ABSTRACT
The fact that children from families with low socioeconomic status perform on average educationally below their middle and upper class peers is well established. Partially as a result of low academic achievement, such children are also more likely to be unemployed or employed in low wage, low prestige occupations as adults. Although schools are often implicated in discussions of this phenomenon, less clear are the specific mechanisms by which this social class reproduction occurs. While there is some indication that schools at times help reduce inequality, more frequently social scientists have emphasized the degree to which schools serve to perpetuate social class disadvantage, or as in the wake of the Coleman report, have claimed that schools are largely irrelevant in shaping student outcomes.2
