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This paper illustrates the influence of a new national assignment system (NSAS) on Chilean middle-class advantage. This system was designed to increase educational equity by changing the previous school admission "rules" that were prejudicial against low-income students. We use Bourdieu's conceptual tools, drawing on concepts of capitals and field, to analyse the influence of the new rules of the game on the value of middle-class capitals. To understand how the new rules shape middle-class families' advantages, we link qualitative and quantitative analyses that empirically explore how families subjectively interpret the policy change and how objectively it shapes their access to desired schools. The qualitative phase shows that middle-class parents experience the NSAS as a risky new scenario. However, quantitative analysis shows the NSAS is associated with only a modest decrease in middle class-advantages. We illustrate the difficulty of transforming marketized educational systems, where previously privileged families react against equity-driven changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes an empirical contribution to the study of the global middle class (GMC), and sheds light on the complex relationships that are constructed and sustained by these families with their ‘home nation’ through their educational strategies. Drawing on an inductive analysis of 20 in-depth interviews with Israeli migrant mothers in the United Kingdom who constitute a specific fraction of the GMC, this article examines families’ identity constructions and how these shape their educational practices. The participants constitute a growing phenomenon - highly educated, mobile middle-class families who live and move around the world, and position themselves using global frames of references. We emphasise how country of origin acts as a symbolic object in the cultivation of their children’s identity and how different types of attachment to ‘home nation’ are perceived as offering valuable capital for the GMC. The article therefore contributes much-needed empirical analyses on education strategies within the GMC, and challenges the suggestion that critical to the definition of the GMC is that they are ‘rootless’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on middle-class parent activism in the Israeli policy-making arena. In recent decades, public education governance in Israel has been moving gradually from a quasi-social democratic mode to a neoliberal one. Two e-mobilizations of middle-class parents are studied: the ‘Strollers Protest’ of 2011 and the ‘Sardines Protest’ of 2014. First, we explore how these two protests used social media to promote changes in education policies. Next, we argue that social media can be used to promote both anti-neoliberal and pro-neoliberal policies in public education. We conclude by discussing the possible implications of social media on parent activism in the policy arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of literature has begun to explore the individual identities, motivations, and school choices of middle-class, typically white, parents who choose to reside in socioeconomically and racially mixed central city neighborhoods. Drawing on qualitative research in three US cities, we argue that a focus on middle-class parents’ collective engagement in schooling is particularly important in under-resourced urban contexts. In these environments, we show, middle-class parents’ use of social networks often extends beyond basic information-sharing about school quality to encompass a range of activities undertaken with other families ‘like them’ who have also chosen to enroll their children in an urban public school. We find that, in some instances, middle-class parents’ collective actions can benefit an entire class or school. Yet in other instances, their activation of social capital can contribute to processes of social reproduction in urban schooling by excluding or marginalizing low-income students and their families. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we offer a unique contribution to understandings of schooling as a site for the production of social class difference. We bring together the rich body of work that has been conducted on middle-class educational identities, with explorations of the centrality of the feminine in representations of class difference from the field of critical girlhood studies. This is done in order to explore how young femininities mediate the representation of class difference in the environment of the private girls’ school. Drawing from our two research studies, located in private girls’ schools in Australia and the United Kingdom, we argue that the notion of ‘disgust’, commonly used in recent engagements around class, has only limited purchase in understanding the representation of class difference in these schools. It is the inconsistencies and complexities in how class and class relations are produced that we wish to illuminate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Under-representation in UK higher education of students from less privileged social backgrounds is an enduring problem. While there are examples of productive participation, the pattern of collective trajectories of this group differs sharply from that of traditional entrants. The onus falls largely on students to adapt to established practices that remain strongly oriented towards traditional white middle-class populations. Bourdieu's theory of practice informed the analysis of data emerging from a longitudinal case study, and empirical insights are offered into how students with non-traditional academic backgrounds experienced and negotiated the demands of studying in one of the UK's research-intensive universities. A new conceptual framework identifies academic, linguistic, social and professionally-oriented capital as underpinning the logic of practice of this sub-field of higher education, and their influence on the positional tendencies and trajectories of the students operating within it are highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses findings from a small-scale empirical exploration of the views, experiences and educational practices of middle-class minority ethnic families in the United Kingdom. It draws on semi-structured interviews conducted with 36 parents, pupils and 'young professionals'. Analyses consider to what extent generic class resources, as identified by the US work of Lareau, are evident within the educational practices of British middle-class, minority ethnic families. It is argued that generic class resources and practices were evident to the extent that parents expressed a desire for personalised education, felt comfortable voicing their opinions and concerns to schools, and were willing to climb the ladder of authority to get their voices heard. However, it is also argued that 'race' plays a significant and complicating role that calls for a qualification (but not a negation) of Lareau's theorisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the theory of institutional habitus by exploring the differing ways in which the institutional habitus of two schools in Belfast, Northern Ireland mediates the local habitus of working-class boys. All of the boys in this qualitative case study live in the same disadvantaged working-class community but attend two different schools, depending on whether they succeeded or failed in an examination at the age of 11 years. It is argued that these schools have different mediating effects on the boys' common habitus. While most studies of working-class boys focus on underachievement, and most studies of working-class success focus on females, this article draws together the strands of success, failure, working-class boys and locality, and examines the ways in which identity is constructed and reconstructed in response to schooling. Questions are raised about the interpretation and/or misrecognition of working-class culture in schools and within the wider discourses of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on a study conducted among four groups of people who have direct experience of how social-class position affects students' access to, and participation in, higher education. Intensive interviews were undertaken with 122 people deliberately chosen from a range of counties, schools and higher educational institutions in Ireland. Interviews were undertaken with 40 low-income working-class second-level students, 40 others at third level, 10 community workers who were both activists and parents in working-class communities, 16 teachers and school principals including four from fee-paying schools, and 16 second-level students from fee-paying secondary schools. The aim of the study was to examine the barriers experienced by low-income working-class students in accessing and succeeding in higher education. The study also set out to identify strategies for change as seen from the perspectives of the different groups, and to examine the ways in which more privileged students were able to maintain their educational advantage. Working within a broadly structuralist framework, the study identified three principal barriers facing working-class students: economic, social and cultural, and educational Our findings are in general concurrence, therefore, with those of Gambetta. However, our research suggests that while economic barriers are of prime importance, cultural and educational barriers are also of great significance. The three sets of barriers were also found to be highly interactive. The research challenges the view of both resistance and rational action theorists as to the value of structuralist analysis. It argues for a dynamic view of structures as sets of institutions and social relations which are visible, accountable and open to transformation. It is suggested that the dynamic role of the slate, and its collective and individual actors, in creating and maintaining inequality, needs to be more systematically addressed, especial]y in strongly (State) centralised education systems. Through the clarification of how the State and other education mediators create inequalities, it is possible to identify both the actors and the contexts where resistance is possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a study on the support Black Ugandan British children receive for learning within their home environments from their parents who have refugee and asylum seeking-backgrounds. Topics include the different forms of capital Black Ugandan British parents use to support their children's learning and how Black Ugandan British parents bring their middle-class backgrounds to bear to support their children's learning in England.