Scholarship on the links between families and schools encompasses contradictory notions about social capital and its relation to inequality. One view holds that schools can narrow inequality by generating dense relationships among families, while others suggest that advantaged parents can use these networks to hoard opportunities. This multiple case study analyzes qualitative data from diverse North Carolina elementary schools to learn how parents build and deploy social capital. We distinguish between bonding social capital, built in dense, homogeneous networks, and bridging social capital, gained through relationships across a social distance. Our analyses suggest that bonding alone is associated with opportunity hoarding; however, when schools are committed to building both bridging and bonding social capital, they can produce more equitable and inclusive schools
