It was another one of those moments when I didn’t know whether to launch into a lecture or to just smile and move on. It was an informal meeting of colleagues from different departments. The conversation had turned to our students, many of whom are first-generation college students. A woman — known on our campus to be particularly committed to issues of diversity — said “I just wish that they’d come to value learning for the sake of learning. They so often just seem to be here for the credentials”.
I didn’t lecture.
I didn’t hiss.
I did tell a story about a student in my course a few years ago who argued the same thing — that his high school kids from working class families didn’t “care” about learning the way that his middle class kids did. In class that day, I told another story about some research that I’d done in a private high school and the very creative but pervasive cheating that the kids told me about. I asked my student “so, how does an elaborate culture of cheating support your idea that middle class kids care more about learning for the sake of learning?”
My skepticism over whether differences in academic engagement can be explained by deep differences in the value placed on intellectual life is reinforced by this article from the SF Chronicle documenting rampant cheating among the highest achieving students in high school and college, and the students’ justifications of their cheating.
Similar articles are published fairly often in newspapers and education publications. I don’t think that it’s a secret anymore that many highly-ambitious kids casually cheat. Yet I have yet to hear any teacher or college faculty member talk about “them” and “their culture” as being sadly anti-intellectual, as they so often speak of working-class kids.
To justify class advantage, the respectability of the poor and working class must be denied.
My student’s response that day? He said that cheating at least showed that the middle-class kids valued the goals of education, and that made them better than his students who just didn’t bother to do their homework.
I didn’t lecture any more. I didn’t hiss.
My colleague’s response to my story about that high school teacher? A polite smile, and then a move to change the subject. I smiled back, and moved on.
But I do continue to marvel at the myths about class that are sustained in schools and colleges.
He Used to Have a Mullet
August 10, 2007
I’d thought that I was pretty well attuned to the depth and the forms that classism can take in schools and colleges.
And then, Inside Higher Education, one of the most widely-read education websites in the country, published a cartoon that was among the most classist things that I’ve seen in a long time, and when many of us objected, many well-educated people jumped in to defend it.
The cartoon is no longer available. I’d posted it here for a time after the cartoonist, Matthew Henry Hall, announced that in response to the reaction he’d gotten to the original, he’d created an alternative, which IHE published later that day. I believed — and still do — that having the original available would enable dialogue about the classism that IHE and Hall missed.
But both Matthew Henry Hall and the editor of IHE have contacted me to ask me to take down the original cartoon because I have no right to publish it. I pick my battles carefully, so have taken it down.
Here is what’s been changed from the original: The “101% Redneck and proud” t-shirt has been replaced by an “American Idle” t-shirt. The beer cans have been replaced by soda cans. The “Monster Trucks” and “Girls” and “More Girls” magazines have been replaced by “Star” and “People”. The beer spill is gone — apparently soda drinkers have better housekeeping skills. I’m not clear about the significance of his clothing, but he’s traded shorts for long pants, and is now wearing a different style shoe.
And, the mullet is gone.
We have (canned) beer, trucker magazines, a “redneck” t-shirt, and a mullet.
And we have a professor calling this student to thank him for not showing up in class.
And here’s what Hall, the cartoonist said in the message that he posted after getting many emails and after seeing the comments that were posted with the cartoon:
I in no way, ever intended the character in the above cartoon to be emblematic for working poor students. That’s a reading I’d not considered. I simply wanted to depict a fictional character who was a difficult student. That’s it. His level of wealth, be it high, low or somewhere in the middle, wasn’t something I’d even considered.
I’ll take him at his word.
But I’d guess that I’d much rather than he (and the editors of IHE who decided to publish this cartoon) were fully aware of how, when he wanted to depict a student that readers would immediately recognize as “difficult”, he chose a particular set of cultural markers that clearly signaled working-class. Right down to the mullet.
