Race, Culture, and Educational Opportunity

446540
2012
TRE10210.1177/1477878512446540AndersonTheory and Research in Education
Symposium Article
TRE
Theory and Research in Education
10(2) 105–129
Race, culture, and © The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
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DOI: 10.1177/1477878512446540
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Elizabeth Anderson
University of Michigan, USA
Abstract
This article criticizes the view that, if cultural factors within the black community explain poor
educational outcomes for blacks, then blacks should bear all of the disadvantages that follow from
this. Educational outcomes are the joint, iterated product of schools’ responses to students’
and parents’ culturally conditioned conduct. Schools are not entitled to excessively burden such
conduct even when it is less than educationally ideal. Cultural capital theory illuminates the
ways schools may unjustly penalize the culturally conditioned conduct of blacks and the poor.
However, it must be refined to take into account normative differences between arbitrary and
educationally important forms of cultural capital. Differential impact analysis offers a useful tool
for revealing when schools’ responses to students’ and parents’ conduct reflects unjust racial
stigmatization and ethnocentric bias.
Keywords
cultural capital, equality of educational opportunity, racial inequality, class inequality
1. Fair educational opportunities: the question of

culture and disadvantage
Racial disparities in educational achievement in the US are very large.1 Black children
enter Kindergarten scoring 0.64 standard deviation below whites in standardized tests, a
gap that grows to about 1 standard deviation for older children (Fryer and Levitt, 2004:
447). Various studies find that a typical black child who enters a given elementary grade
with equivalent educational achievement to a white child will fall about 0.10 standard
deviations behind the white child by the end of the year (Fryer et al., 2004: 448). Black
students are twice as likely as their white peers to be held back a grade between K-8
(Planty et al., 2009), and nearly twice as likely to drop out of high school (Aud et al.,
2011: 218 Table A-20–1). The black–white gap in college graduation rates grew from
Corresponding author:
Elizabeth Anderson, Department of Philosophy, University of Michigan, 2215 Angell Hall, Ann Arbor,
Michigan 48109-1003, USA
Email: eandersn@umich.edu
Downloaded from tre.sagepub.com at PURDUE UNIV LIBRARY TSS on May 27, 2015
106 Theory and Research in Education 10(2)
13% to 19% between 1975 and 2010 (Aud et al., 2011: 74). These disparities are large
not only in comparative but in absolute terms. Overall educational attainment of African-
Americans is far below what would be needed for all to have a realistic chance of
escaping poverty and securing stable, middle-class standing.
How should we assess these disparities? In this article, I bracket disputes about
whether the ultimate standard of justice in education should focus on ‘equality’ or on a
high level of ‘adequacy’ (Anderson, 2004a; Anderson, 2007; Brighouse and Swift, 2009;
Satz, 2007; Swift, 2003). The status quo fails both standards by a large margin. Because
any normatively acceptable policy for achieving equality would have to achieve a high
level of adequacy for all along the way, any feasible and normatively acceptable policies
for making progress toward either goal are liable to largely coincide in the foreseeable
future. There is therefore no urgency in settling the equality versus adequacy dispute. I
shall refer to the just standard of educational provision as ‘fair opportunity’, leaving open
whether fairness requires equality or adequacy. I shall refer to group-based injustices in
the provision of opportunities as ‘disadvantages’, leaving open whether these are to be
measured in comparative terms (as intergroup disparities) or as shortfalls from an
absolute standard.
I want to turn our attention instead to the ‘opportunity’ side of ‘fair opportunity’ and
to its implicit contrast with ‘outcomes’. Nearly all theories of justice allow that some
causes of disparate outcomes are justified or at least not unjust. The opportunity/outcome
distinction aims to capture this idea. I thus want to focus on normative questions
concerning the causes of observed racial achievement gaps or shortfalls. It is a
commonplace of quantitative analyses in this field to divide the causes into factors
attributable to schools (such as variations in curricular offerings and teacher quality) and
those attributable to students or the home environment (such as time spent on homework
and number of books in the home). Such divisions also appear to track normatively
relevant distinctions between outcomes for which schools are responsible and outcomes
for which students and their parents are responsible.
Some causes of racial inequality in educational outcomes fall clearly on one or the
other side of this line of responsibility. On the side of schools, it is widely acknowledged
that direct racial discrimination – a single agent providing goods of unequal value to
otherwise similar individual students simply on the basis of their race (phenotype tied to
ancestry) or on racial stereotypes concerning the presumed likely merits or demerits of
individuals with a particular phenotype tied to ancestry – violates fair opportunity.2 Some
portion of the black–white gap in educational outcomes is due to direct discrimination in
this sense. But that portion is unlikely to be large, because of the high degree of between-
school racial segregation in the United States.
Segregation creates conditions in which direct discrimination is relatively rare,
because the agents proximately in charge of distributing particular benefits rarely
encounter two similarly situated individuals of different races. Rather, different agents
– different schools and districts – are assigned responsibility for providing educational
goods to students of largely different races. If, due to other inequalities generated by
racial segregation, these districts have access to unequal resources, then different districts
will provide goods of unequal value to their students, and this resource inequality will
track the racial identities of students, even though there is no single agent that is directly
Anderson 107
discriminating against otherwise similar students on the basis of their race. Segregation
is a major discrimination-independent cause of racial disadvantages, besides also causing
and multiplying the bad effects of discrimination (Anderson, 2010). Racial segregation
of schools explains a substantial part of the black–white gap in educational achievement,
in part due to the fact that predominantly black schools have access to lower-quality,
less-experienced teachers (Hanushek and Rivkin, 2008).
On the other side of the responsibility divide, some racial inequalities in educational
attainment seem more directly attributable to voluntary choices of students and parental
guidance. Among Asian-American men in Texas universities, 55.5% major in a STEM
field (science, technology, engineering or mathematics), compared with only 37.6% of
white men (Dickson, 2010: 112, Table 2). Given the history of education in the Texas, it
is unlikely that the lower representation of white men in STEM fields compared with
Asian-Americans is due to unjust practices perpetrated against white men by schools.
The normative force of voluntary choice is much more salient in this case: STEM
educational opportunities appear to be equally open to white and Asian-American men,
but more of the latter are taking advantage of them.3
It is tempting, given the apparent clarity of such cases on either side of the divide, to
suppose that the entire field of normative questions concerning justice in educational
outcomes could be neatly parsed in this way. This is the standard presupposition behind
the distinction between ‘opportunity’ and ‘outcome’ standards of distributive justice,
with the common disavowal of outcome and embrace of an opportunity standard that
seems to encapsulate an American consensus. On this view, schools must offer fair
opportunities to students, but it is up to students to take advantage of these opportunities,
and to their parents to encourage and prepare them to take them up. This neat picture is
also presupposed by what I have dubbed ‘responsibility-catering luck egalitarianism’
(Dworkin, 1981; Rakowski, 1991). On this view, once inequalities in brute luck have
been eliminated, any inequalities brought about by an individual’s voluntary choices are
wholly the responsibility of the individual.4
This is the context in which discussions of cultural differences often figure in
American public discourse on racial differences in educational outcomes. Ever since the
landmark Coleman report on equality of educational opportunity (Coleman et al., 1966),
quantitative analyses of group inequalities have consistently found that a substantial
portion of differential educational outcomes is attributable to factors in the home or
neighborhood environment. These factors are not reducible to inequalities in material
resources available to families, but are often classified as ‘cultural’. For example, there
are profound class differences in styles of linguistic communication between parents and
their children. Annette Lareau (2003) finds that middle-class parents cultivate linguistic
fluency in their children by talking to them frequently, encouraging them to ask questions,
explain their feelings, articulate their interests, reason about problems, and discuss affairs
of the world beyond their immediate experiences. Working-class and poor parents use
language much more sparingly, and mostly for instrumental purposes, to get their
children to do particular things, such as to clean up their rooms or get ready for school.
In light of these observations, it is little wonder that middle-class children enter
Kindergarten with a huge vocabulary advantage over their working-class and poor peers.
One extensive observational study found that three-year-old children of professional
parents had larger working vocabularies than the parents of children on welfare had
(Risley and Hart, 1995). Such differences typically lead to different placements from the
first days of school, setting the already advanced students on a higher and steeper learning
trajectory than their disadvantaged peers. Popular explanations of the impressive
academic success of certain subgroups of Asian-Americans, notably Chinese-Americans,
also point to cultural factors in the home – to the ‘Tiger mothers’ who relentlessly demand
that their children spend long hours devoted to homework and music lessons, accept
nothing less than all As on report cards, cultivate the virtues of perseverance, patience,
meticulousness, hard work, and academic ambition, and ban distractions from schoolwork
such as playdates, sleepovers, and TV (Chua, 2011).
On the darker side of cultural explanations of group differences in educational
outcomes, we find conservative commentators embracing the theory that black students
reject studiousness and educational ambition because they see this as ‘acting white’
(Christie, 2010; McWhorter, 2000; Thernstrom and Thernstrom, 1997: 383; Wax, 2008).
In the context of the ‘opportunity’ frame of educational justice, such explanations,
offered as an account of a supposedly sui generis intrinsic-value orientation of black
youth to education, function to let schools off the hook for black–white educational
disparities and place responsibility solely on the shoulders of blacks themselves. Such
cultural explanations of black educational disadvantages express and reinforce ‘modern’
narratives of black stigmatization, which represent blacks not as biologically incapable
but rather as willfully failing to take advantage of fair opportunities provided by
mainstream institutions, while blaming others for their disadvantages and demanding
undeserved handouts (Kinder and Sanders, 1996; McConahay, 1986).
In view of such normative uses of cultural explanations of racial inequalities, it is no
wonder that scholars and activists on the left have tended to stress structural explanations
of inequality and avoid cultural explanations as ‘blaming the victim’. However, without
denying the powerful influence of unequal structures of opportunity shaped by racial
segregation, stigmatization, and discrimination, we must also acknowledge that such
explanations of black disadvantages are incomplete. As William Julius Wilson (2009)
has stressed, adequate accounts of black disadvantage must integrate structural and
cultural explanations. This is not just for intellectual but for political reasons: any account
of racial justice that ignores culture will be unable to gain any purchase on public
discourse. My aim in this article is to advance our understanding of how to normatively
assess explanations of racial disadvantage that include cultural causes.
The next section of this article criticizes the idea that we can define what fair
educational opportunities are, independently of considerations of how different groups
are likely to respond to opportunities offered, which may be shaped by culture – that is,
the habits, adaptive responses, and normative expectations of group members. In Section
3, I discuss explanations of group disadvantages in terms of ‘cultural capital’ and the
normative conclusions that cultural capital theorists draw from such explanations. In
Section 4, I consider normative critiques of cultural capital theories of group disadvantage
in education. In Section 5, I propose that differential impact analysis in antidiscrimination
law offers a useful guide for policy makers in cases where group-based disadvantages
have cultural causes, and I offer a new account of the normative considerations that
differential impact analysis tracks. On this account, differential impact analysis does not
Anderson 109
aim at uncovering covert or unconscious direct discrimination, or at equality of outcome

