Reproducing National Distinction: How Cultural Capital Shapes Estonia's Russian School Field

ABSTRACT Research on nationalism has long emphasized the homogenizing role of education in producing shared language, history and identity, while studies in the sociology of education have examined how cultural capital and social class structure school hierarchies. Yet these literatures rarely intersect: The former seldom investigates differentiation within education systems, and the latter rarely considers how school legitimacy itself is grounded in nationally specific cultural norms. This article brings them together by theorizing national cultural capital—the capacity of institutions to embody the dominant national culture—as a structuring force in educational fields. Using the historically bifurcated Estonian system, where Russian and Estonian schools evolved in parallel, it examines 2015–2022 school‐level exam data, original coding of Estonian‐oriented practices and neighbourhood socio‐economic indicators. Structural equation models reveal that Estonian cultural capital is positively associated with academic performance but most strongly in low‐status neighbourhoods. These findings show how nationalizing states embed cultural legitimacy into institutional competition, producing hierarchies that fuse class and nationally specific cultural capital.