Race, culture, and educational opportunity - CiteSeerX

446540

TRE0010.1177/1477878512446540AndersonTheory and Research in Education

2012

TRE

Article

Race, culture, and educational opportunity

Theory and Research in Education 0(0) 1–25 © The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1477878512446540 tre.sagepub.com

Elizabeth Anderson University of Michigan, USA

Abstract This article criticizes the view that, if cultural factors within the black community explain poor educational outcomes for blacks, then blacks should bear all of the disadvantages that follow from this. Educational outcomes are the joint, iterated product of schools’ responses to students’ and parents’ culturally conditioned conduct. Schools are not entitled to excessively burden such conduct even when it is less than educationally ideal. Cultural capital theory illuminates the ways schools may unjustly penalize the culturally conditioned conduct of blacks and the poor. However, it must be refined to take into account normative differences between arbitrary and educationally important forms of cultural capital. Differential impact analysis offers a useful tool for revealing when schools’ responses to students’ and parents’ conduct reflects unjust racial stigmatization and ethnocentric bias.

Keywords cultural capital, equality of educational opportunity, racial inequality, class inequality

1. Fair educational opportunities: the question of culture and disadvantage Racial disparities in educational achievement in the US are very large.1 Black children enter Kindergarten scoring 0.64 standard deviation below whites in standardized tests, a gap that grows to about 1 standard deviation for older children (Fryer and Levitt, 2004: 447). Various studies find that a typical black child who enters a given elementary grade with equivalent educational achievement to a white child will fall about 0.10 standard deviations behind the white child by the end of the year (Fryer et al., 2004: 448). Black students are twice as likely as their white peers to be held back a grade between K-8 (Planty et al., 2009), and nearly twice as likely to drop out of high school (Aud et al., 2011: 218 Table A-20–1). The black–white gap in college graduation rates grew from Corresponding author: Elizabeth Anderson, Department of Philosophy, University of Michigan, 2215 Angell Hall, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1003, USA Email: [email protected]

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Theory and Research in Education 0(0)

13% to 19% between 1975 and 2010 (Aud et al., 2011: 74). These disparities are large not only in comparative but in absolute terms. Overall educational attainment of AfricanAmericans is far below what would be needed for all to have a realistic chance of escaping poverty and securing stable, middle-class standing. How should we assess these disparities? In this article, I bracket disputes about whether the ultimate standard of justice in education should focus on ‘equality’ or on a high level of ‘adequacy’ (Anderson, 2004a; Anderson, 2007; Brighouse and Swift, 2009; Satz, 2007; Swift, 2003). The status quo fails both standards by a large margin. Because any normatively acceptable policy for achieving equality would have to achieve a high level of adequacy for all along the way, any feasible and normatively acceptable policies for making progress toward either goal are liable to largely coincide in the foreseeable future. There is therefore no urgency in settling the equality versus adequacy dispute. I shall refer to the just standard of educational provision as ‘fair opportunity’, leaving open whether fairness requires equality or adequacy. I shall refer to group-based injustices in the provision of opportunities as ‘disadvantages’, leaving open whether these are to be measured in comparative terms (as intergroup disparities) or as shortfalls from an absolute standard. I want to turn our attention instead to the ‘opportunity’ side of ‘fair opportunity’ and to its implicit contrast with ‘outcomes’. Nearly all theories of justice allow that some causes of disparate outcomes are justified or at least not unjust. The opportunity/outcome distinction aims to capture this idea. I thus want to focus on normative questions concerning the causes of observed racial achievement gaps or shortfalls. It is a commonplace of quantitative analyses in this field to divide the causes into factors attributable to schools (such as variations in curricular offerings and teacher quality) and those attributable to students or the home environment (such as time spent on homework and number of books in the home). Such divisions also appear to track normatively relevant distinctions between outcomes for which schools are responsible and outcomes for which students and their parents are responsible. Some causes of racial inequality in educational outcomes fall clearly on one or the other side of this line of responsibility. On the side of schools, it is widely acknowledged that direct racial discrimination – a single agent providing goods of unequal value to otherwise similar individual students simply on the basis of their race (phenotype tied to ancestry) or on racial stereotypes concerning the presumed likely merits or demerits of individuals with a particular phenotype tied to ancestry – violates fair opportunity.2 Some portion of the black–white gap in educational outcomes is due to direct discrimination in this sense. But that portion is unlikely to be large, because of the high degree of betweenschool racial segregation in the United States. Segregation creates conditions in which direct discrimination is relatively rare, because the agents proximately in charge of distributing particular benefits rarely encounter two similarly situated individuals of different races. Rather, different agents – different schools and districts – are assigned responsibility for providing educational goods to students of largely different races. If, due to other inequalities generated by racial segregation, these districts have access to unequal resources, then different districts will provide goods of unequal value to their students, and this resource inequality will track the racial identities of students, even though there is no single agent that is directly

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discriminating against otherwise similar students on the basis of their race. Segregation is a major discrimination-independent cause of racial disadvantages, besides also causing and multiplying the bad effects of discrimination (Anderson, 2010). Racial segregation of schools explains a substantial part of the black–white gap in educational achievement, in part due to the fact that predominantly black schools have access to lower-quality, less-experienced teachers (Hanushek and Rivkin, 2008). On the other side of the responsibility divide, some racial inequalities in educational attainment seem more directly attributable to voluntary choices of students and parental guidance. Among Asian-American men in Texas universities, 55.5% major in a STEM field (science, technology, engineering or mathematics), compared with only 37.6% of white men (Dickson, 2010: 112, Table 2). Given the history of education in the Texas, it is unlikely that the lower representation of white men in STEM fields compared with Asian-Americans is due to unjust practices perpetrated against white men by schools. The normative force of voluntary choice is much more salient in this case: STEM educational opportunities appear to be equally open to white and Asian-American men, but more of the latter are taking advantage of them.3 It is tempting, given the apparent clarity of such cases on either side of the divide, to suppose that the entire field of normative questions concerning justice in educational outcomes could be neatly parsed in this way. This is the standard presupposition behind the distinction between ‘opportunity’ and ‘outcome’ standards of distributive justice, with the common disavowal of outcome and embrace of an opportunity standard that seems to encapsulate an American consensus. On this view, schools must offer fair opportunities to students, but it is up to students to take advantage of these opportunities, and to their parents to encourage and prepare them to take them up. This neat picture is also presupposed by what I have dubbed ‘responsibility-catering luck egalitarianism’ (Dworkin, 1981; Rakowski, 1991). On this view, once inequalities in brute luck have been eliminated, any inequalities brought about by an individual’s voluntary choices are wholly the responsibility of the individual.4 This is the context in which discussions of cultural differences often figure in American public discourse on racial differences in educational outcomes. Ever since the landmark Coleman report on equality of educational opportunity (Coleman et al., 1966), quantitative analyses of group inequalities have consistently found that a substantial portion of differential educational outcomes is attributable to factors in the home or neighborhood environment. These factors are not reducible to inequalities in material resources available to families, but are often classified as ‘cultural’. For example, there are profound class differences in styles of linguistic communication between parents and their children. Annette Lareau (2003) finds that middle-class parents cultivate linguistic fluency in their children by talking to them frequently, encouraging them to ask questions, explain their feelings, articulate their interests, reason about problems, and discuss affairs of the world beyond their immediate experiences. Working-class and poor parents use language much more sparingly, and mostly for instrumental purposes, to get their children to do particular things, such as to clean up their rooms or get ready for school. In light of these observations, it is little wonder that middle-class children enter Kindergarten with a huge vocabulary advantage over their working-class and poor peers. One extensive observational study found that three-year-old children of professional

