Stratification, families and the ecosystem of educational opportunities: How social class shapes parental involvement in the Dominican Republic

This is a study of social class, education and families in the Dominican Republic (DR). I investigate the family as a social ecology and as children’s primary socializing agents, and how class mediates in their educational lives. Specifically, I examine parental involvement practices in an educational context, operationalized as strategies, investments, and narratives about their roles in their children’s socioeducational trajectories. I draw from a varied empirical body of literature that addresses how families, child-rearing practices, schooling and class intersect. Furthermore, theoretically framed primarily upon Pierre Bourdieu’s analyses of cultural capital and habitus, this study looks at some of class dynamics that shape disparate family practices in the DR’s educational space by 1) exploring the everyday routines of children of upper/middle-class and working-class families; 2) interrogating parents’ subjectivities about their educational roles; 3) placing stratification and social disparities as the overarching ecosystem in which parents and children navigate schooling in the DR.

Through a qualitative approach, I conducted 28 parent interviews, of families of different socioeconomic status in the city of Santo Domingo. Through these interactions with participants, I examine how Dominican parents of different social strata perform school-related parenting and the ways class can shape family dispositions towards schooling. From the findings, I distinguish two ways of performing parental involvement in the context of DR’s education: one I call strategic involvement, where upper/middle-class parents make significant efforts to provide their children with the best educational experience they can afford; the other, I call free-range involvement, where working-class parents rely primarily on the resource-deprived public school system with no apparent strategic planning of their children’s educational paths. Moreover, I find that families of disparate strata construe their educational roles differently, and the discourses parents use to discuss such roles show distinctly classed modes of understanding the broader educational landscape. I conclude underscoring the need for policy and research to pay closer attention to the issue of class in educational inequality in the DR.