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By Root 1383 0

students’ life chances. Schools vary tremendously in the quality of their curricula, pace of instruction, extent of teacher preparation, degree of safety, size of student body, and level of physical upkeep. Middle-class kids tend to go to different, and more academically, socially, and physically desirable, schools than do working-class and poor kids. In addition, at the secondary level, school personnel manage only part of students’ educational program and transition to college. Schools repeatedly request parent involvement, and even if the number of requests by educators is somewhat lower in high school than in elementary school, the stakes are higher. In fact, educators expect parents to be involved in bringing about a child’s successful educational experience in high school and transition to college. But middle-class parents are much more likely to be aware of and able to comply with these institutional expectations than are less privileged parents. Putting this into more general terms, institutional contexts build unevenly on family practices. These institutional advantages then are reproduced and expanded over time, thereby transforming individual actions into well-worn social pathways. Some individuals do deviate from these pathways. We see the evidence in the form of upward mobility and downward mobility. We should not, however, allow these deviations to distract us from the more important reality of the socially powerful, but typically invisible, ways that families’ practices translate into differential advantages for their children.

This chapter is another contribution to the broader, ongoing process of making invisible inequality more visible.11 I divide the discussion into five sections. In Section 1, I present a very brief summary of the methodology I used as I followed up on the lives of the children who participated in Unequal Childhoods. In Section 2, I provide a short update on each of the nine youth who were featured in the book. (A longer version of these portraits can be found at the web page for Unequal Childhoods at www.ucpress.edu. In Appendix D, I also summarize the situation of the young adults, as well as their families, for all twelve of the original intensive study participants.)12 In Section 3, I describe aspects of the social context in which the young people transitioned to adulthood, particularly the schools they attended and the neighborhoods in which they lived. I also share the youths’ reflections on the importance of the organized activities they took part in as children, as well as their awareness of the circumstances of young adults in social classes different from their own. The effects of class standing I report in this section are highly consistent with findings in existing literature on social inequality in the transition to adulthood.13 In Section 4, I turn to a theme largely absent from social science literature: the role social class plays in shaping interactions between families and institutions that sort youth into the labor market. Here I highlight the continuance of concerted cultivation and the accomplishment of natural growth in young adulthood. I show how—particularly in terms of relationships between families and schools—social class differences in family life remain important over time. Working-class and poor parents (and their kids) tended to have very general and often vague information about institutions; middle-class parents had more, and much more detailed, information. Middle-class parents also engaged in active interventions in their children’s institutional lives. Working-class and poor parents, although they loved their children very much, relied on professionals to shepherd the children through institutions. As a result, although all the young people were nearly the same age, in middle-class families, they frequently were treated as if they were still children, while in working-class and poor families they were treated as if they were grown. Lastly, in Section 5, I sum up what the follow-up study tells us about the far-reaching effects of social class differences