Advantaged Families’ Opportunity Hoarding in U.S. K–12 Education: A Systematic Review of the Literature

Abstract

A growing body of educational research uses opportunity hoarding as a construct to understand advantaged families’ engagement in K–12 U.S. schooling. Our systematic review of the literature reveals that advantaged parents hoard educational resources and opportunities in three key areas: (1) the creation and maintenance of white space; (2) school choice/selection; and (3) organizational routines. While much can be learned from the extant research, we detail conceptual, empirical, and methodological gaps in the literature as well as outline a future research agenda that can inform equity-oriented educational policy, practice, and scholarship. We argue that the concept of opportunity hoarding serves as a useful analytic tool for understanding how actors advantaged by race and/or class create and maintain educational inequities and can guide efforts to ameliorate it; therefore, it is important to understand how educational researchers might extend its use.