Early childhood cultural capital, parental habitus, and teachers’ perceptions

Poetics 34 (2006) 83–107 www.elsevier.com/locate/poetic

Early childhood cultural capital, parental habitus, and teachers’ perceptions Susan A. Dumais * Department of Sociology, Louisiana State University, 126 Stubbs Hall, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA Available online 20 October 2005

Abstract Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction posits that social class differences in cultural capital and habitus begin in early childhood and cumulate over time. While the theory maintains popularity in sociological research, no consistent empirical relationship between cultural capital and the reproduction of educational inequality has been established in American research. This study focuses on a population that has not been studied in quantitative research on cultural capital and habitus—children in the early years of elementary school. Data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study are used to show that children’s cultural activities have a positive effect on teachers’ evaluation of students’ language arts and mathematics skills, but only for low-socioeconomic status (SES) students. Only one aspect of parental habitus, expectations that the child will attain a bachelor’s degree, has a consistent positive effect on teachers’ evaluations. These findings suggest that the traditional definition of cultural capital may not be appropriate for young American children, and that habitus should be included in future studies of educational stratification. # 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is well known in American sociology of education for his theory of cultural capital and social reproduction, which states that higher status children are privileged in the educational system because their families possess * Tel.: +1 225 892 4224; fax: +1 225 578 5102. E-mail address: [email protected]. 0304-422X/$ – see front matter # 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.poetic.2005.09.003

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cultural knowledge and language skills that are valued by teachers. Cultural capital has been described by Lamont and Lareau (1988, p. 156) as ‘‘institutionalized, i.e., widely shared, high status cultural signals (attitudes, preferences, formal knowledge, behaviors, goods and credentials) used for social and cultural exclusion.’’ While cultural capital is perhaps the most familiar of Bourdieu’s concepts to sociologists of education, it is actually part of a larger model of social action, which includes habitus. Habitus is one’s orientation toward the world, and is largely based on one’s class position; Swartz (1997, p. 101) describes habitus as ‘‘a set of deeply internalized master dispositions that generate action.’’ As a set of dispositions based on social class, habitus reproduces inequality because people in privileged positions act in ways to secure privilege for their children, while those who are poor see only a limited set of opportunities for their future. For the past 20 years, sociologists have studied cultural capital and its effects on educational outcomes, both quantitatively, using large data sets with samples of high school students, and qualitatively, studying smaller groups of young children in more detail. A few studies have also begun to examine the notion of habitus. Findings from these studies have been mixed, and there has been no consistent operationalization of the main concepts, leading some to conclude that applying Bourdieu’s theories to the American educational system may not be a fruitful endeavor (Kingston, 2001). Nevertheless, Bourdieu’s ideas remain popular as a framework for understanding inequality in educational systems in the United States and around the world. Indeed, in 2004, two major journals, Poetics and British Journal of Sociology of Education, each devoted an issue to articles on cultural capital and Bourdieu’s other concepts. One of the key components of Bourdieu’s argument is that social class differences in cultural capital and habitus begin at birth, and increase over time: ‘‘. . . the initial accumulation of cultural capital, the precondition for the fast, easy accumulation of every kind of useful cultural capital, starts at the outset, without delay, without wasted time, only for the offspring of families endowed with strong cultural capital; in this case, the accumulation period covers the whole period of socialization’’ (Bourdieu, 1997, p. 49). Thus, the major effects of class differences in cultural capital and habitus should be apparent in children at a very young age, since they are part of the primary socialization experience. However, the existing quantitative research on cultural capital, habitus, and American education has focused on students in middle and high school, primarily due to the lack of large-scale data sets that study children of elementary school age. The research that does exist on young children’s cultural capital has been qualitative and has examined social class differences in parental involvement in children’s schooling, devoting little attention to the academic outcomes of the students themselves. This study serves as a complement both to the existing quantitative research on older children, and to the qualitative research that has focused on elementary-school children, by producing generalizable findings about the cultural activities of students in kindergarten and first grades and testing, for the first time, whether young children’s experiences differ by socioeconomic status (SES) and, in turn, whether these differences affect educational outcomes, as Bourdieu argued. In this paper, a recently released, nationally representative sample of kindergarten and first grade students and their parents, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, is analyzed to address how cultural capital and parental habitus affect teachers’ perceptions of students’ academic skills. It is found that cultural capital has

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limited effects on teachers’ perceptions of skill, and that these effects interact with SES in a manner opposite from what Bourdieu’s theory would predict. Additionally, only certain aspects of parental habitus have effects on teachers’ perceptions of skill.

2. Past research 2.1. Bourdieu’s theory of educational stratification Bourdieu named two components to inequality in the educational field: capital and habitus. While there are several forms of capital—economic, social, and symbolic—it is cultural capital that is the most valuable in the educational field (Bourdieu, 1997). Cultural capital exists in three forms: the embodied state, the objectified state, and the institutionalized state. The embodied state of cultural capital includes general cultural awareness, verbal skills, and a taste for what is considered ‘‘high art’’ (Swartz, 1997). Cultural capital in the objectified state refers to material objects, such as paintings or instruments, which require embodied cultural capital to be appreciated fully. Institutionalized cultural capital refers to educational credentials, such as degrees from prestigious universities. Embodied cultural capital is most relevant to the processes that occur in the educational system. Bourdieu argued that cultural capital is unequally distributed in society, with upper class families possessing large amounts, and working-class and poor families possessing none at all. It is transmitted in the home, beginning at birth, so that there are clear class differences in the possession of cultural capital by the time children reach school age. Social class inequality continues because the school system, which on the surface appears to be egalitarian, is actually a value-laden institution (Bourdieu, 1977). Instead of rewarding and promoting students only according to their ability, schools and teachers are biased in favor of students who possess cultural capital—that is, students from the upper classes. Teachers may place these students in higher ability groups and spend more individual time with them in the classroom. Additionally, children who have more cultural capital will communicate easily with teachers and master the course material quickly, and therefore be more likely to do well in school (Bourdieu, 1977). There are also social class differences in habitus (Bourdieu, 1984). Habitus, the internalization of the social structure, forms one’s worldview and serves as a guide throughout an individual’s life. Like cultural capital, the formation of habitus takes place during primary socialization (Swartz, 1997). Beginning in childhood, people begin to understand where they fit into society and what they can expect to achieve. This understanding is based on the social class into which one is born, and has a life-long effect on one’s attitudes, decisions, and actions. Habitus, like cultural capital, plays a role in the reproduction of social inequality. Children from lower SES backgrounds, who are surrounded by family members and adult neighbors who have not attained a post-secondary education, internalize the belief that college is not for them. These internalized beliefs result in actions (cutting class, not studying) that lead to self-fulfilling prophecies, reproducing the current class structure.

