I'm a big fan of studying social class across the spectrum, from privilege to poverty. There are too few scholars studying "up" to see the actions and values of upper-middle class people when studying inequality.
There are exceptions: A good example of the scholarly work of studying "up" is the recent article Advantaged Families’ Opportunity Hoarding in U.S. K–12 Education: A Systematic Review of the Literature published in Review of Educational Research.
The team compiling this 2025 literature review write:
The concept of opportunity hoarding has been used by a growing number of education researchers and sociologists of education in recent years to describe the process through which relatively advantaged families (largely described in the literature as white and/or middle- or upper-middle class) secure and/or maintain scarce educational resources that favor their children at the expense of low income and/or racially minoritized young people and their families.
First, we need to attend to the starting point of this entire argument: scarce resources. Families may hoard more than their share of available public resources, and they may ensure that others won't benefit from the provision of more resources. Either way, privileged families look at the zero-sum landscape of school funding and siphon as many resources as possible from schools for other people's children and into the schools of own children.
In short, the authors argue, we can best understand the educational resources available to poor and working-class students by also studying how networks of privileged parents lay claim to those very resources.
The literature review is comprehensive: the authors review 33 empirical journal articles and 8 books, asking both what we currently understand about how these social processes work and where more needs to be known.
They identify three (sometimes overlapping) ways in which privileged parents opportunity hoard. Each section is dense, so among the highlights are these core strategies:
The creation of white space
Decades after the courts mandated an end to enforced segregation, networks of families work to protect white spaces within which to educate their own children.
Parents may fiercely defend "historic" (pre-integration) school attendance boundaries when districts try to integrate schools by assigning children from adjacent neighborhoods to previously all-white schools. Parents threaten to leave for private schools or organize against school board members who support redrawn attendance boundaries. Suburban schools that served white flight families may consolidate to build political power against efforts to consolidate suburban and urban districts into country districts. White parents may stop voting for school tax levies when they're thinking about about moving as neighborhoods become more integrated, torching the quality of the neighborhood schools behind them as they move on.
In multiple states, parents in affluent districts with impermeable racial boundaries have organized to ensure that their property taxes benefit only their children though other parents or policy makers organize for a more equitable distribution of taxes across districts.
This all then becomes self-sustaining: Well-funded schools attended primarily by upper-middle class white students are designated "excellent" in published school rankings, bestowing academic status on their children and their parents. Property values go up in those neighborhoods with "good" schools, shutting less affluent parents out of home ownership near those schools. Parents then use the cudgel of formal designations of "excellence" to fend off any changes to attendance boundaries or programming that might benefit other families.
In all these ways, parents with political power in their communities have worked to sustain segregated public schools in the name of "wanting what's best" for their own children.
School Choice and School Selection
Districts have sometimes tried to encourage voluntary desegregation of neighborhood schools by dangling carrots in front of privileged parents: Administrators will create sought-after programs (like a science focus, or dual language instruction, or performing arts) in schools serving more diverse families and then designate these schools as open enrollment to encourage voluntary desegregation. White affluent parents may then organize to get their children placed in those now-academically prestigious schools. When demand for these schools exceeds space, decision-makers may be biased toward ambitious families. Privileged parents' threats to appeal administrators' decisions against their children may also simply wear down administrators.
There is one twist to the tactic of hoarding slots in the "best" schools for privileged children: In states in which flagship universities now guarantee admission to the top percentage of graduates in state high schools (another effort at college desegregation without explicitly considering race in admissions decisions), researchers have found that some white families move to districts with lower achievement rates so that their children will be positioned to hoard these guaranteed college admissions spaces that would otherwise have gone to long-time residents. Those parents settle for fewer school resources for their children for part of high school in exchange for hoarding stress-free college admissions that they'd have had to compete for in their affluent home districts.
Organizational Routines
When schools do serve diverse populations, affluent parents work to ensure (through advocacy, appeals, and threats to leave) that their students get access to programs for gifted students, to Advanced Placement courses, or to particular teachers. Parents may advocate for their own children but also work to ensure that the structures that distinguish their children from others are maintained. It is not enough that their children are in the AP classes in a given school. It is also important that the school not dilute that status by offering more AP classes to more students.
Finally, in this section, the authors review studies of parent fundraising that allow families to deepen inequalities between their school and others by privately paying for arts or science or technology programs for their schools that are not available via public funding in other schools.
What's Not Being Studied
The authors thus recommend many additional areas of study – from learning how affluent parents across and within districts learn hoarding strategies from one another, to delving into intersectional forms of hoarding for class, gender, and racial privilege. They also note a few schools in which parents organized against others to preserve racial diversity and families who opt-in to integrated neighborhood schools rather than hoarding placement in specialized district schools. These exceptions, the authors argue, merit more study.
But in the end, the authors argue for much more study of parents' resource hoarding as part of what sustains educational inequalities:
This is a salient time to study the mechanisms that produce and maintain durable inequality in education given major cuts to public education in many U.S. school districts, neoliberal educational reforms and ideologies that contribute to increased competitiveness for “good” schools, increased competitiveness and high costs in postsecondary education, economic precarity facing many families in the United States, and a “parents’ rights” movement that centers whiteness and resists critical examinations of race and racism in U.S. schools and curriculum.
It will never be enough to study the resilience or values of poor and working-class families to explain how some children from these families make it to and through college. We'll only understand these students by locating their education within social class hierarchies in which powerful parents insist that poor and working-class students simply don't deserve good schools. It's not enough to study "imposter syndrome" as first-generation students question whether they're worthy of college. It's also essential to understand what first-gen students have witnessed as children and as college students as others used their political power to sustain systems that convey to them that they are, in fact, unworthy of the resources that more privileged children have.
