| Summary: | The article presents the author's on articles about social identity and academic achievement in the 2001 issue of Sociology of Education. Although Paul W. Kingston pays some attention to the fact that the characteristics that inform high academic performance are not culture-free concepts, he dismisses such bias as exclusionary if it is in accord with the structure and expectations of the society under study. Cultural capital theory has retained a similarly complex sense of culture that incorporates the meaning making of social groups. But while some empirical renditions of cultural difference theory have attempted to account for racial differences in achievement, cultural capital theory has been decidedly fixed on social-class positioning as have other models of social reproduction. Maureen T. Hallinan's article in this issue, however, reminds us that despite sociologists' preoccupation with the statistically robust effect of socioeconomic indices only a third of the achievement gap between blacks and whites is attributable to social-class differences. Furthermore, the sociological studies that have attended to how white working- and middle-class girls perform their gender identity in school have not generally linked these performances to achievement outcomes.
|
|---|