(proportional representation) for different groups, or at providing equal chances for
multicultural flourishing on a supposition of the equal worth of different cultures. Rather,
it aims to block the influence of group stigmatization and ethnocentrism on policy
responses to cultural differences.
2. Some problems with a culture-independent definition

of fair opportunities
Brian Barry has provided an apt description of the view of fair opportunities that I want
to criticize. He summarizes his view as follows:
the rules define a choice set, which is the same for everybody; within that choice set people pick
a particular course of action by deciding what is best calculated to satisfy their underlying
preferences for outcomes, given their beliefs about the way in which actions are connected to
outcomes. From an egalitarian liberal standpoint, what matters are equal opportunities. If
uniform rules create identical choice sets, then opportunities are equal. We may expect that
people will make different choices from these identical choice sets, depending on their
preferences for outcomes and their beliefs about the relation of actions to the satisfaction of
their preferences. Some of these preferences and beliefs will be derived from aspects of a
culture shared with others; some will be idiosyncratic. But this has no significance: either way
it is irrelevant to any claims based on justice, since justice is guaranteed by equal opportunities.
(Barry, 2001: 32)
Barry articulates this view as a critique of multiculturalist claims for special accommo-
dations for cultural or religious minorities who find it more costly than the majority to
obey certain rules. His examples of such rules – humane slaughter laws, laws requiring
safety helmets in construction trades – make it clear that the justification for the rules that
structure opportunities in one way or another makes no reference to the variable costs to
different groups of complying with the rules, or their varying abilities to comply, due to
their cultural differences. I do not contest Barry’s view in all domains. I think his view is
exactly right in the case of humane slaughter laws, for example. Rather, I shall raise
objections to this view in educational contexts.
My first point is that the vast majority of public educational opportunities are
offered to children – that is, to individuals who are not yet fully responsible for their
actions and who are properly subject to paternalistic governance. It is hardly apt to tell
children ‘Here are the rules which tell people what they are allowed to do. What they
choose to do within those rules is up to them. But it has nothing to do with public
policy’ (Barry, 2001: 32).5 A school system that merely offered educational opportunities
to children but remained neutral as to whether they showed up for school, taking no
steps to ensure that they regularly attend, or to engage their interest in learning, is
surely failing in its duties.
This observation underwrites to two distinct notions of holding people responsible for
(the consequences of) their actions. In the libertarian/responsibility-catering luck
egalitarian sense, this requires official neutrality over how they choose, combined with
an insistence that individuals fully internalize the costs and benefits of their voluntary
choices. This notion is obviously out of place with children. To hold children responsible
for regularly attending school is rather to make them attend, punish them for truancy,
require them to make up for lost days, praise and reward them for showing up every day,
and so forth. It is, in other words, to teach them to behave responsibly – prudently and
conscientiously – in this domain of action. This is an educational task, and hence a task
that schools cannot disavow.
Second, the opportunity/choice distinction misleadingly represents the normative
focus of interest on whether a given choice was voluntary, rather than on the consequences
institutions attach to this or that choice. This focus fits with the libertarian idea,
appropriated by responsibility-catering luck egalitarians, that people have, as Herbert
Spencer (1891: Part IV, §35) declared, a right to the consequences of their actions. But
this distracts from where the fundamental normative work is being done, in the decisions
institutional agents make to attach particular consequences to particular choices.
Voluntary choice within an opportunity set that conditions certain outcomes on certain
choices cannot justify decisions to structure the opportunity set in that way.
Consider, for example, ‘zero tolerance’ school policies that prescribe suspensions for
infractions of school rules. In Texas, such policies have led to the suspension of 83% of
African-American male 7th–12th grade students, and nearly 75% of special education
students (Fabelo et al., 2011: x–xi). Even if we suppose that the school rules prohibit
conduct that ought to be prohibited, that the students committed the infraction voluntarily,
without excuse, and with full awareness of the consequences, and that the suspensions
were imposed on a nondiscriminatory basis, there is plenty of room to question such a
punitive approach to infractions. Suspending children from school interrupts their
education. It also likely inspires attitudes of distrust and alienation from school that
undermines these children’s motivation to learn. Without compelling evidence that such
draconian policies have positive rehabilitative effects on the children suspended, or are
necessary to ensure the safety and positive learning environment of other students, they
amount to little more than a continuation of Texas’ traditional policies of excluding
disadvantaged children from access to education.
I am not suggesting, in multiculturalist fashion, that the racial disparity in punishments
should lead to race-based exemptions from otherwise generally applicable rules of
conduct. It is rather that the consequences that schools attach to infractions of otherwise
reasonable rules of conduct should be designed with reference to the likely educational
impact on those who are liable to punishment, and that these impacts, in turn, should
consider the reasons why different groups respond differently to the same punishments.
Suppose, for example, that African-American students are more likely to inhabit a
subculture in which ‘respect’ is in short supply, perceived acts of disrespect are regarded
as provocations to fight, and failures to rise to such challenges are met with a permanent
degradation of one’s status in the eyes of peers along with chronic susceptibility to
bullying. It would not be surprising that the prospect of school suspension for fighting
would have relatively little deterrent or rehabilitative value for students who face such
costs from failing to fight. Instead of waiting for fights to happen, and suspending
students after the fact, schools in such an environment should undertake pro-active
measures to alter the cultural contexts of meaning-making that predictably lead to
fighting.
Anderson 111
Third, the opportunity/choice distinction as applied to education misleadingly