And I wish, too, that Hall and the editors of IHE had any sense of how many of us had no idea what we were getting into when we we aspired to college, how naive we were in our beliefs that it was going to be about big ideas and a love of learning and doors opening before us. I wish that they had any idea how often we instead sensed that our professors, the people in the financial aid office, our roommates, and those other carefully-groomed students in our classes were thinking exactly what the professor in this cartoon at least said out loud: That we didn’t belong, that we were annoying, that college was, essentially, for those who already “got it” and the rest of us deserved the snickers that we just knew trailed behind us — whether we actually heard them or not.
But they didn’t, and neither did a number of people commenting on the IHE website, who felt compelled to teach those of us who did object that we were “morons”, humorless, “wusses” and in the same camp as radical Muslims who objected to Danish cartoonists’ depictions of them.
For example, “ST” completely missed that people were objecting to classism and took it upon himself to teach the rest of us why we were wrong to think that this was “reverse racism”. He went on to teach us that “rednecks” were responsible for the history of oppression of blacks.
Two posters established their “cred” on the subject by tracing their southern roots, but missed completely that this cartoon was about class, not geography.
A number of posters reminded us all that we’ve all had difficult students, and this was just tapping into that experience. They’re right, of course. There are students that we’d wish into the sections of our colleagues. And any number of my difficult students have been wealthy, privileged, and entitled, but no one would *ever* create a cartoon about them. The latest announced on the first day of class that he was gifted and to then pointedly ignored me for the rest of the term.
Others talked about how students like this — who we see, by the way, engaged only in out-of -class endeavors–was obviously choosing to be anti-intellectual and therefore didn’t belong in college.
It seemed pointless to remind these folks that fraternity keg parties, the term-paper mills, the cheating rings at ivy-league colleges are hardly evidence that the middle-class comes to college for intellectual enlightenment alone.
IHE didn’t recognize the classism. Hall didn’t recognize how he was drawing on particular stereotypes as a cheap shortcut to “difficult student”. The rabid commentors didn’t even get that this was about class.
Ironically, I’m spending my time this week reading a collection of essays by people who were the first in their families to attend college. What strikes me about this collection is this: In these times when we promise kids that the world will open to them if only they do well in school, the authors of these essays had to go to exceptional lengths to get themselves to college, and once there, to find the means to stay. To a person, they had to fight teachers, counselors, peers, and sometimes family for the right — a right that they never, ever took for granted — to get a college education. Had they simply conformed, smiled, and played “nice”, they’d never have made it.
And we have the data (IHE itself regularly publishes notices of such studies) that many of them don’t make it, in spite of strong academic credentials and an initial will to become highly educated.
But I guess that the very idea many of the newcomers to college so often find themselves facing obstacles that require that they constantly question whether the fight is worth it, whether they do really deserve to be there, whether they’re selling out to stay — those ideas are, are in the end, too complicated to depict in any simple line drawing.
But certainly, there’s room to talk about this somewhere?
Filed in access, classism, higher education, Matthew Henry Hall, social class
What Are *You* Doing on *Our* Turf?
August 3, 2007
At least some of us find the publication of a cartoon like this puzzling at best, highly offensive at worst. An interesting set of responses, too, in which at least some well-educated people argue that it can’t be negative stereotyping if it’s true.
update: Matthew Hall, the cartoonist, has posted a message that he’s changing the cartoon to remove offensive elements, so here’s the original for those who want to make sense of the commentary that followed:
update 2: Matthew Henry Hall and the editor of IHE each emailed me this week asking me to take down the cartoon because I had no “right” to publish it. I choose my fights carefully, so took it down but have blogged about it here.
From today’s newspaper comes this article on the recent booming demand for luxury goods among those at the distant end of growing income gaps. Women who only a few years ago purchased shoes that cost hundreds of dollars are now spending thousands. A quote:
Louis Vuitton this spring pre-sold its limited number of $40,000-plus handbags made up of a patchwork of samples from different spring and summer collections. The bags cost only slightly less than the median household income of $46,326, as reported by the Census Bureau.
And a second quote:
“Whether it’s a handbag, shoe or watch, the price of keeping up has gone up,”
One of the gurus of social class theory, Pierre Bourdieu, says that we’ll never eliminate class differences by simply teaching those at the bottom the rules of the game of those above because those who already enjoy the comfort, deference, and power of life further up the ladder have a vested interest in protecting their positions.
