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The Rules of the Game and the Uncertain Transmission of Advantage: Middle-class Parents’ Search for an Urban Kindergarten Sociology of Education 2016, Vol. 89(4) 279–299 Ó American Sociological Association 2016 DOI: 10.1177/0038040716669568 http://soe.sagepub.com Annette Lareau1, Shani Adia Evans2, and April Yee3 Abstract Empirical research on cultural and social capital has generally ignored the key role of institutions in setting standards that determine the contingent value of this capital. Furthermore, many studies presume that the yielding of profit from cultural, social, and economic capital is automatic. Bourdieu’s concept of field highlights the ‘‘rules of the game’’ and shows that parents’ displays of capital only are valuable when they help parents comply with institutional standards. In this article, we examine how the field shapes parents’ efforts to transmit advantages to their children through accessing high-status elementary schools. Drawing on interviews with 45 black and white middle-class families, as well as observation of school admission events and interviews with 20 school administrators, we illuminate the rules of the kindergarten admission game and describe how parents attempted to use capital to compete in the field in one large, urban district. We show the rules to be complex, hard to learn about, and implemented inconsistently. In this context, cultural, social, and economic capital that helped parents navigate the field had the potential to be profitable. But even parents with deep reservoirs of capital did not realize their first choice when they misunderstood the rules of the game or faced an imbalance of supply and demand for slots in highly desired schools. Thus, we argue that models need to take into account both the situational meaning of capital and the uncertainty in parents’ efforts to use their capital to transmit advantages to their children. Keywords cultural capital, field, school choice, urban schools, parent involvement, social class [The school district] needs to do something to advertise how it works. I had to teach all my friends how to do it and walk them through it and tell them where to go and what to do. . . . It’s not advertised at all. It’s like a secret. transmit social class advantages to children via social, economic, and especially, cultural capital. For example, much work examines the correlation between possession of cultural capital (i.e., highly 1 —White middle-class urban parent Social stratification studies have demonstrated that parents transmit important advantages to their children (Duncan and Murane 2011). Scholars drawing on Bourdieu have explored how parents University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA Reed College, Portland, OR, USA 3 James Irvine Foundation, San Francisco, CA, USA 2 Corresponding Author: Annette Lareau, University of Pennsylvania, 3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6299, USA. Email: [email protected] 280 valued skills, knowledge, and information) and desirable outcomes (see, e.g., DiMaggio 1982; Dumais 2006; Dumais and Ward 2010; Gabler and Kaufman 2006; Jaeger 2009; Lareau and Weininger 2003; Pitzalis and Porcu 2016). Research also shows that social (i.e., social ties) and economic (i.e., wealth and income) capital is advantageous for children’s life chances (Dika and Singh 2002; Duncan and Murane 2011; see also Bourdieu 1986; Coleman 1988). Yet, Bourdieu (1984; Bourdieu and Passeron 1979) was clear that the value of capital is not intrinsic. Rather, the actions of parents and children gain value only in a specific field (Bourdieu 1984). Attention to the field, however, means scholars’ focus needs to shift from looking at parents and children to also examining the ‘‘rules of the game.’’ It is these rules that determine what actions are given value. Although some school studies point to the importance of institutional standards (Calarco 2011; Cucchiara 2013), this focus on the rules of the game and parents’ actions is relatively unusual. As a result, many educators and policy makers see middle-class actions as inherently valuable, rather than looking at how the rules of the game privilege some actions more than others. In addition, many of these studies presume that the process of gaining advantages (through the application of this capital) is relatively automatic. This is a shaky premise. For example, a significant outlay of cultural, social, and economic capital may help parents secure advantages that contribute to their children’s admission to highly selective colleges, but it does not and cannot guarantee that outcome. Models need to take into account both the situational meaning of capital and the uncertainty in parents’ efforts to use their capital to transmit advantages to their children. Furthermore, studies have overestimated the degree to which middle-class parents can control the transmission of advantage to their children. Although Bourdieu (1976, 1984) was clear about the importance of contingency, too often, studies suggest a seamless reproduction of social inequality. The consistent pattern of downward mobility for children of the middle-class has not been sufficiently acknowledged (Pew Charitable Trust 2011). Although the frenzied nature of college admissions has received attention (Stevens 2007), the numerous ways in which middle-class families experience setbacks, anxieties, and pressure in the transmission process have not (but see Demerath 2009). Put differently, even parents Sociology of Education 89(4) rich in widely valued types of cultural, social, and economic capital can encounter setbacks and fail to capitalize on their advantages (Blum 2015; Ramey and Ramey 2010; Stevens 2007). And, given that research shows that social class shapes parents’ ability to intervene in schooling (Brantlinger 2003; Lareau 2000), if middle-class parents struggle to master the rules of the game, then we can speculate that learning the rules of the game might be even more challenging for working-class and poor parents. In this article, we explore how the rules of the game shape parents’ abilities to access high-status institutions, which they hope will transmit advantages to their children. The arena of school choice is an apt setting to investigate these matters. The very term school choice implies that the power rests with parents and children. This is certainly true in some settings, but in many urban school districts, there is fierce competition among families for limited school slots (Hannah-Jones 2016; Saulny 2003). In such areas, families do not ultimately choose schools; schools choose from interested families (see Pattillo 2015). Too often, school choice scholars focus their attention on families’ application and enrollment patterns across different types of schools, as well as parents’ characteristics in charter schools, traditional public schools, or private schools, rather than focus on the challenges of the selection process (Billingham and Hunt 2016; Lauen 2007; Martinez et al. 1995; Phillips, Larsen, and Hausman 2015; Sikkink and Emerson 2008). Thus, there is a need to understand more deeply the complex rules that shape enrollment decisions in urban settings. In this article, we use qualitative data to illuminate how middle-class parents in a large, urban district went about enrolling their children in kindergarten for the first time. The 45 middle-class families in our study activated their cultural, social, and economic resources as they sought to comply with the rules in the field to gain desired placements for their young children. We also interviewed administrators in 18 of these schools to learn more about the selection criteria. We find the rules of the game to be complex, hard to learn about, and implemented inconsistently. Inaccurate information was routinely handed out by school officials. In this context, cultural, social, and economic capital that helped parents navigate these institutional rules had the potential to be profitable. But even parents with deep reservoirs of capital did not attain their first choice when they misunderstood the rules of the game or faced Lareau et al. an imbalance of supply and demand for slots in highly desired schools. LITERATURE REVIEW: THE CONCEPT OF FIELD Bourdieu conceptualized social life as consisting of multiple, overlapping fields where, by definition, the standards or institutional ‘‘rules of the game’’ are always in flux as actors compete for resources. Given this core characteristic of change and struggle, Bourdieu emphasized that students of stratification needed to see social agents as acting relationally within fields. Rather than seeing the field as a static structure, Bourdieu conceived it as a dynamic, struggling, social system: [T]he field as a structure of objective relations between positions of force undergirds and guides the strategies whereby the occupations of these seek, individually or collectively, to safeguard or improve their position and to impose the principle of hierarchization most favorable to their own products. The strategies of agents depend on their position in the field, that is, in the distribution of the specific capital, and on the perception that they have of the field. (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:101) Some aspects of cultural, social, and economic capital may be valuable in all fields, but Bourdieu’s theory encourages researchers to pay attention to the values these resources have within a specific field. The field influences the kinds of cultural and social resources that can be successfully activated. Put differently, the institutions in the field set ‘‘the rules of the game,’’ and capital gains its value only in light of the specific field in which