WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Recently a criminal investigation into fraud in the testing regimes for college entry revealed that wealthy people buy advantages; many of us surely simply shrugged. What’s new? Folks with money look to buy the path they and their children tread. We seem to accept this even if we are, on occasion, outraged.
And it can’t surprise you if I say that the middle class has advantages that the working class does not enjoy – that’s the whole “story” of class hierarchies in the first place. But perhaps it is surprising that these advantages are mobilized in our public schools on a daily basis.
Our Public Education system is the institution that has been sold to us as the great levelizer of social and economic opportunity. Well, here’s another study that demonstrates how much that really isn’t true. Call it another myth of democracy in America. Instead, class rules in the classroom.
In her book Calarco argues that the middle class has a negotiated advantage in school. Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Calarco traces that negotiated advantage from its origins at home to its consequences at school.
Beginning in the home, working-class students learn to follow rules, to respect authority, and work through problems independently…and in this way they learn that they earn their failure.
But middle-class students learn to challenge rules and request assistance, accommodations, and attention in excess of what is fair or required. The institution is there to serve them.
And their teachers, also on the whole from the middle-class, typically grant those requests, creating advantages for middle-class students.
While the middle class mobilizes strategies of influence the working class bows low to offer strategies of deference. Here is another way our schools are separate and unequal. What is to be done?
And listen up purveyors of the Grit Grift, the poor and working classes are already gritting it out. It’s the middle-class that’s always leaning on the system for help.
GUEST
Jessica McCrory Calarco is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indiana University and author of Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School, published by Oxford University Press.
RELATED
Review of Negotiating Opportunities (Harvard Education Review)
Interchange episodes
No Excuses Schools
Subverting Democracy Through Education Reform
MUSIC
“Educated Fool” Hoobastank
“Expectations” Belle & Sebastian
“Measuring Cups” Andrew Bird
“Don’t Call Us” 10,000 Maniacs
“Raise Your Hand” Bruce Springsteen
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Board Engineer: Wes Martin
Executive Producer: Wes Martin