represents the process of generating educational outcomes as a simple two-stage game:
the school provides a menu of options to which consequences are attached, and children/
parents choose the option that suits their culturally shaped preferences. In reality, the
school process bears little resemblance to ordering at a restaurant, where the options and
prices are easily comprehended, items are delivered simply on order, and their quality is
easily and quickly assessed upon delivery. Instead, the generation of educational
outcomes is a protracted, iterated process in which outcomes are the product of
innumerable choices by schools, parents, and children, each responding in turn to the
choices and conduct of the other actors over the course of 11–25 years. Neither the
process nor the quality of outcomes is transparent to any but the most sophisticated and
assertive parents. Seemingly small decisions early in the process – such as placing a
child in a remedial reading group – can set her on a lower educational trajectory that is
difficult to change and virtually guaranteed to lead to disadvantageous outcomes many
years later. High placements early on generate cumulative and widening advantages.
College-educated professional and managerial parents are vividly aware of these facts
and work the system to ensure that their children are placed in higher tracks; poor and
working-class parents are often in the dark about the long-term implications of initial
placement decisions and lack the skills to effectively contest these decisions.
When educational outcomes are the product of a protracted, iterated, and opaque
process of school responses to parental and student responses to school policies, we need
to ask even harder questions about what consequences schools are attaching to parent/
student responses to their own policies. I shall argue in the next section that it is unjust to
tailor these consequences to cater to the typical responses of advantaged social groups. I
shall argue in Section 5 that it is unjust to tailor these consequences to cater to some
idealized notion of how parents and children ought to respond – even when that ideal, if
followed, would maximize educational achievement. Schools must try to mitigate the
effects of non-ideal responses to their own policies, especially when those responses
reflect the material and cultural constraints arising from socioeconomic disadvantage.
To take stock: the opportunity/outcome distinction is often deployed as a means to
justify structures of opportunity that result in bad educational outcomes for disadvantaged
groups. It is supposed that mainstream institutions provide fair opportunities, but the
disadvantaged have, for voluntary cultural reasons, failed to take adequate advantage of
them. The responsibility for this is laid exclusively on the shoulders of the disadvantaged.
On this view, even if the disadvantages they suffer could be causally traced to racial or
economic injustices of the past, the solutions to these disadvantages lie exclusively in
reforms of conduct and culture internal to the communities of the disadvantaged – they
are responsible for picking themselves up by their own bootstraps (Wax, 2008).
My reply to this claim is that educational outcomes are the joint product of iterated,
protracted interactions between educational institutions and the communities they serve.
Schools are not entitled to attach whatever educational consequences they like to
whatever culturally conditioned responses they find in those communities, even when
those responses are less than educationally ideal. They should tailor their educational
offerings to the likely responses of the members of the communities they serve, with the
aim of making educational outcomes as good as possible given actual (or, in the ideal
case, just) allocations of resources.6 This reply does not erase the opportunity/outcome
distinction. It insists, however, that what counts as fair educational opportunities cannot
be determined independently of culturally conditioned meanings and habits in the
communities that schools serve, which determine the expected outcomes of offering
those opportunities. The question then arises of how to model educational opportunities
in terms of school/community interactional processes in ways that track normatively
relevant considerations.
3. Cultural capital theories of educational outcomes

