diversity

Chapter

13

Improving Schools for All Children

The Role of Social Stratification in Teaching and Learning

Wavebreak Media Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

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Focus Questions

Do you believe that all children can learn?

Do you believe that all children should be educated to the same level?

What factors do you think may hinder reforms that promote learning for all children?

What role do you think social class and social status might have had in your own education?

Are you the first in your family to go to college?

Can you think of some examples in which a person might have high status but not be a member of a higher social class?

Do you believe that those who are born into the lower classes can rise in the U.S. class system if they really work hard? If not, why not?

“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”

PLUTARC

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Case Study

Thinking About the Future

It was the last day of the diversity class, as well as the final student presentation. Everyone was looking forward to hearing what Carl had to say, particularly since he was the one student in the class who had been the most skeptical of the need for and importance of teachers understanding the cultural aspects of many kinds of difference. Yet, over time, Carl had seemed to change his mind a bit, so when Professor Adams nodded to him to begin, he had everyone’s attention.

“We’ve talked about a lot of differences in this class,” he began. “Differences in race and ethnicity, nationality and region, language, religion, gender, the needs of children of different ages, and the needs of students with disabilities—all very interesting and most of them easy to ‘see’. I’m going to talk about a kind of difference that’s not always visible, one that Americans know exist, but don’t much like to think and talk about. And that difference is social stratification—social class and social status. Please, if you have any questions during my presentation, just raise your hand, OK?”

The class agreed.

So, Carl began. “Max Weber (1957), a German sociologist, defined three different types of stratification, but we usually think of only two. The first is social class, understood as a group of people with similar life chances, which depend on the access they have to scarce resources. The degree of access to which any group has means that there is a strong probability that they will have similar biographies in terms of what they will actually achieve in a particular society.”

“The second is social status, which means the degree of esteem and influence that is bestowed on the individual or group. Each of these is not only differentiated, but also ranked, so that there is a hierarchy of class and status (Berger & Berger, 1972).”

David raised his hand. “Do class and status go together?”

“Yes, a lot of the time. But not always.”

“When do they not go together?” persisted David.

“Well,” answered Carl, you can have someone with high status in a lower class group. The local preacher, for instance, or—thinking of schools—the children of the local preacher. The family may not have a lot of money, but they have status in the community. Or, there can be people with a great deal of money, a big home, flashy cars … but if they are drug dealers, they won’t have high status in the general community.”

“For our purposes, I’m using the example of a very rural and very poor part of the ­country—three counties in northern Vermont (Caledonia, Essex, and Orleans), called by its inhabitants The Northeast Kingdom.” There were a few scoffing noises from the class but Carl hastened to assure them, “It’s really true,” he said. “Even the website for northeastern Vermont refers to it as NEK” (Northeastern Vermont Development Association, 2018).

Carl continued, “The area is bordered on the north by Quebec, Canada, and on the east by northern New Hampshire. It has almost no industry but is a region of glacial lakes, rugged forests, small towns, dairy farms, a surprising lack of quaintness, a statistical lack of sunshine in the winter, and a noticeable degree of poverty. It was given its name by then Vermont Senator George Aiken, who said, ‘You know, this is such a beautiful country up here—it should be called the Northeast Kingdom.’ And so it has been and still is. Over time, the richness of its landscape has stood in contrast with the degree of economic development in the area. Still, a wide variety of people have called this area home, including a fair number of French Canadian descendants, some residents of communes founded by counterculture folks in the 1960s and 1970s, farmers, artists, entrepreneurs, and a few fugitives from the fast life in cities down the Eastern Seaboard.” While he talked, Carl passed around beautiful color pictures of the area.

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“Since I had never actually been there, I contacted a high school science teacher named Ben Webster, through his part-time work for the Northeastern Vermont Development Association. He’s been a huge help to me, giving me many of the pictures you’re looking at, and telling me about conditions there. Ben was born and brought up on a dairy farm in the Kingdom and knows the area in his very soul. Another person who needs credit is Garret Keizer, a teacher and minister who wrote of his experiences teaching English in a high school in Orleans county (Keizer, 1988). You’ll hear more about Keizer and his students later in this talk.”

