The references pretty much appear at Sam Bowles web site:
http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~bowles/
and there is the classic 1976 book with Herb Gintis 'schooling in capitalist
america' from which can be found:
"The fact that changes in the structure of production have preceded parallel
changes in schooling establishes a strong prima facie case for the causal
importance of economic structure as a major determinant of educational
structure" (p224)
The gist of their later work is somewhat captured in the following from the
inheritance of inequality paper. It's not to say that these two folks have
it all scoped out, but that their work points to economic issues that are
elemental to understanding learning in institutionalized contexts.
"Because schooling attainment is persistent across generations and has clear
links to skills and perhaps other traits that are rewarded in labor markets,
an account of the transmission of intergenerational status based on human
capital has strong prima facie plausibility. The data already introduced
allow a calculation of the portion of the intergenerational income
correlation accounted for by the fact that offspring of high- income parents
get more schooling (measured in years).
[...]
It used to be commonly assumed that once adequate measures of schooling
quality were developed, the only effects of parental economic status on
offspring earnings would operate through effects on cognitive functioning and
schooling, with the direct effect of parental status on offspring earnings
vanishing. But even as the measurement of school quality has improved over
the years, the estimated direct effect of parental incomes (or earnings) on
offspring earnings has turned out to be remarkably robust.
[...]
A policy maker who is concerned about intergenerational transmission of
economic status will face two difficult sets of issues. First, many of the
policies that might affect the intergenerational transmission of economic
status are controversial. For example, the current political climate seems
inhospitable to increasing the estate tax to limit intergenerational
financial transfers. Eliminating racial discrimination would reduce one
component of the heritability of income, but achieving this goal is
difficult. Improving educational achievement, especially for those whose
parents have relatively low levels of schooling, would reduce
intergenerational transmission both directly, because of the impact of
schooling, and perhaps also indirectly by providing a more open network of
group memberships and mating choices that are less homogeneous by income
class. But improving educational achievement is another goal that is easier
stated than accomplished."
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