Cultural capital theory offers a framework for understanding how the interplay of family
with mainstream institutional cultures generates unequal outcomes that track boundaries
of social identity. As originally theorized by sociologists Bourdieu and Passeron (1977),
cultural capital consists in a set of skills, habits, or behavioral repertoires that are
(a) monopolized by dominant classes, (b) established by them as the standards of
performance in powerful institutions, and (c) used to allocate the goods that lead to or
constitute high social status: admission to the best (most prestigious) schools and highest
educational tracks; awards of high grades, fellowships, degrees and honors; hiring into
entry-level jobs with a propitious promotional ladder; promotion to high-status positions.
In their studies of French upper-class schooling, Bourdieu and Passeron identified
familiarity with and the ability to display appreciation of French high culture – for
example, the ability to aptly quote Racine, or to discuss Debussy, or show good taste in
ordering fine wines – as critical markers of merit or qualification for high-status positions.
Cultural capital theory is a theory about the reproduction of social inequality. It
contributes several important ideas about how group-based inequality is reproduced over
time. First, it rejects a purely materialist view of inequality, which reduces class inequality
to differences in command of material wealth. Cultural capital is somewhat autonomous
from financial capital. Although each kind of capital is ‘convertible’ or can be used to
gain access to the other – college graduates display their cultural finesse to land jobs at
elite law firms; wealthy parents pay for fancy private schools to educate their children in
the classics – neither is reducible to the other. Mere command of money does not
guarantee access to the most prestigious schools; one’s child must also pass an exam (on
which knowledge of Racine is tested), or (in the US) impress an admissions interviewer,
to get in.
Second, cultural capital does not help people merely as a passive asset. It must be
skillfully deployed in ways approved by institutional gatekeepers to gain access to the
goods the institution can provide (Lareau and Horvat, 1999: 37–8). For example, it isn’t
enough to deploy a high degree of intelligence in articulating a valid complaint to get
institutions to respond to it. One must appeal to them in institutionally approved ways. A
school may throw up a wall of resistance to black parents’ well-grounded, angry
complaints that the curriculum neglects important black historical figures, because they
deem it counterproductive to suggest that schools are racially biased. However, black
parents might get their way by using subtler techniques that require insider knowledge of
how these institutions work. Without dropping any hints that they suspect a school of
practicing racial discrimination, they may make a point of frequently dropping by to see
Anderson 113
how their daughter is doing – thereby signaling to the school that they are parents who
are deeply concerned and involved in their daughter’s education. This is a deployment of
cultural capital that tends to generate positive responses from schools. Such institutional
responses may be formally race-neutral: schools may equally resist angry complaints
from white parents that the school is racially biased, and equally reward signals of
parental concern and involvement, regardless of the race of the family. Nevertheless this
institutional strategy yields higher levels of responsiveness to white parents’ than black
parents’ claims, because black parents, having sound reason to distrust the schools given
their racist histories, are more likely to express their claims in a distrustful, angry manner
(Lareau and Horvat, 1999).
Third, access to cultural capital must be restricted by the privileged classes, for once
it becomes widespread it can no longer serve its selective, exclusionary function.
Bourdieu and Passeron hypothesized that upper-class monopolization of cultural capital
was possible because it was unconsciously and implicitly transmitted from parents to
children in the course of family life, and thereby internalized by children as habitus – as
such an easy and familiar way of conducting oneself that one doesn’t have to think about
it. Much cultural capital is not explicitly taught in schools; and even the parts that are
explicitly taught are not fully internalized by lower-class students who lack the prior
familial training to feel at ease in high-status modes of conduct. Cultural capital may be
embodied – in accents, sneers, a flourish in pouring wine, a flair in how one arranges
one’s hair or greets a high-status stranger, a confident, elegant bearing of the body, free
of humility or shame – in ways that are extraordinarily difficult to acquire once one’s
family upbringing has trained one in a dissonant habitus. Even if a working-class child
learns through explicit schooling and painstaking practice how to quote Racine, his
attempts will be shot through with self-doubt and hesitation in worrying whether it is
quite the right moment, or the right quote – and this will reveal him to be an awkward
poseur. (Here cultural capital theory intersects with stereotype threat theory (Steele,
1997): anxieties about confirming group stereotypes of poor performance in a domain
will depress performance in that domain.)
Finally, cultural capital theory explains how group-based inequality can be reproduced
in ways that appear to be perfectly legitimate. This is so for three reasons. (i) The
institutions’ standards of response to the conduct of those who seek access to its benefits
are publicly accepted as meritocratic, even though they merely reflect the power of
dominant social groups to get their parochial, exclusive cultural norms adopted as
standards of evaluation by the institution. (ii) These standards reproduce the exclusion of
disadvantaged groups without anyone practicing illegitimate direct discrimination on the
basis of race, class, or other identity markers that track lines of social stratification
(Lamont and Lareau, 1988: 155). An elite university need not turn down the working-
class applicant because he is poor, but rather because he did not perform well in the
interview (his responses did not match the high-class interviewer’s culturally normative
expectations), or (at Oxford’s Merton College) because he did not know how to pass the
port.7 (iii) Because the fit of individual habitus with institutional norms is often automatic
and unconscious, experienced as a relaxed and natural rapport and response rather than
as a conscious act of inclusion (to be contrasted with stiffening, resistance, or awkwardness
toward those doing things the ‘wrong’ way), the parochial, ethnocentric basis of exclusion
often escapes the notice of the players. The gatekeeper need not be thinking ‘we keep
those types out of our organization’, but rather something more impressionistic and
seemingly innocent: ‘he wouldn’t fit in here’.
Cultural capital theory sometimes helps explain disparate outcomes that reproduce
social stratification. Upper-class accents, dialects, and manners have long served as
modes of exclusion (Elias, 1978; Orwell, 1937). In the US, cultural affinity has been
documented as a hiring criterion by prestigious law and accounting firms: job interviews
look for congruence of tastes in entertainment, sports, and recreation, which are
differentiated by race and class (Rivera, 2009).
Does cultural capital theory also help explain the reproduction of educational
disadvantage by race and class in the US? This point is contested. Some researchers argue
that large-scale quantitative tests have failed to confirm this hypothesis (Kingston, 2001;
Tzanakis, 2011). However, various studies have adopted conflicting conceptions of
cultural capital. Much research on cultural capital theory has simply imported French
conceptions of cultural capital – primarily, engagement with high culture and fine arts – to
the American scene. Americans do not have sharply class-differentiated aesthetic tastes as
in France, and even the upper classes do not regard high-culture tastes, such as a preference
for classical music, as very important. It is an empirical question whether anything counts
as cultural capital in the US and, if so, what its content is (Lamont and Lareau, 1988).
Furthermore, quantitative studies model cultural capital as an individual possession. Yet,
theoretically, cultural capital refers to a relational process, an interplay between individuals’
active deployment of some cultural marker and an institution’s response to it (Lareau and
Weininger, 2003). It is about the ‘micro-politics of exclusion’ (Lamont and Lareau, 1988:
161), the ‘micro-interactional processes whereby individuals’ strategic use of knowledge,
skills, and competence comes into contact with institutionalized standards of evaluation’,
the deployment of skills that ‘are transmissible across generations, are subject to monopoly,
and may yield advantages or “profits”’ (Lareau and Weininger, 2003: 569).
Qualitative ethnographic studies are better suited to uncovering such micro-processes
in the first instance, especially when the task is to discover what, if anything, functions
as cultural capital in the US. The most impressive studies of this sort, examining the
interaction of family culture and school norms, have been conducted by Annette Lareau
and colleagues (Lareau, 2003; Lareau and Horvat, 1999). Lareau’s book-length study
identified sharply class-differentiated styles of childrearing. Middle-class parents bring
up their children in accordance with a model of ‘concerted cultivation’. This parenting
style emphasizes time-intensive involvement of children in multiple extra-curricular
adult-organized activities such as sports and music lessons, and sophisticated linguistic
interactions between parents and children that train and encourage children to articulate
their wants, reason with others, and negotiate terms of interaction favorable to their
interests. Working-class and poor parents bring up their children in accordance with a
model of ‘accomplishment of natural growth’. This parenting style emphasizes a sharp
division between the activities and interests of adults and children. Children are granted
great autonomy over the management of their time and relations with other children;
adults rarely organize activities for them. Linguistic interaction between parents and
children is sparing and instrumental. Disputes are more likely to be settled through
yelling and physical discipline than negotiation and reasoning.
Anderson 115
These class differences in child-rearing styles have profoundly unequal consequences

when families interact with schools to obtain services for their children. Schools are
geared to respond favorably to middle-class styles and unfavorably to working-class
styles. They view parents more favorably when they see them as deeply involved in
cultivating their children’s skills. This gives such parents more leverage in negotiating
favorable treatment of their children – placement in more advanced academic tracks,
gifted programs, or, if their children are experiencing academic difficulties, delivery of
special education services. Middle-class children, too, skilled in the arts of negotiation
and brought up with a sense of entitlement, articulate their needs and demand that
institutions tailor their services to their needs in ways that elicit favorable school
responses. Middle-class parents also command the large vocabularies needed to
understand professional assessments of their children’s academic achievements and
challenges, and are able to respond in kind and feel confident speaking with teachers and
school administrators. The neat fit between middle-class parenting styles and school
cultures opens up favorable opportunities for children.
By contrast, working-class and poor parents, facing already more resource-constrained
and bureaucratically rigid school systems, feel at a loss in dealing with professionals.
They often lack the vocabulary to understand what teachers and other professionals are
saying to them, and lack the confidence to make their own judgments of their children’s
needs and to demand that schools cater to them. They feel that such judgments are better
made by professionals, wait for their assessments, and more often defer to their decisions.
Teachers and principals view this deferential approach unfavorably, judge such parents as
neglectful, and respond by neglecting the needs of students whose parents lack a pushy,
articulate advocate.8 Nor are poor and working-class children in a good position to speak
up for themselves in educational matters, lacking a large vocabulary, used to deferring to
adults in their areas of expertise, and not being trained in the skills of articulating their
needs and negotiation. Schools also judge poor and working-class parents’ physical modes
of discipline harshly. Parents who use corporal punishment know they are walking a fine
line and that schools may call upon state authorities to take away their children if they go
too far. Such parents therefore fear and distrust school authorities; schools respond
unfavorably to that distrust; and their actions further disadvantage poor and working-class
children (Lareau, 2003: ch. 11).
Lareau’s study identifies a particular culture – a behavioral repertoire – that functions
as cultural capital in American educational settings: it is monopolized by an advantaged
class and deployed by its members in interactions with schools that are geared to respond
favorably to it, delivering educational advantages to those who display it, in ways that
reproduce group inequality. Quantitative studies following Lareau’s qualitative research
confirm her argument that schools reward the middle-class child-rearing style of ‘concerted
cultivation’ and that this effect accounts for some of the impact of socioeconomic status
on student outcomes (Bodovski and Farkas, 2008; Farkas et al., 1990).
Let us assess this phenomenon in light of the normative argument made in the previous
section, against definitions of fair opportunity that disregard the likely culturally
conditioned responses of disadvantaged or outsider groups to the opportunities offered.
A given school could argue, along the lines of Barry’s definition, that it is providing
equal opportunities to all of its students, regardless of class.9 It will deliver educational
advantages to children of parents who display and transmit school-approved cultural

