Bringing the Local Back In: How Schools Work Differently in Different Neighborhood Contexts

Abstract

Local settings have not been central to the debate on educational inequality. If researchers have taken neighborhoods into account, they have focused on (social) compositions, peer group effects, or school access. Yet I draw on interviews and observations at two Berlin schools to suggest that neighborhoods are also important as they shape the organizational practices of teachers and other educational professionals. Combining a Bourdieusian perspective and new institutional theory, I show how local settings become important as social, symbolic, and administrative units. As such, neighborhoods structure the interplay of institutional pressures and objective power relations both within and between schools. This perspective not only allows for a better understanding of the processes producing educational inequality; it also highlights that institutional changes might play out differently in different contexts, with consequences for neighborhood inequality in the field of education and beyond.