Nine: The Great Equalizer?
Why do we attend school? When dragged, bleary-eyed, out of bed, I asked that more than once. For me, school often felt as though school was not really about gaining knowledge, but about enforcing discipline, and building social hierarchy. I was being asked to make decisions that would affect the rest of my life while in my early teens, and it just seemed like the students around me had things a lot more “together” than I did, both socially and academically. I imagine that you, like me, were told that going to school was essential, because one needed at least to graduate high school in order to get a job. And if I wanted to have an upwardly mobile career that would permit me opportunities my blue-collar parents did not have, I was going to have to go to college. I was a C student whose extracurricular activities mostly included playing guitar badly and getting into trouble, but I got into the local public college, and it proved life-changing. I eventually became an academic so that I would never have to leave.
But how typical was my experience? And what is education really “for”? Scholars of the history of education note that the earliest function of public education was to educate immigrants—this included schooling in the English language, the history of the United States, and patriotism. The goal, as noted in Chapter 6, was to assimilate peoples from diverse ethnic backgrounds into the American “melting pot.” This sometimes led to aggressive policing of immigrant children’s language and culture; it had dire consequences for Indigenous peoples, whose children were often taken from them to residential and boarding schools, which included high rates of deaths and harrowing reports of abuse alongside this aggressive policing. The more I have studied education, the more I came to realize that I was onto something as a teenager (if I was also more than a little naïve): education is not simply about learning.
Some of the early sociologists of education in the United States, working in the cultural climate of 1950s America, came to view public education as an agent of secondary socialization, an institution that, in a manner of speaking, picked up where the family (see the next chapter) left off. Secondary socialization is the process by which we become assimilated into the institutions of our society. We learn how to become productive adults in our societies via this process. A well-known functionalist sociologist of education, Robert Dreeben, chronicled the ways in which school served to train children for a future in American industrial society. That bleary-eyed kid that was dragged out of bed all those years ago was being taught an important norm: you must arrive on-time in the world of work, or you will find yourself unemployed.
Dreeben went further, describing how schooling trains us to become independent, to do our own work (no cheating) and to hold ourselves accountable for our successes or failures (grading). It might surprise you to know that standards as to what is or is not considered “cheating” in school vary across cultures—in many societies, working together is not only tolerated but encouraged, even expected. Outside of school, helping others is not considered “cheating” in most circumstances, either; the word itself implies that something immoral is going on. In grade school, cheating might result in a stern reprimand or a bad grade. In college, cheating can get you expelled. Stakes get higher, training students for real-life decision-making with lasting consequences. Children of the same age are taught to compete for higher marks, even if they are of vastly different ability levels, much as we often find ourselves in competition for jobs or resources with others with different sets of strengths and weaknesses. Through this, one learns to cope with failure. In other words, schooling contributes to the learning of norms, teaching us more than what is written on the blackboard (or increasingly slide show) or in the textbook. We are being conditioned to be productive members of our society, how to live on its terms.
But this isn’t the only way to view education, and researchers (as well as publics) were dissatisfied with stopping with theory and speculation. We needed data, hard evidence of what school was doing, how, and for whom. There are two studies that stand out in early years of the sociology of education, especially in relation to the study of social problems. Commissioned by the United States Government at the earliest stages of desegregation, James Coleman studied how public education worked, how it affected children, and how monies allocated by federal, state, and local agencies could be best used to improve the quality of education, and educational outcomes. One of the long-standing challenges of studying education and its effects in the context of the United States is that the bulk of funding for public schools does not come from federal or state funds, but is part of property taxes levied on certain neighborhoods. In other words, neighborhoods with lower incomes are able to provide fewer public monies to support education; and it was suspected that this created serious disadvantages among already-disadvantaged populations.
The Coleman Report found surprising results: it turned out that the amount of money a school received was not, in and of itself, significantly correlated to student outcomes. Family background, however, definitely was—the most consistent predictor of how we do in school is who are parents are, socioeconomically, and how invested they are (or can be) in our education. This raised important and complicated questions regarding the role of education in American society. Many people, including me when I first heard this, are somewhat shocked. But it’s not that funding doesn’t matter, it’s that the relationship between funding for a school and student performance is nonlinear. That is, schools need a minimal amount of money to stay open, and significantly more than that to effectively educate students, but there is a diminishing return in pumping more money into the school beyond a certain point. How to best explain? This is related to what psychologists might call “the happiness curve.” Answering the question “does money make you happy”? The answer turns out to be “sort of.” People who live near, or below, the poverty line are definitely less happy than others. But people with $700,000 of annual household income aren’t much happier, on average, than people with $70,000. In other words, schools without enough money perform poorly, and spending more money on schools is beneficial, but pumping ten times more money into public schools will obviously not give you ten times better student outcomes.