styles, and disadvantages (neglect and harsh treatment) to children of parents who display
and transmit unapproved styles, and the same treatment to children of parents who
display the same style, regardless of their social class or race. It is up to the parents to
take advantage of the opportunities on offer by conducting themselves in approved ways
and transmitting these modes of conduct to their children. If they fail to do so, they have
only themselves to blame; it’s their dysfunctional culture, not the school system, that is
at fault.
There are several problems with this equal opportunity argument. It is hardly just to
pile disadvantages on working-class and poor children because of their parents’ behavior.
This injustice is magnified when these parents, owing to their limited linguistic skills and
patterns of class deference required of them in employment contexts, are hardly able to
respond in school-approved ways. It is further magnified when we consider that their
inability to respond in school-approved ways is in part due to the deficient educations –
limited training in language arts and reasoning – the school systems had delivered to
them. Schools that appeal to this argument are simply reaching for an excuse to perpetuate
the disadvantageous educations they had long delivered to poor and working-class
parents. Instead of searching for ways to optimize the education of all children by
adjusting school policies in light of class variations in parenting styles, schools tailor
their policies to the needs of children brought up one way, to the disadvantage of others.
This lack of adjustment is even more objectionable because it reproduces an already
unjust class hierarchy, locking the less advantaged into their subordinate positions.
Schools thereby deliver the opposite of what they promised. The opportunity/outcome
dichotomy is supposed to offer genuine opportunities for upward mobility. This promise
is betrayed when structures of opportunity are configured so as to reinforce the privileges
of the already advantaged and throw up barriers to advancement against less advantaged
classes.
4. A challenge to cultural capital theory: some cultures