it is put to use. Weininger (2005:81) explains that field [is] a notion intended to condense [Bourdieu’s] understanding of social structure. . . . The term is meant to recall a battlefield or a playing field, and more specifically, the fact that the individuals who confront one another will enter into conflict or competition with one another, each from a more or less advantageous position. In recent years, a number of U.S. researchers have turned to the concept of field (Fligstein and 281 McAdam 2012; Martin 2003). Empirical studies often highlight tensions and divisions within fields such as urban land policy (Duffy, Binder, and Skrentny 2010), organizations (Fligstein and McAdam 2012), and think tanks (Medvetz 2014). Still, field scholars have paid scant attention to elementary education, focusing instead on the field of higher education (Grenfell 2009; Maton 2005; Naidoo 2004; Yee forthcoming). Even here, however, limited empirical attention has been paid to both the rules of the game and how actors seek to comply with these (shifting) standards. The precise institutional rules for admission, as well as the limits of parents’ power, also need to be addressed in the extensive literature on school choice (Berends and Zottola 2009; Bosetti and Pyryt 2007; Goldhaber 1999; Henig 1994; Wells 2002). Research shows that in school choice, parents’ advantages, including cultural capital, matter (Ball and Vincent 1998; Fuller, Elmore, and Orfield 1996). For example, many studies show that parents are not equally likely to take advantage of school choice programs. Despite policy makers’ original intentions to provide more alternatives for lowincome families, middle-class parents are more likely to apply to programs and to enroll their children in them (Goldring and Hausman 1999; Schneider, Teske, and Marschall 2000). In addition to showing who attends what programs, the charter school literature has examined the programs’ effects on performance (e.g., Hoxby and Murarka 2009). Yet, this approach neglects a crucial reality: parents do not decide if their children are admitted. Too few studies show that the likelihood of admission is limited in many urban settings (but see André-Bechely 2005; Kimelberg and Billingham 2013; Pattillo 2015; Reay, Crozier, and James 2011), because school choice success, at times, is connected to parents’ ability to comply with institutional standards (as well as the relationship between demand and supply of slots). Nor do these studies sufficiently highlight the work parents do before they ever file an application. Application rules for schools are not the same across districts or even within one district. As such, the rules for applying to schools, and parents’ knowledge of the field, are a crucial, and understudied, part of the school choice process. DATA AND METHODS Our study uses qualitative methods to examine the processes through which middle-class urban 282 parents sought to secure kindergarten spots for their children. We draw on in-depth interviews with 45 native-born middle-class families: 33 white families, 12 black families, and 1 interracial family. In each family, parents were in the process of finding a kindergarten for their child, or they had done so within the previous three years. Interviews were conducted in the home of each participant and lasted about 90 minutes to two hours; respondents were given an honorarium of $50 as well as a dessert, which we brought as a friendly gesture. We mainly interviewed mothers, as prior research indicates mothers are leaders in school matters (Blum 2015; Cooper 2007; Griffith and Smith 2004). In a few instances, however, fathers joined the interviews; we thus use the term parents rather than mothers. Qualitative researchers need to make hard choices in study design. Because the literature on parent involvement suggests that, among a variety of parents, middle-class parents generally have more advantages in realizing their preferences (Brantlinger 2003; Lareau 2000), our data are exclusively from white and black middle-class parents. This focus reveals the power of the field in constraining even the most advantaged parents’ efforts and outcomes; in the conclusion, we further consider the implications of our research for working-class parents. We recruited parents through two methods. First, we used snowball sampling to recruit parents whose eldest child was approaching kindergarten. We began with three different acquaintances who lived in gentrified neighborhoods where the local public school’s reputation was disputed; these parents were thus positioned to search for alternatives. Second, we sampled additional parents through two day-care centers. As it emerged that a key finding of the study was the importance of social networks, we were concerned that the recruitment method might have influenced the result, because the parents recruited through our snowball sample were, by definition, socially connected in their neighborhoods. We found that the responses of parents recruited through day cares were similar to the responses of parents recruited from the snowball sample, allaying our concerns that parents recruited through a snowball sample might be distinctive. Furthermore, parents came from multiple networks in six different neighborhoods. We also interviewed 20 principals and admissions officers at the 18 schools (traditional public, charter, and private schools) parents deemed potentially worthy of consideration. These Sociology of Education 89(4) interviews lasted 60 to 90 minutes each; they were conducted in the offices of the interviewees. We did not provide an honorarium, but we did send a handwritten thank-you note to each administrator after the interview. We define social class in terms of the educational requirements of respondents’ jobs and the amount of supervision they experience at work. The upper-middle class includes families in which at least one adult has a full-time job that requires highly complex, educationally certified (advanced degree) skills and provides substantial autonomy in the course of the work. The middle class includes families in which at least one adult works full-time in a job that requires relatively complex, educationally certified skills (a bachelor’s degree or above) but that does not provide high levels of autonomy. Because we did not discern systematic differences in the process for upper-middleclass and middle-class parents, we grouped them together in the analysis. All the mothers have at least a bachelor’s degree; many have an advanced degree. Whereas many middle-class parents of young children move to the suburbs in search of ‘‘good schools’’ (Holme 2002), our sample is part of the growing number of middle-class families choosing urban schools (Cucchiara and Horvat 2009; Lareau and Goyette 2014; Posey-Maddox 2014; Posey-Maddox, Kimelberg, and Cucchiara 2014). We carried out participant-observation of school events and parents as they navigated the process of selecting a kindergarten. We attended tours and open house events at traditional public schools, charter schools, and private schools. We observed the drawing of names at charter school lotteries. We also examined school websites, collected documents related to the admissions process, and read blogs created by parents to help others navigate the process. The blogs generally echoed the themes that emerged from interviews and observations. In addition, the third author carried out seven months of participant observation with two families and a group of parents during the fall and spring before their four-year-old children entered kindergarten. This was the heart of the period when parents were considering school options. One parent, Ms. Stevenson, and her son, Jared, were followed once or twice a week. The fieldworker visited Ms. Stevenson in her home and accompanied her to school-related events (e.g., private school interviews, a charter school lottery, Lareau et al. and school tours) as well as to play dates and birthday parties. A second parent, Ms. Becker, was also observed along with her son. This parent was a member of a group of ‘‘playground moms,’’ most of whom did not work outside the home. The fieldworker hung out with Ms. Becker and this group of parents at the playground after they picked up their children from the same nursery school.1 As part of the data analysis, we drew on transcribed interviews to develop a coding scheme of emergent themes (e.g., admission processes, parents’ knowledge, anxiety, and strategies) and then coded all interviews using Atlas.ti. We also searched for disconfirming evidence as we read the transcripts and reviewed the results of the coding and during the writing process. All names are pseudonyms. THE URBAN KINDERGARTEN FIELD: AN UNEVEN LANDSCAPE We define the kindergarten admissions field in this large, northeastern city as consisting of three systems of schools (private, charter, and traditional public). The elementary schools within these systems are organized into a hierarchy that, although contested, has a core number of schools about which respondents, websites, and the local media agree on the relative ranking. As noted earlier, the field includes the schools as well as the formal and informal criteria for admission to kindergarten—these are ‘‘the rules of the game.’’ The rules varied in the three systems of schools, and there were sometimes shadow systems, making it difficult for parents to master the rules (Table 1). But across the systems, the overall pattern was the same: for the schools to admit their children, parents needed to master complex rules as well as have some measure of good luck. The field has many significant aspects, including the varying levels of success these schools have in promoting children’s academic achievement. We chose to focus, however, on only one aspect: the degree to which spots at desired schools were available to families. This is a particularly important element of this field, because parents see kindergarten as setting children on an advantageous educational track. The large, northeastern city in which the study took place is racially diverse, with large white and black populations and smaller Latino and Asian communities. In recent decades, a growing 283 number of young, white professionals have moved into the city; however, the public school system enrolls relatively few white children. Most neighborhood public schools in respondents’ communities serve a majority-black student body. Over two thirds of children in the school district are poor or nearly poor. The district has many fiscal challenges, and many of the traditional public schools do poorly on state exams (Table 2). About one third of students in the city are not enrolled in the public school district and instead attend private or parochial schools; there has been a dramatic rise in charter school enrollments. Table 1 shows admissions processes in different types of schools. Our interviews with parents and educators, however, drew a portrait of a district with a limited number of schools with the reputation of being ‘‘good.’’ Among scholars of education, the meaning of a ‘‘good school’’ is subject to debate (Bryk et al. 2010). Scholars have also considered how race and class shape parents’ perceptions of school quality (Byrne 2006; Johnson and Shapiro 2003). In this article, we do not attempt to report a ranking of the schools based on students’ outcomes; we were struck, however, by the relative consensus on school quality among the middle-class parents we interviewed, journalists, and in social media. A small number of private schools are considered to be at the top of the hierarchy. Ranked directly beneath the private schools are four traditional public schools that middle-class parents described as desirable (i.e., Brownside, Fullerton, Ledford, and Lab Public). These schools also consistently appear on the media’s ‘‘best schools’’ lists, and they receive relatively high rankings on websites and blogs. In addition, some up-and-coming traditional public schools have a disputed status (e.g., Clayton, Connelly, Filbert, Grey, and Lincoln). Some parents hoped these schools ‘‘would be ready’’ in the future; other parents in our study considered these schools when their children were not admitted to the more highly desired public schools and they could not afford elite private school tuition. Although parents had many charter schools to choose among, the parents in our sample considered only a small number of them, referring to the same five or six over and over as the ‘‘good schools.’’ At the bottom of the status hierarchy are neighborhood elementary schools that largely serve students who are eligible for free or reduced-cost lunch. The highly desired public elementary schools enrolled more white and Asian students, and fewer 284 Application 1 $50 fee; private IQ tests (costs $300); child visit, parent interview, letter from preschool teacher Admissions officer February; deposit due in March Components of application Who makes decision? How do parents learn outcome? February; deposit due in March Admissions officer Variable; sometimes similar to selective privates, sometimes just an application and deposit Free Variable; often $3,000 to $5,000 Variable; often in the spring Variable; some April Lottery Application (sometimes parents need to come in to pick up the application); usually not via online Variable; each school has a different deadline but many are in the fall Fall before kindergarten when most children are four Fall before kindergarten when most children are four Fall before prekindergarten year when children are three Variable; often $11,000 to $19,000 Variable; most from October to January; some are rolling Age of child when parents usually file application Tuition Deadlines Charter schools Less selective privates Elite, selective private schools Issue Table 1. Types of Schools in the Field. District office; principal discretion Often not until July or August before kindergarten begins Complex: formal system has a deadline of October 31st; informal ‘‘shadow’’ system has no formal deadline Application (variable) Free Fall before kindergarten when most children are four Public, neighborhood schools receiving transfers Lareau et al. 285 Table 2. Test Score Data in Third Grade by School Status. Third-grade proficiency School Charter schools Global Charter Adventure Charter Artistic Charter Sunrise Charter Traditional public schools District average Fullerton Brownside Lab Public Ledford Grey Lincoln Connelly Kentline Clayton Filbert Walker Status % Proficient in math % Proficient in reading Highly-desired charter Highly-desired charter Highly-desired charter Disputed charter 84 96 87 96 71 83 85 71 Highly-desired public Highly-desired public Highly-desired public Highly-desired public Disputed public Disputed public Disputed public Disputed pubic Disputed public Low-status public Low status public 66 90 95 92 78 84 94 83 67 79 60 90 58 76 89 85 88 79 74 85 59 68 45 90 black students, than did most district schools. Compared to the district overall, the percentage of children eligible for free and reduced-price lunch was much smaller at the schools the middle-class parents considered desirable (i.e., 50 percent at desired schools, compared to about 75 percent in the district). However, it is striking that schools with the reputation as being the ‘‘best’’ did not necessarily have the highest test scores.2 For example, white and black parents uniformly described Ledford, but not Grey, in glowing terms. Yet, as Table 2 shows, the percentage of students achieving math proficiency was higher at Grey (84 percent) than at Ledford (78 percent). In addition, some elementary schools with test scores comparable to the highly desired schools enrolled primarily black students. None of the white parents mentioned these schools as an option, but some black parents did consider them, a point we will return to below. The Rules of the Game: What Schools Required Each of the three systems (i.e., traditional public, charter, and private schools) had multiple rules for gaining admission. Overall, information regarding kindergarten enrollment was scarce and difficult to find. Private schools provided more information on websites than did charter schools or traditional public schools that accepted transfer students. None of the schools, however, provided the information parents most wanted: the criteria for admission, the best strategies for securing admission, and the actual likelihood of their children being admitted. Moreover, there was no single source parents could consult to gain information about all possible school choices, deadlines for applications, and criteria for admission. Instead, parents in our study needed to find, collect, and make sense of information for each school they were interested in. Most gathered information on many schools and, to ensure a positive outcome, applied to multiple schools. Some parents, for example, applied to more than 10 different schools. In this section, we seek to demonstrate the sheer complexity of the process of securing a kindergarten spot that middle-class parents found desirable within the urban district. Traditional public schools. The most straightforward way for parents to enroll their children in kindergarten in this city was to buy a home in the catchment area of a traditional public school they considered to be desirable. But this was accompanied by a rule: houses had to be 286 within the exact boundary, and sometimes the boundary went down the middle of the street. School leaders generally enforced the rule strictly. Moreover, the school district had the right to change boundaries over time. Hence, information about the exact boundary was essential. Accurate information, however, was hard to find. Unlike other neighboring districts, this district did not post a clear map of the boundaries at the time of the study. (Today, the district has a website where parents can enter an address to find the assigned school, but the website admonishes parents not to rent or buy a home based on the website information.) And information from school officials could be inaccurate. For example, Sophie Kandis (a white middle-class parent) reported calling Brownside School (a highly desired public school) when she and her husband were purchasing a new home, to see if they would be in the catchment. She was told the new home was in the boundaries, so they ‘‘signed the paper’’ for the purchase. Shortly thereafter, as they chatted with another parent at the playground while they pushed their three-year-old children on the swings, they were dumbfounded to learn their new home was outside the boundary. As the father, Lucas, explains, [We told her] ‘‘Oh yeah, we are moving a block away.’’ She said, ‘‘Oh, you just moved out of the Brownside district.’’ [I said,] ‘‘No, we didn’t. No, we didn’t.’’ She’s like, ‘‘Yeah, you know, south of whatever,’’ and Angie and I looked at each other like, ‘‘Are we the biggest idiots to move? We were in the district, and we move out!’’ They got out of their contract and moved to a different house inside Brownside’s catchment. Parents need knowledge (encompassed within Bourdieu’s conception of cultural capital), which they often learn from their social networks.3 In this case, the parents’ social tie provided extremely valuable information, given the rigid rule about attendance boundaries. Some parents had the cultural capital to know about the highly desired neighborhoods, but they lacked the economic capital to move there. Buying a home within desired catchment areas typically required paying a premium of $100,000 or more, compared to houses just outside the catchment. For example, Ms. Carlton, a black graduate Sociology of Education 89(4) student and parent of two, was priced out of the catchment areas she desired. When asked whether she considered schools when deciding where to live, she replied, I did, and I kind of felt like we couldn’t afford the areas that had good neighborhood schools, and in my mind there’s only a handful of those. . . . I know of some parents who live in the Lab Public catchment and I was envious of them ’cause they had almost a guarantee of getting their child a quality education. Without the economic capital needed to guarantee access to one of those schools, Ms. Carlton had feelings of ‘‘desperation’’ before her child was admitted via lottery to a highly desired charter school. In short, economic capital was essential to gain access to the highly desired public schools, but these resources were valuable only if parents complied with complex district boundaries. Traditional public school transfers: Formal rules. The public school district allowed families to transfer to other neighborhood schools if a school had room. Highly desired neighborhood schools had very few slots available for transfer students. In interviews, principals of three of the four highly desired neighborhood schools reported that they were filled to capacity by children in the catchment area, and they had not admitted a single student from outside of the neighborhood that year. The fourth school, Ledford, did accept some outof-catchment students; the number of transfer students varied from year to year, but most years it was under 25. This information was not publicly available. Trying to transfer children from their assigned school to a more highly desired traditional public school was a challenging enterprise that required gathering elusive, time-sensitive information; filling out forms; and in some cases, making inperson visits to schools. Formally, there is a districtwide lottery (held at the district office) for these coveted spots. The district website instructs parents to fill out a form, bring it to the district office, and have it stamped by a particular date in early November. Parents may list as many as five schools as transfer destinations. These steps are clearly stated, but two additional, key pieces of information are not publicized. Three of the schools considered to be the best are at capacity; in recent years, they have not accepted any Lareau et al. transfer students. Therefore, knowledgeable parents did not ‘‘waste’’ a slot by listing one of these schools. In addition, the order in which parents listed their choice of schools was important. Ms. Dixon, a white parent who worked as a high-level program administrator at a prestigious university recounted her experience with the process: [When] I filled out the application, I didn’t realize that you were supposed to be realistic . . . you were supposed to put your first choice at . . . what you could reasonably get into. I thought it said to list it in your order of preference, so I put number one, Lab Public School because if you’re gonna ask me, obviously where do I want this kid to go to school, that’s where I want. Number two, Brownside, because . . . it’s the second best school in the city. That’s where I want my kid to go to school. And then I . . . went down to the more realistic and I put Clayton as three and I put Ledford as four. I later learned that in order to get your kid on the wait list at Ledford, you have to put Ledford as one. This parent possessed and activated quite a bit of capital: she had valuable knowledge. She knew about the deadline. She knew that she needed to file with the district office as well as the school. She filled out the paperwork. She delivered it. But she was missing one crucial piece of information. In addition, the district had an oversupply of applications at Ledford. She ultimately enrolled her son in Clayton, an up-and-coming school. Ms. Thompson, a black parent of one son, worked in an insurance office and was similarly misled by incomplete information from the district website. Although she had a thick social network with her siblings and extended family, aside from a coworker, she knew very few other parents with children entering kindergarten. Almost all of her knowledge about the school process came from her research online and telephone conversations with school district officials. One official did not tell her how to fill out the form correctly: The reason why I found that out, I called the school district and I was asking them again about that form . . . and this is when he didn’t get into Ledford and I was trying to get him into Laughlin. And the [school 287 district] said, ‘‘You know what, because it’s out of your boundary you would have had to fill this out. You would have had to list that school on that form.’’ At this time, Ms. Thompson had already submitted the form, and the deadline had passed to list all of her preferred schools: I found out that if I ever wanted him to go [somewhere else] I still would have had to list them on that form for the school district. So I missed three opportunities. . . . I could have filled out that one form, put Ledford, Applewood, and Watts, and Laughlin all on that one form that I didn’t know about. By listing only one school, she had limited her options. Ms. Thompson had also filled out lottery forms for a charter school (discussed below), but her son was number 14 on the wait list. The rejections were very difficult. She said, ‘‘I cried. I was heartbroken.’’ Her son was scheduled to go to her neighborhood school, where she felt ‘‘the teachers are not as patient with these children. . . . The whole school system is just—it sucks to be honest. . . . They really do our kids a disadvantage.’’ At the last minute, her coworker told her about a newly opened charter school, and her son was admitted. But although she had made multiple phone calls (twice to the school district and to three different schools), talked with her family members and coworkers, and read online extensively, her lack of knowledge about how to fill out the form led to problems. In her view, she narrowly avoided disaster. The process even differed across specific schools within the district. One exasperated white parent, Ms. Dixon, reported the following experiences filing transfer applications with two local neighborhood schools: They have different systems. So for Ledford, you fill out the application, you put Ledford as one, and the earlier you mail your application, the higher you are on their wait list. So you get back a copy from the school district with a date stamp. If you really are smart, you actually walk it in there yourself. You don’t trust it to the mail or trust it to a secretary. So then you get your date. You have your date stamp. You take it to Ledford. You give it to 288 them and they put your on their wait list because chances are you’re not gonna get in through the lottery. Clayton’s system is different. Clayton, they collect all of the transfer applications at the school. They hang onto them all and on the day that they’re all due, they walk them [to the district] as a group. . . .It’s like courting two prom dates. You’re trying not to let each school know that you’re hedging your bets and so you try not to be insulting to the principal. Ms. Dixon’s reference to ‘‘courting two prom dates’’ highlights the delicate nature of the enterprise. It also highlights her deep knowledge of a highly nuanced system. The information parents received from individual schools and the district office sometimes conflicted. Because these errors could have major consequences, some parents in our sample felt they needed to double-check information for accuracy, as Ms. Thompson, the black middle-class parent quoted above, reported: I filed [the application] at the school. And then I found out later on that I had to go down to the school district by the end of October to actually fill out this separate sheet of paper ‘cause when I inquired about that form the lady said, ‘‘No, just fill out the application. You don’t have to fill that out.’’ And then something said call back ‘cause I wanted to still just make sure I understood their whole process and him being out of the [catchment] area, and then someone said, ‘‘Yes, you do have to fill out that form and you have to get it down to the school district.’’ In another example, some parents who called Ledford were told they could walk in and apply, and they would likely get in because children were ‘‘rarely’’ turned away from the school. In fact, parents needed to start by getting an application for the next school year and submitting it by a specific (but varying) date in October. The information that rejections were ‘‘rare’’ was also false; most applicants were not admitted to the school. A parent–teacher organization (PTO) officer at Ledford, who led a school tour attended by a member of the research team, seemed aware of the problem of erroneous information. When a parent on the tour complained that he had been misinformed Sociology of Education 89(4) by a receptionist, the PTO officer acknowledged that the Ledford School had one problematic employee: ‘‘[The tour leader] says, ‘Honestly, they have two great people in the office and one really bad person, and he probably got the bad person on the phone.’’’ Thus, conscientious parents could easily get inaccurate information. Still, some families had a successful outcome in the transfer process, although it often came very late in the year. For example, Ms. O’Donnell, a white parent who works in publishing and has two children under age five, toured schools and applied to two private schools and two charter schools, as well as listing five public schools on the district transfer application. Her son was admitted to an expensive private school (Madison), but her first choice was to transfer to Ledford. However, she was aware of a timing problem: You never find out about the transfers early. If you’re shooting for public school with a private school backup you never find out from the public school before you have to pay that deposit. So we sent in the 500 bucks . . . in January. In late May, she learned her son was admitted to Ledford. It created a dilemma. In the end, she and her husband forfeited the $500 deposit and transferred their child to Ledford. Although the process was not without bumps, her family had a successful outcome. But what mattered here was not simply the amount of their social, cultural, and economic capital but their ability to leverage that capital in accordance with school rules as well as some amount of luck. Other families fared less well. Ms. Woodley, a white stay-at-home mother married to a social worker, had ruled out sending her daughter Kara to her neighborhood school after a neighbor who taught in the district warned against it. Because the family could not afford private school tuition, Ms. Woodley hoped to get Kara into a charter school or transfer to a ‘‘better’’ public school. She scoured the Internet and used her social networks, talking to other parents at her daughter’s preschool, to find out which schools were ‘‘good’’ and which were most likely to accept transfers. She and her husband toured 13 traditional public and charter schools, submitted a transfer application to the school district listing their top five schools, and entered the lotteries of six charter schools. At Ledford, Ms. Woodley followed up Lareau et al. with a handwritten letter to the principal, begging for a spot. She activated a formidable amount of cultural and social capital on her daughter’s behalf. When Kara was not accepted at any of the schools to which the family applied, Ms. Woodley had a ‘‘breakdown.’’ Having no other acceptable option, she secured a transfer for Kara to an up-and-coming public school with disputed status, where a group of middle-class parents were working to bring about reforms that would make the school more to their liking. Ms. Woodley described the entire experience as ‘‘a huge nightmare’’ and ‘‘probably one of the worst times of my entire life.’’ Traditional public school transfers: Shadow system of informal rules. A further complication was that district transfer policies were often implemented inconsistently or ignored. Some educators complained that parents who applied to their schools using the district form were never granted admission to their schools even though they had room for transfers. Connelly’s principal explained, If you’re in one school and you want to go to another school, you have to file an application, which goes [to the district office] downtown. What was happening was a lot of those parents put in an application but they didn’t get to Connelly. You know, they [the district office] wouldn’t approve it. . . . I’m not quite sure how the process worked. This principal’s solution was to innovate. She counseled parents to bypass the district’s process and come to her directly. In August, district rules permitted her to admit students without a district application. If she had space, she would admit the children: I just told parents, ‘‘Come in if you’re interested.’’ As long as I have room—’cause again, my thing was, my goal was to keep class size small, and if I started to go over [the desired class size], then I’d say to a parent, ‘‘I’m sorry, I don’t have room, so you know, you can try me next year, or whatever, but you have to go to your neighborhood school.’’ And, that’s been working pretty nicely. This principal’s comments reveal the convoluted nature of the district’s admissions process. 289 Principals’ discretion could work easily at some points of the year but not at others. We found evidence of a similar shadow system for transfers in other neighborhood schools. Other principals, however, took a hybrid approach. At Ledford, the only highly desired public school that accepted transfers, the principal instructed parents to take their application to the district office, have it stamped, and then bring a copy to the school. This advice was offered during a tour for prospective parents attended by one of the researchers: The principal tells the group of prospective parents about the lottery process. He repeats [sounding somewhat frustrated] that the district receives 700 applications for Ledford, but he won’t know those people exist unless they bring a copy of the application directly to the school. Ledford puts [delivered applications] into a pile to form a waiting list. He says there are 60 applications in the waiting list at this point for kindergarten. He says that he designates the number of slots that will be chosen through the [districtwide] lottery and he intentionally requests fewer students than he can accommodate. After the district conducts the lottery and sends a list of names to the school, [the principal] will go to the wait list to fill remaining slots. He tells the parents to call, e-mail, get in touch [to find out the results] in whatever way works for them. Through this strategy of underreporting the number of slots available to the district, the Ledford principal was able to handpick knowledgeable, highly motivated parents from his own waiting list. Hence, he created an institutional standard where parents who attended the tour, or knew others who attended the tour, have advantages not available to those who rely only on the website. Parents, such as Ms. Thompson, who only sent an application to the district (and did not call the school until her son was not admitted), had significantly lower odds of admission at Ledford. Parents who understood the transfer shadow system, including when exactly to submit applications, possessed highly valuable capital. For example, Ms. Becker, a white stay-at-home mom who had been researching schools since her son was two, gathered extensive information and was seen as an ‘‘expert’’ on the topic by other parents. 290 She applied to 14 private, public, and charter schools, but Ledford was her first choice. Unlike Ms. Thompson, she was aware that in addition to the district transfer office application, Ledford had a shadow system where parents filed photocopies of the district application at the school. Ms. Becker came prepared to the school’s kindergarten open house with a photocopy of her district transfer application. She reported that during the open house, the principal said, ‘‘How we do it is how early you got your application in.’’ So actually pretty much as he was saying this I was filling out my application and I went and dropped it off while mostly everybody else was doing the tour. I was like, ‘‘I’ll get a tour later, I’m just gonna drop this off now.’’ Although leaving in the middle of an open house might be considered rude in other settings, in this context, it was valuable for Ms. Becker to presume that every moment she delayed could affect her application. She later learned that her son’s application was seventh in the pile; he was admitted to the kindergarten class at Ledford. Another parent in our study, Ms. Woodley, submitted her transfer application one week later and was not admitted to Ledford. Hence, Ms. Becker’s knowledge and actions, and her shrewd playing of the information she learned, paid off. It was difficult for us to assess how frequently a shadow system was in effect, but there was clear evidence that some principals used their own approach to admitting children. The school district website makes no mention of any informal or alternative transfer processes. Parents who attended school tours, who had friends who attended tours, or who learned about school-specific informal admissions processes from other sources had highly valuable knowledge that, in some instances, could be transformed into gaining a slot in a highly desired kindergarten. But advising parents to be actively involved in learning about schools without focusing on the forms, principals’ actions, and district rules offers an incomplete analysis. Charter schools. A commonality across charter schools was that, according to state law, oversubscribed schools had to admit students by lottery. However, the crucial lottery application deadlines varied, as did the odds of admission. Sociology of Education 89(4) In some cases, admission rates were similar to Ivy League universities. Our interviews with school officials revealed that two highly desired charter schools, Global Charter and Adventure Charter, had admission rates between 11 and 16 percent. The admissions director of Adventure Charter estimated that the school received approximately 275 applications for 80 to 90 kindergarten slots. The school had a sibling preference policy, and about half the slots were reserved for siblings of children already attending the school, leaving only 40 to 50 slots for new families. Out of 275 applicants, 45 admitted students is equivalent to a 16 percent admissions rate. Global Charter received approximately 350 applications for 85 kindergarten slots, but about 45 of those slots were reserved for siblings. This left only 40 open slots and an admissions rate of around 11 percent. (At the time of our study, the numbers of applications and slots were not publicized on Global Charter’s website. Today they are, but the number of spaces taken up by siblings is not.) The less desired charter schools were less competitive; still, one of these charter schools had a waiting list of 120 students, and another had a waiting list of 141 students. Charter schools had only one major rule: applications had to be submitted by the deadline. According to educators, schools were inflexible about deadlines, as this extract from an interview with the Sunrise Charter school principal indicates: Principal: As the date starts rolling around, we shut down our receipt. Q: [What] if it’s only one day after the deadline? Principal: We don’t accept it. Some parents understood how important it was to submit the application on time. Ms. Elliot, who is black, a parent of three, and a social worker, explained that she delayed submitting her child’s application to Global Charter as she mulled over the option of homeschooling, but when the deadline arrived, she knew she had to get to the school that day, despite bad weather: After doing months and months of research, I came across Global Charter and I got an application off the Internet, filled it out and everything, and I just held onto it. So the last day of the lottery . . . I’m sitting here holding this application and this is March. It’s freezing outside. It’s raining. Lareau et al. And I’m like, ‘‘I don’t feel like going over there.’’ I get up and I walk from my office to the school, turn in the application the last day, and he got accepted. So that’s why I said I’ll never forget that day as long as I live. However, the principal at Global Charter confirmed that some parents were unaware of the application deadline. In August, a month before kindergarten began, some parents were hoping to apply: We have people walking in saying, ‘‘Can I get an application?’’ And they [the staff] will remind them or the application will say when you need to apply and deposit the application. But many people are shocked. Some parents missed the deadlines not by hours or days but by months. The application deadline for many charter schools was in the winter prior to the September of enrollment. Some charter schools announced the due date for applications on their websites very briefly in the fall—and at no other time. Most of the year, the websites stated, ‘‘Applications are not being accepted now; check back later for additional information.’’ Parents who called the school were readily told the date; but parents needed to know to call. Because the school district did not send information to parents of children who were three, four, or five years old, there was no standard mechanism for parents to learn about the important, and inflexible, deadline for charter school admissions.4 Parents were on their own to learn the inflexible rules of the charter school lottery game. Private schools. In addition to charter and ‘‘good’’ public schools, some parents applied to private schools. Most parents considered independent schools that provided a secular education. These schools varied in cost, ranging between $8,000 and $25,000 annually. Some black parents and a few white parents also considered religious institutions, which tended to have lower tuition rates; for example, Catholic school tuition was approximately $4,000 per year. Many of the independent private schools where parents applied were oversubscribed. For example, Arch received around 50 kindergarten applications, but only 8 to 10 children without sibling preference were admitted (i.e., a 16 to 20 percent 291 acceptance rate). Acceptance rates at Madison (63 percent) and Riverdale (73 percent) were higher, but even these private schools typically denied admission for one quarter to one third of applicants. Nonetheless, the odds of being admitted to an oversubscribed private school were higher than being admitted by transfer to a highly desired public school, such as Ledford, or by lottery to the most sought-after charter schools. To apply to private schools, parents had to submit an application that often included several essay questions about the applicant. The applications had to be accompanied by an application fee, typically $50, and submitted by each school’s deadline. Undersubscribed religious schools would immediately enroll applicants, but for oversubscribed schools, the process was more involved (see Table 1). Some schools required that students take and submit scores for a standardized academic ability test administered by a psychologist (which cost $300 and took a few hours). The oversubscribed schools then invited all applicants for an interview and observation. During the interview, a teacher would take every student aside to individually assess his or her academic skills. Parents worried about how their children would behave in these visits, knowing they did not have control over how their four-year-old would be perceived. School representatives also interviewed parents, either during the student’s interview or at another time, to assess the fit of families with the school. Several months after the interview, the oversubscribed schools would send letters offering admission, denying admission, or offering a spot on a wait list. The timing for applying to private schools was significantly different from the charter school and public school transfer application processes. To maximize their chances of admission at oversubscribed independent schools, savvy parents began the process when their children were three, the year before they were eligible to enroll in prekindergarten (pre-K). Admission rates were much more favorable for applications to pre-K than to kindergarten. (At Arch, for example, the pre-K acceptance rate was 44 percent, compared to its kindergarten acceptance rate of 20 percent.) Moreover, as the Riverdale admissions director revealed, entry into pre-K did not require the testing and evaluation required for kindergarten: It’s tricky because if you come in [for preK] . . . you don’t have to be tested. . . . And as the kids get older, we get a little 292 stricter about their testing scores because it’s just easier to quantify the abilities of older kids. The advantage of applying to private schools for pre-K and not waiting until kindergarten was not conveyed on websites, in application packets, or during tours. Despite possessing abundant cultural and economic capital, some parents did not understand the field well enough to deploy their capital effectively. For example, Ms. Terra, a white parent, had a degree from an Ivy League university and, until a recent layoff, had worked in a managerial position in graphic design. Her son attended an expensive nursery school that was renowned for its elaborate art, puppet, and outdoor programs. Ms. Terra had believed that students at this nursery school had a near-automatic admission to Arch, because a number of children in the nursery school had transitioned to Arch in previous years. As noted earlier, however, Arch administrators estimated a 20 percent admittance rate for kindergarteners. Ms. Terra lacked this crucial knowledge. Describing herself retrospectively as ‘‘overconfident,’’ she said she filled out only a few applications, thinking, ‘‘I’ll get in [to Arch] for sure’’: I thought [Arch] was a complete slam dunk. . . . That was where I put most of my efforts. I secondarily also applied [to] Artistic Charter, though they were definitely B choice. Oh—oh, I did the normal thing of trying to—I got on the [transfer] lottery for Brownside and Fullerton. [In the district transfer application] I applied to the top five [public schools] . . . in the area. Ms. Terra’s son was not accepted at Arch or at any of the other schools where she had submitted applications. Ms. Terra and her husband were aware of other private schools, such as Madison (where two thirds of children were admitted), but she had ‘‘missed the deadline’’ because she had been busy at work. When her son was not admitted to Arch or Artistic Charter, Ms. Terra went into a tailspin. She could not sleep, had nightmares of dinosaurs eating children, and then began eating obsessively. In the end, Ms. Terra enrolled her son in the kindergarten at their neighborhood catchment school, which had up-and-coming status. She was excited about her son’s teacher, who Sociology of Education 89(4) she felt was the ‘‘best teacher in the district,’’ but she was anxious about the future. If Ms. Terra had applied to more private schools, she may have found a spot at a school she found desirable. Ms. Terra possessed significant economic and cultural capital that would be valuable in many settings, but because she lacked critically important, field-specific information about the rules of the game and the scarcity of opportunities, her capital lacked value. A ‘‘heartbreaking’’ process. Middle-class parents found the process agonizing. For example, Ms. Carlton, a black graduate student, explained how the timing of the choice process made the experience of rejection particularly difficult: We toured the Arch School, went all the way through the application process, and didn’t make it. And when you get those rejection letters, that’s heartbreaking— especially when you haven’t gotten a single acceptance letter. . . . We got the Arch School’s rejection before she was accepted to Global Charter so that was another . . . agony. . . . What if this happens again and again? Similarly, the following field note describes how Ms. Stevenson, a white art director (and a focus of the participant-observation portion of our study), reacted to receiving—on the same day—rejection letters from both private schools to which she had applied (Arch and Creekwood). The fieldworker was visiting the evening the letters arrived: It is a cold Wednesday night in February. Over dinner at her home, Amy tells me that when she saw both letters were thin, she ‘‘kind of knew what was coming.’’ Her face is pale . . . [and she] looks shellshocked and in a daze. She stares into the distance, where Jared is now playing on the couch, but she doesn’t seem to see him. I watch as her face slowly contorts with emotion—her brows knit together, her nose crinkles, and her upper lip curls. . . . I think she might start to cry or get sick. Ms. Stevenson second-guessed her actions: ‘‘I just wonder if I didn’t do something that other people Lareau et al. did, you know? Like, should I have called every week?’’ She worried she should have done more to activate her resources. In particular, she wondered aloud if she should have asked her son’s nursery school teacher, who wrote a letter of recommendation, to cite specific examples of Jared’s strengths. Ms. Stevenson desperately wanted the schools to provide a real explanation for the rejections, not ‘‘pat answers’’ about ‘‘the numbers’’ and ‘‘creating a balanced class.’’ One month later, which felt interminable to his mother, Jared was admitted to Arch from the waiting list. He enrolled. Although ultimately successful, Ms. Stevenson’s experience with (temporary) rejection was anxiety producing and deeply meaningful. Her experience also highlights the uncertain pathways through which parents seek to transmit advantages to their children. In private school admissions, as well as charter and public schools, the institutional standards and scarcity of spots, rather than the parents, determine the process and outcomes. Middle-class parents described being consumed with anxiety about where their children were going to kindergarten in the city. They reported that schools and admissions procedures were a nearconstant topic of conversation at playgrounds, at birthday parties, and during informal interactions with neighbors, something we also observed in our fieldwork. Mothers, especially, reported having frequent, long, and anxious conversations with other mothers about these topics. ‘‘The main conversation you would hear on the playground,’’ Ms. Adler, a white stay-at-home mother married to a computer programmer, told us, ‘‘is ‘Where [will] your kid go to school? What have you heard about this school? What have you heard about that school? And what are the options? What do you know? What about this one?’’’ Participating in social and informational networks (including parenting groups) that shared this knowledge provided advantageous social capital. Yet, some forms of social capital also failed to provide expected advantages. The principal of Global Charter described some of the strategies parents used: ‘‘I get letters from councilpersons presenting somebody, saying, ‘We know you have a lottery process, but my constituent would like to be considered—a wonderful kid.’ I [also] get personal letters [from VIPs].’’ In tossing these letters aside, this principal was adamant that the charter did not admit children in any way other than a lottery. Others echoed this view. 293 A common complaint among the parents in our study was that they had no control over a process whose outcome mattered deeply to them. They did not, as Ms. Woodley noted, ‘‘know what the future’s going to be, and it’s in someone else’s hands. You really don’t have any control over it.’’ Indeed, as Table 3 (in the online appendix) reveals, parents reported the process to be stressful. In the uncertain landscape of kindergarten admissions, their capital did not always have value, and their strategies for activating capital often failed. The realization that their class resources had limits was an unexpected and unpleasant discovery for many parents. Although it is difficult to truly measure an ‘‘outcome’’ in this process, since parents’ expectations kept shifting as the process unfolded, Table 3 reveals that in our sample of 45 parents, 20 got their children into a highly desired school, 6 had not decided yet, and 19 were in disputed- or low-status schools. Of course, when middle-class families failed to get their children into their first-choice school, this did not mean these children were headed to ‘‘bad’’ institutions; in fact, nearly all the children would attend schools that the parents considered better than the majority of schools in the district. Nonetheless, the rejections demonstrate that profits are not automatic after the investment of capital. Differences between black and white parents. Overall, white and black middle-class parents described similar experiences with the school choice process. All parents living outside the catchment areas of a few ‘‘good’’ schools found their neighborhood school undesirable. They found the process frustrating and stressful, largely because the rules of the game in the field were complex and opaque. Yet, there were some differences in how white and black middle-class parents experienced school choice. In our study, as in others, white parents defined schools with large numbers of black children as low quality (see, e.g., Billingham and Hunt 2016; Goyette 2014; Goyette, Farrie, and Freely 2012). Although a number of parents discussed their desire for ‘‘diversity,’’ white parents were overwhelmingly averse to enrolling their children in predominantly black settings (Evans 2013). A few black parents spoke of avoiding majorityblack schools, but most were less averse to such schools than were white parents. As a result, black parents viewed a wider set of school options as 294 acceptable if not ‘‘good.’’ Still, black parents hoped their children would be accepted in one of the few ‘‘good’’ schools. Generally, black parents could gain admission to such schools only by being successful in the district transfer process or charter school lotteries, which had uncertain outcomes. Thus, although black parents had a wider array of acceptable choices, this did not appear to reduce their anxiety and stress over the transfer process and the goal of enrolling in a ‘‘good’’ school. A number of the black parents were interested in private, religious education. For example, Ms. Coleman, a black parent who worked in education, had two children enrolled at Hickory Charter. Although pleased with her children’s placements, when asked what her first choice was, she replied without hesitating: To the private school that I went to, because I do want them to have a Christian education. Yes, I definitely want them to have a Christian education. In my book [it is] the biggest thing. Other black parents echoed this view. This interest contrasted with white parents, who, with few exceptions, did not consider religious schools. White parents described frequent conversations with other parents about schools and the choice process, but black parents made fewer mentions of these types of conversations. Some black parents were upset that the school district did not provide more information. A librarian, Ms. Lambert, a black parent, was told by her day care of an information session sponsored by the school district in the winter. But at that meeting, she learned that many of the key deadlines had passed: What I found out was, is that I had the option for my child to go to a different public school and that really bugged me. It bugged me because what I didn’t know is that I would have needed to apply for that the whole year before he was going to start kindergarten, which would have meant that I needed to do that in, um, September. They don’t notify parents about that, about that option, nor do they notify parents about that deadline so I was very frustrated. . . . I was a bit upset that I didn’t have the opportunity to go to even get my child Sociology of Education 89(4) somewhere else that could have been a better fit. Many (but not all) black parents mentioned solitary online searches when describing their process for learning about schools (Weininger 2014). Although the school choice process was complex and frustrating for all, we find some evidence that white parents were more connected to valuable social capital. At the same time, black parents were willing to consider a wider set of schools for their children. DISCUSSION Despite the clear and important role that the rules of the game play in children’s success, sociologists have not always sufficiently showcased the importance of the field. Nor have scholars always had a ‘‘double vision’’ and examined both the rules of the game and how class position helps children draw on their parents’ capital. But without this focus, scholars risk treating particular social and cultural resources as inherently and unchangingly valuable. Researchers fail to consider how the field and the rules of the game matter for determining what is capital and who is able to successfully activate that capital. In contrast, Bourdieu and Passeron (1990:8) argue that the definition of culture is arbitrary, ‘‘not being linked by any sort of internal relation to ‘the nature of things,’’’ its legitimacy coming only from the state of competition in the field (see also Bourdieu and Passeron 1979). In this article, we argued that social scientists must be clear-eyed about the precise nature of the rules of the game in key institutions and interrogate how parents are able to activate capital to comply with these rules. We showed that by activating their capital, parents can access desired high-status institutions for their children. At the same time, however, middle-class parents can fail to leverage their considerable capital by not complying precisely with institutional standards. And in the context of a limited number of highly desired options, there are limited opportunities and actors have limited power; as a result, middle-class parents can comply with all institutional standards and still, at times, not get the outcomes they desired. In the case of school choice, researchers make a mistake by not looking enough at the precise Lareau et al. rules schools enact for admission, the formal and informal implementation of these rules, and the degree to which schools, rather than parents, can control the school choice