The Role of Cultural Capital and Parental Involvement in Educational Achievement and Implications for Public Policy

Abstract

Using the theory of social and cultural reproduction originally posited by Pierre Bourdieu, I test the idea that social status and individual culture affect academic achievement. The data used for this analysis was from the first panel of the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS), a survey sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and based on a nationally representative sample of 16,719 tenth-grade respondents in 2002. As one would expect, the measure of student's ability was the only variable that remained significant throughout for both classes and racial groups throughout all statistical models. The difference in the importance of upper class students and lower class is dependent on race. These findings are bolstered by other studies that show parental involvement has been shown to mediate the effects of race and socioeconomic resources in achievement gaps it could also be used as a possible strategy for reducing the achievement gap even in the presence of cultural capital.