Bourdieu's critical analysis of capital (BCAC) is a useful tool for unmasking how schools legitimate class structure and identifying the institutional, societal, and cultural forces that structure class reproduction and oppression. In this paper, we examine the ways educational researchers have constrained the critical application of Bourdieu's…

The incidence of drug-related deaths in Scotland has reached crisis proportions. Comparable only to the rust belt States in the US these figures point to the impact of the rapid scale of deindustrialisation and a global neoliberal economy, based on austerity, deepening class divisions and a return to a more naked form of capitalism. The question…

Various sociological perspectives have been applied to facilitate school choice research over the past two decades, as showcased in this "2020 Yearbook of Politics of Education Association." Among them, Pierre Bourdieu's concepts and theories stand out as a catalyst for the field's sociological development. My first objective in this…

Kappan editor Rafael Heller interviews Annette Lareau about her research into different experiences of childhood and family life. In her observations of families of different social classes, she learned that upper-middle-class families approach parenting as an act of "concerted cultivation" requiring ongoing attention, making them more…

What if the families of students most impacted by the opportunity gap somehow had the power to organize whatever activities they felt would best help their children succeed? That's the question that began Families with Power/Familias con Poder (FWP), a grassroots organization of low-income students and caregivers in Northampton, MA. Through…

The chairman of the drafting committee of the modern Indian Constitution, Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar, emphasized that education cultivates democracy in society, strengthens the roots of democracy, and brings about social transformation. The social transformation includes a way of life that will promote liberty, equality, and fraternity, which are Dr…

In July 1963, students from Queens College (QC) and a group of New York City teachers traveled to Prince Edward County (PEC), Virginia, to teach local black youth in Freedom Schools. The county had eliminated public education four years earlier to avoid a desegregation order. PEC Freedom Schools represented the first major effort to recruit an…

Research published in the special section documents how children's and adolescents' awareness and sensitivity to group-level exclusion, inequality of opportunity, and broader patterns of economic inequality in society influence and are associated with moral emotions, moral reasoning, and decisions about resource allocation. It also assesses the…

In this autoethnographic tale, I tell the story of my own family's experience with race, class, and language privilege. In particular, I focus on my children's experience with elementary schooling in the United States and Hungary. Their intercultural education experience vividly illuminates the socially and culturally constructed nature of race,…

There are large social class inequalities in educational achievement in the UK. This paper quantifies the contribution of one mechanism to the production of these inequalities: social class differences in school "effectiveness," where "effectiveness" refers to a school's impact on pupils' educational achievement (relative to…

The provision of 25% reservations in private schools under Right to Education Act (RTE) for children belonging to weaker sections and disadvantaged groups has garnered much debate among researchers as well as the common people in India. The overarching goal of such provision is to promote social inclusion that recognises the diversity of children…

Jessica Calarco explains in this article that students from different backgrounds tend to manage problems in contrasting ways that can have real consequences in the classroom. More specifically, Calarco observed children from middle-class families tended to actively seek help from their teachers, while children from working-class families…

Research on sexual practices among young South Africans has proliferated in light of the national imperatives to challenge the spread of HIV/AIDS, gender-based violence and unwanted early pregnancies. In this special issue of "Perspectives in Education" the authors builds on this research by examining how Life Orientation (LO) or Life…

The theme of the AMS 2014 Annual Conference is "Unity in Diversity," a concept that also describes the work of conference keynote speaker Andrew Solomon. Solomon is a writer and lecturer on psychology and politics; winner of the National Book Award; and an activist for LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender] rights, mental health,…

Cara Hoffman's work enacts George Orwell's imperative to "pay attention to the obvious" (an idea that several sympathetic characters repeat in her 2011 novel "So Much Pretty"), probing aspects of twenty-first century life in the United States that have become so accepted as to be unremarkable, such as epidemic levels of…