from recent studies of second‐level education in Ireland, and data compiled on the newly emerging ‘grind’ schools (private tuition centres), we outline how the availability of economic capital allows middle‐class parents to choose fee‐paying schooling or to opt out of the formal school sector entirely to employ market solutions to their class ambitions. The data also show that schools actively collude in the class project to their own survival advantage.     

Does gender matter for the intergenerational transmission of education? Evidence from rural China

Many studies have examined whether children’s gender influences their educational attainment. However, there are limited studies on both the impact of parents’ education on children’s education and the educational gender gap in rural China. This paper investigates the impact of parents’ education on their children’s education from a gender perspective in rural China using comprehensive rural household data. We find that the educational gender gap in rural China has been decreasing over the last several decades. Moreover, the educational gender gap decreases as parents’ education increases. Parents’ initial educational attainment plays an important role in narrowing the educational gender gap.     

How does mobility shape parental strategies – a case of the Israeli global middle class and their ‘immobile’ peers in Tel Aviv

We examined the parental strategies of global middle class (GMC) parents currently living in Israel, and compared these to their local middle class (LMC) peers. Both groups of parents were focused on securing advantages for their children through education choices and practices of cultivation. The central difference between these two groups of middle class parents was the ways in which ‘mobile-mindedness’ was conceived of, and in turn shaped the future aspirations they held for their children. A second critical finding was that this group of GMC actively fostered strong relations to belonging to their ‘home’ nation, challenging the suggestion of rootless nomads found in the literature. We argue that the GMCs in our sample think locally in each place they settle in order to secure the educational advantage, but act globally with respect to their children’s prospective futures. Meanwhile, the LMCs think globally in terms of cultivating forms of capital to secure advantages for their children, but do so with a locally-informed frame of reference for their imagined futures. These conceptual insights into the lived narratives of the GMC have implications for the ways we come to understand this emerging middle class fraction, and should shape further research in this area.     

Social justice,race and class in education in England: competing perspectives

‘Narrowing the gap’ and addressing low educational achievement of specific social class and ethnic groups has long been an expressed government concern. This paper considers the links between poverty, ethnicity and gender and school attainment and the interrelations of these factors using national data sets and other quantitative data. The limitations of single-theme analyses and their potentially misleading implications are explored. Related to this, the failures of social and educational policies to bring about greater equality are examined. Competing perspectives on low attainment and their positions are critiqued. The paper argues that ethnic and class discrimination stems from the same structural arrangements contrived for the advantage of more affluent sectors of society. Theoretical development is needed to bring together class, race and other discriminatory features and construct more sophisticated causal analyses that relate to the web of economic, status and power regimes and the negative processes of ‘racialisation’.     

Parent preferences and parent choices: the public–private decision about school choice

School choice survey data from the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, a large county‐wide school district, is analysed to examine the characteristics of parents who consider choosing private schools for their children and those who do not. We examine differences in background, including race, educational attainment and socioeconomic status, as well as differences in parent satisfaction with their child’s previous school, parent involvement in school, parents’ priorities in school choice, as well as parents’ social networks. After controlling for background characteristics, we find that parent satisfaction with their child’s previous school was not a predictor of considering a private school. Rather, parent involvement seems to be a more important indicator of whether or not a parent would consider sending their child to a private school. In this case, parents are not ‘pushed’ away from public schools, contrary to much public rhetoric that suggests private schools are somehow inherently ‘better’ than public schools and parents who are dissatisfied with their public schools will opt for private schools. Instead, these findings suggest a ‘pull’ towards private schools. Parents may perceive that parent involvement and parent communication are more easily facilitated and valued in private schools.     

Parental practices and educational achievement: social class,race, and habitus

A large, nationally representative database of American elementary school students was used to quantitatively assess the complex ways in which race intersects with social class, affecting parenting strategies that in turn produce various educational outcomes among children. The determinants and consequences of parental practices associated with middle‐class families – what Lareau terms ‘concerted cultivation’ – among White and African American students were examined. The findings reveal that cultural differences in child‐rearing occur along class, race, and gender boundaries.     

家长教育政策了解度与子女教育获得——基于课外补习的中介效应分析

家长教育政策了解度作为一项重要的教育素养,对完善家庭教育体系有着重要的意义。文章运用描述统计和结构方程的方法得出,目前家长教育政策了解度处在较低水平;家长教育政策了解度与子女教育获得呈显著正相关;课外补习在家长教育政策了解度与学生成绩间起中介作用;课外补习在中考政策了解度的中介效应高于高考政策和“双一流”政策。政府应从完善教育政策宣传路径,提升家长教育政策了解度;引导家长合理参与补习教育,制定低产阶层参与补习的帮扶机制;优化义务教育阶段资源配置,加快推动考试改革等方面提升家长教育政策认知度及教育获得感。     

Being strategic,being watchful,being determined: Black middle-class parents and schooling

This paper reports on qualitative data that focus on the educational strategies of middle-class parents of Black Caribbean heritage. Drawing on Bourdieu’s key concepts of habitus, capital and field, our focus is an investigation of the differences that are apparent between respondent parents in their levels of involvement with regard to schools. We conclude that, within a broadly similar paradigm of active involvement with and monitoring of schools, nuanced differences in parental strategising reflect whether academic achievement is given absolute priority within the home. This, in turn, reflects differential family habitus, and differential possession and activation of capitals.     

