I took a class last term called "School & Society." Wanna guess what it was about? Anyway, we talked about cultural capital and the role that it plays in education.
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Reinforcing what they are learning in school by going to museums, art galleries, enrolling their child extra curricular activities.
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This is cultural capital. As MattUMASSD noted, it's often quite expensive.
In my Social Psychology class, we discussed what happens when a person is not good at something. I'll use the rather inocuous example of sports. My parents are not very good at sports. They're more of an academic/musical type. I wasn't necessarily encouraged to play soccer or softball, but I was given piano lessons from an early age. It didn't matter if I got poor grades in gym class because that was all sports. The important thing was that I did well in academics. Consequently, I never improved at sports, so I just hated gym class more and found it more worthless as I got older. Eventually, the phrase "I'm not an athlete" became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Today, I do not care that I'm not talented in those areas, because they don't matter to me or my family.
So the principle holds that if someone is not talented at something, he will devalue it and disassociate from it, focusing his energies elsewhere and never improving in the devalued area.
So think about the effect that this has on low-income/minority students, for example, a child growing up in the South Side of Chicago, West Harlem, Long Beach, or any of the other "ghetto" areas. His parents and his peers' parents may or may not even have high school diplomas and definitely do not have the cultural capital to reinforce what he and his friends are learning at school. For these reasons and from a young age, he does not do as well in school as your average suburban, middle-class, white child. The same goes for his friends. Therefore, they will devalue education and disassociate from school. They won't work as hard because it doesn't matter to them, so they won't improve academically as much as the suburban, middle-class, white child, whose parents and peer group value education. And that's how we lose entire inner cities to poverty, drugs, and violence.
Even if the low-income/minority child above does come from a family that values education, the family is still low-income and does not possess the cultural capital to give the child the same advantages that a suburban, middle-class, white child would have. That's why programs like Head Start have come into play.
A big topic in education is "early intervention," meaning things like Head Start and scholarships for summer camp and grants for inner-city elementary schools. The idea is that if we can start with young children and head them off at the pass, then we can eliminate the need for Affirmative Action at higher levels.
I guess my take on the subject of Affirmative Action is that it's useful, but must be applied carefully. The more important thing is to start from the beginning, with things like Head Start, and even the playing field so that all students approach things like college applications from an equal level.