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Students from more privileged backgrounds have a habitus that matches with the values of the school and teachers. These students are therefore more comfortable interacting with teachers than lower SES students, and the teachers see these students as more motivated than their lower SES peers. In the early school years, both children’s and parents’ cultural capital and habitus influence school experiences. Working-class parents do not feel as comfortable in the school environment and have a harder time interacting with teachers than middle-class parents. Teachers may interpret parents’ working-class habitus as an indication that they are not as invested in their children’s schooling as middle-class parents. Bourdieu (1977) thus argued that the educational system, which appears to be meritocratic on the surface, actually perpetuates and exacerbates existing inequalities because it has a hidden value system that privileges individuals from higher status backgrounds and because lower status individuals may self-select themselves out of the educational hierarchy due to their habitus. A number of studies, in the United States and elsewhere, have attempted to confirm these assertions, with varying results. 2.2. The limitations of past empirical research Past empirical research has operationalized many different concepts as cultural capital, leading some critics to say that the term has become too conceptually unclear (Kingston, 2001; Lareau and Weininger, 2003). A second criticism is that research to date has not shown cultural capital as accounting for the relationship between socioeconomic background and academic success (Kingston, 2001). In past research, cultural capital has been operationalized as the following: students’ interest in the arts, participation in arts activities, and knowledge about art (based on a test); cultural lessons in subjects, such as sculpture and dance; attendance at arts events, such as concerts and lectures; parents’ attendance at arts events; extracurricular activities more broadly, such as participation in sports and clubs; parents’ encouragement of their children to do outside reading; parents’ own reading behavior; cultural trips; household educational resources, such as having books at home; students’ working hard in school; and father’s educational level. (DiMaggio, 1982; DiMaggio and Mohr, 1985; Aschaffenburg and Maas, 1997; Katsillis and Rubinson, 1990; Dumais, 2002; Kaufman and Gabler, 2004; Gabler and Kaufman, 2006; Kalmijn and Kraaykamp, 1996; De Graaf et al., 2000; Roscigno and AinsworthDarnell, 1999; Teachman, 1987; Farkas et al., 1990; Robinson and Garnier, 1985). Without a consistent operational definition of the cultural capital concept, it is difficult to form any general conclusions about its effects on educational outcomes. Nevertheless, the most consistently used measures of cultural capital in American research include attendance at arts events and participation in arts classes, which do seem to fit Bourdieu’s conception of cultural capital. Additionally, past quantitative research has not consistently determined that cultural capital results in social reproduction in the American educational system. Some research does not show evidence of any cultural capital effect (Katsillis and Rubinson, 1990), or shows cultural capital as benefiting students from lower SES origins (Kalmijn and Kraaykamp, 1996; De Graaf et al., 2000), both in the United States and worldwide. Kingston (2001) points to DiMaggio’s (1982) study, frequently cited as proof of the effect

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of cultural capital, as actually disproving Bourdieu’s theory. DiMaggio finds that cultural capital benefits the grades of lower SES males more than the grades of higher SES males, a trend that he refers to as the ‘‘cultural mobility’’ model because access to culture allows less privileged students to excel at school. Kingston (2001) argues that cultural capital is supposed to serve as a resource only for members of the upper classes, and therefore states that DiMaggio’s study lends no support to a cultural capital effect in America. However, several studies show cultural capital operating in the way that Bourdieu theorized. For example, DiMaggio (1982) found evidence of social reproduction when studying females: educational returns for females’ cultural capital increased with father’s education. Aschaffenburg and Maas (1997) and Roscigno and Ainsworth-Darnell (1999) also found that cultural capital provided more benefits for students from more privileged backgrounds. While the evidence may not be overwhelming, it also does not point to abandoning the cultural capital concept altogether. Perhaps developing better measures, as Kingston (2001) argues, would lead to more conclusive results—either for or against cultural capital. Unfortunately, quantitative data sets are often limited in the kinds of evaluation measures that show the micro-processes by which teachers evaluate cultural capital, converting it into academic rewards. A number of qualitative studies have started to point in that direction, providing a rich description of the roles that socioeconomic status and cultural capital play in the relationships between teachers, parents, and young students. The most thorough qualitative research to date on cultural resources in American elementary schools has been conducted by Lareau (1987, 1989, 2000, 2002, 2003) and Lareau and McNamara Horvat (1999). Lareau (1989) found that working-class parents lacked the resources (education, occupational status, and so forth) to feel comfortable confronting teachers; they also believed that school was a separate domain from home, and that teachers should be responsible for their children’s schooling. In contrast, upper middle class parents saw an interconnectedness between home and school, and were in constant contact with teachers. While both working-class and upper middle class parents wanted their children to do well in school, teachers believed that the working-class parents’ lack of involvement indicated that they did not care. As Lareau (1989, p. 8) concluded, ‘‘The standards of the school are not neutral; their requests for parental involvement may be laden with the cultural experiences of intellectual and economic elites.’’ Lareau and McNamara Horvat (1999) found that not only were there race and class differences in the amount of cultural capital that parents of elementary school students possessed, but that parents also varied in their skills at using the cultural capital to gain advantages in particular situations, such as their children being placed in higher ability groups. Lareau and McNamara Horvat (1999) described these differences in skills as differences in habitus. These studies by Lareau provide a detailed picture both of the structures in which educational inequalities persist (the school system and the values held by teachers), and the agency of individual actors (parents) who, based on their habitus, can activate their cultural capital in ways that are advantageous to their children’s educational outcomes. A few quantitative studies have also examined the idea of habitus (McClelland, 1990; Dumais, 2002); both of these studies focused on students in middle school or above, and

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operationalized habitus as students’ occupational aspirations, particularly whether or not they aspired to white-collar jobs. The existing literature presents a gap in our understanding of Bourdieu’s theory. Qualitative research, on the one hand, has shown that class differences in the interactions that children and parents have with the school system begin very early in the students’ educational careers, but has not rigorously examined the consequences that these differences have for student achievement. Furthermore, because the studies have been based on only one or two classrooms at a time, their findings are not generalizable. Quantitative research, on the other hand, has had mixed findings regarding the effects of cultural capital, and has focused on students in middle and high school. The availability of a nationally representative data set that follows children from the onset of their education provides a new opportunity for quantitative analyses of the early effects of cultural capital and habitus on students’ educational outcomes.

3. Analysis 3.1. Research questions The analyses address three main research questions. First, How does a child’s cultural capital affect the teacher’s evaluation of that child’s academic skills? Bourdieu (1977, p. 496) argued that teachers used cultural capital as a way of promoting students, while maintaining the appearance that students were being evaluated on their abilities: ‘‘By making social hierarchies and the reproduction of these hierarchies appear to be based upon the hierarchy of ‘gifts,’ merits, or skills established and ratified by its sanctions, or in a word, by converting social hierarchies into academic hierarchies, the educational system fulfills a function of legitimation . . .’’ Empirical research on adolescents has shown that even when students are of equal ability levels (based on achievement test scores), higher grades are given to those students who possess the cultural knowledge valued by many middle-class teachers (DiMaggio, 1982). Bourdieu’s theory as well as past empirical research thus implies that elementary school teachers will rate students who have cultural capital as more skilled than those who lack it. Second, How does parental habitus affect the teacher’s perception of a child’s academic skills? Teachers may have higher opinions of students whose parents are involved in and comfortable with the school environment, perceiving the students to have higher levels of skill than students whose parents do not have a school-oriented habitus. Third, How does socioeconomic status interact with cultural capital and habitus? Past research has unveiled two different types of interactions. In the first, Bourdieu’s model of social reproduction, students from higher SES backgrounds benefit more from their participation in cultural activities than students from lower SES backgrounds; for example, a high-SES student who takes music lessons may receive higher grades than a low-SES student who also takes music lessons, even when the two students are comparable academically. The second type of interaction is DiMaggio’s (1982) cultural mobility model, where lower SES students receive a greater academic benefit for their participation in cultural activities than students from higher SES backgrounds. Cultural activities thus

