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'School segregation' indicates the concentration of a minority into a school that significantly exceeds the presence of the same population living in the surrounding territory. A segregated school is generally synonymous of low level of attainment and social marginalization. This phenomenon can be addressed as an urban issue or an educational problem, studied through spatial measures or qualitative interviews, interpreted as an institutional or a spatial effect. Many disciplines and approaches have in fact addressed the topic. This article, through a critical literature review, identifies the main drivers of segregation in the institutional context, the residential distribution of the population and the households' choice. Taking into account evidence from the literature, especially from Northern Europe and United States, the author then disentangles the three drivers highlighting similarities and differences that can be found in diverse cities. Segregation in schools in fact seems eligible to acquire various shapes and features especially according to urban contexts, educational system and middle classes behaviors. The article will then highlight flaws in the current literature and suggest further research lines in order to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon. [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]

This article is about twelve middle-class students, previously studying in elite primary and secondary schools, making another attempt at getting into university in Hong Kong. Despite their failure at a critical educational stage, which contradicts a general pattern of middle-class educational success, they decide to seek a second chance by reading an associate degree in community college, a perceived inferior educational option. Despite feeling determined, they are anxious and uneasy with taking up this option. How the middle class feel about their academic pursuits, especially after a critical failure, is under-researched. This article attempts to fill this gap by referring to Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and field to make sense of the complex or contradictory feelings of 12 students with a self-conscious, high-status, middle-class habitus in encountering a perceived low-status community college. I shall conclude this article with the normative implication of our discussion in making sense of educational inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent Russian studies by the Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences, have revealed the economic and sociocultural characteristics of the Russian middle class as an aspect of Russia's development model. The maximum resource for the growth of that class, which at the time of the study comprised 40% of Russia's economically active population, is not expected to grow by more than 8-10% of the overall country's population. The middle class has certain advantages compared to other social strata in terms of financial and living conditions, and a higher professional status. Some problems are also stated, including a drastic decline in governmental resource, uncertainty about the future, an increase in the proportion of unsophisticated leisure in contrast to active leisure. A consensus between the state and the middle class is feasible as to obligations to resolve social problems. However, no consensus is sofar available [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the issues of education, employment, reservations and the question of creamy layer with reference to Dalit middle class. It examines varied perceptions in deciding the criteria for availing reservations in the context of creamy layer. It examines current utilization of reservation and aspiration for its future utilization by the middle class Dalits. In the post-independence period, the Indian State has adopted 'social justice' as its goal. As a part of which, it has been supporting the Dalits' socio-economic mobility through the policy of 'protective discrimination' or the policy of reservations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advocates for a conceptualization of the African middle class that would be universally valid: security from economic vulnerability and prospects for social mobility. We suggest three minimum criteria that are jointly necessary and sufficient to reflect this conceptualization: secondary schooling completion, decent housing amenities and skilled employment. Using household surveys for nine African countries, we then demonstrate how measures of the middle class based on expenditure thresholds refer to households with vastly different abilities to meet these three criteria. This cautions against overreliance on expenditure-based definitions, which may obscure qualitative differences among the middle class across African countries. © 2015 The Authors. Journal of International Development published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between private schooling and the middle classes in urban India. It complicates the argument that private schools have become spaces in which young people come to see themselves less as representatives of one ethnic or caste community and more as indices of their own family’s economic standing and as members of a class group. I argue that a closer look at the way in which students experience and narrativise private schooling reveals a much less straightforward process. Schools, I argue, are mobilised by youth as flexible tools in complex and competing strategies to construct a middle social space for themselves. The article seeks to address the lack of research on the complex and severely contested processes of transformation of the selves implicated in strategies of urban educational opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The pursuit of high-quality schools for their children is one of the main factors motivating middle-class families to exit urban communities. This study draws on interviews with middle-class mothers in Boston who have opted instead to stay in the city to explore how they evaluated their local public elementary schools. Specifically, I examine how some middle-class mothers deploy their cultural capital in the process of embracing a choice that others may see as risky or surprising. Findings reveal that respondents’ awareness of and confidence in their own cultural capital—in particular, their ability to provide enriching learning opportunities outside the classroom—shape how they think about the kind of school their children need and enable them to downplay the relevance of the district’s standardized test scores. This, in turn, allows them to privilege other aspects of the educational experience when deciding among public school options. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses upon the classed and early professional experiences of middle-class novice teachers in England experiencing and contemplating working in schools serving socio-economically disadvantaged communities. Through an examination of the visibility and invisibility of social class in education set within an increasingly unequal and changed social landscape, the article reports upon research which seeks to better understand the class identities of these teachers. Evidence is presented of the key, yet complex, role that social class occupies within the working lives of new teachers and reveals the different ways in which teachers respond to the classed dimensions of their early professional experiences. It is concluded that the fundamentally important role that social class plays in terms of shaping early professional experiences in teaching suggests the need not only for a commensurately enhanced focus as part of early professional development, but also for attention that is sensitively attuned to the class identities of teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider identity as a historically emerging discourse that requires genealogical analysis - not to discover the roots of our identity but to commit [ourselves] to its dissipation (Foucault , p. 162). We suggest analyzing identity through the history of socio-economic