ABSTRACT
Schools are social institutions filled with people. This chapter presents contemporary sociological work connected to education, inequality, and approaches to further understand the challenges confronting many urban schools and the potential avenues for transformation that validate and build upon the diverse assets of urban students of color and their families. It examines social and cultural capital, critical pedagogy, and hidden curriculum. Functionalist, conflict, and interactionist theories emerged as three useful lenses for considering the role of schools in society and whether schools help reproduce or transform society. These theories have important implications for how principals might work to change schools in low-opportunity communities. In the early 1960s, sociologists began investigating why schools in low-opportunity communities did not produce similar outcomes to majority White schools in suburban neighborhoods. Critical theory, critical pedagogy, and critical race theory (CRT) have important implications for principals working in low-opportunity communities of color.
