After over forty years of study, sociologists continue to debate the educational system’s role in reducing or reproducing intergenerational patterns of inequality. Theoretical perspectives frame schools as both equalizers that reduce inequality across generations and as agents of social reproduction, recreating and legitimizing inequality. This study focuses on an understudied aspect of these intergenerational processes: parents’ early educational expectations for their children. Multilevel models applied to the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) test the degree to which parents’ educational expectations for their young children reflect class privilege, race/ethnic-specific orientations to schooling, or broader trends of “college for all.” I also examine how aligned parental expectations are in relation to institutional feedback, and whether such congruence varies across class and race/ethnic groups in ways that the social reproduction perspective predicts.
I find that parents’ expectations for their children are positively associated with SES. While the lowest SES families were more likely to report the lowest expectations, many others reported great optimism expecting their children to receive the highest level of educational attainment. In fact, a larger percentage of lower SES parents held the highest level of graduate school expectations than the highest SES group, indicating a “reach for the stars” approach to thinking about their children’s educational achievements. The parents of minority students held higher expectations than the parents of white students. This was especially evident when examining parents’ expectations for advanced degrees. Parents of minority students also reported more polarized expectations, expressing both the highest and humblest hopes for their kindergarteners. With regard to congruence between parents’ expectations and school feedback, I found that the highest SES parents’ expectations most “mirrored” the various institutional assessments in the ECLS-K. Outside of the highest SES families, teacher-based assessments were generally not associated with parents’ expectations. In addition, parents of white students reported expectations that were more closely aligned with school feedback than did the parents of racial and ethnic minorities.
Between the time their children began kindergarten and were in fifth grade, parents who reported the bachelor’s degree category were more likely to maintain their initial expectations than parents with either lower or higher expectations. Many of the parents who did not initially report a bachelor’s-degree-level expectation moved in that direction, reflecting a “college for all” tendency in which a bachelor’s degree is the default educational plan. Upper-SES parents reported the most stable expectations over time and parents of white students were most likely to stick with their kindergarten expectations. The parents of Hispanic and black students were least likely to maintain their initial expectations over their children’s elementary school careers. The results provide nationally representative evidence that SES and race/ethnicity shape how parents relate to school feedback and view their children’s educational potential.