If too many people can figure out how to play by their rules (or, horrors, can begin to afford those $500 handbags), you can just much move the bar a bit further up.
Too many people getting college degrees? Start requiring graduate degrees for even routine jobs. Too many kids now doing as well as your kid in first grade? Start intensifying pressures to learn Japanese and calculus in your kid’s kindergarten. Too many people in off-the-rack clothes in your wine shop now? Find even more obscure vineyards and vintages so that you’re still set apart.
It’s about maintaining distinctions. That’s what Bourdieu says about the significance of different “rules of the game” between classes.
Those who suggest that we can eliminate poverty by teaching kids the “rules” of the middle class are imagining the middle class standing with open arms, just waiting to welcome all of those newcomers who will compete with their kids for college admission, jobs, political power, and privileges that are now theirs alone.
That’s what social class is about: Not just static rules of behavior among different groups, but about the power of some folks to set the rules and then to change them so that others have little hope of ever reaching them.
Instead of Ruby Payne …
June 12, 2007
The Ruby Payne discussion continues today with this comprehensive post from Dan Butin on the Education Policy Blog, one of the few bloggers over the past few days that actually critiques Payne. Steve grapples with how poverty might be eliminated, but misreads those who acknowledge structural dimensions of poverty as believing that the poor themselves can’t change without being “lifted up” by the “power elite” (which is sort of like saying that anyone who believes that women still face sexism also believes that women won’t get anywhere until men “lift them up”).
I also read this article yesterday, in which a number of educators critique Payne’s work in their districts.
This article mentioned that one district spent more than $320,000 dollars on Payne training. Reading this reminded me of the unfortunate comments on the blogs that I read yesterday that suggested that the only real choices available to teachers of poor children are to embrace Payne’s “theories” or to become mired in the critique of overly-intellectual, self-interested, out-of-touch academics.
That got me thinking of just a few of the many other ways that this district might have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. And had they done any of these things, they could have been pretty confident that they were drawing upon carefully-researched, effective practices (most of them developed in collaboration with academics). I’m including here only links that are readily available on the web (I’m not one to take copyright lightly). There are many more resources on any of these practices in journals, in library catalogs, and via ERIC, just as there are many other effective practices with poor kids beyond this short list.
- Home visits, so that teachers can form relationships with parents and kids directly, without Payne positioning herself as the cultural broker between them.
- Smaller classes so that teachers can get to know kids better without relying on Payne to explain what they’re really like.
- Supporting teachers in developing deep, inquiry-based curriculum, as Deborah Meier did at Central Park East.
- Support innovative and creative uses of technology in schools for poor kid so that you’d see more of the literacy learning that is evident in Sara Kajder’s classrooms.
- Educate poor kids in partnership with their parents, not as adversaries of families, as Comer schools are designed to do.
- Invest deeply in the arts for low-income kids, as Shirley Brice Heath recommends, because in the arts, kids learn “motivation, persistence, critical analysis, and planning”, and the sense that they have a point of view that matters.
- Have a full-time person coordinating community partnerships, as BF Day School did in Seattle, because having such a person brought multiple new resources to the homeless kids attending the school, the teachers, and the families.
- Involve kids in investigating and solving real-world problems, so that they sense their personal power and ability to change –not just adapt themselves to — the broader world.
- Invest in programs that support authentic, long-term relationships with kids and their families, such as that created by Stephanie Jones.
- Ensure that low-income kids are being educated within new media, as are the kids in the City Voices, City Visions program, who are learning a tremendous amount about history and literature and literacy along the way.
Those are just a few of the things that schools looking to better serve low-income students might do.
And what do all of these programs have in common? They bring the best of what we know about teaching, learning, and schooling to low-income kids.
And they do these things without first teaching teachers that people are poor because poor families engage in bizarre and destructive child-rearing practices (even if the workshop leaders do insist that they’re not stereotyping when they speak of the drugs, the alcohol, the beatings, the inability to plan or to engage in such basic cognitive skills as predicting cause and effect).
