IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp14910.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Bringing Underprivileged Middle-School Students to the Opera: Cultural Mobility or Cultural Compliance?

Author

Listed:
  • Coulangeon, Philippe

    (CNRS)

  • Fougère, Denis

    (Sciences Po, Paris)

Abstract

This article assesses the impact of a two-year long project-based learning program conducted by the National Opera of Paris in a large number of junior high-schools located in underprivileged areas, aiming at preventing school dropout and tackling educational inequalities by providing disadvantaged students with the opportunity to discover the world of opera. Taking a counterfactual approach (propensity score matching), we measure the impact of participation in the program on final exam and continuous assessment grades. The analysis displays mixed results: a significant and positive impact for the students who participate in the program for its whole duration (two years), at least for continuous assessment scores, but a negative impact for those who leave the program after only one year. The contrast between the effects of full and partial participation in the program suggests that these may be primarily due to a selection effect in favor of the most culturally and socially compliant students, in line with Bourdieu's and Passeron's reproduction theory (1997 [1970]) rather than a mobility effect (DiMaggio, 1982) resulting from the transfer of cultural capital to disadvantaged students.

Suggested Citation

  • Coulangeon, Philippe & Fougère, Denis, 2021. "Bringing Underprivileged Middle-School Students to the Opera: Cultural Mobility or Cultural Compliance?," IZA Discussion Papers 14910, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    • Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14910
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://docs.iza.org/dp14910.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    statistical matching; middle school; project-based learning; mixed method; cultural capital;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
    • I29 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Other
    • Z11 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Economics of the Arts and Literature
    • Z18 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Public Policy
    • C21 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Cross-Sectional Models; Spatial Models; Treatment Effect Models

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14910. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Holger Hinte (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/izaaade.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.