ABSTRACT
Over the past 25 years, scholars have amassed an impressive array of work aimed at uncovering the ways in which schools reproduce social inequalities. Forming a corpus of structuralist interpretation, such studies wind through the ways in which curriculum (Apple, 1982; Anyon, 1983; Gaskell, 1992), standardized testing (Haney, 1993), political economy and bureaucratic organization (Anyon, 1997), teacher practices (Kelly & Nihlen, 1982), and university preparation (Ginsberg, 1988) serve to sustain broader social inequalities. Although it is well understood that schooling plays a crucial role in offering opportunities for individual social mobility, it does, at the same time, serve to perpetuate and indeed legitimize widespread structural inequalities.