“While Vermont isn’t the poorest state in the Union, parts of it—including the Northeast Kingdom—are demonstrably poor. The three counties in the Kingdom (out of 14) have the lowest per capita income (Economic-Demographic Profile of Vermont, 2019) and it is getting harder and harder for agricultural workers to stay in the middle class. Ben told me that he sees the results of poverty every day: most of his students have lived in the Kingdom all their lives, mostly on farms. And they’re all a bit isolated, both because of the circumstances of their lives and because the rest of America is woefully ignorant of, not to say indifferent to its rural populations. Even some of his students’ real deprivations don’t ‘count’ in the larger scheme of things because ‘real’ poverty is most often equated with urban poverty. But he knows that Emily spent last winter living in an unheated trailer behind her grandma’s house, and that Tom missed a week of school because of all the fleas he picked up at his father’s house” (Keizer, 1988).

“Ben gave me some other statistics as well: the people of the Northeast Kingdom are among the poorest and least healthy people in Vermont. In fact, Caledonia, Essex, and Orleans counties had three of the five lowest rankings on the ‘health factors’ list, which includes diet, exercise, tobacco and alcohol use, health care access and quality, physical environment, and economic issues. In addition, 25% of children in Essex County were living in poverty, higher than either the state’s rate of 14% or the U.S. rate of 20%. And, the teen birth rate in Orleans was 27% of girls, age 15–19 years, twice as high as other counties in Vermont (VTDigger.org, 2018).”

“And the coronavirus pandemic hasn’t helped. Ben says that prior to the appearance of COVID-19 in the area, the social services organization was running a 10-bed seasonal warming shelter; now there are four sites across the region, with at least 118 residents (VTDigger, 2020). He says they’ve never had this problem before because they had no place to house the homeless. But the pandemic has caused folks who were letting friends and neighbors sleep on the sofa, or come in to eat, changed their minds and asked those people to move out. And although the Northeast Kingdom has had 26 cases and no deaths, yet, a housing shortage has been a problem for a long time, and what housing is available is very expensive. So, homelessness has become a larger issue.”

“That all seems to be plenty of evidence that poverty is a real problem. But is no one who lives in the Kingdom middle class?” asked Rebecca.

“Oh, of course there are middle class folks as well. But the fact that these three counties are the poorest in the state appears to mean that the preponderance of people would be classified as lower class—perhaps lower working class.”

“What about the schools there?” asked Oliver. “If schools are so ‘middle class,’ why aren’t they helping the kids … well, grow, raise up, you know.”

“Well,” answered Carl, “that’s the interesting thing. It’s true that schools in the United States are largely middle class institutions. And it’s also the case that we hear all the time about alleviating poverty by somehow providing government intervention to obtain food, jobs, and housing, and so forth. Which, of course, are all very well and good. But Keiser has a different idea. He thinks that giving poor kids a rich introduction to the world on the other side of the mountains, in history and math and science and, yes, English, and expecting them to devote time and effort to it, in their own ways and without criticizing their own history, will in the long run be the best way to help them move up the social class ladder.”

“He’s helped a bit by the fact that rural poverty often has a somewhat different character. Because life is tied to the land, and often families are large and have been in that place for generations, there is also pride. In the Northeast Kingdom, there is a history—usually told and retold in family stories—of coming to the place, of clearing the land, of growing crops or raising milk cows—of good years and bad years, of success and failure. But they are also stories of independence, stories of pride that often make the people resist government (or any other) ‘help’. This may also be true of urban poverty, but somehow we fail to see it.”

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“Yes, but what can teachers do?” repeated Samantha.

“Here’s where Garret Keizer is really helpful,” answered Carl. “Nearly all I have learned about teaching is from him, through his book about his life as an English teacher at Lake Region Union High School, town of Barton, Orleans County, Vermont, in the Northeast Kingdom. It’s called No Place But Here: A Teacher’s Vocation in a Rural Community, and I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to be a teacher. On this particular subject, he writes:

My freshman English classes read Antigone, The Odyssey, Macbeth, Hardy’s Return of the Native—none of these abridged or paraphrased. I begin our study of these works by stating that I can think of several reasons why we shouldn’t study them … that I reject the reasons out of hand and that we are going to study the classics come what may. I will not pretend that the books are not difficult … but I will also not pretend that tripe is profound or that people lack sensibility simply because they are 15 and live ‘in the sticks.’ So we begin to read. And the response from the majority of students is one of mature commitment, unfeigned enjoyment, and surprising insight.”

“In short,” says Carl, “just because kids are young, or poor, expect a lot from them and help them get it. That goes for any kid in any setting—rural, urban, high-rise, or hood. Kids want to matter.” Mr. Keizer tells a story that illustrates his attitude toward his students:

“When a student goes home and tells her mother, as the mother then told me, that Mr. Keizer comes into homeroom and he says, ‘Would you like to hear some music?’ and we don’t think nothing of it, so we say, ‘All right.’ And what does he put on? The opera! I thought I’d die. Well, I got to listening to it there, and you know, it weren’t half bad.”