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parents had larger working vocabularies than the parents of children on welfare had (Risley and Hart, 1995). Such differences typically lead to different placements from the first days of school, setting the already advanced students on a higher and steeper learning trajectory than their disadvantaged peers. Popular explanations of the impressive academic success of certain subgroups of Asian-Americans, notably Chinese-Americans, also point to cultural factors in the home – to the ‘Tiger mothers’ who relentlessly demand that their children spend long hours devoted to homework and music lessons, accept nothing less than all As on report cards, cultivate the virtues of perseverance, patience, meticulousness, hard work, and academic ambition, and ban distractions from schoolwork such as playdates, sleepovers, and TV (Chua, 2011). On the darker side of cultural explanations of group differences in educational outcomes, we find conservative commentators embracing the theory that black students reject studiousness and educational ambition because they see this as ‘acting white’ (Christie, 2010; McWhorter, 2000; Thernstrom and Thernstrom, 1997: 383; Wax, 2008). In the context of the ‘opportunity’ frame of educational justice, such explanations, offered as an account of a supposedly sui generis intrinsic-value orientation of black youth to education, function to let schools off the hook for black–white educational disparities and place responsibility solely on the shoulders of blacks themselves. Such cultural explanations of black educational disadvantages express and reinforce ‘modern’ narratives of black stigmatization, which represent blacks not as biologically incapable but rather as willfully failing to take advantage of fair opportunities provided by mainstream institutions, while blaming others for their disadvantages and demanding undeserved handouts (Kinder and Sanders, 1996; McConahay, 1986). In view of such normative uses of cultural explanations of racial inequalities, it is no wonder that scholars and activists on the left have tended to stress structural explanations of inequality and avoid cultural explanations as ‘blaming the victim’. However, without denying the powerful influence of unequal structures of opportunity shaped by racial segregation, stigmatization, and discrimination, we must also acknowledge that such explanations of black disadvantages are incomplete. As William Julius Wilson (2009) has stressed, adequate accounts of black disadvantage must integrate structural and cultural explanations. This is not just for intellectual but for political reasons: any account of racial justice that ignores culture will be unable to gain any purchase on public discourse. My aim in this article is to advance our understanding of how to normatively assess explanations of racial disadvantage that include cultural causes. The next section of this article criticizes the idea that we can define what fair educational opportunities are, independently of considerations of how different groups are likely to respond to opportunities offered, which may be shaped by culture – that is, the habits, adaptive responses, and normative expectations of group members. In Section 3, I discuss explanations of group disadvantages in terms of ‘cultural capital’ and the normative conclusions that cultural capital theorists draw from such explanations. In Section 4, I consider normative critiques of cultural capital theories of group disadvantage in education. In Section 5, I propose that differential impact analysis in antidiscrimination law offers a useful guide for policy makers in cases where group-based disadvantages have cultural causes, and I offer a new account of the normative considerations that differential impact analysis tracks. On this account, differential impact analysis does not

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aim at uncovering covert or unconscious direct discrimination, or at equality of outcome (proportional representation) for different groups, or at providing equal chances for multicultural flourishing on a supposition of the equal worth of different cultures. Rather, it aims to block the influence of group stigmatization and ethnocentrism on policy responses to cultural differences.

2. Some problems with a culture-independent definition of fair opportunities Brian Barry has provided an apt description of the view of fair opportunities that I want to criticize. He summarizes his view as follows: the rules define a choice set, which is the same for everybody; within that choice set people pick a particular course of action by deciding what is best calculated to satisfy their underlying preferences for outcomes, given their beliefs about the way in which actions are connected to outcomes. From an egalitarian liberal standpoint, what matters are equal opportunities. If uniform rules create identical choice sets, then opportunities are equal. We may expect that people will make different choices from these identical choice sets, depending on their preferences for outcomes and their beliefs about the relation of actions to the satisfaction of their preferences. Some of these preferences and beliefs will be derived from aspects of a culture shared with others; some will be idiosyncratic. But this has no significance: either way it is irrelevant to any claims based on justice, since justice is guaranteed by equal opportunities. (Barry, 2001: 32)

Barry articulates this view as a critique of multiculturalist claims for special accommodations for cultural or religious minorities who find it more costly than the majority to obey certain rules. His examples of such rules – humane slaughter laws, laws requiring safety helmets in construction trades – make it clear that the justification for the rules that structure opportunities in one way or another makes no reference to the variable costs to different groups of complying with the rules, or their varying abilities to comply, due to their cultural differences. I do not contest Barry’s view in all domains. I think his view is exactly right in the case of humane slaughter laws, for example. Rather, I shall raise objections to this view in educational contexts. My first point is that the vast majority of public educational opportunities are offered to children – that is, to individuals who are not yet fully responsible for their actions and who are properly subject to paternalistic governance. It is hardly apt to tell children ‘Here are the rules which tell people what they are allowed to do. What they choose to do within those rules is up to them. But it has nothing to do with public policy’ (Barry, 2001: 32).5 A school system that merely offered educational opportunities to children but remained neutral as to whether they showed up for school, taking no steps to ensure that they regularly attend, or to engage their interest in learning, is surely failing in its duties. This observation underwrites to two distinct notions of holding people responsible for (the consequences of) their actions. In the libertarian/responsibility-catering luck egalitarian sense, this requires official neutrality over how they choose, combined with an insistence that individuals fully internalize the costs and benefits of their voluntary

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choices. This notion is obviously out of place with children. To hold children responsible for regularly attending school is rather to make them attend, punish them for truancy, require them to make up for lost days, praise and reward them for showing up every day, and so forth. It is, in other words, to teach them to behave responsibly – prudently and conscientiously – in this domain of action. This is an educational task, and hence a task that schools cannot disavow. Second, the opportunity/choice distinction misleadingly represents the normative focus of interest on whether a given choice was voluntary, rather than on the consequences institutions attach to this or that choice. This focus fits with the libertarian idea, appropriated by responsibility-catering luck egalitarians, that people have, as Herbert Spencer (1891: Part IV, §35) declared, a right to the consequences of their actions. But this distracts from where the fundamental normative work is being done, in the decisions institutional agents make to attach particular consequences to particular choices. Voluntary choice within an opportunity set that conditions certain outcomes on certain choices cannot justify decisions to structure the opportunity set in that way. Consider, for example, ‘zero tolerance’ school policies that prescribe suspensions for infractions of school rules. In Texas, such policies have led to the suspension of 83% of African-American male 7th–12th grade students, and nearly 75% of special education students (Fabelo et al., 2011: x–xi). Even if we suppose that the school rules prohibit conduct that ought to be prohibited, that the students committed the infraction voluntarily, without excuse, and with full awareness of the consequences, and that the suspensions were imposed on a nondiscriminatory basis, there is plenty of room to question such a punitive approach to infractions. Suspending children from school interrupts their education. It also likely inspires attitudes of distrust and alienation from school that undermines these children’s motivation to learn. Without compelling evidence that such draconian policies have positive rehabilitative effects on the children suspended, or are necessary to ensure the safety and positive learning environment of other students, they amount to little more than a continuation of Texas’ traditional policies of excluding disadvantaged children from access to education. I am not suggesting, in multiculturalist fashion, that the racial disparity in punishments should lead to race-based exemptions from otherwise generally applicable rules of conduct. It is rather that the consequences that schools attach to infractions of otherwise reasonable rules of conduct should be designed with reference to the likely educational impact on those who are liable to punishment, and that these impacts, in turn, should consider the reasons why different groups respond differently to the same punishments. Suppose, for example, that African-American students are more likely to inhabit a subculture in which ‘respect’ is in short supply, perceived acts of disrespect are regarded as provocations to fight, and failures to rise to such challenges are met with a permanent degradation of one’s status in the eyes of peers along with chronic susceptibility to bullying. It would not be surprising that the prospect of school suspension for fighting would have relatively little deterrent or rehabilitative value for students who face such costs from failing to fight. Instead of waiting for fights to happen, and suspending students after the fact, schools in such an environment should undertake pro-active measures to alter the cultural contexts of meaning-making that predictably lead to fighting.

