Dividing Classes: How the Middle Class Negotiates and Rationalizes School AdvantageThis 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. |
Contents
Examining Social Class Reproduction at Micro | 22 |
Affluent Mothers Narrate Their | 34 |
Conflicted Pedagogical and Curricular | 61 |
Positions and Outlooks of Teachers | 79 |
Impact of Teacher Position on Divided Classes | 120 |
School Board Perceptions of Policy and Power | 170 |
Choosing a Democratic | 188 |
References | 211 |
| 235 | |
Other editions - View all
Dividing Classes: How the Middle Class Negotiates and Rationalizes School ... Ellen A. Brantlinger No preview available - 2003 |
Dividing Classes: How the Middle Class Negotiates and Rationalizes School ... Ellen Brantlinger No preview available - 2003 |
Common terms and phrases
ability grouping academic achievement administrators affluent mothers African American agenda Ali Banuazizi already there teachers American Educational Research April 27 asked attended Beauford Bluffton Bourdieu Brantlinger Calhoun chapter claims class status classrooms conservative critical cultural curriculum democratic desegregation Dieken disparities district dominant Eastside Educational Research Association elementary schools elite equity Fairtest Falmer families feel felt gifted and talented global goals Hale hierarchies high school high-income schools Hillsdale schools Hillview Husby ideals ideas ideology in-the-middle teachers inclusion inequities interview kids Kinder learning levels liberal low-income parents low-income schools lower-income meritocracies middle school middle-class mixed narratives neighborhood neoliberal participants pedagogy people's perspective political poor position problems professional programs progressive redistricting Rockenweil role school board members school personnel school reform segregation social class Southside special education stratified superintendent teaching theory tion town tracking University Press upward-striving Westside working-class York