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...

In this study of the school system of an Indiana town, Ellen Brantlinger studies educational expectations within segments of the middle class that have fairly high levels of attainment. Building on her findings, she examines the relationship between class structure and educational success. This book asserts the need to look beyond poor peoples' values and aspirations--and rather to consider the values of dominant groups--to explain class stratification and educational outcomes.

Who Benefits From Special Education?: Remediating (Fixing) Other People's Children addresses the negative consequences of labeling and separating education for students with "disabilities," the cultural biases inherent in the way that we view children's learning difficulties, the social construction of disability, the commercialization of special education, and related issues.
The theme that unifies the chapters is that tension exists between professional ideology and practice, and the wishes and expectations of the recipients of professional practice--children, adolescents, and...