“It occurs to me that playing a portion of ‘the opera’ (actually a Brandenburg Concerto) for this young woman may have been the single most important thing I have done in seven years of teaching” (Keizer, pp. 6-7).

Carl smiles. “So here’s another idea: don’t assume that poor kids won’t appreciate the larger humanity in a piece of music, or a poem, or a painting, or a play. They do. At least some of them. Keizer says that poor kids, as well as better-off kids, need a challenge but that we often think about the education of our youth with the idea that they don’t want to learn, or that they will only learn anything touted in movies, rock music, or the Internet.”

“I think that’s a pretty romantic, even naïve, idea,” offers Melissa. “All schools have a curriculum that has to be taught. Teachers don’t have time to develop other curricula, even if they want to.”

“I’ve heard that before,” responded Carl. “But I think that’s why everyone here so emphasizes the idea that if you’re going to be a teacher, you must really know your subject. If you do, then you can present it in many different ways, depending on who the students are, the nature of the issues of the day, and sometimes, whether or not you’re feeling brave that day. My uncle teaches in an urban school that was once under a desegregation court order. There was a lot of turmoil, much backlash about bussing kids from Black neighborhoods to white ones, and every day at school seemed to offer more difficulties. But, he had his fourth-graders—Black and white, middle class and lower class (and sometimes off the class charts) read The Hobbit, and taught almost the entire curriculum in terms of that story. He came home every day with stories about his class—funny and sad and sometimes exciting stories. And he didn’t know he couldn’t do it—actually, he did it. Mr. Keizer would have approved, I think.”

Again, there was silence in the room. Carl suddenly remembered his correspondence with his friend John in New Zealand and John’s inability to explain to New Zealanders why Americans were perceived as so violent. Perhaps, he thought, Americans did have a streak of violence in them that came out in many ways. Certainly, one of the reasons he was so taken by Garett Keizer’s approach to teaching was that it was in no way violent. And when violence threatened, he acted to stop it, as he did the time that students left the school early in the morning to protest the removal of some skylights in the gymnasium roof. What does a teacher do when the kids walk out of class? Well, Mr. Keizer decided to hold class outside. Instead of berating them, as the school administrators had done, he taught them.

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“I told them that demonstrations die of their own inertia. I told them they needed to organize and to keep the troops creatively active—have them pick up trash off the grounds, sing songs, anything, but not to let them get bored or straggle off into anarchy … I told them to stamp out with a vengeance any horseplay, anything that might hurt a student or involve the police, who by this time were standing watch. I told them to formulate what they wanted into a few simple words, to elect leaders, and to stay in communication with the main office.

Finally, I told them that they had set themselves a task which required them to be more responsible and better behaved than they had ever had to be in the classroom. The authority figures were gone now—there was no one to say, “Be good.” The kids were only as good as they themselves decided to be, and they would be effective only insofar as they could be good. “There are some people who are no doubt waiting for you to act like jerks so they can put down what you’re fighting for. But you are not jerks. You have to show them that (pp. 163–164).”

“Well,” said Carl, “the situation resolved itself because Mr. Keizer showed them the way to be good. And that is what I pretty much think teaching is all about.”

And then Oliver Bridges, the young man from New Zealand, began to clap. One by one, the whole diversity class began to clap. A little embarrassed, Carl blushed. Professor Adams beamed, and shook Carl’s hand. “You’ve come a long way, Carl. Congratulations!”

And Samantha thought to herself, “Well, now I might be able to seriously think about teaching students who come from widely different experiences. I’d like that.”

Case Analysis

Both the experiences of Ben and Mr. Keizer in the Northeast Kingdom are typical of many teachers who work in schools where there is significant poverty, but they are somewhat different from those whose students live in urban areas. Rural poverty is just as devastating, but, as Ben notes, it often does not get the attention that urban poverty does. The counties of the Northeast Kingdom are 3 of 23,448 such counties defined as rural by the federal census; these counties comprise about 97% of the nation’s land mass but only about 19.3% (or 60 million) of its population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2017). Rural child poverty rates have been rising in the United States since 2003, reaching their highest level of 26.7% in 2012. Rising income inequality rather than lower average incomes is the major driver of child poverty (Farrigan & Hertz, 2016).