are better than others
The case thus far made against the ways schools differentially reward the cultural styles
of different socioeconomic classes is strong, but not unassailable. Paul Kingston (2001)
has advanced the most important challenge to it. He argues that the critical power of
cultural capital theory depends on a background assumption that schools’ decisions to
favor certain cultural styles over others are morally arbitrary. This is why ‘French’
standards of cultural capital seem so vulnerable to critique (to Americans, at least): why
favor the children who are familiar with classical music over those who have commanding
knowledge of hip-hop or country music? This does seem arbitrary and unfairly class-
biased. Yet American schools do not appear to be much geared to favor children endowed
with highbrow cultural tastes – or, to the modest extent that they are, this is so in ways
that facilitate class mobility rather than class reproduction, because American upper
classes have not monopolized access to highbrow culture (Kingston, 2001: 91–2).
Kingston argues that the cultural styles that US schools favor are directly relevant to
educational attainment:
Anderson 117
My underlying plea is that the cultural practices that enhance school success should not be
passed off as ‘conformity to dominant norms,’ with the implication that some other norms
should be just as beneficial, or even that these norms are somehow illegitimate. To do so, even
implicitly, diverts attention from an important message, especially for the disadvantaged: Some
cultural practices tend to help everyone at school. They are no less worthwhile because of some
presumed class linkage, nor are they incompatible with the maintenance of any vital subcultural
differences. (Kingston, 2001: 91–2)
For this reason, the fact that schools favor certain cultural practices is not morally arbi-
trary, but instrumental to academic success in any educational program suited for mod-
ern, complex, post-industrial economies.
At this point we must analyze the content of American cultural capital at a more fine-
grained level. Several distinct behaviors are at issue. Among parents of middle-class
children, we observe (a) encouragement of adult-organized extracurricular pursuits by
children; (b) encouragement in children of a sense of entitlement to have others tailor their
practices to children’s individual needs; (c) demanding delivery of services tailor-made to
their children’s needs; (d) cultivation of linguistic ability in their children; (e) encouraging
studiousness and academic ambition in their children; (f) providing children with effective
help with their homework, making sure they complete it and correct errors.
Lareau has an effective reply to behaviors (a) and (b). She argues that, while middle-
class parenting styles that include (a)–(b) deliver genuine benefits to their children, the
parenting styles of the working class and poor deliver other benefits that should not be
disparaged. Working-class and poor children, having much greater autonomy over how
they spend their time and with whom, learn to handle themselves in unstructured
situations, are never at a loss for ways to entertain themselves, are full of energy, rarely
whine or complain, are more polite and obedient toward their parents, uncomplainingly
and promptly completing requests and errands, and nicer to their siblings than their
middle-class peers (Lareau, 2003: 67–8, 102–3, 153, 159). Middle-class children, raised
with strong linguistic skills and a sense of personal entitlement, are whiny, resistant,
argumentative with their parents over reasonable demands (to clean up their rooms, do
household chores, etc.), rude and insulting toward their parents, mean to their siblings,
dependent on adults to entertain them, frequently bored when left on their own, and
exhausted from overscheduled lives (Lareau, 2003: 52–3, 127, 169–70, 242). To put the
point bluntly, they are spoiled. There is no particular reason for schools to encourage or
reward (a)–(b) over the working-class styles, nor any inherent connection between (a)–(b)
and successful educational outcomes. Recall that, a few decades ago, middle-class
parents were far less involved in scheduling their children’s lives with adult-supervised
extracurricular activities, maintained stronger boundaries between adult and child
activities, allowed their children great autonomy in deciding what to do with vast
quantities of leisure time, and expected their children to do household chores without
complaint.10 These practices did not appear to impair the educational success of middle-
class children then, and there is no reason for schools to favor the currently fashionable
middle-class parenting styles in these respects.
Lareau’s argument also succeeds with respect to (c). While it is understandable that
institutions grease the squeaky wheels, justice demands that schools do not resist the
delivery of needed services to the less complaining. Fair opportunity demands that
schools take extra steps to avoid neglecting those who face challenges in articulating
their needs and demanding action.
Difficulties arise, however, with respect to (d)–(f). These practices are directly
instrumental to academic success and not merely arbitrary practices that schools have
decided to favor by rewarding them with extra educational opportunities. Students who
begin school with large vocabularies, and already knowing their letters and some sight
words, are plainly in a better position to make greater strides in learning to read than
those with weaker linguistic backgrounds. Nor is the strong empirical connection
between academic achievement (grades and test scores) and studious habits such as
showing up every day at school ready to learn, studying hard, completing homework on
time, persevering with tasks, paying attention to the teacher, participating in class
activities, and refraining from disruptive behavior purely artificial: deployment of such
habits is causally connected to educational achievement apart from any rewards schools
might attach to their display.
It is no help to appeal to a conception of cultural capital which refuses any distinction
between technical competence (skills genuinely causally relevant to academic/job
performance) and symbolic capital (arbitrary status signals that yield rewards without
making a genuine contribution). Although Lareau and Weininger sometimes suggest
such a view (Lareau and Weininger, 2003: 582), to do so would eviscerate the normative
force of cultural capital theory. If one’s position is that nothing could possibly count as a
genuine merit – that literacy, say, is no better than illiteracy – then one hardly needs
empirical evidence to unmask the pretensions of society to be running a meritocracy.
That would already be built in to one’s normative presupposition. Moreover, such a
normative position would fail to account for the critical power we actually find in the
empirical evidence Lareau uncovers about how schools allocate advantages and
disadvantages.
A better argument would critically examine how schools measure and reward studious
behavior. Focus on reward first. There is strong evidence that teachers double count
studiousness in awarding course grades: students whom teachers perceive as behaving
more studiously get higher grades than other students who score equally well on tests of
coursework mastery. While studiousness also correlates with tests of coursework mastery,
its impact on grades is not exhausted by its impact on mastery. In fact, teachers’ evaluation
of students’ work habits has a stronger effect on course grades than mastery of the
material as measured by test scores (Farkas et al., 1990: 140). Given that teachers judge
Asian-American students as having vastly better work habits than any other racial group
(Farkas, et al., 1990: 132), this explains much of their very high academic achievement
records, including most of their one-letter-grade GPA advantage over white students
(Farkas, 2003: 551).
Is this double-counting unfair? Should course grades reflect coursework mastery
alone? Or are good work habits independently valuable? Farkas et al. take their study to
confirm cultural capital theory. In other work, Farkas describes work habits as ‘non-
cognitive’ and notes that some have viewed their strong impact on earnings is an
indictment of the American economic system’s claim to meritocracy (Farkas, 2003:
542). Yet, to the extent that grades are used as a signal for employers, it is not evident that
Anderson 119
teachers’ grading practices are unfair. It is not unreasonable for employers to independently
value good work habits over and above the cognitive skills they engender. Showing up
for work every day, perseverance, and consistency are probably more important to
employers of high school graduates than mastery of algebra.
However, to the extent that course grades are used to determine student placement in
more or less advanced courses the following year, double counting is unfair. It places
students on a permanently lower learning trajectory than warranted by their cognitive
skills. If this is one of the ways that poor and minority children end up being offered
inferior opportunities to learn, this iterated interaction of family with school culture
confirms cultural capital theory’s critique of schools.
A separate issue concerns biases in teachers’ assessments of student behavior. Teachers
judge black students’ behavior to be worse than that of white students. However, there is
some evidence that this disparity is due to a mismatch between students’ and teachers’
backgrounds. One study found that middle-class teachers perceive black students and
poor/working-class students to be less mature than white or middle-class students, but
