Tag Archives: social reproduction

Over and over featuring large and wealthy suburbs on Best Places to Live lists

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A new list of the “Best Places to Live” was recently released. Reading through the list, I was reminded of what kind of communities often dominate the top of these lists: large and wealthy suburbs. All the top ten communities have median household incomes of over $116,000, six are over $131,000, and the top two are over $146,000.

Photo by Tara Winstead on Pexels.com

One reason for this is the methodology of rankings. US News looks for particular communities and happens to find a number of wealthy suburbs:

U.S. News & World Report’s Best Places to Live rankings help readers make the most informed decisions when choosing where to settle down. Cities in the rankings are evaluated using data from Applied Geographic Solutions (AGS) and U.S. News’ own internal resources. AGS develops its core database and specialized indexes from both private and government sources, including the U.S. Census Bureau, Department of Commerce, the Federal Reserve and the Bureau for Economic Analysis, as well as state and local sources.

This data was categorized into the five indexes listed below and evaluated using a methodology determined by Americans’ preferences. The percent weighting for each index follows the answers from a February 2025 public survey in which people from across the country voted for what they believed was the most important factor to consider when choosing where to live.

Another might be that these are the kinds of communities Americans say they want. The ratings methodology above suggests this but generally Americans like, no, love, suburbs. And wealthy suburbs tend to have traits Americans like in suburbs: big houses, nice amenities, a quiet lifestyle. How many suburbanites want to be successful and then live around other successful people?

But if we keep naming the same kind of places as the best places to live, does this reinforce a particular story about places to the exclusion of other places? Many people will not have the opportunity to live in these communities, whether because of a lack of resources or ties and connections to other places within metropolitan regions. Could it be better to focus on helping more communities be places where people can thrive? Can many suburbs within a region be successful, even if they never make it to the top of lists with particular criteria?

“Creativity of the young” and the digital divide in working student play with technology into learning

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I recently saw a Letter to the Editor in the Chicago Tribune that highlighted the savvy use of technology by a seven year old:

Kids can access their parents multiple ways today and vice versa. This letter suggests the observer was “captivated” by this technology use, hinting at the resourcefulness of the boy.

This response is interesting to compare to the findings of a sociology book I recently browsed. In Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era, Matthew Rafalow found that schools differed less on their access to or use of technology in learning but in how they treated the student’s creative use of that technology. From the conclusion:

The students that I profiled in the previous chapter suggest that kids’ potential as budding technologists gets bifurcated as they pass through middle school. Despite the fact that digital play with peers led to the development of digital skills with online communication, media editing and production, and even the basics of programming logic, these eighth-graders reported different conceptions of whether online play was acceptable or even welcome in schools. While students at a school for mostly White and wealthy youth came to see digital play, including social media and video games, as fun and even necessary for achievement, students at schools serving less privileged and mostly students of color were taught that play at school was either irrelevant or threatening to schooling. Schools differently disciplined digital play, and in doing so, they different shaped how young people came to evaluate their own digital self-worth in these settings. (135)

Restating the argument a few pages later:

My takeaway from this project is that cultural resources are not like a currency you can hand to anyone in exchange for rewards. The students in this study varied by race-ethnticity and social class, and each developed a set of digital skills in online communication, collaboration, and digital production from play with friends online. Despite each student’s access to this knowledge, only students at the school serving wealthy and predominantly White children were given the right to treat their digital knowledge as currency to be exchanged for achievement. The school organizational context determines not only what ideal cultural resources are but also who the buyer can be to facilitate the exchange. Working- and middle-class Latinx and Asian American youth at Chávez and Sheldon had the same resources but were not permitted to exchange them for a reward. (154)

As Rafalow notes, this is what class reproduction – intersecting with race and ethnicity – looks like in today’s world. Just as Bourdieu suggested with art and music, digital technology is widely available but who it is for and how it is supposed to be used differs by group. Is digital creativity lauded and celebrated for a kid who people think might be headed for success and a creative class career or is it discouraged or punished because it is distracting from acquiring necessary skills?

Sociologist on the growing achievement gaps between upper, middle, and lower-class children

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A sociologist explains the “substantial” growing achievement gaps in recent decades among students of different classes:

One way to see this is to look at the scores of rich and poor students on standardized math and reading tests over the last 50 years. When I did this using information from a dozen large national studies conducted between 1960 and 2010, I found that the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago…

The same pattern is evident in other, more tangible, measures of educational success, like college completion. In a study similar to mine, Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski, economists at the University of Michigan, found that the proportion of students from upper-income families who earn a bachelor’s degree has increased by 18 percentage points over a 20-year period, while the completion rate of poor students has grown by only 4 points.

And why is this happening?

It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school…

High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources — their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school — on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich.

In other words, it appears social reproduction is occurring through the schooling system. Sounds like the ideas of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who argued social class differences are reinforced by education systems, as well as sociologist Annette Lareau who suggests different classes have different parenting approaches. In the end, those who already have resources can put them to use in getting the best out of the system while those with fewer resources can’t keep pace.