Class in Everyday Life
January 29, 2007
In The Moral Significance of Class, Andrew Sayer writes:
Condescension, deference, shame, guilt, envy, resentment, arrogance, contempt, fear and mistrust, or simply mutual incomprehension and avoidance, typify relations between people of different classes. Some people may be, or want to be, respectful, considerate, and warm to individuals from other classes, but the inequalities themselves are likely to frustrate their attempts by tainting them with suspicions of condescension, disrespect, or unwanted familiarity.
Clearly, more stands in the way of poor and working class kids than their test scores. When peer relationships form along class lines, and when teachers act as representatives of the middle class, can teachers name the implicit tensions, the wariness, the incomprehension for they are? Can teachers become credible to kids from backgrounds very different from their own without first acknowledging the social distances from which teachers and kids view each other across class boundaries?
Why getting to preschool in a limo matters (but being silly doesn’t)
January 25, 2007
On his EarlyStories blog, Richard Lee Colvin also wrote about the NYT chauffeur-driven preschoolers story , and he asks a fair question:
This is a variant on a story that appears frequently in the New York media. Striving, image-conscious, nouveau-riche Manhattanites do whatever they can to get into a handful of expensive preschools because they think the schools will guarantee their kids a quick-trip to the Ivy League and we make them look silly in the bargain. Old story. Easy target. But beyond its obvious entertainment value, does it matter?
Some of the reasons that I think that this story matters (beyond the considerable entertainment value, of course):
- Stories like this are a reminder of a major flaw in the logic of NCLB: Parents like this will never stand still while other kids catch up to their kids. If all poor and working-class kids aced every standardized test thrown at them this year, these parents would simply find ways to move the bar. And then they’d hire drivers to get their kids to the other side of that bar.
- These kids are learning who they are in the world. They are learning (consciously or not, and not is worse) that they deserve
- to be buffered from contact with people not like them by enormous personal and public space,
- to have adults defer to them,
- to be exempted from silly rules that were made for other people,
- to consume as much fossil fuel on one preschool run as an entire village in African consumes in a month
- to be very comfortable even when traversing only a few blocks to preschool.
- The kids heading for other schools, stuck behind the idling limos on public transportation, are learning (consciously or not, and not is much worse) their own lessons about what kids like them deserve.
- There is social drama going on all around the idling limos on the busy streets. The sanitation workers, bus drivers, taxi drivers, and delivery people are thinking about their own kids as they’re stuck in traffic. As they dream the dreams of parents, they think about the enormous social distance that their kids would have to travel to be within shouting distance of a level playing field with the kids stepping out of the limos. From days and weeks of such encounters, aspirations are shaped.
- The kids of the sanitation workers, bus drivers, taxi drivers, and delivery people are probably going to be working for the kids in the limos some day. At the very least, the kids in the limos will someday be called upon to to sit on policy advisory boards, foundations, and university boards. They’ll be major contributors to the political candidates of their choice. Other peoples’ kids are going to live under their influence.
- And everyone on the block is learning something about the inevitability of all of this.
Are these parents acting silly? You bet. But acting silly doesn’t seem to really matter.
Schools for Rich Kids Have Troubles, Too
January 24, 2007
In the NYT today, word of a crisis at the elite 92nd St Y preschool in Manhattan. It seems that the chauffeur-driven luxury SUVs are double and triple parking as they drop off and wait to pick up the 3 and 4 year olds, creating safety and traffic concerns. A letter to parents threatening that their children wouldn’t get into the kindergarten of their choice if they, the parents, didn’t demonstrate more cooperation was largely ignored.
According to one observer,
“ That game used to be played much more quietly, over what clubs the parents had their children’s birthday parties at. There weren’t such visible signs of a pecking order.”
But it’s only a matter of time until such things no longer matter, because when poor and working class kids begin to do better on their standardized tests, we’ll have more level playing fields, right?
Right?
Education: Sometimes a Matter of Life and Death
January 23, 2007
Today’s New York Times ran a story on a study recently published on the treatment of breast cancer (“All Breast Cancer Patients Are Not Treated the Same”). The study reports that low income women or women with low levels of education routinely get insufficient doses of chemotherapy compared to higher income, more educated women. The article suggests that one explanation for the difference is that doctors assume that these women will not understand the ordeal they’re about to experience, so the doctors cut doses in the hope that the women will stick with the long and unpleasant course of treatments.
