ABSTRACT
Scholars have long debated the extent to which education enhances mobility chances or simply maintains existing patterns of inequality. On the one hand, social scientists have argued that mobility based on achievement, rather status maintenance, is a hallmark of the U.S. social system (Blau and Duncan 1967). The U.S. educational system has been characterized as one with "contest," rather than "sponsored" mobility. Unlike the British system, in which elites induct a select group of youth at an early age to groom them for high-status positions, youth in the United States compete in multiple contests, with every effort taken to keep students in the game (Turner 1960). Alternative views argue that through hidden curriculum and tracking, the U.S. system "cools out" the mobility aspirations of disadvantaged students, thereby reinforcing, rather than overturning, existing patterns of stratification (MacLeod 1995; Oakes 1985; Rosenbaum 1976).