that teachers with a low socioeconomic background do not share this perception. The
discordance between teacher and student background appears to affect not only behavior
judgments but course grades, a result consistent with Farkas’ research and with cultural
capital theory more generally: teachers reward middle-class behavioral styles independent
of the cognitive achievements they may engender (Alexander et al., 1987). Another study
found a race-matching effect: white teachers judge black students’ behavior as worse
than white students’ behavior, but black teachers do not share this judgment (Downey
and Pirbesh, 2004). In such cases racial or socioeconomic mismatch mediates the impact
of cultural capital on whatever educational opportunities, such as placement in more
demanding classes, schools attach to teacher judgments of student behavior.
There is no escaping the use of normative judgments in shaping social scientific
concepts. If we want empirical inquiry to help us answer questions about the justice of
our social arrangements, we must design our conceptual tools in response to our
normative concerns (Anderson, 1995; Anderson, 2004b). With respect to cultural capital
theory, this means that we must distinguish morally arbitrary from educationally valuable
forms of cultural capital. It is unjust for schools to tie their provision of educational
opportunities to arbitrary forms of cultural capital. But schools are not entitled to attach
whatever rewards they like to educationally relevant deployments of cultural capital
either. Double-counting studious behavior (counting it over and above its impact on
coursework mastery and hence ability to handle more advanced work) in deciding what
further educational opportunities students have access to reproduces class and racial
stratification and is also unjust.
This limited response is not sufficient to overcome the ways educationally relevant
forms of cultural capital reproduce social inequality along lines of race and class.11
Cultural capital theory provides two avenues for criticizing the ways that cultural capital
affects people’s socioeconomic prospects. One is to criticize the ways that society
rewards cultural capital – by attaching rewards to normatively arbitrary cultural
repertoires, or inappropriate rewards to normatively relevant cultural repertoires. The
other is to criticize group monopolization of normatively relevant cultural repertoires. If
certain behaviors are instrumental to success for sound (non-arbitrary) reasons, then
schools should open up access to these cultural repertoires to students who lack them.
This would transform what currently functions as a mechanism of social exclusion into
a mechanism of social mobility.
Against this proposal, conservative critics might complain that schools are not in a
position to teach culture – at least not by means other than the reward system currently
in place, which reproduces group inequality. If disadvantaged racial and class groups do
not respond appropriately to such incentives, the blame for this resides in their own
dysfunctional cultural values, which their communities alone are responsible for
changing. Thus arises conservatives’ enthusiastic embrace of a debased form of
oppositional culture theory12 to explain poor educational outcomes among blacks: on this
theory, blacks reject academic ambition and achievement because they see this as ‘acting
white’.
There are many things one could say against this claim, not least that the empirical
evidence for it, beyond the anecdotal, is weak. Several researchers have found no
empirical support for the hypothesis that blacks reject academic achievement, or reject
black peers who study hard and get good grades (Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey, 1998;
Cook and Ludwig, 1998; Harris, 2006). Roland Fryer found that high-achieving black
students do not lose popularity in black schools or private schools, but are less popular
in racially mixed public schools (Fryer and Torelli, 2006). This is significant, because to
the extent that students recruit their friends from students taking the same classes, the
lower popularity of blacks in more academically demanding classes (which, in integrated
schools, are overwhelmingly white) reflects white students’ rejection of high-achieving
blacks (Fryer and Torelli, 2006: 21–2). Comparisons of high-achieving white and black
students show that both experience some stigmatization from peers as ‘nerds’ or ‘geeks’,
and that contingent factors within schools determine whether students see high
achievement as a racial or a class phenomenon (Tyson et al., 2005). Ronald Ferguson’s
nuanced study of social pressure and achievement in the racially integrated middle-class
Shaker Heights school district found that the same proportion of blacks and whites
reported peer pressure against studying hard. When black students criticized high-
achieving black peers, this was not due to disparagement of academic achievement but
to perceptions that high-achieving blacks were rejecting association with their same-race
peers in spending so much time studying and in majority white settings. High-achieving
whites do not face the same conflict because they remain affiliated with same-race peers
in taking advanced classes, which are overwhelmingly filled with white students
(Ferguson, 2001).
The ‘acting white’ hypothesis raises additional questions about how to understand
culture. In the conservative critique, culture stands for shared values. On the conservative
interpretation of ‘acting white’, whites (and Asians) value academic achievement; blacks
(and perhaps Latinos and the poor) do not. This interpretation fits with Barry’s conception
of equal opportunity. But it does not fit with substantial evidence in the studies cited
above that blacks and whites do not differ in academic ambition or in how much they
value academic achievement.
In cultural capital theory, culture stands for habits, skills, strategies, or behavioral
repertoires.13 Even if whites and blacks do not differ in academic ambition, they may
differ in the skills (cultural and human capital) they can deploy to realize their aims. This
Anderson 121
fits with Ferguson’s (2001) argument that the black–white achievement gap in middle-
class, racially integrated schools is due more to a skills than a values gap. It also suggests
a more optimistic view of the ability of schools to overcome educational disadvantages.
Values may seem hard for schools to change. But the purpose of schools is to impart
skills. If the morally relevant forms of cultural capital are sound academic work skills
and habits, these should be as teachable as anything in the formal curriculum. Indeed,
cultural capital so understood has been shown to be teachable to disadvantaged students
in a cost-effective way (Farkas, 1996).
5. Conclusion
In light of the preceding discussion of the interaction of culture and educational
opportunities, how are we to define a standard of fair educational opportunity? I have
argued that we cannot define such a standard independent of expected educational
outcomes for children of different race and class backgrounds. A purely formal definition
of fair opportunity, in which the same choice sets are made available to all, and choices
made on the basis of children’s and parents’ educational values or preferences, is
inappropriate for education (Section 2). Schools cannot be neutral about the educational
choices parents and students make. Nor is it proper for schools to adopt a simplistic
incentives model of differential response to these choices, rewarding the educationally
sound choices (studying hard, regular attendance, etc.) and penalizing the poor choices.
Such a system reproduces class- and race-based educational inequality by setting already
privileged groups on a permanently higher trajectory of educational opportunities than
disadvantaged groups. By double-counting good behavior, such a system cheats
cognitively able children of opportunities for higher achievement in which they could
succeed. In neglecting to cultivate good forms of cultural capital in students who lack it,
but in simply accepting cultural capital differences as given, schools reinforce monopoly
privileges and betray their professed mission of promoting social mobility. It does no
good to reply that if disadvantaged students only behaved in educationally ideal ways
they would learn so much more. Once we understand culture as a set of behavioral
repertoires rather than values or preferences that can be implemented at will, we must
ask whether students have mastery over the repertoires in question. If not, schools must
do what they can to teach those repertoires.
Still, it is not clear what schools can achieve in this domain. Individual schools and
pilot studies have shown some success. But it is not clear whether these results can be
scaled to the whole country. The demands of justice must be tailored to the capacities of
agents to fulfill the responsibilities justice assigns to them (Anderson, forthcoming).
These capacities are as yet inadequately known. So what we need for educational
policymaking is not another a priori ultimate standard of fair educational opportunity, but
a method for determining when certain types of injustice are occurring. This form of non-
ideal inquiry is proper for our non-ideal world.
Recall that educational outcomes are the iterated product of institutional responses to
student and parent conduct, which is itself shaped in part by prior institutional responses.
Educational policies set students on different educational trajectories depending on their
responses to student and parent conduct. This article focuses on the justice of differential
institutional responses to students’ and parents’ deployment of cultural capital, which