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serve as a tool to help the lower SES students fit in with their more privileged peers, and receive higher evaluations from their teachers.1 To date, results in the United States have been mixed, with some studies finding evidence for cultural reproduction and some finding evidence for cultural mobility. More often than not, however, support has been found for reproduction, and so it will be assumed that the reproduction relationship will also be found here. In sum, it is expected that higher levels of cultural capital and parental habitus will be associated with higher teacher ratings of students’ academic skills. Additionally, it is expected that socioeconomic status will interact with cultural capital and habitus in a way to support reproduction of the social class structure. 3.2. Data and sample Data are from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998– 1999 (ECLS-K). The ECLS-K, collected by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, follows a nationally representative cohort of children from kindergarten through fifth grade; currently, data from kindergarten, first grade, and third grade are available. The ECLS-K data have been used to explore a number of educational inequalities, including: SES and racial differences in school readiness (Farkas and Hibel, 2005); differences in learning loss over summer vacation (Downey et al., 2004); the racial gap in test scores (Reardon, 2003; Farkas, 2004); and ability grouping and its effects (Tach and Farkas, 2005). The specific data used in this study are from the ECLS-K Longitudinal Kindergarten— First Grade Public-Use Child File; this data file contains 17,212 cases. The children’s teachers, parents, and schools all provide information. Of the original schools selected, the response rate is 69%; within these schools, the response rate is 85% for parents, 90% for children’s assessments, and 91% for teachers.2 Data in these analyses are from the Fall, 1998 (kindergarten), Spring, 1999 (kindergarten), and Spring, 2000 (first grade) Questionnaires for Parents and Teachers, and from the direct child assessments. For these analyses, the sample is restricted to students in public schools. Public schools in the United States are open to all students and expected to operate in an egalitarian fashion, while private schools select their students. Public schools provide a more appropriate setting for testing Bourdieu’s theory, which states that schools purporting to be egalitarian are actually reproducing inequality. Whites, African-Americans, and Hispanics were all included in the sample; the sample sizes for 1

It is debatable whether the cultural mobility model is truly distinct from the cultural reproduction model; in both, students participate in the dominant culture to secure privileged positions in society. Still, Bourdieu might disagree with the cultural mobility model in principle, because he believed that even if a lower status individual acquired some cultural capital (either through participating in cultural activities, or through the schooling process itself), he or she would never be as natural at using it as someone from a more privileged background, who had been exposed to cultural capital from birth (Swartz, 1997). Teachers would thus be able to distinguish between the stilted cultural capital of lower SES students and the more natural cultural capital of the higher SES students, and reward the latter. 2 Taking the response rate for schools into account, the overall response rate is 59% for parents, 62% for the child assessments, and 63% for teachers.

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other racial and ethnic groups, such as Asians and Native Americans, were too small for meaningful analyses, and thus these groups were excluded from the analyses. The exclusion of these students, in addition to the exclusion of private school students and students whose records were missing data on any of the key variables, resulted in a final sample size of 7290. Because the ECLS-K are complex survey data, the survey commands in Stata were used in the analyses (svytab and svyreg). These commands take into account the strata, primary sampling units, and weights relevant to the data; in this case, the value used for strata was c124 pstr, the value used for the primary sampling unit was c124 ppsu, and the sampling weight was c124 pw0. A table of means and standard deviations for all the variables in the analyses is provided in the Appendix A; I briefly describe the key variables here. Grades are often used as the dependent variable in quantitative studies on cultural capital, and are a particularly good measure because they contain the subjectivity that Bourdieu would argue is influenced by the students’ cultural capital and habitus. Unfortunately, none of the waves of the ECLS-K data to date contain students’ grades. Instead of grades, these analyses use two other dependent variables, both of which involve teachers’ evaluating students and contain subjective components. The two dependent variables come from the Spring 2000 first grade teacher’s questionnaire. The first dependent variable is a rating of the child’s language arts skills compared to the other students in the class. Teachers are asked, ‘‘Overall, how would you rate this child’s academic skills in each of the following areas, compared to other children of the same grade level?’’ The area selected here is ‘‘language and literacy skills.’’ The choices are far below average, below average, average, above average, and far above average, a scale from 1 to 5. This variable has a mean of 3.13 and a standard deviation of 1.06. The second dependent variable is the teacher’s rating of students’ mathematics skills (mean = 3.18, standard deviation = .91), based on the same question posed above to teachers with regard to language arts skills. The independent variables include a dummy variable for gender (1 = female), a dummy variable for minority status (1 = African-American or Hispanic), and a composite socioeconomic status variable reflecting the SES of the household in Spring 1999, which consists of five components: father/male guardian’s education; mother/female guardian’s education; father/male guardian’s occupation (recoded as a prestige score); mother/female guardian’s occupation (recoded as a prestige score); and household income. SES is the average of these five measures, each of which was standardized to have a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1. A hot deck imputation methodology was used to impute for missing values of all components of the SES. In hot deck imputation, the value reported by a respondent for a particular item is given or ‘‘donated’’ to a ‘‘similar’’ person who failed to respond to that question. Finally, a direct reading assessment and a mathematics assessment from the Spring 1999 kindergarten questionnaire are included as control variables; the IRT scale scores for these assessments are used in the analyses. DiMaggio’s (1982) classic study of cultural capital contained several measures, including scores on cultural exams, indicators of participation in cultural activities, and a scale for whether or not students considered themselves to be cultured people. Unfortunately, the ECLS-K, like other educational data sets, is much more limited in its scope of cultural capital variables. Parents in the ECLS-K report on two different types of cultural activities in which their children are involved outside of school: one-time

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cultural activities and long-term lessons. For the one-time activities, parents are asked, ‘‘In the past month, that is, since {MONTH} {DAY}, has anyone in your family done the following things with {CHILD}?’’ The items included in this study are ‘‘Gone to a play, concert, or other live show?’’ and ‘‘Visited an art gallery, museum, or historical site?’’ The questions about the lessons are: ‘‘Outside of school hours, has {CHILD} ever participated in . . .’’ The choices are: ‘‘Dance lessons,’’ ‘‘music lessons,’’ ‘‘drama classes,’’ ‘‘art classes or lessons,’’ ‘‘organized performing arts programs,’’ ‘‘crafts classes,’’ and ‘‘non-English language instruction.’’ For all activities, the survey responses are simply ‘‘yes’’ or ‘‘no’’; a ‘‘yes’’ response is coded as 1 and a ‘‘no’’ response is coded as 0. Cultural capital, then, consists of the total number of activities in which the student participates (ranging from 0 to 9). Past studies of cultural capital (Kalmijn and Kraaykamp, 1996; De Graaf et al., 2000) have included reading activities as cultural capital; however, reading does not fit the criterion of being an arbitrary activity (Kingston, 2001), particularly among the age group studied here. Because the children in the ECLS-K are quite young, there are no survey questions directly asked of them in the kindergarten or first grade waves; there are only direct assessment tests of the students’ abilities in several subject areas. Therefore, in order to examine habitus, it is necessary to turn to the information that the parents provide about their own experiences with and attitudes about their children’s schooling. There are several survey questions that reflect Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. One set of questions, asked of the parents in the fall when their children first entered kindergarten, taps into the parents’ ideas about preparing their children for school. The parents are asked, ‘‘Now, I’m going to ask you how important you think it is for children to know or do certain things to be ready for kindergarten. How important do you think it is that a child . . .’’ The selections are: ‘‘Can count to 20 or more?’’; ‘‘Takes turns and shares?’’; ‘‘Is able to use pencils and paint brushes?’’; ‘‘Sits still and pays attention?’’; ‘‘Knows most of the letters of the alphabet?’’; and ‘‘Communicates needs, wants, and thoughts verbally in {his/her} primary language?’’ The answer choices are ‘‘essential,’’ ‘‘very important,’’ ‘‘somewhat important,’’ ‘‘not very important,’’ and ‘‘not important.’’ For this study, ‘‘essential’’ and ‘‘very important’’ are coded as 1, and the other responses are coded as 0. Two additional questions reflect parents’ negative experiences with schools. Parents are asked in the Spring 1999 questionnaire, ‘‘This year, have the following reasons made it harder for you to participate in activities at (CHILD)’s school?’’ The two questions of interest here are: ‘‘The school does not make your family feel welcome?’’ And ‘‘You don’t hear about things going on at school that you might want to be involved in?’’ The possible responses are ‘‘yes’’ (coded as 1) and ‘‘no’’ (coded as 0).3 Finally, parents are asked in the Fall 1998 questionnaire, ‘‘How far in school do you expect {CHILD} to go?’’ Answers including a bachelor’s degree or higher are coded as 1, and less than a bachelor’s degree are coded as 0. This measure taps into the parents’ understanding of their place in society and what they can reasonably expect for their children. 3 Of course, it is difficult to establish causality with regard to these two questions: is it because the parent is not interested or doesn’t feel welcome that the student does worse in school (i.e., has lower evaluations), or is it because of the student’s educational experiences that the parent does not feel welcome or interested? By using information from kindergarten as the independent variables, and from first grade as the dependent variables, I hope to establish that it is the parents’ attitudes and actions that affect the child’s educational experience.