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Third, the opportunity/choice distinction as applied to education misleadingly represents the process of generating educational outcomes as a simple two-stage game: the school provides a menu of options to which consequences are attached, and children/ parents choose the option that suits their culturally shaped preferences. In reality, the school process bears little resemblance to ordering at a restaurant, where the options and prices are easily comprehended, items are delivered simply on order, and their quality is easily and quickly assessed upon delivery. Instead, the generation of educational outcomes is a protracted, iterated process in which outcomes are the product of innumerable choices by schools, parents, and children, each responding in turn to the choices and conduct of the other actors over the course of 11–25 years. Neither the process nor the quality of outcomes is transparent to any but the most sophisticated and assertive parents. Seemingly small decisions early in the process – such as placing a child in a remedial reading group – can set her on a lower educational trajectory that is difficult to change and virtually guaranteed to lead to disadvantageous outcomes many years later. High placements early on generate cumulative and widening advantages. College-educated professional and managerial parents are vividly aware of these facts and work the system to ensure that their children are placed in higher tracks; poor and working-class parents are often in the dark about the long-term implications of initial placement decisions and lack the skills to effectively contest these decisions. When educational outcomes are the product of a protracted, iterated, and opaque process of school responses to parental and student responses to school policies, we need to ask even harder questions about what consequences schools are attaching to parent/ student responses to their own policies. I shall argue in the next section that it is unjust to tailor these consequences to cater to the typical responses of advantaged social groups. I shall argue in Section 5 that it is unjust to tailor these consequences to cater to some idealized notion of how parents and children ought to respond – even when that ideal, if followed, would maximize educational achievement. Schools must try to mitigate the effects of non-ideal responses to their own policies, especially when those responses reflect the material and cultural constraints arising from socioeconomic disadvantage. To take stock: the opportunity/outcome distinction is often deployed as a means to justify structures of opportunity that result in bad educational outcomes for disadvantaged groups. It is supposed that mainstream institutions provide fair opportunities, but the disadvantaged have, for voluntary cultural reasons, failed to take adequate advantage of them. The responsibility for this is laid exclusively on the shoulders of the disadvantaged. On this view, even if the disadvantages they suffer could be causally traced to racial or economic injustices of the past, the solutions to these disadvantages lie exclusively in reforms of conduct and culture internal to the communities of the disadvantaged – they are responsible for picking themselves up by their own bootstraps (Wax, 2008). My reply to this claim is that educational outcomes are the joint product of iterated, protracted interactions between educational institutions and the communities they serve. Schools are not entitled to attach whatever educational consequences they like to whatever culturally conditioned responses they find in those communities, even when those responses are less than educationally ideal. They should tailor their educational offerings to the likely responses of the members of the communities they serve, with the aim of making educational outcomes as good as possible given actual (or, in the ideal

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case, just) allocations of resources.6 This reply does not erase the opportunity/outcome distinction. It insists, however, that what counts as fair educational opportunities cannot be determined independently of culturally conditioned meanings and habits in the communities that schools serve, which determine the expected outcomes of offering those opportunities. The question then arises of how to model educational opportunities in terms of school/community interactional processes in ways that track normatively relevant considerations.

3. Cultural capital theories of educational outcomes Cultural capital theory offers a framework for understanding how the interplay of family with mainstream institutional cultures generates unequal outcomes that track boundaries of social identity. As originally theorized by sociologists Bourdieu and Passeron (1977), cultural capital consists in a set of skills, habits, or behavioral repertoires that are (a) monopolized by dominant classes, (b) established by them as the standards of performance in powerful institutions, and (c) used to allocate the goods that lead to or constitute high social status: admission to the best (most prestigious) schools and highest educational tracks; awards of high grades, fellowships, degrees and honors; hiring into entry-level jobs with a propitious promotional ladder; promotion to high-status positions. In their studies of French upper-class schooling, Bourdieu and Passeron identified familiarity with and the ability to display appreciation of French high culture – for example, the ability to aptly quote Racine, or to discuss Debussy, or show good taste in ordering fine wines – as critical markers of merit or qualification for high-status positions. Cultural capital theory is a theory about the reproduction of social inequality. It contributes several important ideas about how group-based inequality is reproduced over time. First, it rejects a purely materialist view of inequality, which reduces class inequality to differences in command of material wealth. Cultural capital is somewhat autonomous from financial capital. Although each kind of capital is ‘convertible’ or can be used to gain access to the other – college graduates display their cultural finesse to land jobs at elite law firms; wealthy parents pay for fancy private schools to educate their children in the classics – neither is reducible to the other. Mere command of money does not guarantee access to the most prestigious schools; one’s child must also pass an exam (on which knowledge of Racine is tested), or (in the US) impress an admissions interviewer, to get in. Second, cultural capital does not help people merely as a passive asset. It must be skillfully deployed in ways approved by institutional gatekeepers to gain access to the goods the institution can provide (Lareau and Horvat, 1999: 37–8). For example, it isn’t enough to deploy a high degree of intelligence in articulating a valid complaint to get institutions to respond to it. One must appeal to them in institutionally approved ways. A school may throw up a wall of resistance to black parents’ well-grounded, angry complaints that the curriculum neglects important black historical figures, because they deem it counterproductive to suggest that schools are racially biased. However, black parents might get their way by using subtler techniques that require insider knowledge of how these institutions work. Without dropping any hints that they suspect a school of practicing racial discrimination, they may make a point of frequently dropping by to see

