Creating Pathways of Influence: Families’ Efforts to Exercise Control over Middle School Enrollment in China

• In Event: Creating an (un)equal playing field: parenting practices and educational strategies among China’s emerging middle- and affluent classes

Proposal

Much empirical research within the sociology of education field portrays the conversion of socioeconomic resources into advantages at school as a relatively natural, seamless process. Largely overlooked is the fact that socioeconomically advantaged families likely encounter barriers to the transmission of advantage within educational systems, particularly when policymakers engage in efforts to equalize educational opportunities. How middle-class and affluent families respond to these barriers is an important question, both for informing social reproduction theory, and from the perspective of education policy. In this paper, I investigate one context in which families are struggling against barriers to the transmission of advantage: the middle school admissions arena in China. I draw on nationally representative survey data to reveal that despite official policies designed to constrain the influence families have over where their children attend middle school, almost a quarter of Chinese middle school students’ families used social connections (guanxi), special testing, gifts, or other unsanctioned strategies to gain access to preferred middle schools. Moreover, I find that engagement in these strategies is strongly associated with social class. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of field, I argue that these unsanctioned strategies represent an effort on the part of socioeconomically advantaged families to transform the “rules of the game” that govern middle school enrollment in their favor. Notably, however, my findings also suggest that there may be important differences among members of China’s emerging middle- and affluent classes in their incentives to change these existing structures.

Author

• Natalie A.E. Young, University of Pennsylvania