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Table 1 Percentage of kindergarten children participating in cultural activities, by SES quintile

Concerts Museums Dance lessons Music lessons Drama lessons Art lessons Performance art programs Foreign language classes Crafts lessons

1 (Lowest)

2

3

4

5 (Highest)

26.2 18.6 5.8 2.2 0.6 3.0 11.2 2.1 5.6

34.0 22.1 8.9 3.3 0.3 3.6 10.5 2.7 6.4

39.7 27.6 15.0 5.0 0.8 5.6 14.8 4.6 10.6

43.9 34.5 21.6 6.4 1.8 6.4 17.4 5.0 11.4

48.4*** 42.6*** 30.6*** 14.0*** 3.7*** 12.6*** 25.5*** 8.2*** 19.7***

N = 7290. Source: ECLS-K Longitudinal Kindergarten—First Grade Public-Use Child File. *** p < .001 (based on the design-corrected Pearson chi-square statistic for independence calculated for each activity, comparing the SES quintiles).

3.3. Results: socioeconomic status, cultural participation, and parental habitus in kindergarten In Table 1, the parents’ reports of kindergarteners’ participation in cultural activities are presented by socioeconomic status quintile.4 In every activity, the highest SES quintile has the highest participation rate; in every activity except drama lessons and performance art programs, the lowest SES quintile has the lowest participation rate. The second SES quintile has the lowest participation rate for drama lessons and performance art programs. The general pattern is that as SES increases, the percentage of kindergarten children participating increases. The differences in participation rates between SES quintiles are significant for every activity. The most popular category of activities for students of all socioeconomic levels is attendance at concerts, followed by visits to museums. Over one-fourth of kindergarten children in the lowest SES quintile have been to a concert, and 19% have been to a museum; at the top end of the SES distribution, almost half of the children have been to a concert, and 43% have been to a museum. The finding that one-time activities are more popular than sustained lessons is also true for children in middle school and high school (Dumais, 2002; Aschaffenburg and Maas, 1997), perhaps because the time and money required to escort a child to one afternoon of culture is a smaller investment than that needed for long-term lessons. The least popular activities for kindergarten students are repeated lessons in subjects such as drama, music, foreign language, crafts, and art. In the lowest two quintiles, 10% or fewer children participate in each of these lessons. There is more participation in cultural lessons in the highest SES quintile. Over 30% of the high SES children take dance lessons; 4 In the first socioeconomic quintile, the median parental educational level (based on the parent with the highest level of education) is a high school diploma, and the median income is $12,000. In the third socioeconomic quintile, the median parental educational level is some college (no degree), and the median income is $40,000, and in the fifth quintile, the median educational level is some graduate school education (no degree) and the median income is $80,000. The sample sizes for each socioeconomic quintile, from lowest SES to highest SES, are: 1148, 1562, 1613, 1551, and 1416.

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when broken down by gender, 58% of female kindergarteners in the top SES quintile take dance lessons. Twenty-six percent of kindergarten children in the highest SES quintile participate in performance art programs, such as choir or theater performances. Considering these children are five or six years old, it is noteworthy that there are such high levels of participation in cultural activities. Lareau (2000, 2003) found that 9- and 10-year-old middle-class children were involved in a variety of activities, a phenomenon she referred to as ‘‘concerted cultivation’’; the findings here indicate that high-SES parents start involving their children in these activities quite early in life.5 The total number of possible activities a student can pursue is nine. The majority of students in the lowest SES quintile (52%) participate in no cultural activities at all, compared to 18% of children in the highest SES quintile. Only 7% of the children in the lowest SES quintile, and 8% of children in the second lowest SES quintile, participate in three or more activities, compared to 35% of children in the highest SES quintile, and 20% of children in the second highest quintile. The average number of cultural activities ranges from .75 for the first SES quintile to 2.1 for the fifth, and the correlation between number of cultural activities and socioeconomic status is .31 ( p < .001). Children from higher SES backgrounds are thus more likely to be exposed to a variety of cultural experiences, compared to their lower SES counterparts. For this particular aspect of cultural capital—participation in cultural activities and lessons—there are striking differences by socioeconomic status. As socioeconomic status increases, kindergarten students are more likely to participate in a greater number and a wider variety of cultural activities; this finding corresponds to Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital as well as past empirical research on the subject. While the consequences of these differences will be explored below, it is also important to consider the causes for these patterns. Parents from higher SES backgrounds have more money to pay for lessons and for admission to cultural activities, and they may also have more flexible schedules than lower SES parents and thus be able to drop off and pick up their children from these activities more easily. Higher SES parents may also be more aware of the activities that are available, learning about them through their friends and colleagues. Furthermore, it is possible that higher SES parents are more likely to consider these activities to be important, as Lareau (2003) finds in her study of children’s after-school activities. With arts programs being eliminated at many schools due to budget constraints, higher SES parents may be more inclined to find substitute programs outside of school so that their children will be wellrounded. In addition to differences in cultural capital, Bourdieu argued that the upper and lower social classes experience different types of habitus. Those who are from upper class backgrounds will feel more comfortable in academic settings and will feel that education is an important part of their and their children’s lives (Lareau, 1989). These differences in perspective may affect the ways in which the parents of kindergarteners engage with the school system, teachers, and other parents, as well as the ways that parents interact with their own children regarding schooling. 5 Lareau (2003) found that many middle-class children in the third and fourth grades were involved in sports activities. Among the kindergarten students studied here, 74% of those in the highest SES quintile participate in organized sports, compared to 16% of those in the lowest SES quintile.

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Table 2 Percentage of parents of kindergarteners who agree with school habitus-related statements, by SES quintile

Important for a child to count Important for a child to share Important for a child to draw Important for a child to be calm Important for a child to know letters Important for a child to communicate well Does not find school interesting Does not feel welcome at school Expect child to get at least a bachelor’s degree

1 (Lowest)

2

3

4

5 (Highest)

74.7 95.1 78.8 90.8 82.5 93.5 18.1 9.9 56.4

64.7 96.0 76.1 89.4 75.8 95.2 12.6 5.8 62.6

58.9 96.0 74.9 82.9 68.0 93.9 12.0 4.1 70.97

57.5 95.6 72.1 82.5 65.0 95.7 11.4 3.9 84.5

48.8*** 94.3 67.7*** 76.0*** 54.7*** 94.3 7.0*** 2.5*** 94.8***

N = 7290. Source: ECLS-K Longitudinal Kindergarten—First Grade Public-Use Child File. *** p < .001 (based on the design-corrected Pearson chi-square statistic for independence calculated for each question, comparing the SES quintiles).