process. As we have shown, the rules for applying to kindergarten are not easy to learn or easy to follow, given the multitude of different procedures and deadlines. The lack of flexibility and transparency within each system exacerbates the challenges for parents. Although the information is not widely available, deadlines are rigidly enforced. If charter lottery dates are widely announced, it could potentially have a leveling effect. Moreover, a formal district policy that prevents principals from selecting transfer students would reduce the benefits of dominant cultural, social, and economic capital. Our study highlights the contingency and anxiety that may occur as middle-class parents, like other parents, are unable to ensure that things unfold for their children in the way they would like. To be sure, the schools these middle-class children attended, although not the parents’ first choice, were higher performing than many other schools in the district. For these middle-class parents, however, the knowledge that others were worse off than their own children was cold comfort. Indeed, in our sample, a number of middleclass parents were unable to place their children in a highly desired school. In the spring before kindergarten, many parents were out of options if they had not applied to a sufficient number of schools or had listed only one school, rather than five, on the public school transfer application. Some of these parents had late-breaking success, but others did not. As Frank (2016) argues, there is compelling evidence that luck can play a crucial role in success and failure. Given that the pool of applicants was significantly larger than the number of slots, it is undeniable that some parents were luckier than others. Having more capital would not have changed the outcome. Without more details on the applicant pool and the admission decisions, it is hard for us to assess the power that luck played here relative to other factors. Our point, however, is that middle-class parents with quite a bit of widely valued capital can still make mistakes in the process by not complying with the formal and informal rules of the game. Parents missed charter school deadlines, misunderstood the district transfer policy, or made small, but consequential, errors when filling out forms. 295 Future research might examine the complex interplay of cultural, social, and economic capital with the precise institutional standards across fields and the ways parents of different social classes are able to comply (see Small 2009). For example, there are signs that working-class parents, although caring deeply about the quality of their children’s education, undertake a much more truncated search for a kindergarten and rely heavily on information from family and friends (Lareau 2014; Rhodes and Deluca 2014; Weininger 2014). In addition, other research suggests that working-class families’ networks, white and black, are much more kin based and less interwoven with other (nonkin) parents (Horvat, Weininger, and Lareau 2003). Thus, the challenges that working-class parents face in complying with the rules of the game and the ways institutions can foster the formation of cultural and social capital are important topics for future work. One implication of our study, however, is that clear, easy-to-follow, rigid, and widely announced rules of the game would likely help both working-class and middle-class parents. Furthermore, we need more research on how reputations of various schools actually map on to meaningful school qualities. As we noted, many middle-class parents were averse to sending their children to predominantly black and predominantly poor schools; it seemed harder for these schools to gain traction in building a reputation as a ‘‘good school’’ (see also Cucchiara 2013; Posey-Maddox 2014). Thus, further work is needed on the construction of school identities as highly desired, with attention to school qualities independent of students’ background characteristics. In closing, we suggest that to understand the use of capital in processes whereby parents gain advantages for their children, sociologists need to be clearer about the nature of the field in which some resources are considered valuable. In addition, in focusing on the skill of players in the game, Bourdieu (1976) points to contingency in the activation of capital. The yielding of profit from cultural, social, and economic capital is far from automatic. Yet, the key role of institutions in creating standards where some practices have more value than others has generally been ignored in the empirical research on cultural and social capital. By having a ‘‘double vision’’ of the rules of the game as well as displays of capital, sociologists can develop more sophisticated studies of the transmission of advantage. In addition, 296 researchers may turn their attention to a deeper understanding of the processes of upward as well as downward mobility. Not all parents are able to realize their hopes and dreams for their children. Improving our understanding of the mechanisms in various pathways for transmitting advantages from parents to children is an important topic for future research. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The first author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Spencer Foundation as well as resources provided by the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Maryland, College Park. The second author acknowledges the assistance of the Institute of Education Sciences Predoctoral Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. An earlier version of this article was presented at the American Sociological Association annual meeting in 2011. The article benefited from the feedback of the anonymous reviewers and Rob Warren as well as Jessica Calarco, Maia Cucchiara, Shelley Kimelberg, Judith Levine, M. Katherine Mooney, Vanessa Muñoz, Elliot Weininger, and Rachelle Winkle-Wagner. The audience at CUNY Graduate Center and the Russell Sage Foundation provided helpful comments. All errors, of course, are the responsibility of the authors. RESEARCH ETHICS The research project reported here was reviewed and approved by the University of Pennsylvania Institutional Review Board for the Protection of Human Subjects. All of the parents and educators gave their written consent prior to being interviewed; parents observed in private settings also gave their consent. Numerous steps were taken to protect participants’ confidentiality including the use of code names for the participants and the schools. NOTES 1. Ms. Stevenson was paid an honorarium of $600. Given that most interactions with Ms. Becker took place on the playground, and the home observation was limited in scope, the Becker family was given an honorarium of $300. Although only one author carried out participant observations with this group of parents, all three authors consulted regularly in lengthy team meetings. In addition, the first author met with Ms. Stevenson to explain the study, answer questions, and pick up signed consent forms. Sociology of Education 89(4) 2. In these interviews, test scores were not a prominent factor in how parents settled on good schools. Some parents mentioned checking them, but it was almost always in the context of what they had learned from the grapevine (see Ball and Vincent 1998). In other contexts, parents do rely more on test scores (see Friesen et al. 2012; Weininger 2014). 3. Although Bourdieu is clear that knowledge is cultural capital, not all researchers agree. There is an ongoing debate about the proper definition of cultural capital (see, e.g., Lareau and Weininger 2003), which is beyond the scope of this article. One reviewer was concerned that this knowledge of where to apply should not be called cultural capital but ‘‘procedural knowledge,’’ but because we see this knowledge as gaining access to highly valued settings that are believed to provide educational advantages, we use the concept of cultural capital. There is considerable blurriness on the boundary between social capital and cultural capital, because parents gained information in their chats with other parents at the playground, but this intellectual debate is also beyond the scope of our article. 4. In recent years, the school district has begun to list all the charter application deadlines and the lottery dates. But this information does not include all the charter schools in the district. In addition, the information does not provide the likelihood of admission or whether the school gives priority to siblings. In some cities, parents have published books telling other parents how to apply to kindergarten (Adams 2015). 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In 2011, she issued a second edition of Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life; the 100 additional pages discuss the results of a follow-up study of the youth into adulthood. With Kimberly Goyette, she is the editor of Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools. Shani Adia Evans is scholar in residence in sociology at Reed College. She received a PhD in sociology and education from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016. Her research focuses on inequality, urban education, social class, and race. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, and the American Sociological Association Minority Fellowship Program. April Yee is a program officer at The James Irvine Foundation. She received a PhD in sociology and education from the University of Pennsylvania in 2014. Her research and grant-making efforts seek to identify processes that shape educational inequality and promote solutions for increasing educational opportunity and equity.

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