The Coleman Report seemed, in many ways, to ask more questions than it answered. As the first major undertaking in the sociology of education, it provided an important starting point for studying both the role of education in American society, as well as some of the factors external to education that might influence the course of people’s lives. Coleman was passionately interested in equality of educational opportunity, providing people of different racial and ethnic groups, and from different walks of life, equal opportunities to succeed through the education system. Early sociology of education work set the stage for the development of modern sociology by focusing on race, class, and gender disparities in opportunity (see above), educational attainment, the highest level of schooling people complete, and educational outcomes, how education translates into adult well-being. These concepts are of central important in understanding education, and also in how social problems are defined in relation to education.
The second such study is the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (hereafter “The Wisconsin Study”), conducted by University of Wisconsin-Madison scholars William H. Sewell and Robert M. Hauser. Educational research can be difficult to conduct, especially given the research questions that sociologists are most interested in answering. Whether, and how, school effectively prepares students for careers, sorts students into groups, and in general, affects the life chances of students, requires studies that examine change over time. Sociological research can be sub-divided into two categories that are particularly relevant to quantitative research. Cross-sectional studies are “one-shot” studies, gathering data from a sample population just once, and analyzing it. Longitudinal studies are excellent for studying change over time, both changes over the life course of individuals and historical trends. If you wanted to find out how students from different family backgrounds fared over time, you would have to follow them from their earliest experiences in primary school all the way into their adult careers. Longitudinal studies are quite difficult (and expensive) when compared to cross-sectional studies, but they are also a lot more informative, helping researchers examine change over time.
The first wave of the analysis began in 1957, and a follow-up took place in 1962. Multiple variables were included, including student socioeconomic status (see Chapter 4), intellectual ability, and aspirations, as well as gender, community type (urban or rural). Men and students from higher socioeconomic status backgrounds had higher college and career aspirations. Part of this was explained by parental encouragement—parents from working-class or lower-class backgrounds, and those in rural communities, were less likely to push their children toward college. The follow-up report showed that children from the top 25 percent of income backgrounds were 2.5 times more likely to go to college than those from the lowest 25 percent. A third wave took place in 1975. In adulthood, men achieved higher career prestige than women regardless of education, even though women often entered the job market with higher prestige than men. Women self-selected careers that could be placed on hold and entered again later to provide time for having families; men took no such steps. In short, if we trace backward from adulthood, gender had the strongest impact on achievement after leaving the education system, but family background and socioeconomic status had the strongest impact on a person’s educational attainment in the first place.
One of the notable limitations of the study was its exclusion of race as a variable. People of color in the region available for participation in the research were too few to provide comparisons. However, the Wisconsin Study made clear that class, family background, and gender have significant impacts on individual life chances. How we experience education and its long-term effects on our life chances is impacted by exogenous factors, or factors existing outside of the education system itself. This realization increasingly shaped sociology of education, and, in addition to the cultural shifts that manifested themselves in the 1960s, turned attention toward a more critical approach to educational research.
There are conflict theories of education that took off in this era. Social reproduction theory argues that education, far from being a “great equalizer,” actually serves to reproduce existing social hierarchies across generations. In the well-known work with a telling title in relation to the overall attitude of social reproduction scholars, Goodbye American Dream, the authors argue that “In effect, if not by design, the American education system functions primarily to transmit advantage and disadvantage across generations” (Wysong et. al. 2014:219). From teachers to the school system, however unintentionally, students from lower social strata are, subtly and overtly, tracked, or placed in categories according to measured ability and expected achievement. Ray Rist found compelling evidence that this phenomenon might begin as early as kindergarten, if informally—students in a low-income school district found themselves placed in three reading groups that seemed to be based on factors indicating their socioeconomic status. There is a tendency, what might be called schema, or bundles of information that we absorb and use to judge others, to conflate markers of socioeconomic advantage (being clean, well-groomed, articulate, well-dressed) with intelligence and ability. As a writer who sometimes spends long hours in front of a computer with disheveled hair and second-day clothing, I would not be any smarter or more capable if I took a shower, changed my clothes, and ran a brush through my hair (though I also know folks who work from home who make the opposite argument).
Thus, for social reproduction theorists, schooling potentially becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as people from lower social strata are measured according to middle-class standards and found wanting, leading to belief that such children are just “not cut out for college.” The fact that those who are less likely to go to college happen to be disproportionately economically disadvantaged and/or persons of color is by no means lost on social reproduction theorists. Some social reproduction scholars argue that the American education system effectively maintains existing racial as well as class hierarchy in societies by depriving people of color of opportunities for advancement in subtle steps throughout the education process. Education, for them, is not a solution to a set of social problems, a way to engender and perpetuate social problems related to poverty, unemployment, economic inequality, and the disenfranchisement of women, low-income persons, and people of color.
Many know about the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that permitted segregation in the Southern United States; still more, perhaps, are aware of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that overturned school segregation. Far fewer have heard of a string of cases that slowly and quietly dismantled legally enforced desegregation. Just one year after the original decision, Brown II called for desegregation to happen with “all deliberate speed” but removed any reference to a clear timetable of desegregation. Miliken v. Bradley (1974) effectively shut off desegregation across the heavily-white suburbs of Detroit and urban districts with large non-white populations, setting a precedent that effectively preserved de facto residential segregation (see Chapter Three) that was followed, in the 1990s, by a near-complete restoration of local control of school districts (see, for example, Board of Education of Oklahoma v. Dowell, 1991, Missouri v. Jenkins, 1995), and the effective termination of Federal-led desegregation efforts. In other words, neighborhoods, and therefore schools, remain “separate and unequal,” divided along racial lines, and those divides in the context of schools are actually greater now than they were in the late 1960s.
