Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America

Boudon is a sociologist, professor of social sciences at the University of Paris, who wrote this volume while a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford. Many of the data Boudon reviews were collected while he was a consultant with the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). A necessary limitation of those data is that they are not uniform in quality and were not collected by Boudon on the basis of a design he articulated. But there can be no doubt that Boudon is at home with methodology appropriate for display and interpretation of data focused on a response to the rhetorical question, "Why has the tremendous surge in the development of education, common to most Western countries since World War II, had so little impact in furthering the cause of social equality and economic opportunity? " In suggesting that the extension of educational opportunity in the lower classes has won little economic or social advantage for the youth of those groups, Boudon's monograph complements Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America by Christopher Jencks et al. (New York: Basic Books, 1972). The Jencks study argues that the number of years of schooling, and even the quality of academic achievement, have little effect on later income. Boudon undertakes to explain the apparent lack of relation between reducing the inequality of educational opportunity (IEO) and inequality of social (or socio-occupational) opportunity (ISO). The analysis is skillful and persuasive. It could have been proposed a bit more modestly and without a modish claim to being an example of systems analysis. At one moment structuralism is the approach, then the analysis of systems has center stage. Actually an understanding of formal education as a system calls for the interaction of all behavioral studies, including a social-psychological probing of attitudes. It was the French study of the latter, which as Jean Floud reminds us, gave rise to the illuminating phrase, lafamille educogene—that is, the family that highly prizes education—wishes a maximum amount of education for its children and cooperates with schools in spurring students to high levels of achievement. (Jean Floud, together with A. H. Halsey pioneered the study of social-class influences on education, using British populations for studies initiated just after World War II.) This type of family has exerted social and intellectual pressures reinforcing those of the schools. Surely humanistic reflection on the reformist visions, to which Boudon gives hardly more than a nod, is not out of order. One recalls that it was Boudon's predecessors who, shortly after World War I, joined in Les Compagnons de Vuniversite Nouvelle. These proponents of a new education may have seemed romantic optimists, but their desire was not primarily for social and economic advantage. Rather it was the humanistic goal of achieving less snobbishness and monopolization of privilege. Given these caveats, Boudon's reader will be sobered by his demonstration that there is a low correlation between education (grade completed) and mobility (p. 6). If one wishes to increase mobility, the conclusion of Boudon and Jencks (together with many styled "revisionists" among contemporary historians of American education), is that the character of the economicsocial order must be reconstructed to greatly reduce the distance between high and low income and hence between upper and lower class. It is not enough to revise the structure of education by advancing the cause of comprehensive education, mixing youth without regard for social class, or increasing the years of compulsory and fee-free education. It is not enough, Boudon argues, to increase the number of lowerand lower-middle-class families who qualify as les families Sducogenes. The manner in which Boudon uses a number of analyses to buttress his contention disarms his opposition. But we are left without direction. Perhaps that is too much to ask of the behavioral sciences, the moreso if they are not in tandem with conventional literary-moral humanism. Nonetheless, for those who wish to understand what Boudon refers to as the data of school bookkeeping, his methodological explorations truly will advance comparative studies in education. Those of us concerned with those studies are very much in Boudon's debt.