Rather than assessing its causal effect on educational attainment, the authors of this article aim to use the concept of cultural capital to define a huge, complex and interconnected collection of educational and school strategies adopted by students and families and to examine the way that these strategies are related to school inequalities. Data…

Nine predictor measures available from student files were used in classifying seventh- and eighth-grade students in mathematics classes into one of three or four levels of instruction in the following year. These measures were scores on tests of language intelligence, nonlanguage intelligence, general intelligence, reading vocabulary, reading…