Whose Homework? How the Decoupling of Fairness-Oriented Rules Reinforces Inequalities in School

• In Event: Cultural Capital

Abstract

While schools can create rules to increase fairness, those rules decrease the relative advantage of privileged families. Thus, privileged families might have an interest in “decoupling” formal rules from informal practice. And that decoupling might exacerbate inequalities. I examine those possibilities by considering elementary teachers’ formal and informal expectations for homework. Drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews, and school records from students in a socioeconomically diverse public school, I find that when formal rules promote fairness, privileged people use the power of their privilege to promote a loose coupling that allows them to bend or break rules without consequence. That loose coupling allows inequality to flourish, maintaining the relative advantage of privileged people, even in the context of formal fairness-oriented rules.

Author

• Jessica Calarco, Indiana University - Bloomington