One might understand the development of social reproduction theory against the background of changing labor conditions. Work intended to test the frequency of social reproduction, such as the work of Coclough and Beck drew upon a distinction between the blue-collar “manual labor” of mechanics, construction workers, and manufacturing jobs and the white-collar “mental labor” of sales, management, and other office jobs. They found that just under two thirds of students from each respective family type experienced mobility into the other type. Their conclusions are thus more nuanced than the overall picture painted by social reproduction theory: a significant minority of students do experience mobility, either upward or downward, during their educational career. This “manual-mental” distinction has eroded over the past three decades—manufacturing sector jobs in the U.S. have declined, while an increasing number of careers require a college education. Some of the careers that require higher levels of education do not pay as well as some of the more traditionally “manual labor” fields due to skills mismatch, or the relative dearth of people going into the trades. Plumbers, electricians, fluid power/hydraulic specialists, and other skilled laborers are thus positioned to earn more than in the past (though learning such trades, like getting a degree, takes years of work and training).
Although both functionalist and social reproduction approaches to education research help to understand important pieces of the puzzle, neither perspective alone seems to provide a satisfactory explanation. Both have been criticized for the “usual reasons”: functionalism in general does not account well for change, or for when institutions perform poorly or become dysfunctional. Social reproduction theory at times contains a subtext that points to the economic system—capitalism—as the problem, assuming the truth of this before beginning the analysis. Other perspectives have been offered, attempting to shore up the limitations of earlier research, and to understand education in terms of both social problems and solutions. By the 1980s, education research began to experience a “cultural turn,” attempting to understand some of these complex factors. Why, for instance, was it increasingly difficult to capture the effects of family background as students advanced to high school, and beyond? New ways of understanding education attempted to “go beyond” the critical perspectives that were concerned almost exclusively by economic factors. Some of these efforts were spearheaded by the French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, who “ran with” the idea of “capital” as being not merely economic, or money to invest. Bourdieu offered, and American sociologist Paul DiMaggio tested, the presence of cultural capital, behaviors, and activities, that distinguish one as belonging to higher, or upwardly mobile, social strata. Knowing how to tie a tie (men), the etiquette at a “white tablecloth” restaurant; knowing how to meaningfully discuss the taste of a fine wine or classical music or great literature or a famous work of art, can indicate to others that you “belong” in certain places that would be difficult for others to access. DiMaggio found that higher levels of cultural capital were positively correlated with grades of high school students (men more than women) even after controlling for student ability and family background. Indeed, student knowledge and participation bore only a low correlation with parental education, suggesting a “bigger picture” than the social reproduction theory, conflict-based arguments about educational attainment that sometimes bordered on economic determinism. Economic determinism is the view that individual lives, cultural currents, social institutions, and power relationships are all ultimately reducible to economic factors. If you regularly say with sincerity that “money makes the world go ‘round,” or something similar, you might be in the grips of some form of economic determinism. Additionally, research on social capital, your access to individuals occupying higher social strata—“who you know”—more than suggested that part of one’s career success, especially as an ever-increasing segment of American society attended college, has to do with your placement within a social network. In fact, some, such as University of Kansas researchers Byeongdon Oh and ChangHwan Kim, have argued recently that as more and more students attend college, this will place greater emphasis on social networks over level of education in terms of long-term life chances.
So is education the great equalizer or a way to reproduce the status quo? Both, and neither. It’s complicated. That’s sociology for you, I guess. It’s not that there’s no solution, only that data and theory can only partially explain something subject to change and complexity.
Image credit: a chart that tells a story, how women’s wages have increased in relation to education, while all groups of men other than those with four-year degrees or more have increased, on average. Source: 2024 Bureau of Labor Statistics https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/womens-earnings/2024/home.htm
Important Words
Boarding schools
Cross-sectional studies
Cultural capital
Educational attainment
Educational opportunity
Educational outcomes
Economic determinism
Exogenous
Longitudinal studies
Nonlinear
Schema
Secondary socialization
Self-fulfilling prophecy
Skills mismatch
Social capital
Social reproduction theory
Tracked
Sit With It: Big Questions
Choose one of the theories or approaches discussed in this reading and apply it to education based on your own experience as a student, parent, person shaped by education. How is it similar to, or different from, your own experiences?
Connect an aspect of race, gender, or social class as discussed in an earlier chapter to education, based on what you’ve read and what was discussed in class. How does looking at education affect or change your understanding statistical disparities, or average differences?
Can you think of other ways that education either teaches social norms, or reproduces social hierarchies and stratification, that were not covered in the reading or lecture?