classes, their life struggles, ambitions, development, and reproduction. We see learning not as a project of transformation of identity, but rather as developing access to socially valuable practices and developing one's own voice within these practices (through addressing and responding to other voices). The access and voice projects free agents from unnecessary finalization and objectivization by oneself and others (Bakhtin ; Bakhtin ). In education, we should develop indigenous discourses of learning and develop a conceptual framework that makes analysis of diverse discourses possible. We argue that learning, as transformation of participation in a sociocultural practice to gain more access, is a better conceptual framework than learning as transformation of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple contexts interact to position any school on a spectrum from cumulatively advantaged to cumulatively disadvantaged. This article discusses a study of the contextual advantages and disadvantages experienced by primary schools in the south east of England, concentrating especially on schools in the least deprived 5% of schools nationally. The research highlights the central influence of advantaged socioeconomic contexts on day-to-day school processes and on the related perspectives and beliefs of head teachers as well as variations on this theme related to other external and internal contextual variables. It illustrates that England's most socially advantaged primary schools are likely to have much in common including a high level of parent involvement, a strong focus on student learning and progress, considerable ability to raise funds, very good reputations and only a handful of students with serious learning or behavioural problems. They also have in common middle class forms of transience and profiles of special needs. The article concludes that while contextual variations amongst socially advantaged schools do exist and are talked up by head teachers, they usually have an impact that can be managed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we draw on three studies of social class change amongst the middle classes undertaken in London over the last 25 years to reflect on the changing values expressed by respondents to school choice. We argue that there has been a hardening of attitudes to school performance and a loss of middle-class autonomy towards schooling. Increasingly we note a concern to navigate the few areas of privilege in a school system designed for working class children but now expected to cater for a vastly increased and educationally-anxious middle class. We specifically address the way in which choice of school has become enshrined in legislation but has itself become constrained by the lack of places in popular schools. We argue that the consequence has been to diminish the amount of choice and ensure that 'distance from school' becomes the sole arbiter of access to most popular schools. Thus an attempt at widening access to education has in effect restricted it to those able to access the housing markets nearest to the most popular schools. Taken together with a series of policy interventions designed to circumvent middle-class families playing the system, this has in effect reduced the element of choice by forcing most parents to play for the 'safe option' in the fear of being allocated to something worse. We conclude by suggesting that this policy is unsustainable in the longer term and suggest that the government policy of building new Academies is a means of re-engineering London's system of secondary education to reflect the aspirations of those living in its recently gentrified areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the relationship between educational reforms in China and the growing urban middle class in terms of shifting modes and techniques of governing through the family. Central to the production of an urban middle class in China are new forms and practices of family culture that are anchored in a market ideology of education. The article argues that the idea and practice of school choice among urban middle-class families is part of a naturalized consumerist dynamic in China wherein the transformation of education into a market-supplied commodity is legitimated and animated within a neo-liberal discourse of competition, meritocracy and self-determination. Family life and decisions, while seemingly afforded a new degree of autonomy from state intervention, are not outside the workings of official power, but intimately tied to state policies and agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers how the nature and effects of neoliberal policy in education are illuminated by the outcomes of a study of white middle-class families choosing ordinary state secondary schools in England. Having described the main features of the study and some of its findings, consideration is given to specific 'global' dimensions - one in terms of parental perceptions and the other drawing upon analysis of the global effects of neoliberalism, an example of which is illustrated with reference to an influential UK policy. The article concludes that the conditions so generated not only provide advantages to those making conventional choices in keeping with a marketized service, but that they may also bring advantages to middle-class families making 'counterintuitive' choices as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, working middle class parents organize for their children's future success and, increasingly, extra-curricular activity becomes the socializing mechanism for this preparation. In this article, we take an anthropological approach to examine the following: 1) the nature and amount of extra-curricular activity families organize for their children; 2) the meanings parents' attribute to their children's well-being and future educational and personal success. At the same time, the augmented commitment to arranging children's lives has resulted in a new family form defined by intensified busyness as families negotiate the demands of work, home, and children's development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the relationship between 19th century Italian poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli and his son Ciro Belli, against the background of middle class education. Topics discussed include the history of the Papal Restoration of the 19th century and its impact on concepts of social class, correspondence between the elder and younger Belli, as well as between the elder and members of the aristocracy, and the efforts of the elder Belli to assure the continuance and success of the education of his son.

The article offers the authors' insights regarding the role of community colleges in the U.S. to middle-class students. The authors cite that community colleges prepare students through offering knowledge about American society. They differentiate community colleges from universities in which they mention that community colleges aspire the preparation of students in entering the middle class while universities aspire in pulling students out of middle class. They believe that community colleges protect the American middle class students because these colleges evolved into places of great tension in developmental, academic and vocational demands. They note the need for a learning culture in the U.S. that improves morality, ethics and deeper sense of life.

The article reflects on the teachings in middle class education. It states that middle class best practice in education is being made up by educational politics and economics. Teachers are abandoning instructional practices that they know are best for a diverse set of students in favor of focusing on making up other methods of teaching to raise test scores. Middle level education is also commented in television shows. Commercial issues in history publishing are also made up. It emphasizes that Americans should look onto what they are doing in middle class education. The future always relies on the students, the next generation, and making sure that the turnover of knowledge should always be credible and factual.