Family Background, Cultural Capital, and Teachers' Perceptions of Students and Parents: Examining the development of organizational habits in urban elementary schools

John Diamond

Family background has consistently been linked to children's educational outcomes, attainment, and adult occupational status. Many analysts have used the cultural capital framework to explain this as a social reproduction process, focusing on how race and class shape students’ experiences with educational institutions dominated by middle-class cultural values and expectations. However, fewer studies closely examine what expectations key gatekeepers hold for students and parents and how these expectations are developed and reinforced inside schools. This study examines how teachers’ expectations of students and parents are generated and reinforced in urban elementary schools. The database for this study, drawn from four years of research in eight urban elementary schools, includes semi-structured interviews with over 200 teachers and administrators, direct observation of formal and informal school settings, and a social network survey completed in four schools. This material will be combined to develop a rich account of the content, development, and reinforcement of teachers’ beliefs about and expectations of students and parents. This work will extend the literatures on cultural capital and social reproduction by specifying the cultural signals that key gatekeepers (e.g. school teachers and administrators) value and by providing a conceptual framework that contextualizes teachers’ expectations for student learning and parent involvement in broader organizational sense-making processes.

About John Diamond

John B. Diamond is a sociologist of education who studies the relationship between family background and children’s educational experiences. In particular, he focuses on how race, ethnicity, and social class interact with family resources and school characteristics to shape children’s educational outcomes. He is currently Research Assistant Professor at the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University and Research Director for the Minority Student Achievement Network, a national consortium of school districts working to reduce racial achievement gaps through research and evidence-based interventions. He served as research directed for the Distributed Leadership Study (a four year study of urban school leadership) from 1999-2002 and is currently principal investigator for the National Science Foundation funded study “Overcoming Barriers to Success in Higher Level Mathematics for African American and Latino Students.” His current and forthcoming articles appear in Sociology of Education, Educational Researcher, Educational Policy, the Journal of Curriculum Studies, The Journal of Research in Science Teaching, and The Berkeley Journal of Sociology.