Not only are deep poverty rates among children higher than those for the overall population, but children have experienced higher rates of growth in deep poverty over the last decade, particularly in rural areas. In 2018, poverty rates for children under five in rural areas were 25%, the highest of all age groups (USDA, 2018).

Residents of the Northeast Kingdom, like other residents of rural areas, are also keepers of important American history and traditions, and significant caretakers of the environment. What is difficult for many residents is their isolation, which often contributes to a lack of access to well-paying jobs and to education and health care. Small farmers, largely dairy farmers, often have a hard time too, especially as they are being squeezed by “megafarms” in other parts of the country. Indeed, in the United States over half a million small farmers have incomes below the poverty level. In Vermont, there’s an old joke about the farmer who won the lottery. “What are you going to do now?” he was asked. “Well, I guess I’ll just keep on farming till it’s gone!”

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Over the years, Ben has tried in many different ways to adapt his own ideas about education and his science curriculum to the needs of the students of the Northeast Kingdom and to ways in which their work can benefit the entire region. Mr. Keizer has done the same. In this chapter, we ask—in addition—what role does social class and social status play in the outcomes, not only of assessments but of teaching and learning as well? Indeed, it has long been somewhat wryly acknowledged that the best predictor of student achievement is the student’s zip code; where one lives (and how much one’s home is worth as an indicator of social class) is still too often the determiner of how well one does in school. How that comes to be the case is a major subject in this chapter.

Teaching in the 21st Century: Who Are the Students?

There are those who claim that children, even teenagers, are very much like their parents and grandparents when they were in school; things don’t change that much after all. Teachers in classrooms today will tell you that there is truth in that belief, but that similarity across generations is definitely not the whole story.

So, are students somehow “different” today, and if so, how? One way to approach that question is to ask “What has been going on in the world that might influence the nature of the kids who come into our classrooms?”

That question has some surprising answers, particularly with respect to their implications for teaching practice. First, it is likely that when the schools open, there will be more “poor” children than there have been, even if temporarily. Over 36 million people lost their jobs in two months of 2020 (Cohen, 2020), and the end is probably not in sight. Many of these newly “poor” students will be totally unused to this new status and it is likely that they may be somewhat disoriented. Moreover, even parents who still have jobs, or who are slowly going back to work, will often work fewer hours and have had pay cuts, so the financial situation of these families will be slow in recovering. In addition, in places like the Northeast Kingdom, the largest group of rural children in deep poverty—25% in 2018—will all be in school by 2022 (USDA, 2018).

Second, most young people, regardless of class, will be tech savvy in ways that their recent peers were not. For example, students from grades 5 and 6 through high school do not spend all their time on social media, but are used to looking for information on the Internet. Some say they are learning all the time and wonder if schools can keep up (Noonoo, 2020). Other studies find that most students want to learn, want to do well in school, but comparing “school knowledge” and the way it is presented to that found on the Web, most students find that digital material is newer, broader, more engaging, and quicker (Norton & Petrilli, 2017). They are also more adept at using apps, and, sometimes, of designing them, thus finding new ways of getting information.

Third, the students in our schools today will belong to Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012. It is the most racially and ethnically diverse generation in American history. The parents of Gen Z are, in general, better educated than parents of the Millennials. Gen Z students are more likely to go to college, although nearly all are fearful of student loans, which most of them will need as college costs are going up dramatically. As recently as 2019, student loan debt stood at $1.5 trillion dollars (Friedman, 2019). Whether or not adjustments are made, either in the cost of college or in the current debt, might have a large influence on the curriculum across the K-12 spectrum. Indeed, as a society we have not always seen a college education as necessary. For example, one hundred years ago, the ratio of 18-24-year-olds in college compared to all 18-24-year-olds was about 5 out of 100 (NCES, 1993).

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The Work of Teachers and Students

While the world around them is changing relatively fast, the work of teachers and students in schools is changing much more slowly. One of the ways we know that is that, thanks to the encouragement of Stanford University’s d.school K-12 Lab’s program, Shadow a Student Challenge (2020), teachers all over the world are now spending some time shadowing their students to see what their days are like. This is mostly happening in middle and senior high schools, where students change classes and interact with a variety of teachers who do not see them all day, as do elementary teachers.

One teacher who did this twice, in two different schools, found that the experience of high school students in those two schools was a shock to her. Five takeaways were:

Students sit all day and sitting is exhausting.

High school students are sitting passively and listening during approximately 90% of their classes.

You feel a little bit like a nuisance all day long, constantly being told to sit still and pay attention (Wiggins, 2014).

