Book Description

This research is an ethnographic study of a K-5 Mandarin bilingual charter school that was established by five upper-middle-class white parents. The study examines how the middle and upper-middle-class parents' capital (economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital) influence the establishment and development of a charter bilingual school, thus creating elite learning experiences for their children to secure their class privilege. Beyond that, the study also includes analysis of the school community and family activities to demonstrate how these parents support their children's education experience outside the school. The detailed data presentation and analysis aim to illustrate how social inequality is reproduced through this charter bilingual school and its surrounding community. Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical framework of capital and habitus are used in this study to explain how parents' capital and the neoliberal ideology interact with race and class to reproduce the existing inequalities in the education system. Capital is used as a mechanism to funnel students into particular positions within the hierarchy of capitalist society. This study not only aims to support existing literature on power relations between families from different social classes but also to utilize a variety of data to analyze how capital functions in this particular charter school context and its benefits for families that can activate their capital and disadvantages for low-income minority families without such capital. This dynamic, I claim, thus reproduces the current social hierarchy. The results of the study can help educators in different school contexts rethink the impact of parents' capital on students' learning. In addition, this study can offer insight into the present and future charter school development and regulation.