ultimately results in different educational outcomes. Our question is: when are these
institutional responses unjust, and, in particular, when do they set disadvantaged students
on a lower educational trajectory than can be justified?
To answer this question, I suggest that we borrow a leaf from discrimination law. In
employment contexts, facially neutral business practices that have a substantial differential
impact on access to the benefits of employment, depending on the race, ethnicity, gender,
religion, or age of the employee, are regarded as prima facie discriminatory. Businesses
may rebut this charge by showing that the practice is justified by business necessity.
Plaintiffs may override that defense by showing that an alternative business practice is
available that serves business interests equally well but does not have such a grave
differential impact. For our purposes we need not investigate the legal details of how such
claims are established. I am more interested in understanding what normative concerns
differential impact tests may be tracking, and considering how they arise in educational
contexts.
One use of differential impact analysis is to ferret out direct discrimination on
forbidden grounds when ‘smoking gun’ evidence of discriminatory intent is lacking.
When unequal outcomes so closely track race that there is no other plausible explanation
of the pattern other than discriminatory intent, then such intent may be justly inferred
even if the agent never professed discriminatory purposes or beliefs. Within individual
schools, however, we know of innumerable causes other than direct discrimination for
unequal outcomes.
Differential impact analysis could also be seen as an implementation of a multiculturalist
vision of equality of outcome. On this view, every social group is conceived as a cultural
group that is a distinct subject of justice entitled to its proportionate share of goods, as an
ethnic spoils system. As a normative ideal, I have argued against this idea elsewhere
(Anderson, 2010: 60, 138). It is inapt in educational contexts in any event, since the goods
in question are actual achievements, skills, or abilities, and people cannot be endowed
with these goods by the unilateral action of schools. Furthermore, since certain forms of
cultural capital are genuinely valuable in educational and employment contexts, and not
merely arbitrary, it would be wrong for schools to undermine their primary educational
mission by adopting a neutral stance toward valuable cultural capital. Differential impact
analysis in educational contexts cannot be based on a premise of equal worth of all cultural
repertoires.
Rather, I suggest that differential impact analysis in educational contexts be seen as a
tool for smoking out two injustices: group stigmatization and ethnocentrism in policy
responses to cultural differences. Policy can express group stigma without engaging in
direct discrimination. In the post-Civil Rights era, it characteristically takes the form of
excessively harsh or exclusionary policy responses to behaviors and characteristics more
commonly found in disadvantaged than privileged groups. Such policy responses express
antipathy toward characteristics and behaviors publicly associated with disadvantaged
groups, and function to reinforce group stigma, disadvantage and exclusion. A classic
case is the 100-to-1 sentencing ratio for possession of crack as opposed to powder
cocaine. Because blacks use crack more than whites, who prefer powder, this sentencing
Anderson 123
law puts blacks into prison for far longer terms than whites, reinforcing the public stigma
of black criminality.
Differential impact analysis would begin by noting the extraordinary disparate racial
impact of the different sentences for what, on the face of it, appear to be equivalent
crimes. To defend this sentencing policy, the state would need to produce a legitimate
policy rationale for the difference. This is impossible, because, as the Supreme Court has
recently noted, crack is obtained from powder, but the 100-to-1 sentence differential puts
petty street users and dealers in prison for longer terms than the major powder dealers
who supplied them.14 The history of the sentencing disparity points to stigmatizing
images of black criminality – hysterical and subsequently discredited stories of black
‘crack babies’ growing up to become criminal ‘superpredators’ – deployed by the media
and politicians to rally public support for an excessively punitive response.
Differential impact analysis could equally well be used in educational contexts.
Consider, for example, Texas’ extremely punitive suspension policy for infractions of
school rules, which leads to enormous racial disparities in suspension rates. Granting that
some discipline is warranted for infractions of legitimate school rules, differential impact
analysis asks whether the harshness of the discipline serves any legitimate educational
purposes, and whether less harsh measures could serve those purposes at least equally
well. Given that other school districts have managed their discipline problems without
such extreme measures, that highly punitive responses do not generate commensurate
deterrent effects, and that suspensions disrupt and undermine students’ educations,
Texas’ policy is unjust. It continues the stigmatizing ways of thinking that gave us Jim
Crow policies of punitive exclusion and punishment to keep minorities subordinate.
Not all racially unjust facially neutral policies reflect racial stigmatization. Some are
products of ethnocentrism or in-group favoritism. All policies for promoting human welfare
are designed with a background picture of the needs, interests, and characteristics of the
people being served. Such pictures are often parochial, biased toward the needs, interests,
and characteristics of advantaged groups, as if members of such groups were representative
of humanity generally. Such bias need not be deliberate or conscious. Architects once
designed public buildings with magnificent staircases leading to the top, paying careful
attention to the dimensions of steps needed for ambulatory persons to climb them, while
completely neglecting the access requirements of disabled people. They were not trying to
exclude the disabled; they simply did not have their interests in mind.
Differential impact analysis can detect ethnocentrism. When schools cater to arbitrary
forms of cultural capital, their responses are tailored to fit the interests and cultural styles
of the privileged, to the disadvantage of subordinate groups. Differential impact analysis
would ask whether there is any educational justification for schools to specially favor the
cultural styles of the privileged. Given that, in these cases, the cultural displays are
arbitrary from the point of view of the basic mission of schools, no positive answer
would be forthcoming.
Matters are more challenging with respect to forms of cultural capital that are non-
artificially instrumental to attaining valuable educational outcomes. There is a sound
educational justification for schools to promote studious habits. The relevant question is
whether promoting such habits by providing incentives to practice studiousness – in the
form, say, of granting privileged access to a more advanced curriculum to the studious,
above what would be warranted on the basis of coursework mastery – can be justified
when this leads schools to place privileged and disadvantaged students on radically
unequal educational trajectories. Is an alternative available that fulfills educational
objectives as well or better than such a policy, while narrowing the gaps between
privileged and disadvantaged groups? If so, then justice requires its implementation. One
credible alternative would focus on actively teaching studious habits to students who
lack them, rather than merely offering incentives for their display – a strategy that works
only for those already prepared to practice them.
Cultural capital theory provides important insights into the causes of and possible
remedies for race- and class-based injustice in education. I conclude by fitting cultural
capital theory into a larger-scale account of group inequality. Because it focuses on the
‘micro-politics of exclusion’, cultural capital theory considers how group-based
inequality is reproduced in face-to-face transactions, rather than in larger structures that
generate inequality by blocking transactions between those who have benefits to confer
and disadvantaged groups seeking those benefits. In other work (Anderson, 2010), I have
argued that group-based segregation is the linchpin of group inequality. The past several
decades have witnessed multiple reform movements aimed at improving educational
outcomes for the nation’s worst-performing schools – virtually all of which are sharply
segregated by class and race, featuring high concentrations of disadvantaged students.
Every few years, we witness major turnover in curricula, pedagogy, instructional
technology, teaching staff, school principals, school district superintendents, school
governance, and accountability and funding mechanisms at such schools. And every few
years we see the latest reforms fall far short. While individual schools are doubtless
capable of doing better, I question the relentless focus on individual schools and teachers
as the fundamental units of public accountability – a focus that is encouraged by cultural
capital theory’s stress on micro-processes. The deeper causes of school failure are not
fundamentally due to the sorts of variables that individual schools can change unilaterally,
but to the fact that larger structures of segregation already stack the deck against them.
As long as we accept the pervasive segregation of schools by the relative advantage of
their students, so as to create schools of concentrated disadvantage, remedies to
educational injustices and failures located at the school level will be inadequate. The
problem is not simply a matter of material resources. Schools with high concentrations
of disadvantaged students lack all four forms of capital – financial, human, social, and
cultural. Cultural capital is not something that is simply transmitted from better-endowed
teachers to less-endowed students. Students learn from their peers. If their peers lack the
cultural capital needed to get ahead in society, they will not be able to help each other
move ahead.
Once we face up to the larger structures of segregation that reproduce group inequality,
we are also in a position to offer a more critical perspective on the content of cultural
capital itself. In sociology, cultural capital is defined in terms of the behavioral repertoires
individuals must deploy to gain access to socially conferred advantages. We have already
seen the need to draw a distinction between what counts as cultural capital and what
ought to count, in rejecting parochial class styles as just forms of cultural capital. It does
not follow that what remains – habits of hard work, perseverance, conscientiousness, and
so forth – exhausts the content of what cultural capital ought to be. Far too much has been
Anderson 125
written about cognitive and cultural deficiencies of disadvantaged groups, and not nearly
enough about the cognitive and cultural deficiencies of groups that are privileged by
segregation. Segregation makes the privileged insular, clubby, smug, and filled with an
excessive sense of their own entitlement. It makes them ignorant of the less advantaged
and their lives, neglectful of the often disastrous consequences their decisions wreak on
them, uncomfortable interacting with them, and consequently unaccountable and
irresponsible. In a democratic society, in which those occupying positions of responsibility
and privilege are expected to serve the interests of people from all walks of life, and not
simply the interests of a privileged class, these qualities entail that the privileged are
incompetent. To enable them to competently engage in respectful intergroup
communication with those less privileged than themselves requires the construction and
transmission of new forms of cultural capital forged through cooperative interaction on
terms of equality of members of all salient social groups in society (Anderson, 2007;
Anderson, 2010: ch. 5). Schools must be comprehensively integrated to create and
transmit this vital form of cultural capital.
Acknowledgements
I thank Annette Lareau for providing helpful advice and an advance copy of the new sections of
the second edition of her book Unequal Childhoods. I also thank Derrick Darby for thorough
comments on this article, the other participants in ‘Race, Opportunity, and Education’, the Second
Annual Conference in the Philosophy of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education,
14–15 October 2011, George Steinmetz, and the other participants in the Social Theory Workshop
at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Notes
1. In this article I focus on the educational disadvantages faced by blacks. Such disadvantages
cannot be understood apart from class disadvantages, since the racialization of blacks makes
them disproportionately poor and concentrated in low-status jobs, conditions that, in the US,
reproduce educational disadvantage across generations.
2. I explain why race-based affirmative action does not amount to objectionable racial
discrimination in either of these senses, or in any other sense, in (Anderson, 2010: ch. 8).
3. This does not rule out the possibility that parents might be responsible for certain injustices
in this case – perhaps, unduly pressuring Asian-American sons to major in STEM fields. This
also does not rule out the possibility that diffuse social phenomena such as stereotype threat
(Steele, 1997) are unjustly undermining white students’ self-confidence in fields dominated
by Asian-Americans.
4. What I have called ‘desert-catering luck egalitarianism’ advances a more nuanced view,
because it takes into account the varying difficulties individuals may have in choosing
well, due to variations in their natural endowments of executive skill (Arneson, 1997) and
in social environments that may support or discourage good choices (Roemer, 1994). For
the distinction between ‘responsibility-catering’ and ‘desert-catering’ luck egalitarianism, see
Anderson (2008).
5. Even Barry shrinks from applying this view to children when educational access is at stake.
He concedes that private schools should be required to accede to a Sikh boy’s religiously
prescribed practice of wearing a turban, notwithstanding its otherwise justified interest in
requiring all students to wear the same school uniform. Children’s interests in educational
opportunities are too important to sacrifice to the relatively minor school interest in uniformity,
and therefore trump the latter interest in contexts where the child would not attend the school
at all if he could not wear a turban (Barry, 2001: 62).
6. In practice, schools must operate within the constraints of the resources they are given,
however unjust that allocation is. In this article, I bracket issues of unjust material constraints
in order to focus on justice in school responses to varied culturally conditioned habits of
members of disadvantaged groups.
7. Thanks to Nathaniel Coleman (Merton College 2003) for this example.
8. In one shocking case, Lareau (2003: 211) records a teacher complaining to the working-class
mother of a child with serious learning disabilities that she has failed to badger the school into
delivering the necessary educational services to her child. If the school knew what educational
services the child needed, why did it refuse to deliver them in the absence of a vigorous push
from the parent? This blame-shifting is all the more galling, considering that, in employment
contexts, working-class people are expected to defer to managers and professionals and that
schools have long been organized to deliver the sorts of educations that befit them for such
deferential roles.
9. Of course, given the realities of class segregation of schools and school districts, and the
unequal material resources available to schools for middle-class versus working-class and
poor children, the same cannot be said of the overall organization of schooling in America.
Also, I do not suggest that Barry would endorse the argument that follows, only that his
definition of equal opportunity licenses this argument.
10. As I can testify from my own decidedly middle-class upbringing in the 1960s and 1970s.
11. Lareau found that the form of cultural capital she designated as ‘concerted cultivation’
was monopolized by class, not race (Lareau, 2003: 240–1). Nevertheless, race affects the
deployment of cultural capital in complex ways that may disadvantage blacks (Lareau and
Horvat, 1999).
12. Oppositional culture theory was originally advanced by Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu
(1986). I explain why conservative appropriations of this theory are crudely reductionist in
Anderson (2010: ch. 4).
13. These two alternatives do not exhaust the range of meanings of culture in social scientific
studies of disadvantage. For a wider survey, see Lamont and Small (2010).
14. Kimbrough v. US, 552 US 85 (2007).
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Biographical note
Elizabeth Anderson is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Rawls Collegiate Professor
of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a
Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of Value in
Ethics and Economics (Harvard University Press, 1993), The Imperative of Integration
(Princeton University Press, 2010), and over 60 articles on moral and political philosophy,
social and feminist epistemology, and the philosophy of the social sciences.

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446540

1. Fair educational opportunities: the question of

aim at uncovering covert or unconscious direct discrimination, or at equality of outcome

2. Some problems with a culture-independent definition

Third, the opportunity/choice distinction as applied to education misleadingly

3. Cultural capital theories of educational outcomes

These class differences in child-rearing styles have profoundly unequal consequences

advantages to children of parents who display and transmit school-approved cultural

4. A challenge to cultural capital theory: some cultures

institutional responses to students’ and parents’ deployment of cultural capital, which

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