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how their daughter is doing – thereby signaling to the school that they are parents who are deeply concerned and involved in their daughter’s education. This is a deployment of cultural capital that tends to generate positive responses from schools. Such institutional responses may be formally race-neutral: schools may equally resist angry complaints from white parents that the school is racially biased, and equally reward signals of parental concern and involvement, regardless of the race of the family. Nevertheless this institutional strategy yields higher levels of responsiveness to white parents’ than black parents’ claims, because black parents, having sound reason to distrust the schools given their racist histories, are more likely to express their claims in a distrustful, angry manner (Lareau and Horvat, 1999). Third, access to cultural capital must be restricted by the privileged classes, for once it becomes widespread it can no longer serve its selective, exclusionary function. Bourdieu and Passeron hypothesized that upper-class monopolization of cultural capital was possible because it was unconsciously and implicitly transmitted from parents to children in the course of family life, and thereby internalized by children as habitus – as such an easy and familiar way of conducting oneself that one doesn’t have to think about it. Much cultural capital is not explicitly taught in schools; and even the parts that are explicitly taught are not fully internalized by lower-class students who lack the prior familial training to feel at ease in high-status modes of conduct. Cultural capital may be embodied – in accents, sneers, a flourish in pouring wine, a flair in how one arranges one’s hair or greets a high-status stranger, a confident, elegant bearing of the body, free of humility or shame – in ways that are extraordinarily difficult to acquire once one’s family upbringing has trained one in a dissonant habitus. Even if a working-class child learns through explicit schooling and painstaking practice how to quote Racine, his attempts will be shot through with self-doubt and hesitation in worrying whether it is quite the right moment, or the right quote – and this will reveal him to be an awkward poseur. (Here cultural capital theory intersects with stereotype threat theory (Steele, 1997): anxieties about confirming group stereotypes of poor performance in a domain will depress performance in that domain.) Finally, cultural capital theory explains how group-based inequality can be reproduced in ways that appear to be perfectly legitimate. This is so for three reasons. (i) The institutions’ standards of response to the conduct of those who seek access to its benefits are publicly accepted as meritocratic, even though they merely reflect the power of dominant social groups to get their parochial, exclusive cultural norms adopted as standards of evaluation by the institution. (ii) These standards reproduce the exclusion of disadvantaged groups without anyone practicing illegitimate direct discrimination on the basis of race, class, or other identity markers that track lines of social stratification (Lamont and Lareau, 1988: 155). An elite university need not turn down the workingclass applicant because he is poor, but rather because he did not perform well in the interview (his responses did not match the high-class interviewer’s culturally normative expectations), or (at Oxford’s Merton College) because he did not know how to pass the port.7 (iii) Because the fit of individual habitus with institutional norms is often automatic and unconscious, experienced as a relaxed and natural rapport and response rather than as a conscious act of inclusion (to be contrasted with stiffening, resistance, or awkwardness toward those doing things the ‘wrong’ way), the parochial, ethnocentric basis of exclusion

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often escapes the notice of the players. The gatekeeper need not be thinking ‘we keep those types out of our organization’, but rather something more impressionistic and seemingly innocent: ‘he wouldn’t fit in here’. Cultural capital theory sometimes helps explain disparate outcomes that reproduce social stratification. Upper-class accents, dialects, and manners have long served as modes of exclusion (Elias, 1978; Orwell, 1937). In the US, cultural affinity has been documented as a hiring criterion by prestigious law and accounting firms: job interviews look for congruence of tastes in entertainment, sports, and recreation, which are differentiated by race and class (Rivera, 2009). Does cultural capital theory also help explain the reproduction of educational disadvantage by race and class in the US? This point is contested. Some researchers argue that large-scale quantitative tests have failed to confirm this hypothesis (Kingston, 2001; Tzanakis, 2011). However, various studies have adopted conflicting conceptions of cultural capital. Much research on cultural capital theory has simply imported French conceptions of cultural capital – primarily, engagement with high culture and fine arts – to the American scene. Americans do not have sharply class-differentiated aesthetic tastes as in France, and even the upper classes do not regard high-culture tastes, such as a preference for classical music, as very important. It is an empirical question whether anything counts as cultural capital in the US and, if so, what its content is (Lamont and Lareau, 1988). Furthermore, quantitative studies model cultural capital as an individual possession. Yet, theoretically, cultural capital refers to a relational process, an interplay between individuals’ active deployment of some cultural marker and an institution’s response to it (Lareau and Weininger, 2003). It is about the ‘micro-politics of exclusion’ (Lamont, and Lareau, 1988: 161), the ‘micro-interactional processes whereby individuals’ strategic use of knowledge, skills, and competence comes into contact with institutionalized standards of evaluation’, the deployment of skills that ‘are transmissible across generations, are subject to monopoly, and may yield advantages or “profits”’ (Lareau and Weininger, 2003: 569). Qualitative ethnographic studies are better suited to uncovering such micro-processes in the first instance, especially when the task is to discover what, if anything, functions as cultural capital in the US. The most impressive studies of this sort, examining the interaction of family culture and school norms, have been conducted by Annette Lareau and colleagues (Lareau, 2003; Lareau and Horvat, 1999). Lareau’s book-length study identified sharply class-differentiated styles of childrearing. Middle-class parents bring up their children in accordance with a model of ‘concerted cultivation’. This parenting style emphasizes time-intensive involvement of children in multiple extra-curricular adult-organized activities such as sports and music lessons, and sophisticated linguistic interactions between parents and children that train and encourage children to articulate their wants, reason with others, and negotiate terms of interaction favorable to their interests. Working-class and poor parents bring up their children in accordance with a model of ‘accomplishment of natural growth’. This parenting style emphasizes a sharp division between the activities and interests of adults and children. Children are granted great autonomy over the management of their time and relations with other children; adults rarely organize activities for them. Linguistic interaction between parents and children is sparing and instrumental. Disputes are more likely to be settled through yelling and physical discipline than negotiation and reasoning.

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These class differences in child-rearing styles have profoundly unequal consequences when families interact with schools to obtain services for their children. Schools are geared to respond favorably to middle-class styles and unfavorably to working-class styles. They view parents more favorably when they see them as deeply involved in cultivating their children’s skills. This gives such parents more leverage in negotiating favorable treatment of their children – placement in more advanced academic tracks, gifted programs, or, if their children are experiencing academic difficulties, delivery of special education services. Middle-class children, too, skilled in the arts of negotiation and brought up with a sense of entitlement, articulate their needs and demand that institutions tailor their services to their needs in ways that elicit favorable school responses. Middle-class parents also command the large vocabularies needed to understand professional assessments of their children’s academic achievements and challenges, and are able to respond in kind and feel confident speaking with teachers and school administrators. The neat fit between middle-class parenting styles and school cultures opens up favorable opportunities for children. By contrast, working-class and poor parents, facing already more resource-constrained and bureaucratically rigid school systems, feel at a loss in dealing with professionals. They often lack the vocabulary to understand what teachers and other professionals are saying to them, and lack the confidence to make their own judgments of their children’s needs and to demand that schools cater to them. They feel that such judgments are better made by professionals, wait for their assessments, and more often defer to their decisions. Teachers and principals view this deferential approach unfavorably, judge such parents as neglectful, and respond by neglecting the needs of students whose parents lack a pushy, articulate advocate.8 Nor are poor and working-class children in a good position to speak up for themselves in educational matters, lacking a large vocabulary, used to deferring to adults in their areas of expertise, and not being trained in the skills of articulating their needs and negotiation. Schools also judge poor and working-class parents’ physical modes of discipline harshly. Parents who use corporal punishment know they are walking a fine line and that schools may call upon state authorities to take away their children if they go too far. Such parents therefore fear and distrust school authorities; schools respond unfavorably to that distrust; and their actions further disadvantage poor and working-class children (Lareau, 2003: ch. 11). Lareau’s study identifies a particular culture – a behavioral repertoire – that functions as cultural capital in American educational settings: it is monopolized by an advantaged class and deployed by its members in interactions with schools that are geared to respond favorably to it, delivering educational advantages to those who display it, in ways that reproduce group inequality. Quantitative studies following Lareau’s qualitative research confirm her argument that schools reward the middle-class child-rearing style of ‘concerted cultivation’ and that this effect accounts for some of the impact of socioeconomic status on student outcomes (Bodovski and Farkas, 2008; Farkas et al., 1990). Let us assess this phenomenon in light of the normative argument made in the previous section, against definitions of fair opportunity that disregard the likely culturally conditioned responses of disadvantaged or outsider groups to the opportunities offered. A given school could argue, along the lines of Barry’s definition, that it is providing equal opportunities to all of its students, regardless of class.9 It will deliver educational