Table 2 presents several indicators of parental habitus, again comparing SES quintiles. The first six variables are all skills that parents of kindergarten students considered very important or essential for their child to have prior to entering kindergarten. For the variables counting, drawing, being calm, and knowing letters, parents in the lowest SES quintile are more likely to believe these skills are very important or essential, and the percentage decreases with each quintile. Indeed, only 49% of parents in the highest SES quintile think it is important for their children to know how to count before entering kindergarten, and only 55% think it is important for their children to know the alphabet. These findings are similar to the findings from Joffe’s (1977) study of a pre-school, where middle-class parents were not eager to push for early instruction in academic subjects and wanted their children to focus more on social activities and skills. The parents felt confident that their children would naturally pick up the academic skills that they needed, as one parent stated: ‘‘Why bother with that stuff here? If she’s really interested, she’ll pick it up from Sesame Street anyway’’ (Joffe, 1977, p. 73). Lower SES parents may not be as secure in thinking that their children can pick up these skills naturally, and therefore may want their children to be prepared when they enter the kindergarten classroom. Additionally, past research has shown that lower SES children are more often taught about discipline and following rules, as indicated in the importance with which lower SES parents rate ‘‘being calm’’(Kohn, 1969). For the two other variables, sharing and communicating well, there does not appear to be a pattern; each SES quintile is equally as likely to believe the skill is very important or essential. The majority of the variables, then, are qualities considered more necessary for preparation for schooling by lower SES than higher SES parents. In addition to the questions about the types of skills their children should have, there are two questions about the parents’ own attitudes toward the school. Eighteen percent of parents of kindergarten students in the lowest SES quintile agreed that they were not involved in their child’s school because they did not find anything interesting there, compared to 7% of the parents in the highest SES quintile. Ten percent of parents in the lowest SES quintile answered ‘‘yes’’ to the question about not feeling welcome at their

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child’s school, compared to 3% in the highest SES quintile. Like the measures of cultural capital, these measures of habitus are clearly associated with socioeconomic status in the way that Bourdieu argued. Although the majority of parents from all backgrounds disagree that they feel unwelcome at their child’s school or uninterested in school activities, lower SES parents are more likely to agree with these statements. Finally, 56% of parents in the lowest SES quintile expect their child to get a bachelor’s degree or higher, while a full 95% of parents in the highest SES quintile have this expectation. This variable provides partial confirmation for the class habitus argument. Upper class parents overwhelmingly expect that their children will attain a bachelor’s degree, and will most likely act in ways to make this expectation a reality. However, a majority of parents in the lowest-SES quintile also expect that their children will graduate from college. Putting the findings from Tables 1 and 2 together, elementary school teachers are presented with a wide variety of families. On one end of the spectrum are low-SES families where the child is involved in few, if any, cultural activities, but where the parents do have concern about some of the practical skills their child may need for kindergarten. On the other end are high-SES families, where children have experience in a variety of cultural experiences, where the parent feels comfortable and interested in the school environment, and where there is already the expectation that the child will attain a bachelor’s degree or higher. How these differences from kindergarten affect first grade teachers’ perceptions of the students is examined below. 3.4. Results: the effects of cultural capital and parental habitus on first grade teachers’ perceptions Having established that higher SES students participate in more cultural activities than lower SES students, the first research question can be asked: how does the cultural capital of a child affect the teacher’s evaluation of that child’s academic skills? If Bourdieu’s argument applies in the United States, then cultural participation should have a positive effect on teachers’ evaluations, should decrease the effect of socioeconomic status (Kingston, 2001), and should interact positively with the socioeconomic status variable. In Table 3, the OLS regression results are presented. The dependent variable is the teacher’s ranking of the student’s language arts skills compared to students of the same grade level. Model 1 contains the child’s kindergarten reading score, race, and female status. Just these three variables explain 41% of the variance in teachers’ rankings of students’ language arts skills; indeed, the student’s reading score by itself explains 40% of the variance. The coefficient for female status is significant, indicating that given two students with equal test scores, a teacher will give a more favorable evaluation of language arts skills to the female student. In Model 2, the socioeconomic status variable is added, which slightly increases the variance explained (from .4082 to .4108); the variables for gender and the reading test score are essentially unchanged. In Model 3, the cultural capital variable is added, and it has no effect on the dependent variable, nor does the size or influence of the SES variable change. This is also the case when each cultural activity is included as a separate independent variable in the model (results not shown here). In contrast to past research that found a

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Table 3 OLS estimates of the effects of cultural capital on first grade teachers’ rankings of students’ language arts skills Model 1 Kindergarten reading test score Female Minority SES Number of cultural activities Cultural activities* SES Constant R2

***

.065

Model 2 (.001)

***

.064

(.001)

Model 3 ***

.064

Model 4

(.001)

.064*** (.001)

.156*** (.020) .028 (.030)

.159*** (.020) .008 (.030) .080*** (.016)

.159*** (.020) .008 (.030) .080*** (.016) .000 (.010)

.934*** (.047)

.976*** (.047)

.975*** (.047)

.161*** (.020) .010 (.030) .085*** (.016) .005 (.010) .029** (.009) .982*** (.048)

.4082

.4108

.4108

.4118

Notes: standard errors are in parentheses. N = 7290. Source: ECLS-K Longitudinal Kindergarten—First Grade Public-Use Child File. * p < .05. ** p < .01. *** p < .001.

cultural capital effect, then, the finding here is that participation in cultural activities, whether one-time events or regular lessons, does not affect the teacher’s evaluation of the student’s language arts skills. In this instance, it appears that teachers are using the most objective criteria (test scores) to generate a subjective evaluation of students, although ascribed characteristics such as gender and SES do exert some influence. Model 4 includes the interaction between the cultural capital variable and socioeconomic status and answers another research question: how does socioeconomic status interact with cultural capital?6 Following Bourdieu’s argument, one would expect higher SES students to benefit more from cultural participation than lower SES students. Indeed, according to Kingston’s (2001) interpretation of Bourdieu, lower SES students should not benefit at all from cultural capital. The research of DiMaggio (1982) showed the opposite to be the case for males—lower SES students had a higher return for cultural participation than higher SES students. For the students here, the number of cultural activities in which they participate does not have a significant effect on the teacher’s evaluations, but the interaction of cultural activities and SES does have an effect. The interaction term for cultural activities and SES is negative ( .03), indicating that the higher a student’s SES, the lower the returns to participating in cultural activities. A low-SES student, in contrast, is more likely to benefit from cultural participation. This finding supports DiMaggio’s (1982) cultural mobility model rather than Bourdieu’s cultural reproduction model, where high SES students benefit more from exposure to cultural capital. The final model’s variance explained, .412, is not a great improvement over the first model (.408); nearly 60% of the variance in teachers’ evaluations of language arts skills remains unexplained. 6 In this and all subsequent analyses, the continuous variables that were interacted were centered prior to the interaction. In other words, in Model 4, the variable for socioeconomic status was centered, as was the variable for number of cultural activities; the interaction term is the product of these two centered variables.