No mention is made of actual differences in compliance with treatment regimens.
It is situations like this — in which decisions are made “on behalf” of members of lower social class women, apparently without even discussing the consequences of those decisions — that sharpen for me the urgency of educating poor and working class kids to stand up for themselves, to ask questions, to expect respect.
Sometimes, it is really a matter of life and death.
Isn’t Anyone Teaching Working Class Kids Well?
January 23, 2007
There was an interesting thread on the Working Class Studies listserv today. Someone asked for recommendations for materials for teaching a class of K-12 teachers about class issues. The poster said that he had plenty of good texts and films about class issues but was coming up short on materials of actual successful teaching in classrooms with working class kids.
I answered off-list, and others may well have, also. But the answers from the group were, I believe, representative of the fairly limited discourse about educating working class kids:
- The first response was the cynical [not a direct quote] “well, you just need to respect them, provide relevant materials, teach them to think. There are no special methods. But doing even those things would require dismantling of the whole system, so that’s not going to happen”.
- Next came a posting from one of the organizers of the The Rouge Forum, who claimed that his group was the “only” coalition of teachers, professors, parents, students, and community activists working on class issues and social change. On their website are papers on policy issues, some materials on teaching social studies, quite a few photos of people meeting in various cities, but, from what I could see, nothing from classroom teachers on how they might teach. From their website:
We had modest success in defeating the standardized test, the MEAP, in Michigan. We work in faculty organizations and unions to deal with the racism and sexism in academia. We try to press forward questions of class size, curricular freedom, anti-racist pedagogy, real inclusion, and a just tax system. As part of the Whole Schooling Consortium, we have sponsored forums in the U.S., uniting hundreds of people for democracy and equality.
All worthy causes, but I’m not clear what they do to work on classroom practice in working class schools.
- Someone else, of course, mentioned Rethinking Schools publications.
When class is discussed in teacher ed, I see the conversation constrained within essentially these same arguments.
Students often come to us with a sense that they have chosen a good and noble profession through which they will be able to do some good in the world, and then, often in their first weeks in the program, we run them through a deep and scathing critique of the institution of schooling and the constraints on the teaching profession. And I teach these courses, too, but I long ago learned that we have to go beyond the limited “We’ve critiqued it, now you have to fix it” model within which these courses are commonly taught.
And to a point, I’d agree with the Cynical Poster that solid teaching methods go a long way for most kids. But solid, generic teaching methods dont’ enable kids to understand and to act upon the particular life circumstances within which they find themselves.
And yes, we have to teach about teaching within community contexts, about building relationships with families, about the essentially politicized nature of their work and their need to become involved in policy issues. And yes, some teachers will eventually become activists in their communities. But these are not the same things as being effective at working with children in classrooms.
I trust that short of dismantling the entire school system, we could find teachers who are doing excellent work with working class kids in small towns, in rural areas, in suburbs, in cities. I trust that there are classrooms where all kids feel respected and hopeful, where the honest messages of schooling are not simply that hard work will be rewarded, but that there are strategies for facing down the obstacles. I trust that there are schools in which kids are supported as they negotiate delicate relationships within their own families as they begin to aspire to lives elsewhere. I trust that there are schools in which all kids get a solid education, not just those singled out as the “smart ones” amongst the mediocre.
Until very recently, university faculty sustained a monopoly on dissemination about information about teaching and schooling. Teachers now can by-pass conventional publishing altogether and talk directly to one another about the things that they’re learning about teaching. And their practice can be subject to the daily supportive critique of others as they blog, post videos, publish student work on the web, participate in public forums.
I’d argue that if we’re serious about preparing teachers to become effective with poor and working class kids, part of teacher ed has to be about making practice public, about forming networks of support and critique, about making successes more visible.
That said, given the hundreds of teacher blogs, on-line forums, and listservs, where are the examples of effective teaching with working class kids? Why are these teachers so hard to find?