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advantages to children of parents who display and transmit school-approved cultural styles, and disadvantages (neglect and harsh treatment) to children of parents who display and transmit unapproved styles, and the same treatment to children of parents who display the same style, regardless of their social class or race. It is up to the parents to take advantage of the opportunities on offer by conducting themselves in approved ways and transmitting these modes of conduct to their children. If they fail to do so, they have only themselves to blame; it’s their dysfunctional culture, not the school system, that is at fault. There are several problems with this equal opportunity argument. It is hardly just to pile disadvantages on working-class and poor children because of their parents’ behavior. This injustice is magnified when these parents, owing to their limited linguistic skills and patterns of class deference required of them in employment contexts, are hardly able to respond in school-approved ways. It is further magnified when we consider that their inability to respond in school-approved ways is in part due to the deficient educations – limited training in language arts and reasoning – the school systems had delivered to them. Schools that appeal to this argument are simply reaching for an excuse to perpetuate the disadvantageous educations they had long delivered to poor and working-class parents. Instead of searching for ways to optimize the education of all children by adjusting school policies in light of class variations in parenting styles, schools tailor their policies to the needs of children brought up one way, to the disadvantage of others. This lack of adjustment is even more objectionable because it reproduces an already unjust class hierarchy, locking the less advantaged into their subordinate positions. Schools thereby deliver the opposite of what they promised. The opportunity/outcome dichotomy is supposed to offer genuine opportunities for upward mobility. This promise is betrayed when structures of opportunity are configured so as to reinforce the privileges of the already advantaged and throw up barriers to advancement against less advantaged classes.

4. A challenge to cultural capital theory: some cultures are better than others The case thus far made against the ways schools differentially reward the cultural styles of different socioeconomic classes is strong, but not unassailable. Paul Kingston (2001) has advanced the most important challenge to it. He argues that the critical power of cultural capital theory depends on a background assumption that schools’ decisions to favor certain cultural styles over others are morally arbitrary. This is why ‘French’ standards of cultural capital seem so vulnerable to critique (to Americans, at least): why favor the children who are familiar with classical music over those who have commanding knowledge of hip-hop or country music? This does seem arbitrary and unfairly classbiased. Yet American schools do not appear to be much geared to favor children endowed with highbrow cultural tastes – or, to the modest extent that they are, this is so in ways that facilitate class mobility rather than class reproduction, because American upper classes have not monopolized access to highbrow culture (Kingston, 2001: 91–2). Kingston argues that the cultural styles that US schools favor are directly relevant to educational attainment:

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My underlying plea is that the cultural practices that enhance school success should not be passed off as ‘conformity to dominant norms,’ with the implication that some other norms should be just as beneficial, or even that these norms are somehow illegitimate. To do so, even implicitly, diverts attention from an important message, especially for the disadvantaged: Some cultural practices tend to help everyone at school. They are no less worthwhile because of some presumed class linkage, nor are they incompatible with the maintenance of any vital subcultural differences. (Kingston, 2001: 91–2)

For this reason, the fact that schools favor certain cultural practices is not morally arbitrary, but instrumental to academic success in any educational program suited for modern, complex, post-industrial economies. At this point we must analyze the content of American cultural capital at a more finegrained level. Several distinct behaviors are at issue. Among parents of middle-class children, we observe (a) encouragement of adult-organized extracurricular pursuits by children; (b) encouragement in children of a sense of entitlement to have others tailor their practices to children’s individual needs; (c) demanding delivery of services tailor-made to their children’s needs; (d) cultivation of linguistic ability in their children; (e) encouraging studiousness and academic ambition in their children; (f) providing children with effective help with their homework, making sure they complete it and correct errors. Lareau has an effective reply to behaviors (a) and (b). She argues that, while middleclass parenting styles that include (a)–(b) deliver genuine benefits to their children, the parenting styles of the working class and poor deliver other benefits that should not be disparaged. Working-class and poor children, having much greater autonomy over how they spend their time and with whom, learn to handle themselves in unstructured situations, are never at a loss for ways to entertain themselves, are full of energy, rarely whine or complain, are more polite and obedient toward their parents, uncomplainingly and promptly completing requests and errands, and nicer to their siblings than their middle-class peers (Lareau, 2003: 67–8, 102–3, 153, 159). Middle-class children, raised with strong linguistic skills and a sense of personal entitlement, are whiny, resistant, argumentative with their parents over reasonable demands (to clean up their rooms, do household chores, etc.), rude and insulting toward their parents, mean to their siblings, dependent on adults to entertain them, frequently bored when left on their own, and exhausted from overscheduled lives (Lareau, 2003: 52–3, 127, 169–70, 242). To put the point bluntly, they are spoiled. There is no particular reason for schools to encourage or reward (a)–(b) over the working-class styles, nor any inherent connection between (a)–(b) and successful educational outcomes. Recall that, a few decades ago, middle-class parents were far less involved in scheduling their children’s lives with adult-supervised extracurricular activities, maintained stronger boundaries between adult and child activities, allowed their children great autonomy in deciding what to do with vast quantities of leisure time, and expected their children to do household chores without complaint.10 These practices did not appear to impair the educational success of middleclass children then, and there is no reason for schools to favor the currently fashionable middle-class parenting styles in these respects. Lareau’s argument also succeeds with respect to (c). While it is understandable that institutions grease the squeaky wheels, justice demands that schools do not resist the

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delivery of needed services to the less complaining. Fair opportunity demands that schools take extra steps to avoid neglecting those who face challenges in articulating their needs and demanding action. Difficulties arise, however, with respect to (d)–(f). These practices are directly instrumental to academic success and not merely arbitrary practices that schools have decided to favor by rewarding them with extra educational opportunities. Students who begin school with large vocabularies, and already knowing their letters and some sight words, are plainly in a better position to make greater strides in learning to read than those with weaker linguistic backgrounds. Nor is the strong empirical connection between academic achievement (grades and test scores) and studious habits such as showing up every day at school ready to learn, studying hard, completing homework on time, persevering with tasks, paying attention to the teacher, participating in class activities, and refraining from disruptive behavior purely artificial: deployment of such habits is causally connected to educational achievement apart from any rewards schools might attach to their display. It is no help to appeal to Bourdieu’s original conception of cultural capital, which refuses any distinction between technical competence (skills genuinely causally relevant to academic/job performance) and symbolic capital (arbitrary status signals that yield rewards without making a genuine contribution). Although Lareau and Weininger appear at times to side with Bourdieu on this point (Lareau and Weininger, 2003: 582), to do so would eviscerate the normative force of cultural capital theory. If one’s position is that nothing could possibly count as a genuine merit – that literacy, say, is no better than illiteracy – then one hardly needs empirical evidence to unmask the pretensions of society to be running a meritocracy. That would already be built in to one’s normative presupposition. Moreover, such a normative position would fail to account for the critical power we actually find in the empirical evidence Lareau uncovers about how schools allocate advantages and disadvantages. A better argument would critically examine how schools measure and reward studious behavior. Focus on reward first. There is strong evidence that teachers double count studiousness in awarding course grades: students whom teachers perceive as behaving more studiously get higher grades than other students who score equally well on tests of coursework mastery. While studiousness also correlates with tests of coursework mastery, its impact on grades is not exhausted by its impact on mastery. In fact, teachers’ evaluation of students’ work habits has a stronger effect on course grades than mastery of the material as measured by test scores (Farkas et al., 1990: 140). Given that teachers judge Asian-American students as having vastly better work habits than any other racial group (Farkas, et al., 1990: 132), this explains much of their very high academic achievement records, including most of their one-letter-grade GPA advantage over white students (Farkas, 2003: 551). Is this double-counting unfair? Should course grades reflect coursework mastery alone? Or are good work habits independently valuable? Farkas et al. take their study to confirm cultural capital theory. In other work, Farkas describes work habits as ‘noncognitive’ and notes that some have viewed their strong impact on earnings is an indictment of the American economic system’s claim to meritocracy (Farkas, 2003: 542). Yet, to the extent that grades are used as a signal for employers, it is not evident that

