Dividing Classes: How the Middle Class Negotiates and Rationalizes School Advantage

ISBN-13: 9780415932974 / Angielski / Twarda / 2003 / 262 str.

Ellen A. Brantlinger; E. Brantlinger;Brantlinger Ell

Opis

This text offers a first-hand ethnographic account to examine the relationship between social class structures and educational success. Instead of studying the historically marginalized lower classes, it asserts the need to look beyond poor peoples' values of dominant groups to explain the reproduction of social class. Drawing on interviews with 31 administrators, principals and teachers and 20 middle class mothers in a small Indian town in which the author lives, Ellen Brantlinger discovers the considerable power the middle class wields in determining school policy and practice to secure educational advantages for their children. With the insight gained from this perspective, the roots of increasingly conservative educational policy and the idea of class as an organizing category in education are critically examined.

Recenzje

"Dividing Classes forces us to confront perhaps the most troubling and least studied challenge to equitable schooling: Middle-class Americans' presumption that their own superiority accounts for their school success and the life chances that successful schooling brings. In her penetrating account of affluent, mostly liberal, mothers and education professionals, Brantlinger shows how powerfully the ideology of meritocracy undercuts the educational opportunities of low-income young people. Most important she illuminates how this undercutting works through the seemingly innocent, day-to-day talk and actions of middle-class Americans that consistently advantage society's already-advantaged young people." -- Jeannie Oakes, Presidential Professor of Educational Equity, UCLA
"Describes how members of the educated middle class act to secure the best of what schools have to offer for their own children and how they rationalize their actions." -- Journal of Economic Literature

Spis treści

Preface1. Class Position, Social Life, and School Outcomes2. Examining Social Class Reproduction at Micro and Emic Levels: A Critical, Interpretive Study3. Affluent Mothers Narrate Their Own and Other People's Children4. Conflicted Pedagogical and Curricular Perspectives of Middle Class Mothers5. Positions and Outlooks of Teachers at Different Schools6. Impact of Teacher Position on Divided Classes7. Succumbing to Demands: Administrators under Pressure8. School Board Perceptions of Policy and Power9. Conclusion: Choosing a Democratic, Communitarian Ethic for Schools and SocietyNotesReferencesSubject IndexAuthor Index

O autorze

Ellen Brantlinger is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Indiana University, Bloomington.