Education and Class

A new TV show (on the N Network?) promises to tackle questions of class in college. From the NYT blurb,

At a time when American culture has become increasingly obsessed with parsing the differences between people who make $250,000 a year and those who earn $10 million, the ones who cook their Kobe beef on Vikings versus the ones whose chefs prepare it on Agas, any evocation of what it feels like to live among the legions who can’t afford the meat seems, if not a full-blown corrective, a welcome therapeutic.

After being away for a few days, I’m still catching up with the many blog postings, listerve discussions, comments, news stories (from NPR to the Chronicle of Higher Ed), and misrepresentations of Danah Boyd’s essay on social class divisions among users of the social networking sites Facebook and MySpace. Boyd argues that Facebook is the network of choice for the educated, upper-middle class, while MySpace is the choice of kids who are “socially ostracized in school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers”. Boyd cogently argues that these differences are, essentially, grounded in class.

Boyd makes clear that her observations are not (yet) based in research. She’s not reporting on a formal study.

Yet she has sparked deliberation in major newspapers, in hundreds of blogs, on numerous listserves.

She’s talking about class in a land in which class is not supposed to exist.

And people are sitting up and taking notice.

Among the more careful responses to Boyd’s essay are several that press the intriguing questions of why social class would trace into virtual worlds, where ascribed identities would seem to matter less than in the “real” world.

Scott Rosenberg writes that while there have always been distinctions between what is “cool” to the elite few and what is accessible to the broader masses in the on-line world,

The difference today, it seems to me, is not that social class divides extend from the offline world into online space, but rather that online interaction has assumed such a central place in the lives of young people that the divisions now matter far more. For teenagers trying to figure out who they are, the choice of social networking site has become one more agonizing crossroads of self-definition.

Engineers Without Fear writes that

[P]eople cannot help but take the social structures their bodies grew up in online as well. Our virtual existences are a hybrid of the old and the new. We have already created new social forms but we cannot junk the old ones yet.

Boyd references Paul Willis’s Learning to Labor as offering one explanation for why working-class kids might choose community and belonging over accepting the values of higher social classes in which one might never be accepted.

Yet I think that in all of this focus on what’s going on within the technology, we may be missing even more intriguing questions about what is going on within class.

Working class culture in Learning to Labor is circumscribed by the maleness of the shop floor and the pub, by traditional gender roles in the home. In their economic, social and geographic isolation, the racism and sexism of “the lads” go unchallenged. Yet as Willis has written more recently, with the demise of manual jobs, identity formation among working class youth is grounded now more in their participation in a global, consumerist culture than in the culture of work. He writes:

They find more passion and acceptable self-identity through music on MTV, wearing baseball caps, branded sneakers and designer shirts, and socializing in fast-food joints than they do through traditional class-based cultural forms.

Within consumer and electronic cultures, Willis argues, working-class kids now have access to

…something that only the elite has enjoyed as part of their sacred privilege. This privilege entails the formation of sensibilities to mark oneself culturally as a certain kid of person — rather than simply an unconscious carrier of traditional markers of class, race, and gender — or to “choose” to belong to these categories in transformative, distinctive, mannered, celebratory, or self-conscious ways. … there are simply more groups, so to speak, within the working class. …Within the different groups are very many more discursive, symbolic, and socially symbolic resources feeding into their cultural productions.

For Willis, though, the questions in the 70’s and the questions now remain the same:

How do the cultural forms of youth — whether “having a laff with the boys” in the pub, or creating a presence in Myspace - represent the their understanding of their positions within the larger social structure? To what extent do their cultural practices represent their resistance against exploitation, and when do they participate in reproducing their own subordination?

Knowing that college kids are in Facebook and the socially marginalized are in Myspace does, indeed, raise important questions about the reach of class in contemporary culture.

But the much more intriguing questions may be about how class is being lived within new cultural spaces that include not just “the lads” of Learning to Labor, but also queers, immigrants, and punks, all constructing their own representations of identity in a global virtual space.

What are young people learning their positionality, their agency, their potential in their active participation in deep and broad social networks? How is it different being a working-class kid — the child of “the lads” — now connected to potentially thousands of others via tools that enable voice, discourse, and representation of self via a dazzling array of media?

Willis, Paul (2004). Twenty-five years on: Old books, new times. In N. Dolby and G. Dimitriadis (with P. Willis). (Eds.) Learning to Labor in New Times. New York: Routledge.