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teachers’ grading practices are unfair. It is not unreasonable for employers to independently value good work habits over and above the cognitive skills they engender. Showing up for work every day, perseverance, and consistency are probably more important to employers of high school graduates than mastery of algebra. However, to the extent that course grades are used to determine student placement in more or less advanced courses the following year, double counting is unfair. It places students on a permanently lower learning trajectory than warranted by their cognitive skills. If this is one of the ways that poor and minority children end up being offered inferior opportunities to learn, this iterated interaction of family with school culture confirms cultural capital theory’s critique of schools. A separate issue concerns biases in teachers’ assessments of student behavior. Teachers judge black students’ behavior to be worse than that of white students. However, there is some evidence that this disparity is due to a mismatch between students’ and teachers’ backgrounds. One study found that middle-class teachers perceive black students and poor/working-class students to be less mature than white or middle-class students, but that teachers with a low socioeconomic background do not share this perception. The discordance between teacher and student background appears to affect not only behavior judgments but course grades, a result consistent with Farkas’ research and with cultural capital theory more generally: teachers reward middle-class behavioral styles independent of the cognitive achievements they may engender (Alexander et al., 1987). Another study found a race-matching effect: white teachers judge black students’ behavior as worse than white students’ behavior, but black teachers do not share this judgment (Downey and Pirbesh, 2004). In such cases racial or socioeconomic mismatch mediates the impact of cultural capital on whatever educational opportunities, such as placement in more demanding classes, schools attach to teacher judgments of student behavior. There is no escaping the use of normative judgments in shaping social scientific concepts. If we want empirical inquiry to help us answer questions about the justice of our social arrangements, we must design our conceptual tools in response to our normative concerns (Anderson, 1995; Anderson, 2004b). With respect to cultural capital theory, this means that we must distinguish morally arbitrary from educationally valuable forms of cultural capital. It is unjust for schools to tie their provision of educational opportunities to arbitrary forms of cultural capital. But schools are not entitled to attach whatever rewards they like to educationally relevant deployments of cultural capital either. Double-counting studious behavior (counting it over and above its impact on coursework mastery and hence ability to handle more advanced work) in deciding what further educational opportunities students have access to reproduces class and racial stratification and is also unjust. This limited response is not sufficient to overcome the ways educationally relevant forms of cultural capital reproduce social inequality along lines of race and class.11 Cultural capital theory provides two avenues for criticizing the ways that cultural capital affects people’s socioeconomic prospects. One is to criticize the ways that society rewards cultural capital – by attaching rewards to normatively arbitrary cultural repertoires, or inappropriate rewards to normatively relevant cultural repertoires. The other is to criticize group monopolization of normatively relevant cultural repertoires. If certain behaviors are instrumental to success for sound (non-arbitrary) reasons, then

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schools should open up access to these cultural repertoires to students who lack them. This would transform what currently functions as a mechanism of social exclusion into a mechanism of social mobility. Against this proposal, conservative critics might complain that schools are not in a position to teach culture – at least not by means other than the reward system currently in place, which reproduces group inequality. If disadvantaged racial and class groups do not respond appropriately to such incentives, the blame for this resides in their own dysfunctional cultural values, which their communities alone are responsible for changing. Thus arises conservatives’ enthusiastic embrace of a debased form of oppositional culture theory12 to explain poor educational outcomes among blacks: on this theory, blacks reject academic ambition and achievement because they see this as ‘acting white’. There are many things one could say against this claim, not least that the empirical evidence for it, beyond the anecdotal, is weak. Several researchers have found no empirical support for the hypothesis that blacks reject academic achievement, or reject black peers who study hard and get good grades (Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey, 1998; Cook and Ludwig, 1998; Harris, 2006). Roland Fryer found that high-achieving black students do not lose popularity in black schools or private schools, but are less popular in racially mixed public schools (Fryer and Torelli, 2006). This is significant, because to the extent that students recruit their friends from students taking the same classes, the lower popularity of blacks in more academically demanding classes (which, in integrated schools, are overwhelmingly white) reflects white students’ rejection of high-achieving blacks (Fryer and Torelli, 2006: 21–2). Comparisons of high-achieving white and black students show that both experience some stigmatization from peers as ‘nerds’ or ‘geeks’, and that contingent factors within schools determine whether students see high achievement as a racial or a class phenomenon (Tyson et al., 2005). Ronald Ferguson’s nuanced study of social pressure and achievement in the racially integrated middle-class Shaker Heights school district found that the same proportion of blacks and whites reported peer pressure against studying hard. When black students criticized highachieving black peers, this was not due to disparagement of academic achievement but to perceptions that high-achieving blacks were rejecting association with their same-race peers in spending so much time studying and in majority white settings. High-achieving whites do not face the same conflict because they remain affiliated with same-race peers in taking advanced classes, which are overwhelmingly filled with white students (Ferguson, 2001). The ‘acting white’ hypothesis raises additional questions about how to understand culture. In the conservative critique, culture stands for shared values. On the conservative interpretation of ‘acting white’, whites (and Asians) value academic achievement; blacks (and perhaps Latinos and the poor) do not. This interpretation fits with Barry’s conception of equal opportunity. But it does not fit with substantial evidence in the studies cited above that blacks and whites do not differ in academic ambition or in how much they value academic achievement. In cultural capital theory, culture stands for habits, skills, strategies, or behavioral repertoires.13 Even if whites and blacks do not differ in academic ambition, they may differ in the skills (cultural and human capital) they can deploy to realize their aims. This

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fits with Ferguson’s (2001) argument that the black–white achievement gap in middleclass, racially integrated schools is due more to a skills than a values gap. It also suggests a more optimistic view of the ability of schools to overcome educational disadvantages. Values may seem hard for schools to change. But the purpose of schools is to impart skills. If the morally relevant forms of cultural capital are sound academic work skills and habits, these should be as teachable as anything in the formal curriculum. Indeed, cultural capital so understood has been shown to be teachable to disadvantaged students in a cost-effective way (Farkas, 1996).

