This research focuses on the social pressures experienced by parents at schools identified as middle class across southern California. The literature review of school finances, the LCFF, funding levels, and studies stretches all the way back to the Coleman report. Within this vast body of prior research remained a void in the data. This missing…

This study examines the phenomenon of Chinese families bringing their children to attend international schools in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand, over the past 5 years. Positioned as a subgroup within the broader context of Chinese global education migration toward Southeast Asia, this research utilizes semi-structured interviews with 38 sampled…

In recent years, Innovative Schools in Dali have received increasing coverage in Chinese social media and have also attracted middle-class parents from cities, as viable bottom-up educational initiatives. This paper explores the rationales for Chinese middle-class parents' choice of Innovative Schools in Dali. Analysis of data from online…

Despite an extensive body of literature that has examined the role of museums in cultural reproduction and public education, most of the current discussion is western-centred. Whilst explorations of museum education in developing countries often focus on the institution, the agency perspective regarding how different social groups negotiate access…

Parental involvement in children's education often prescribes strategies to align with educational authority. Prevailing perspectives view compliance with educational authority as subjection and its rejection as a form of autonomy. However, there is autonomous parental involvement that accepts educational authority but results in opposite…

This article explores how middle-class Asian immigrants disrupted settled geographies and social relations in a high-tech Southern suburb. In a case study of controversies over the redrawing of the Chapel Hill school district attendance boundaries, it asks what middle-class Asian immigrants attempts to navigate the space "between Black and…

In international comparisons, Sweden is one of the countries with the lowest number of children growing up in poverty; its material standard is high, and welfare services are extensive and heavily subsidised. How child poverty can be understood in that context is interrogated in the article. The point of departure for the discussion is Swedish…

This paper seeks to take advantage of the concept of emotional capital to analyse how class is lived out through a critical educational failure by referring to the experiences of 64 community-college students in Hong Kong from a longitudinal qualitative study. Arguably an analysis of the emotions of middle-class and working-class respondents and…

This study uses Bourdieusian (1977, 1978, 2011) approaches to reproduction to position athletic bureaucracies as legitimating institutions that convert capital. I examine how the cultural production of amateurism in U.S. college sports facilitates class reproduction by enabling a direct conversion between accrued economic, social, and physical…

In Italy, the National Evaluation System (SNV), encompassing both internal and external accountability components, is designed not only to hold school actors accountable but also to stimulate innovation and change in pedagogical practices. Nevertheless, existing literature presents inconclusive and contradictory findings regarding the effects and…

Berlant's notion of cruel optimism refers to investments in material structures, social norms, and ideological claims of being that work against individual and collective flourishing. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data spanning 2007-2016, this longitudinal study utilizes cruel optimism to explore material and affective investments of…

Educational transitions are crucial sites of social selection. Whereas social bias in teacher recommendations is well-established, less is known about teacher guidance in the process preceding the actual choice. Bridging the literature on social class and educational choice and home-school relations this study explores classed patterns in the…

Schooling has long been studied for its role in class formation and reproduction, Australian government secondary schools have also traditionally been associated with 'the local' and with 'nation building'. Some schools might now also be engaged with ideas of the 'the global' not only through policy practices and priorities, but also through the…

Education researchers continue to cite Bernstein's 'Education cannot compensate for society', while Bernstein's own focus on 'in-school processes' was echoed by Michael Gove's insistence that there are 'no excuses' for low working-class achievement in schools. Bernstein's ideas illuminate the relationship, within education policy, of…

Drawing on empirical data regarding educational strategies among internationally mobile families in the Stockholm-Uppsala region, this study questions the notion of a global middle class. First, a quantitative analysis shows that immigrating middle class professionals and their children are few, having marginal impact on the demand for…