According to Lareau (2003), middle-class pupils are advantaged in educational settings because the parenting style in their home (“concerted cultivation”) aligns better with institutional practices than the parenting style used in underprivileged families (“the accomplishment of natural growth”). In addition, middle-class parents’ social, cultural, and economic capital may enable their children to access schools of higher quality (Ball & Vincent, 1998; Holme, 2002; Noreisch, 2007). However, in recent years, authors have noted that referring to “middle-class parents” as a homogenous group may obscure the diversity of parental strategies that lead to social reproduction in varied sociocultural settings (Hernández, 2019). The Central European context in particular has been rather neglected by researchers examining primary school choice, raising questions about whether the theoretical frameworks proposed by widely-known Western sociologists are applicable (for instance, Ball, 2003; Lareau, 2003; van Zanten, 2005).

Czechia presents a unique case for exploring middle-class parents’ strategies of avoiding downward mobility. Czech middle-class parents express a variety of educational preferences and ambitions; some emphasize holistic development while others focus on achievement in high-stakes tests (Smith Slámová, 2021). In addition, the educational system has recently experienced a surge of educational alternatives to the mainstream elementary school, including specialized tracks functioning within public schools, private schools, and unregistered schools for home-schooled pupils (Straková, 2021). In such a diversified educational context, social reproduction might take place through hitherto unexplored mechanisms.

In this paper, I focus on Czech middle-class parents who seek specialized alternative/innovative tracks (e.g., Montessori, Waldorf) functioning within the public school system. Pupils attending these tracks are separated from their peers in regular classes for the duration of all lessons, similarly to pupils attending “classes with a special emphasis” or “profile” classes in other European countries (Altrichter et al., 2014; Berisha & Seppänen, 2017; Kosunen, 2014; Lilliedahl, 2021). Since these specialized tracks often pose entry barriers to families with lower socioeconomic status, including hidden fees and entrance interviews screening for the parents’ cultural capital, their presence in the system may result in social segregation and subsequent inequities (Smith Slámová, 2021). Understanding middle-class parents’ reasoning surrounding school choice is thus crucial to helping make public schools more equitable.

The aim of this paper is to explore why Czech middle-class parents select specialized tracks with an alternative/innovative focus as their child enters elementary school. The research was supported by the Charles University Grant Agency (project no. 58420 titled The choice of selective classes in public primary schools).

The overarching research project used the design of the constructivist grounded theory, suitable for studying complex social processes insufficiently explored by the existing literature (Charmaz, 2006). The data collection involved 27 interviews, conducted during 2018-2021, with parents, teachers, and public representatives in nine towns of varying sizes across Czechia. In this paper, I draw primarily on 14 interviews with parents who expressed no exclusive preference for one innovative approach but rather a general inclination towards child-centered educational approaches. First, parents in a selected school district were approached through class teachers, information meetings, and snowball sampling (Heckathorn, 1997). The district was selected for its large variety of specialized classes. Next, theoretical sampling was used to selectively approach additional participants from different regions across the country in order to explore the relationships between the emerging concepts. The data collection ended once theoretical saturation pertaining to the main categories and their relationships was reached.

The results showed that the parents perceived a lack of congruence of their parenting style with the mainstream public schools’ presumed practices. Although their parenting practices partially overlapped with “concerted cultivation”, a parenting style supposedly leading to institutional advantage (Lareau, 2003), the participants expected their child to be disadvantaged by the mainstream schools as a result of the perceived lack of congruence. The limits of applying the concepts of “concerted cultivation” and “the accomplishment of natural growth” in sociocultural settings outside of the U.S. are discussed, as are the tensions faced by public schools in striving to keep middle-class pupils within socially mixed classes.

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