Social class and educational decision-making in a choice-driven education system: a mixed-methods study

Social class differences in educational decision-making form an important explanation for persisting educational inequalities, particularly in choice-driven systems with early tracking. Nevertheless, little is known about the process preceding these choices, especially when school and track choice are interrelated. Building on school choice literature, this study aims to explore how parents from different social backgrounds shape their decision-making process at the transition from primary to secondary education in Flanders (Belgium). To this end, we adopt an explanatory mixed-methods design. Quantitative findings from a parent survey conducted in 36 primary schools were complemented with 32 in-depth interviews with parents. Our findings show two parental profiles regarding educational decision-making, which can be traced back to differences in social and cultural capital. Although effective navigation of the complex field of educational decision-making proved to be strongly class related, parents’ educational and immigrant biographies led to specific approaches, transcending the middle class versus working class binary.     

Parents’ educational involvement: Types of resources and forms of involvement in four countries

Parents’ involvement in schooling and education is highly important for children’s results. Still, both levels of involvement and their effects vary according to social class. Previous research on educational reproduction within the family has, however, largely studied differences between the middle and the working class, and generally ignored differences in the composition of cultural and economic capital. In this article, we aim to fill this gap in the literature by separating cultural and economic resources and investigate their correlation with two kinds of parental involvement in four different European countries. Results show that parents with more cultural resources are more likely to be involved by having future educational expectations, and parents with more economic resources are more likely to be involved in their children’s current schooling (e.g. help with homework) than those with more cultural resources. The association between economic resources and involvement in educational expectations is however stronger in Spain and Iceland than in Belgium and Norway, suggesting an influence from system-level features as well as general economic trends.     

Educational markets in space: gamekeeping professionals across Australian communities

This paper argues that the logic of neoliberal choice policy is typically blind to considerations of space and place, but inevitably impacts on rural and remote locations in the way that middle-class professionals view the opportunities available in their local educational markets. The paper considers the value of middle-class professionals’ educational capitals in regional communities and their problematic distribution, given that class fraction’s particular investment in choice strategies to ensure their children’s future. It then profiles the educational market in six communities along a transect between a major regional centre and a remote ‘outback’ town, using publicly available data from the Australian Government’s My School website. Comparison of the local markets shows how educational outcomes are distributed across the local markets and how dimensions of ‘choice’ thin out over the transect. Interview data offer insights into how professional families in these localities engage selectively with these local educational markets or plan to transcend them. The discussion reflects on the growing importance of educational choices as a marker of place in the competition between localities to attract and retain professionals to staff vital human services in their communities.     

Enriching intimacy: the role of the emotional in the ‘resourcing’ of middle‐class children

This paper analyses qualitative interviews conducted with Norwegian middle‐class parents. It explores how a particular type of intimacy – an enriching intimacy – is produced as part of everyday parent–child interactions and considers the notion of the social self that spurs middle‐class parents to seek this very type of intimacy with their child. By so doing it adds to the growing field of research on middle‐class parents’ child‐rearing strategies and the role these strategies play in the ‘resourcing’ of middle‐class children. The relevance of the dimension of intimacy for studies on the parental effect on children’s school achievement is discussed.     

Parental involvement and the educational trajectories of youth in Russia

This paper studies the influence of parental involvement in the educational process on the educational achievements of Russian students and their educational strategies, such as studying in high school and successful admission to university. We argue that the patterns of parental involvement represent a link between the formal (school) and informal (family) educational institutions and can have a beneficial effect on academic performance and contribute to the choice of the educational pathway to higher education. Based on data from the longitudinal study ‘Trajectories in Education and Careers’, it was shown that the results of school state examinations are positively associated with the active participation of parents in school meetings, the employment of tutors (except for the Unified State Exam score in mathematics), and the provision of additional literature for the child. A negative relationship was found between homework control and student success. In general, the factor of ‘rational’ (not excessive) involvement is positively associated with educational achievement and educational choice, which may indicate the non-linear nature of the relationship. Parental involvement itself depends on the family characteristics, such as mother’s education, family income and the number of books at home. In addition, family has a positive impact on educational success and educational strategies, and high school characteristics are especially important for the results of the Unified State Exam and the university choice.