5. Conclusion In light of the preceding discussion of the interaction of culture and educational opportunities, how are we to define a standard of fair educational opportunity? I have argued that we cannot define such a standard independent of expected educational outcomes for children of different race and class backgrounds. A purely formal definition of fair opportunity, in which the same choice sets are made available to all, and choices made on the basis of children’s and parents’ educational values or preferences, is inappropriate for education (Section 2). Schools cannot be neutral about the educational choices parents and students make. Nor is it proper for schools to adopt a simplistic incentives model of differential response to these choices, rewarding the educationally sound choices (studying hard, regular attendance, etc.) and penalizing the poor choices. Such a system reproduces class- and race-based educational inequality by setting already privileged groups on a permanently higher trajectory of educational opportunities than disadvantaged groups. By double-counting good behavior, such a system cheats cognitively able children of opportunities for higher achievement in which they could succeed. In neglecting to cultivate good forms of cultural capital in students who lack it, but in simply accepting cultural capital differences as given, schools reinforce monopoly privileges and betray their professed mission of promoting social mobility. It does no good to reply that if disadvantaged students only behaved in educationally ideal ways they would learn so much more. Once we understand culture as a set of behavioral repertoires rather than values or preferences that can be implemented at will, we must ask whether students have mastery over the repertoires in question. If not, schools must do what they can to teach those repertoires. Still, it is not clear what schools can achieve in this domain. Individual schools and pilot studies have shown some success. But it is not clear whether these results can be scaled to the whole country. The demands of justice must be tailored to the capacities of agents to fulfill the responsibilities justice assigns to them (Anderson, forthcoming). These capacities are as yet inadequately known. So what we need for educational policymaking is not another a priori ultimate standard of fair educational opportunity, but a method for determining when certain types of injustice are occurring. This form of nonideal inquiry is proper for our non-ideal world. Recall that educational outcomes are the iterated product of institutional responses to student and parent conduct, which is itself shaped in part by prior institutional responses. Educational policies set students on different educational trajectories depending on their responses to student and parent conduct. This article focuses on the justice of differential

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institutional responses to students’ and parents’ deployment of cultural capital, which ultimately results in different educational outcomes. Our question is: when are these institutional responses unjust, and, in particular, when do they set disadvantaged students on a lower educational trajectory than can be justified? To answer this question, I suggest that we borrow a leaf from discrimination law. In employment contexts, facially neutral business practices that have a substantial differential impact on access to the benefits of employment, depending on the race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or age of the employee are regarded as prima facie discriminatory. Businesses may rebut this charge by showing that the practice is justified by business necessity. Plaintiffs may override that defense by showing that an alternative business practice is available that serves business interests equally well but does not have such a grave differential impact. For our purposes we need not investigate the legal details of how such claims are established. I am more interested in understanding what normative concerns differential impact tests may be tracking, and considering how they arise in educational contexts. One use of differential impact analysis is to ferret out direct discrimination on forbidden grounds when ‘smoking gun’ evidence of discriminatory intent is lacking. When unequal outcomes so closely track race that there is no other plausible explanation of the pattern other than discriminatory intent, then such intent may be justly inferred even if the agent never professed discriminatory purposes or beliefs. Within individual schools, however, we know of innumerable causes other than direct discrimination for unequal outcomes. Differential impact analysis could also be seen as an implementation of a multiculturalist vision of equality of outcome. On this view, every social group is conceived as a cultural group that is a distinct subject of justice entitled to its proportionate share of goods, as an ethnic spoils system. As a normative ideal, I have argued against this idea elsewhere (Anderson, 2010: 60, 138). It is inapt in educational contexts in any event, since the goods in question are actual achievements, skills, or abilities, and people cannot be endowed with these goods by the unilateral action of schools. Furthermore, since certain forms of cultural capital are genuinely valuable in educational and employment contexts, and not merely arbitrary, it would be wrong for schools to undermine their primary educational mission by adopting a neutral stance toward valuable cultural capital. Differential impact analysis in educational contexts cannot be based on a premise of equal worth of all cultural repertoires. Rather, I suggest that differential impact analysis in educational contexts be seen as a tool for smoking out two injustices: group stigmatization and ethnocentrism in policy responses to cultural differences. Policy can express group stigma without engaging in direct discrimination. In the post-Civil Rights era, it characteristically takes the form of excessively harsh or exclusionary policy responses to behaviors and characteristics more commonly found in disadvantaged than privileged groups. Such policy responses express antipathy toward characteristics and behaviors publicly associated with disadvantaged groups, and function to reinforce group stigma, disadvantage and exclusion. A classic case is the 100-to-1 sentencing ratio for possession of crack as opposed to powder cocaine. Because blacks use crack more than whites, who prefer powder, this sentencing

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law puts blacks into prison for far longer terms than whites, reinforcing the public stigma of black criminality. Differential impact analysis would begin by noting the extraordinary disparate racial impact of the different sentences for what, on the face of it, appear to be equivalent crimes. To defend this sentencing policy, the state would need to produce a legitimate policy rationale for the difference. This is impossible, because, as the Supreme Court has recently noted, crack is obtained from powder, but the 100-to-1 sentence differential puts petty street users and dealers in prison for longer terms than the major powder dealers who supplied them.14 The history of the sentencing disparity points to stigmatizing images of black criminality – hysterical and subsequently discredited stories of black ‘crack babies’ growing up to become criminal ‘superpredators’ – deployed by the media and politicians to rally public support for an excessively punitive response. Differential impact analysis could equally well be used in educational contexts. Consider, for example, Texas’ extremely punitive suspension policy for infractions of school rules, which leads to enormous racial disparities in suspension rates. Granting that some discipline is warranted for infractions of legitimate school rules, differential impact analysis asks whether the harshness of the discipline serves any legitimate educational purposes, and whether less harsh measures could serve those purposes at least equally well. Given that other school districts have managed their discipline problems without such extreme measures, that highly punitive responses do not generate commensurate deterrent effects, and that suspensions disrupt and undermine students’ educations, Texas’ policy is unjust. It continues the stigmatizing ways of thinking that gave us Jim Crow policies of punitive exclusion and punishment to keep minorities subordinate. Not all racially unjust facially neutral policies reflect racial stigmatization. Some are products of ethnocentrism or in-group favoritism. All policies for promoting human welfare are designed with a background picture of the needs, interests, and characteristics of the people being served. Such pictures are often parochial, biased toward the needs, interests, and characteristics of advantaged groups, as if members of such groups were representative of humanity generally. Such bias need not be deliberate or conscious. Architects once designed public buildings with magnificent staircases leading to the top, paying careful attention to the dimensions of steps needed for ambulatory persons to climb them, while completely neglecting the access requirements of disabled people. They were not trying to exclude the disabled; they simply did not have their interests in mind. Differential impact analysis can detect ethnocentrism. When schools cater to arbitrary forms of cultural capital, their responses are tailored to fit the interests and cultural styles of the privileged, to the disadvantage of subordinate groups. Differential impact analysis would ask whether there is any educational justification for schools to specially favor the cultural styles of the privileged. Given that, in these cases, the cultural displays are arbitrary from the point of view of the basic mission of schools, no positive answer would be forthcoming. Matters are more challenging with respect to forms of cultural capital that are nonartificially instrumental to attaining valuable educational outcomes. There is a sound educational justification for schools to promote studious habits. The relevant question is whether promoting such habits by providing incentives to practice studiousness – in the form, say, of granting privileged access to a more advanced curriculum to the studious,

