Social Capital, Cultural Values, Immigration, and Academic Achievement: The Host Country Context and Contradictory Consequences

ocial-capital explanations of school outcomes, particularly of the school outcomes of immigrant children and children of immigrants, have come into wide use in recent years. These explanations attempt to account for individual or group variations in school performance by viewing the family and community relations that surround children as forms of investments that yield payoffs in schools. These family and community relations are seen as specific to immigrant groups, or ethnicity as social (Bankston, Caldas, and Zhou 1997). I believe that although this ethnicity-as-social-capital approach can be a valuable one, it runs the risk of overlooking the complex and contradictory nature of the association between immigrant social relations and the adaptation of immigrant children and children of immigrants. Normative relations among immigrants and their children are not inherent ethnic properties brought from homelands, but the results of responses to the challenges and deprivations of the host country. In addition, social ties that may pay off in one way (say, school success) may constitute liabilities in other ways. For example, the same ties among children, parents, and communities that support strong school performance may also result in estrangement from peers and social discrimination for youths from immigrant communities. The use of capital as an explanation of the school achievement of immigrant children and children of immigrants can be seen as a version of an approach to schooling. The term input refers to the influences on academic outcomes that students bring with them to school, while the term process refers to the influences of schools as institutions on