Who is school good for?
Students whose experiences are reflected in the classroom do better than those whose experiences are invisibilized or diminished.
It’s a wonderful feeling when you learn something that enables you to put words to your experiences.
I spent my entire life taking this feeling for granted. I took for granted the fact that I saw the classroom as a space of genuine inquiry and expression, where I was eager to please my teachers and bring home good grade reports to my parents. It wasn’t until I became a teacher in a Title I school in North Carolina that I realized just how much my upbringing had shaped that perception of school. For me, the classroom reflected or affirmed my own experiences. But this isn’t the case for every student.
In order for me to feel so connected to what I learn in the classroom, I have to come to school already equipped with the language, mannerisms, behaviors, and knowledge-base that enables me to engage with my teacher and my peers. For students who weren’t raised with what sociologists call “concerted cultivation,” whose parents focused on meeting their basic needs rather than managing their cognitive development, and who grew up caring for siblings while their parents worked night shifts, the relationship with school can be very different.
This summer I began my Master’s of Education and dove into the sociology of education and the history of education innovation. I learned about theories that gave me clarity around the jarring contradictions I held as a teacher. On the one hand, I was striving every day to ensure I was setting high expectations for my students, delivering culturally relevant pedagogy that drew on their experiences, and empowering them to be agents of their learning. On the other hand, I was teaching them within the confines of an existing power structure that labeled certain behaviors or learning styles as legitimate, and other forms as barriers to achievement.
So what is considered “legitimate” versus “a barrier”?
Some students identify as visual or oratory learners. These needs are legitimized when teachers differentiate instruction by including videos and readings to accommodate a variety of learning styles. But the needs of the student who has trouble sitting still will not be legitimized in the same way. In fact, that student might be labeled as disruptive and disobedient because they want to stand up and move around the classroom.
Or, take my experience for example. When I first attended an American school after growing up in England, my cultural background was seen as an asset — it was charming that I pronounced things differently and even endearing that my knowledge of American history was so limited. But what about a student who has just immigrated from Honduras? Their cultural background and needs may not be seen as assets to be celebrated but as barriers to overcome. They will be expected to assimilate by learning English and distancing themselves from their native language and, ultimately, their culture.
In this paradigm, some students’ cultural knowledge or learning styles are validated, while others are forced to adapt lest they fall behind. Author and professor Gerald Campano chalks this up in part to the traditional curriculum as one that positions some students as “objects for remediation” or “clients,” instead of arbiters of their own knowledge and experiences.
Schools do not create social inequality, but they do perpetuate it by creating “a process that reproduces within the schools the social-class inequalities of the society.” Thus, the macro-level class and power relations are exacerbated by the micro-level processes within the school.
How does this happen?
British sociologist Basil Bernstein classified this process as “code theory”:
“The code theory asserts that there is a social class-regulated…privileging of communication, . . . and that social class, indirectly, effects the classification and framing of the elaborated code transmitted by the school so as to facilitate and perpetuate its unequal acquisition. Thus the code theory… draws attention to the relations between macro power relations and micro practices of transmission.”
Let’s break this down.
Assume that you are a middle-class student living in a suburb whose parents are college-educated. Let’s say you play on a soccer team and you take piano lessons once or twice a week. On your soccer team you learn how to collaborate with and compete against others, you gain leadership skills, and you learn how to take directions from your coach. In your piano lessons, you learn how to work diligently on a task in concert with an adult, you are held accountable for learning melodies or memorizing scales, and you become familiar with classical music and its history.
Now assume you are from a working-class family who lives in an overcrowded housing project in the inner city. You are being raised by a single mother who left school at 16 and whose family has lived in this housing project for generations. You live in an apartment with your siblings and cousins, and you are left to fend for yourself in the evenings and on weekends while your mother is at work. You have learned how to cook for yourself and change your siblings diaper, and you have learned how to stand up to adults who threaten your sense of safety.
These parallel lives are both rich with cultural knowledge and experience, yet only if you are the first student will your set of skills will be affirmed in a school setting. If you are the second student, it doesn’t matter that within your household you exhibit independence, agency and leadership, because in the classroom there is no space for you to showcase these skills. Your communication style might be labeled as oppositional, and your mother might be considered neglectful. Eventually, you begin to withdraw because school is purposeless in the context of your own life.
As you withdraw, you might then be labeled a disengaged learner. Your teacher tells you that school is “not for you” and that you should pursue the vocational track offered at your high school. Your classes are now filled with students like yourself who believe that school has nothing to offer them. A large portion of them drop out and you contemplate whether finishing high school is worth it. You may as well gain the skills needed for the blue-collar work you now feel destined for on the job with some pay, as opposed to in school with no pay.
Meanwhile, as the first student, you are taking multiple AP classes that will be credited towards your college degree. Your college counselor is helping you edit your application essays, and you decide to join the debate team in addition to the orchestra to help you further stand out in college admissions. Your future career is not yet defined, but the prospects are optimistic and inspiring to you.
In the span of only a few years, these two students’ lives were shaped to reflect the class structures into which they were born. Author, sociologist, theologian, and parish priest Jay MacLeod studied mechanisms of social reproduction by comparing the trajectories of two groups of friends living in a housing project in Massachusetts. He found that barriers to upward mobility that kept working-class children in working-class jobs were both structural and cultural. Young men of color might face structural barriers such as racism, while they also face cultural barriers at school, where the “rules of the game” favored their middle to upper-class peers.
It is at school that the structural and cultural barriers can conflate and exacerbate each other. For example, it is not that as the second student you lack individual rigor and motivation. But when you are faced with the structural barriers that cause you to show up to school hungry as well as the cultural barriers that makes it difficult to get along with your teachers, it is no wonder that your interest in education begins to wane.
The socioeconomic stratification of schooling doesn’t just impact students, but their parents as well. While middle-class parents can afford to show up to every parent-teacher conference and pay for private tutoring and extracurriculars that provide strong foundational knowledge for their children, working-class and low-income parents often cannot prioritize these things over providing basic needs for their families. This contrast translates to a higher degree of authority and entitlement among middle-class parents, while lower-class parents are made to feel powerless and deficient within the school context.
So how do we create schools that give everyone, regardless of their background, the chance to participate in their school community in ways that are self-determining and empowering?
We need to position all students as holders of valuable knowledge. If we don’t, we will lose them.
Small-scale initiatives like Gerald Campano’s classroom are good starting points. But Campano’s approach to teaching with no “comprehensive pedagogical doctrine” and instead, a methodology that “foregrounds the experiential and cultural resources of teachers and students” is difficult — if not impossible — to scale up. Individual teachers can create these “second classrooms,” but if beyond the four walls of their classroom their students’ experiences are minimized, we aren’t getting very far.
Through my MBA/M.Ed program, my next steps are to continue to gather information, language, and perspectives that get me closer to answering these questions. Is this a systemic issue that can be solved through community-based initiatives? Or is it a community-based issue that can be solved systemically? Or is it neither?
These are questions I have contemplated, brainstormed, complained about, and become frustrated with for the last 5 years, but I hope that this newsletter can continue to be a place for me to get these transforming ideas on “paper” and document the evolution of my thinking as I learn new things and find new perspectives.
Until next time…
Sneak peek:
Systemic change might not be realistic.
Changing the institution of public education is a tall order. The challenge with systemic change is that schools are designed to reflect our contemporary society. They are susceptible to shifting political climates, global competition, and economic volatility. For education reforms to succeed on a systemic level, they must withstand those pressures of a rapidly changing political landscape.