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Table 4 OLS estimates of cultural capital on first grade teachers’ rankings of students’ mathematics skills

Kindergarten math test score Female Minority SES Number of cultural activities Cultural activities * SES Constant R2

Model 1

Model 2

Model 3

***

***

***

.066

(.002)

.034 (.019) .049 (.025)

.064

(.002)

.033 (.019) .086** (.026) .093*** (.016)

Model 4 (.002)

.064*** (.002)

.031 (.019) .087** (.026) .095*** (.016) .005 (.008)

.029 (.019) .089** (.026) .101*** (.015) .001 (.008)

.064

.034*** (.007) 1.329*** (.052) .3590

1.386*** (.051) .3637

1.389*** (.052) .3638

1.389*** (.051) .3655

Notes: standard errors are in parentheses. N = 7290. Source: ECLS-K Longitudinal Kindergarten—First Grade Public-Use Child File. * p < .05. ** p < .01. *** p < .001.

Table 3 considered teachers’ evaluations of language arts skills. Table 4 focuses on teachers’ evaluations of students’ mathematics skills. In Model 1, with the control variables, only the student’s kindergarten math test score has a significant effect. When SES is added in Model 2, it is found to have significant positive effect, and the variable for minority status also becomes significant. That is, minority students receive higher mathematics evaluations from teachers than do white students, even when all the students have the same kindergarten test score and the same SES background. In Model 3, the variable for number of cultural activities is added, and no effect is found. This is also the case when each activity is included as a separate variable (not shown here). Finally, in Model 4, the interaction of socioeconomic status and number of cultural activities is added, and has a significant negative effect. This finding is similar to that for the teachers’ evaluations of language arts skills. Lower SES children will receive higher evaluations for their mathematics skills than will higher SES children who participate in the same number of cultural activities. The answer to the first research question, how cultural capital affects a teacher’s perception of a child’s academic skills, for the most part, appears to be that cultural activities in and of themselves do not have much of an effect at all. When considering the interaction of SES and cultural participation, students with a negative SES (about half of the sample in these analyses) who participate in cultural activities will receive a greater return than higher SES students to their cultural participation with regard to teachers’ evaluations in language arts and mathematics. When operationalized as attendance at cultural events and participation in cultural lessons, cultural capital does not appear to operate in a reproductive fashion in American schools. The second research question asks how parental habitus affects the first grade teachers’ evaluations. In Table 5, the OLS regression results are presented for teachers’ evaluations

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Table 5 OLS estimates of the effects of parental habitus on first grade teachers’ rankings of students’ language arts skills Model 1 Kindergarten reading test score Female Minority SES Counting Sharing Drawing Being calm Knowing letters Communicating Parent does not feel interested Parent does not feel welcome Parental college expectations Counting* SES Sharing* SES Drawing* SES Calm* SES Letters* SES Communicating* SES Not interested* SES Not welcome* SES Expectations* SES Constant R

2

***

.065

Model 2 (.001)

.156*** (.020) .028 (.030)

***

.064

(.001)

.159*** (.020) .008 (.030) .080*** (.016)

Model 3 ***

Model 4 (.001)

.063*** (.001)

.152*** (.020) .021 (.030) .062*** (.016) .015 (.025) .016 (.053) .034 (.029) .055 (.032) .012 (.028) .080 (.062) .005 (.040)

.152*** (.020) .022 (.030) .030 (.091) .016 (.026) .016 (.052) .034 (.029) .047 (.033) .014 (.029) .079 (.061) .006 (.042)

.040 (.047)

.041 (.049)

.136*** (.032)

.115*** (.029)

.063

.934*** (.047)

.976*** (.047)

.769*** (.105)

.054 (.038) .060 (.064) .010 (.030) .060 (.041) .007 (.035) .019 (.057) .003 (.055) .001 (.077) .056 (.042) .791*** (.105)

.4082

.4108

.4153

.4161

Notes: standard errors are in parentheses. N = 7290. Source: ECLS-K Longitudinal Kindergarten—First Grade Public-Use Child File. * p < .05. ** p < .01. *** p < .001.

of language arts skills. Models 1 and 2 are the same as those shown in Table 3. In Model 3, the habitus variables are included, resulting in a slight increase in the variance explained— from .4108 to .4153. None of the skills variables has an effect, nor do the variables about the parent not feeling comfortable or welcome at the child’s school. The only habitusrelated variable to have an effect is parental college expectations; when parents expect their child will attain a bachelor’s degree, the teachers’ language arts evaluation increases by .136 units. In Model 4, the interaction terms are included for SES and the habitus variables. None of the interaction terms has a direct effect on teachers’ evaluations, but the variable for SES decreases in size and loses its statistical significance, indicating that some of the effect of SES works through habitus. Like Model 3, the only habitus-related variable to have an effect is parents’ college expectations. Teachers’ evaluations of students’

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language arts skills thus do not appear to be affected by how skilled the parents want their children to be before entering kindergarten, or how interested or comfortable the parents feel in school. Additionally, this final model shows that higher SES students are not privileged in their evaluations from teachers (since the SES variable is no longer significant). In Table 6, the dependent variable is first grade teachers’ ratings of students’ mathematics skills. Models 1 and 2 are identical to Models 1 and 2 from Table 4. In Model 3, the habitus variables are included, and three of them are found to have a significant effect. First, students receive higher evaluations when their parents think that it is important for them to know how to draw (i.e., how to use a pencil and/or a paintbrush) before entering kindergarten. Secondly, students receive lower evaluations from their teachers when their

Table 6 OLS estimates of the effects of parental habitus on first grade teachers’ rankings of students’ mathematics skills Model 1 Kindergarten math test score Female Minority SES Counting Sharing Drawing Being calm Knowing letters Communicating Parent does not feel interested Parent does not feel welcome Parental college expectations Counting* SES Sharing* SES Drawing* SES Calm* SES Letters* SES Communicating* SES Not interested* SES Not welcome* SES Expectations* SES Constant R2

Model 2

Model 3

Model 4

.066*** (.002)

.064*** (.002)

.063*** (.002)

.063*** (.002)

.034 (.019) .049 (.025)

.033 (.019) .086** (.026) .093*** (.016)

.041* (.019) .070* (.028) .072*** (.017) .022 (.021) .009 (.043) .046* (.022) .023 (.027) .006 (.026) .052 (.060) .026 (.033)

.039* (.019) .068* (.028) .069 (.090) .023 (.021) .007 (.043) .045* (.022) .027 (.029) .005 (.026) .050 (.057) .023 (.032)

.109* (.051)

.083 (.051)

.112*** (.025)

.097*** (.027)

1.270*** (.096)

.030 (.033) .020 (.058) .052 (.028) .046 (.037) .011 (.034) .026 (.054) .014 (.041) .066 (.057) .043 (.042) 1.289*** (.094)

1.329*** (.052) .3590

1.386*** (.051) .3637

.3684

.3694

Notes: standard errors are in parentheses. N = 7290. Source: ECLS-K Longitudinal Kindergarten—First Grade Public-Use Child File. * p < .05. ** p < .01. *** p < .001.