While many of us teach and write about the many reasons (moral and otherwise) to address funding inequities in public education, the press regularly reports on “research” that suggests that substantial increases in school funding don’t produce gains in achievement. These studies are, in turn, cited by policy makers to counter demands for increased funding for schools.

I’ve always appreciated Jonathon Kozol’s response to such arguments: that if funding doesn’t matter, all of those savvy, well-educated parents in suburban schools would quit funding the smaller classes, art teachers, computers, well-stocked libraries, elaborate field trips, and science specialists for their own kids because those parents are not known for casually wasting their money.

But I’ve also wondered what is behind that “research”. Thus, I was interested in this essay from The School Administrator, in which the research methods of one such report are called into question. A quote from the essay:

[L]et’s begin with the report’s claim that even though “per pupil expenditures have increased by 77.4 percent (after adjusting for inflation)” over the past two decades, “student performance has improved only slightly.”

This claim is based on the incorrect assumption schools have the same spending needs now as in the mid-1980s. In reality, school expenditures have increased most on items that are unlikely to show up in standardized test scores, such as special education, dropout prevention, transportation services, health care for employees, school security and free- and reduced-price meals.

Dropout prevention programs offer the best example of the erroneous approach used in the ALEC report. A successful dropout program will keep low-scoring students in school, thus reducing average test scores for the school. The more money spent, the lower the scores.

The Think Tank Review Project, cited in this article, would seem to be a potentially good resource for verifying the claims made by various “research” groups weighing in on educational policy issues. At very least, these reviews could inform the public about conventions of research and, perhaps, support more critical reading beyond the headlines that such reports can generate. This assumes, of course, that the public has an interest in learning more about what does make schools work.

This assumes, too, that the public would be willing to read beyond the think tanks and policy analysts that support what they already believe about schools.

More on Ruby Payne from bloggers:

A letter to the author of the NYT time article from Stephanie Jones, who says:

Frankly, it won’t matter if they know how to use the right silverware, substitute their old “ain’t”s for “isn’t”s, or speak with more (middle-class) clarity and in a more (middle-class) elaborated manner when they still find it improbable or impossible to pay the bills at the end of the month even when working two full-time jobs at a low wage. And in the meantime, if students really do learn all the “rules” of class and they still don’t find themselves in an upwardly mobile trajectory, they may end up blaming themselves, their families, and their neighborhoods.

And this, from Confessions of a Keyhole.

A quote:

I think there’s something very telling and tragic about the conjunction of, on the one hand, Payne’s noble New Age (but also modernist) wish to live “a life without institutional constraints” and, on the other hand, her preaching of the importance of lower-class adoption of upper- and middle-class personal stylings (what she calls “the hidden rules”).

And finally, a summary of what some bloggers are saying about the NYT article from the Payne organization blog itself, in which people who’ve never read her work or heard of Payne before reading the article are cited as those representing the “high points of the dialogue, examples in which people are thinking deeply and carefully about the issues at hand”. While they invited more comments and “dialogue” two days ago, they’ve not yet published any. One of those who resonates with Payne says:

Perhaps some discomfort with Payne’s approach also stems from the fact that as a nation we like to think the lines of class are nonexistent, or at least blurred. Defining class with such specificity denies that.

… which suggests, at best, that this “deep and careful thinker” didn’t even get as far as the two paragraphs summarizing the critique of Payne in the NYT article.

I have no problem with a blogger thinking out loud in her posts. But it’s curious that an organization would cite this very quote as being among the “highlights” of the discourse about their work.

From Inside Higher Education, come this report of a new study on the limitations of the SAT for predicting success in college, even while SAT scores are highly correlated with socio-economic status.

From the article:

A major study released Monday by the University of California suggests that high school grades may be good at predicting not only first-year college performance, as commonly believed, but performance throughout four undergraduate years. The same study suggests that the SAT adds little predictive value to admissions decisions and is hindered by a high link between SAT scores and socioeconomic status — a link not present for high school grades.

And further, the study finds that all of the information admissions officers currently have is of limited value, and accounts for only 30 percent of the grade variance in colleges — leaving 70 percent of the variance unexplained.

Such studies would certainly seem to open the door to admissions reviews that take into account a broader range of life experiences and strengths. Peter Sacks writes eloquently of students whose test scores underestimated their potential as scholars in his new book, Tearing Down the Gates.