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above what would be warranted on the basis of coursework mastery – can be justified when this leads schools to place privileged and disadvantaged students on radically unequal educational trajectories. Is an alternative available that fulfills educational objectives as well or better than such a policy, while narrowing the gaps between privileged and disadvantaged groups? If so, then justice requires its implementation. One credible alternative would focus on actively teaching studious habits to students who lack them, rather than merely offering incentives for their display – a strategy that works only for those already prepared to practice them. Cultural capital theory provides important insights into the causes of and possible remedies for race- and class-based injustice in education. I conclude by fitting cultural capital theory into a larger-scale account of group inequality. Because it focuses on the ‘micro-politics of exclusion’, cultural capital theory considers how group-based inequality is reproduced in face-to-face transactions, rather than in larger structures that generate inequality by blocking transactions between those who have benefits to confer and disadvantaged groups seeking those benefits. In other work (Anderson, 2010), I have argued that group-based segregation is the linchpin of group inequality. The past several decades have witnessed multiple reform movements aimed at improving educational outcomes for the nation’s worst-performing schools – virtually all of which are sharply segregated by class and race, featuring high concentrations of disadvantaged students. Every few years, we witness major turnover in curricula, pedagogy, instructional technology, teaching staff, school principals, school district superintendents, school governance, and accountability and funding mechanisms at such schools. And every few years we see the latest reforms fall far short. While individual schools are doubtless capable of doing better, I question the relentless focus on individual schools and teachers as the fundamental units of public accountability – a focus that is encouraged by cultural capital theory’s stress on micro-processes. The deeper causes of school failure are not fundamentally due to the sorts of variables that individual schools can change unilaterally, but to the fact that larger structures of segregation already stack the deck against them. As long as we accept the pervasive segregation of schools by the relative advantage of their students, so as to create schools of concentrated disadvantage, remedies to educational injustices and failures located at the school level will be inadequate. The problem is not simply a matter of material resources. Schools with high concentrations of disadvantaged students lack all four forms of capital – financial, human, social, and cultural. Cultural capital is not something that is simply transmitted from better-endowed teachers to less-endowed students. Students learn from their peers. If their peers lack the cultural capital needed to get ahead in society, they will not be able to help each other move ahead. Once we face up to the larger structures of segregation that reproduce group inequality, we are also in a position to offer a more critical perspective on the content of cultural capital itself. In sociology, cultural capital is defined in terms of the behavioral repertoires individuals must deploy to gain access to socially conferred advantages. We have already seen the need to draw a distinction between what counts as cultural capital and what ought to count, in rejecting parochial class styles as just forms of cultural capital. It does not follow that what remains – habits of hard work, perseverance, conscientiousness, and so forth – exhausts the content of what cultural capital ought to be. Far too much has been

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written about cognitive and cultural deficiencies of disadvantaged groups, and not nearly enough about the cognitive and cultural deficiencies of groups that are privileged by segregation. Segregation makes the privileged insular, clubby, smug, and filled with an excessive sense of their own entitlement. It makes them ignorant of the less advantaged and their lives, neglectful of the often disastrous consequences their decisions wreak on them, uncomfortable interacting with them, and consequently unaccountable and irresponsible. In a democratic society, in which those occupying positions of responsibility and privilege are expected to serve the interests of people from all walks of life, and not simply the interests of a privileged class, these qualities entail that the privileged are incompetent. To enable them to competently engage in respectful intergroup communication with those less privileged than themselves requires the construction and transmission of new forms of cultural capital forged through cooperative interaction on terms of equality of members of all salient social groups in society (Anderson, 2007; Anderson, 2010: ch. 5). Schools must be comprehensively integrated to create and transmit this vital form of cultural capital. Acknowledgements I thank Annette Lareau for providing helpful advice and an advance copy of the new sections of the second edition of her book Unequal Childhoods. I also thank Derrick Darby for thorough comments on this article, as well as the other participants in ‘Race, Opportunity, and Education’, the Second Annual Conference in the Philosophy of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, 14–15 October 2011.

Notes 1. In this article I focus on the educational disadvantages faced by blacks. Such disadvantages cannot be understood apart from class disadvantages, since the racialization of blacks makes them disproportionately poor and concentrated in low-status jobs, conditions that, in the US, reproduce educational disadvantage across generations. 2. I explain why race-based affirmative action does not amount to objectionable racial discrimination in either of these senses, or in any other sense, in (Anderson, 2010: ch. 8). 3. This does not rule out the possibility that parents might be responsible for certain injustices in this case – perhaps, unduly pressuring Asian-American sons to major in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering or mathematics). This also does not rule out the possibility that diffuse social phenomena such as stereotype threat (Steele, 1997) are unjustly undermining white students’ self-confidence in fields dominated by Asian-Americans. 4. What I have called ‘desert-catering luck egalitarianism’ advances a more nuanced view, because it takes into account the varying difficulties individuals may have in choosing well, due to variations in their natural endowments of executive skill (Arneson, 1997) and in social environments that may support or discourage good choices (Roemer, 1994). For the distinction between ‘responsibility-catering’ and ‘desert-catering’ luck egalitarianism, see Anderson (2008). 5. Even Barry shrinks from applying this view to children when educational access is at stake. He concedes that private schools should be required to accede to a Sikh boy’s religiously prescribed practice of wearing a turban, notwithstanding its otherwise justified interest in requiring all students to wear the same school uniform. Children’s interests in educational

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6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

Theory and Research in Education 0(0) opportunities are too important to sacrifice to the relatively minor school interest in uniformity, and therefore trump the latter interest in contexts where the child would not attend the school at all if he could not wear a turban (Barry, 2001: 62). In practice, schools must operate within the constraints of the resources they are given, however unjust that allocation is. In this article, I bracket issues of unjust material constraints in order to focus on justice in school responses to varied culturally conditioned habits of members of disadvantaged groups. Thanks to Nathaniel Coleman (Merton College 2003) for this example. In one shocking case, Lareau (2003: 211) records a teacher complaining to the working-class mother of a child with serious learning disabilities that she has failed to badger the school into delivering the necessary educational services to her child. If the school knew what educational services the child needed, why did it refuse to deliver them in the absence of a vigorous push from the parent? This blame-shifting is all the more galling, considering that, in employment contexts, working-class people are expected to defer to managers and professionals and that schools have long been organized to deliver the sorts of educations that befit them for such deferential roles. Of course, given the realities of class segregation of schools and school districts, and the unequal material resources available to schools for middle-class versus working-class and poor children, the same cannot be said of the overall organization of schooling in America. Also, I do not suggest that Barry would endorse the argument that follows, only that his definition of equal opportunity licenses this argument. As I can testify from my own decidedly middle-class upbringing in the 1960s and 1970s. Lareau found that the form of cultural capital she designated as ‘concerted cultivation’ was monopolized by class, not race (Lareau, 2003: 240–1). Nevertheless, race affects the deployment of cultural capital in complex ways that may disadvantage blacks (Lareau and Horvat, 1999). Oppositional culture theory was originally advanced by Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu (1986). I explain why conservative appropriations of this theory are crudely reductionist in Anderson (2010: ch. 4). These two alternatives do not exhaust the range of meanings of culture in social scientific studies of disadvantage. For a wider survey, see Lamont and Small (2010). Kimbrough v. US, 552 US 85 (2007).

References Ainsworth-Darnell J and Downey D (1998) Assessing the oppositional culture explanation for racial/ethnic differences in school performance. American Sociological Review 63(4): 536–53. Alexander K, Entwisle D and Thompson M (1987) School performance, status relations, and the structure of sentiment: Bringing the teacher back in. American Sociological Review 52(5): 665–82. Anderson E (1995) Knowledge, human interests, and objectivity in feminist epistemology. Philosophical Topics 23: 27–58. Anderson E (2004a) Rethinking equality of opportunity: Comment on Adam Swift’s How Not to be a Hypocrite. Theory and Research in Education 2(2): 99–110. Anderson E (2004b) Uses of value judgments in science: A general argument, with lessons from a case study of feminist research on divorce. Hypatia 19(1): 1–24.

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Biographical note Elizabeth Anderson is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Rawls Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of Value in Ethics and Economics (Harvard University Press, 1993), The Imperative of Integration (Princeton University Press, 2010), and over 60 articles on moral and political philosophy, social and feminist epistemology, and the philosophy of the social sciences. Address: Department of Philosophy, University of Michigan, 435 South State Street, 2215 Angell Hall, Ann Arbor, Mchigan 48109-1003, USA. [email: [email protected]]