School Structures and Students’ Outcomes

Abstract

In the family-school model in Chapter 1, I proposed that relationships between distal family background and students’ school outcomes are mediated, in part, by school structures and that the associations between these structures and outcomes vary for students from different backgrounds. Bourdieu (1998, p. 22) claims, for example, that “the school, once thought of introducing a form of meritocracy by privileging individual aptitudes over heredity privileges, actually tends to establish, through the hidden linkage between scholastic and cultural heritage, a veritable social nobility.”