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parents say that they are not involved with their child’s schooling because they do not feel welcome at the school. Finally, parental college expectations has a positive effect on teachers’ evaluations, as it did when language arts evaluations were the dependent variable. The inclusion of these habitus variables causes the variable for SES to decrease from .093 (in Model 2) to .072 (in Model 3), indicating that some of the effect of SES works through habitus. Additionally, the variable for female, which was not significant in the previous two models, is significant in Model 3. At the same time, the increase in R2 from Model 2 to Model 3 is quite small—only from .3637 to .3684. In Model 4, the habitus variables are interacted with SES. With the addition of these interaction terms, the variable for SES itself becomes insignificant. None of the interaction terms is found to have a significant effect on teachers’ evaluations, and the variable for parents’ not feeling welcome, which was significant in the previous model, is no longer significant here. The variables for drawing and parental college expectations have effects similar to what they had in Model 3. The answer to the second research question, then, is that only one specific aspect of habitus, as measured here—parents’ expectations for college—has a consistent effect on teachers’ evaluations of students’ ability levels, and a second variable—parents’ concern about their children’s drawing skills—has an effect on teachers’ mathematics evaluations. None of the variables interacts with SES, thus providing no support for either the cultural reproduction or the cultural mobility model. Finally, in Table 7, cultural capital and habitus are included in the models together. For the first grade teachers’ evaluation of the students’ language arts skills, the number of cultural activities in which the student participates does not have an effect on its own (Model 1), and parents’ college expectations is the only component of habitus to have an effect on teachers’ evaluations. In Model 2, when all the interaction terms are included, cultural activities interacted with SES has a negative effect on teachers’ evaluations, meaning that students from lower SES backgrounds receive greater benefits from participating in cultural activities than higher SES students. The SES variable no longer has a significant effect, but reading test scores and being female do affect teachers’ evaluations positively. Parental college expectations remains the only habitus variable to have a significant effect on this dependent variable. The models thus show that cultural activities in and of themselves do not sway teachers’ evaluations, but lower SES students who participate are rewarded for their participation. Only limited support is evident for Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (as operationalized here), in the form of parents’ college expectations. Turning to the teachers’ evaluations of students’ mathematics skills, Model 1 shows that the number of cultural activities has no effect, and the drawing skills and college expectations components of habitus both have positive effects; parents’ not feeling welcome at school has a negative effect on teachers’ evaluations. When interaction terms are added in Model 2, the interaction of number of cultural activities and SES has a significant negative effect on teachers’ evaluations, a finding that more in line with DiMaggio’s (1982) cultural mobility model than Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction. Two of the habitus variables that were significant in the previous model, drawing skills and parental college expectations, continue to be statistically significant here. SES is not significant in this final model. Throughout all the models in Table 7, the

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Table 7 OLS estimates of the effects of cultural capital and parental habitus on first grade teachers’ rankings of students’ language arts skills and mathematics skills Language arts skills

Kindergarten test score Female Minority SES Number of cultural activities Counting Sharing Drawing Being calm Knowing letters Communicating Parent does not feel interested Parent does not feel welcome Parental college expectations Cultural activities* SES Counting* SES Sharing* SES Drawing* SES Calm* SES Letters* SES Communicating* SES Not interested* SES Not welcome* SES Expectations* SES Constant R

2

Mathematics skills

Model 1

Model 2

***

***

.063 (.001) .153*** (.020) .020 (.030) .064*** (.016) .004 (.025)

.063 (.001) .155*** (.020) .021 (.030) .031 (.092) .000 (.010)

.015 .017 .034 .055 .012 .080 .006

.015 .018 .035 .048 .015 .077 .006

(.025) (.053) (.029) (.032) (.028) (.062) (.040)

Model 1

Model 2 ***

.063 (.002) .036 (.019) .070* (.028) .076*** (.017) .009 (.008)

.063*** (.002) .034 (.019) .071* (.027) .072 (.090) .003 (.008)

(.026) (.053) (.029) (.033) (.029) (.060) (.042)

.022 (.020) .009 (.044) .046* (.022) .024 (.027) .006 (.026) .052 (.060) 025 (.033)

.040 (.047)

.042 (.049)

.110* (.051)

.085 (.050)

.136*** (.032)

.119*** (.029)

.114*** (.025)

.103*** (.028)

.772*** (.105)

.024** (.009) .055 (.038) .060 (.065) .007 (.030) .049 (.041) .012 (.034) .017 (.059) .003 (.055) .007 (.072) .034 (.043) .792*** (.105)

1.274*** (.096)

.030*** (.007) .031 (.033) .021 (.056) .048 (.027) .031 (.036) .005 (.033) .023 (.057) .014 (.040) .059 (.054) .014 (.043) 1.285*** (.094)

.4153

.4167

.3686

.022 (.021) .003 (.043) .047* (.022) .026 (.029) .004 (.026) .048 (.056) .024 (.032)

.3708

Notes: standard errors are in parentheses. The kindergarten test score is for reading when the independent variable is rating of language arts skills, and for mathematics when the dependent variable is rating of mathematics skills. N = 7290. Source: ECLS-K Longitudinal Kindergarten—First Grade Public-Use Child File. * p < .05. ** p < .01. *** p < .001.

student’s achievement test score in kindergarten had a significant positive effect on the dependent variables. Because some researchers may not consider parental college expectations to be the best measure of habitus, regressions were also run without this variable. The results were similar to the models that included the variable; the main change was that the variable for socioeconomic status increased in size. None of the other cultural capital or habitus variables increased in size or significance.

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4. Discussion Bourdieu argued that social class differences emerge very early on in life, generated by the transmission of cultural capital and habitus from parents to children. Higher status children obtain a general cultural knowledge from their parents that gives them an advantage in the school setting. Additionally, higher status children incorporate the worldview that school is a place where they belong and can achieve success. Lower status parents do not pass on cultural knowledge to their children, and the habitus that the children develop leads them to see school as a place where they do not quite fit. Teachers easily perceive the students’ cultural capital and habitus once children enter school, and show favoritism toward those students from the upper classes. In this study, support was found for Bourdieu’s argument that families from different social class positions transmit different types and quantities of cultural capital and habitus to their children. Kindergarten students from higher SES backgrounds are significantly more likely to attend cultural events and to take lessons in cultural activities. The high rates of participation among mid- and high-SES children indicate that enrolling children in cultural activities has become a norm among many parents. With fewer arts opportunities available in schools as funding is directed toward academics and testing, higher status parents are making the effort themselves to ensure that their children are well-rounded. With regard to habitus, lower SES parents are more likely to feel unwelcome at and uninterested in their child’s school and to want their children to have practical skills before entering kindergarten; higher SES parents are more likely to expect that their children will attain a college degree. While there are clear class differences in cultural participation rates, little support was found for Bourdieu’s argument that students with cultural capital are favored by teachers. Teachers’ evaluations of students’ language arts skills were affected by the interaction of students’ cultural capital with SES, but the effect size ( .03 for a dependent variable with a standard deviation of 1.1) was quite small; similarly, teachers’ evaluations of students’ mathematics skills were affected by the interaction of SES and cultural capital, with a small effect size ( .03 for a dependent variable with a standard deviation of .91). Furthermore, the interaction of cultural activities and SES indicates that lower SES students, rather than higher SES students, receive greater benefits for their cultural participation, a finding in contradiction to Bourdieu’s reproduction theory. Perhaps because relatively few lower SES children participate in cultural activities, their participation helps them to stand out to teachers as students who fit in well with the culture of the school and whose parents are particularly invested in them. The argument that teachers favor students with a middle- to upper class habitus was also not fully supported. Teachers’ evaluations of students’ language arts skills were affected by parents’ college expectations, but again the effect sizes were small (.115 for a dependent variable with a standard deviation of 1.1), and none of the habitus variables interacted with SES. For teachers’ evaluations of students’ mathematics skills, parental college expectations and parents’ desire for their children to have drawing skills prior to kindergarten both had significant positive effects; none of the habitus variables interacted with SES. There are a number of possibilities why cultural capital does not have an effect on teachers’ perceptions. For example, a number of studies on taste in art (Peterson and

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Simkus, 1992; Halle, 1993) have found that a minority of even upper class people in the United States have preferences for abstract art, classical music, or opera, while their favorite forms of culture tend to be more ‘‘lowbrow.’’ The question arises, then, as to whether there is an elite culture that is shared by members of the upper class and widely recognized by all Americans as the dominant culture, as there is in France, where Bourdieu conducted his research. Moreover, some critics question whether schools in the United States operate in the same reproductive fashion as schools in France. First, the American school system is not as standardized and hierarchical in the United States as in France. Classrooms tend to be relatively homogeneous, and there may not be enough variation within one class for teachers to sort or rate students according to their social class backgrounds or cultural capital. Secondly, American teachers tend to have lower middle class status, as opposed to the higher status they hold in France; while they are disproportionately represented in arts audiences (DiMaggio and Useem, 1978), not all of them are participants, and they may not value cultural capital to the degree that Bourdieu argues. Cultural capital may have more of an impact on higher status teachers, who are more often found at the secondary school level; further research is necessary to establish the status differences between teachers and how these differences translate into different interactions with students. It may also be that in the elementary school years, fewer opportunities arise for students to display their cultural capital, at least as it is measured here. Since the focus is on learning basic skills such as reading and writing, teachers may be concentrating more on making sure these tasks are accomplished than on teasing out the students who seem to be the most culturally well-rounded. Another possibility is that cultural capital, as operationalized in this study, does not matter for elementary school students, but that other, unmeasured types of cultural capital do matter. As mentioned above, the measure in this study is quite limited—it includes only cultural visits within the last month, and whether the student ever took a cultural class; there is no information about whether the student has made multiple cultural visits, or for how long or with what intensity he or she has taken cultural classes. Other kinds of activities, such as participation in sports and clubs, may also need to be considered, as Kaufman and Gabler (2004) did in their study of American high school students. Other kinds of skills not measured in the ECLS-K, such as particular ways of speaking, may also serve as cultural capital. While cultural capital has been operationalized in a multitude of ways in past research, habitus has only recently begun to be studied empirically. Habitus is a very broad term that encompasses one’s entire worldview; thus, it is difficult to limit it to a few variables from a data set. Some of the aspects of habitus that were selected for this study, such as parents’ college expectations and parents’ desire for their children to have drawing skills, do appear to affect teachers’ perceptions, but it remains to be seen if these operationalizations of habitus will become standard measures in sociology of education research. Additional measures of habitus, such as the student’s own level of comfort at school and views for his/her own future (not included in the ECLS-K data) would be particularly useful measures in future studies. Overall, the variable which had the largest effect on both dependent variables was the student’s ability test score. This finding should not lead to the conclusion that schools operate in a completely meritocratic fashion, however. Socioeconomic status had direct

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effects on teachers’ perceptions of students’ skill in the models featuring cultural capital, as shown in Tables 3 and 4, and female and minority status had effects on teachers’ perceptions in the final models in Table 7; these background factors may also indirectly affect teachers’ perceptions by influencing students’ test scores. The reading test itself is correlated with SES at .318 ( p < .001), indicating that higher SES students tend to score higher (and thus receive higher teacher evaluations). In other words, inequality exists within the educational system, but it may not be operating through cultural capital and habitus, at least not in the way these concepts have been operationalized here. Although the effect sizes found in the analyses were small, it is important to consider the long-term consequences that might arise from differences that begin in the early elementary school years. Teachers’ perceptions can have serious repercussions—teachers decide which ability groups to place the students into, whether to hold a student back, and how much time to spend with each student—which in turn may exacerbate the educational inequalities that already exist. Teachers’ giving higher or lower evaluations and expecting more or less from students who come from different backgrounds may lead to these students living up or down to these expectations (Rosenthal and Jacobson, 1968). The best way to understand the ways in which inequalities are generated and perpetuated in the educational system appears to be with research combining both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Lareau’s work has been extremely important in exposing the processes by which family background affects teachers’ relationships with students and parents; combining this research with survey data on teachers’ perceptions and evaluations of students and parents, parents’ feelings about school, and students’ beliefs about where they fit into the school system would help provide a complete picture of the inequalities that occur in the classroom. It will be important to assess whether cultural lessons and attendance at cultural events become significant for elementary students’ educational outcomes as students grow older and accumulate these cultural experiences; a fifth-grade wave of the ECLS-K will be released soon, and will enable researchers to address these questions. Future cultural capital research should also consider the interactive effects of race and gender with cultural participation, in addition to SES. A debate has arisen within the sociology of education as to whether cultural capital is a useful term, and, indeed, if research should continue to explore this topic (Kingston, 2001; Lareau and Weininger, 2003). While attending cultural events and taking cultural lessons did not have any direct effects on the dependent variables studied here, it seems too soon to say that Bourdieu’s cultural capital argument should be abandoned in American educational research, particularly in light of both quantitative (Roscigno and AinsworthDarnell, 1999) and qualitative (Lareau and McNamara Horvat, 1999) studies that indicate cultural capital and habitus do affect educational outcomes. As programs like No Child Left Behind attempt to make sure that all students meet particular educational standards, it will be important to determine which kinds of activities and practices give an advantage to students, either helping some to overcome their less privileged backgrounds, or generating a barrier that secures the position of those at the top of the social class ladder. Continuing to explore the concept of habitus, as well as trying to refine the concept of cultural capital as argued by Kingston (2001), may eventually unveil more of the links in the chain between family background and school success.

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Acknowledgements This research was supported by Louisiana State University’s Council on Research Summer Stipend Program. I am grateful for the comments of Stanley Lieberson, Stephen L. Morgan, and the anonymous reviewers.

Appendix A. Descriptive statistics for variables used in the analyses Variable

Mean

Standard deviation

Female (0 = no, 1 = yes) Minority (0 = no, 1 = yes) Socioeconomic status Socioeconomic status quintile Goes to concerts (0 = no, 1 = yes) Goes to museums (0 = no, 1 = yes) Dance lessons (0 = no, 1 = yes) Music lessons (0 = no, 1 = yes) Drama lessons (0 = no, 1 = yes) Art lessons (0 = no, 1 = yes) Does performances (0 = no, 1 = yes) Foreign language classes (0 = no, 1 = yes) Crafts lessons (0 = no, 1 = yes) Total number of cultural activities Important for a child to count (0 = no, 1 = yes) Important for a child to share (0 = no, 1 = yes) Important for a child to draw (0 = no, 1 = yes) Important for a child to be calm (0 = no, 1 = yes) Important for a child to know letters (0 = no, 1 = yes) Important for a child to communicate well (0 = no, 1 = yes) Total number of skills considered important Is not interested in school happenings (0 = no, 1 = yes) Does not feel welcome at school (0 = no, 1 = yes) Wants child to attain a bachelor’s degree or more (0 = no, 1 = yes) Kindergarten reading test score Kindergarten math test score First grade language arts ranking score First grade mathematics ranking score

.49 .36 .08 2.92 .38 .28 .16 .06 .01 .06 .15 .04 .10 1.26 .61 .95 .74 .85 .70 .95 4.80 .12 .05 .73 32.70 27.84 3.13 3.18

.50 .48 .75 1.35 .49 .45 .36 .23 .11 .24 .36 .20 .31 1.35 .49 .21 .44 .36 .46 .23 1.33 .33 .22 .44 10.17 8.30 1.06 .91

N = 7290. Source: ECLS-K Longitudinal Kindergarten—First Grade Public-Use Child File.

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