Teachers don’t really know their students because they only see them in one class; when she saw the students in action in all their classes, she had a better three-dimensional understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, their behavior in classes they really were interested in and vice versa.

In hands-on subjects like Physical Education, Yearbook, and Acting, motivation to complete tasks can be high because there is freedom to create and innovate, the success criteria are very clear, and the audience is authentic (Wiggins, 2018).

In this book, we’ve been recommending a variety of approaches to teaching, including collaborative projects, classes with a variety of activities in each class period, learning with rather than learning from teachers, and, in general, looking at teaching curriculum content as a matter of design thinking (Vande Zande, 2017), which is a solutions-based approach to solving problems. If students are lethargic, get them up and moving, even if only for 5 minutes. If students are clearly bored, suggest a problem in the subject they are studying, get them involved in finding the possible answer(s), discussing them, and creating a plan to implement them. If there is a wide disparity in achievement among the students, put the lower-achieving students in charge of administering the change.

Changing the work of teachers and students in the classroom can be engaging for everyone.

Knowledge as a Tool in the Classroom

In her now-classic study of the work fifth-grade children do in schools representing different social classes, Jean Anyon (1981) documented the role of curriculum in preparing students for different roles in life based on their social class. In general, for children in working-class schools, work is procedural and teacher-directed and involves little choice or decision making. For children in middle-class schools, work is demonstrated by getting the right answer, which is usually based on following directions. Accumulating right answers results in good grades. However, in middle-class schools, following directions often includes some figuring out, some choice, and some decision making. In upper- or professional-class schools, work is quite often carried out independently and involves creative and/or critical thinking. Suggesting that her study (and others) finds the nature of schoolwork is “tacit preparation for relating to the process of production in a particular way,” she noted that by emphasizing different cognitive and behavioral skills related to academic content, children are learning the expectations the society has with respect to their relation to authority and to work.

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In many ways, these distinctions are part of a “hidden” curriculum. The formal curriculum teaches little about the experiences of people living at either end of the social class scale, and teaches quite a bit about the experiences and worldview of middle-class America. The public school is, again, a middle-class institution.

What does seem to be the case, however, is a differentiation of actual content by social class along several dimensions: emphasis on “advanced” versus “basic” skills, emphasis on conceptual understanding, range and variety of academic tasks, degree of repetition, extent of topical coverage, and attention to “practical” or vocational knowledge (Knapp & Woolverton, 2003, p. 673). By the time students reach high school, selection into various “tracks” (e.g., college-bound, vocational, and commercial), can be fundamentally related to social class patterns, with the result that students from different social class backgrounds often leave public schooling with quite different educations. It is, in part, this phenomenon that the No Child Left Behind Act failed to effectively address, and that seems to continue under the Every Student Succeeds Act. When there is so much emphasis on testing, no one has time (or incentive!) to individualize schooling on the basis of the many kinds of diversity, including social class.

However, when knowledge (curriculum content) is used as a tool to help all students accomplish something in class—a project, a piece of writing, a forum, a proposal, a letter, and a piece of software—anything that engages the student in understanding a concept or a principle or a bit of history through using what is necessary from the knowledge base he or she is working with, will help weave that content into what the student already knows, sometimes changing it and sometimes enlarging it. This is usually called a constructivist approach and it supports using knowledge this way because its central idea is that learning is constructed by the learner and that prior knowledge influences what new or modified knowledge a student will “build” from new learning experiences.

Examples are legion. In American history class, create a newspaper report on the signing of the Declaration of Independence, with articles about the signers, about their original position on the matter of independence, about the major arguments pro and con, and about why Benjamin Franklin said, “We all hang together, or surely we will hang separately.” Or, in math class, pose the question, “What were the Islamic contributions to mathematics” and have students put together charts, or a PowerPoint on all the contributors. Or, in English or music (or both collaboratively), ask students to provide information on the background settings for The Man of LaMancha (Spain), Brigadoon (Scotland), Aladdin (Arabia), Oklahoma (United States), or The King and I (Thailand/Siam). Or, in social studies, involve the students in creating a national political convention when no more than 10 people are supposed to be in face-to-face groups.

In these and many other ways, students of all social classes can collaborate on questions or problems of interest. If students are really tired of small group work, organize these projects in terms of a “committee of the whole” idea, using the entire class.

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Evaluating the Results of Teaching and Learning

The stated goal of measuring student achievement in terms of standardized testing as put forth by both NCLB and ESSA is, in part, an effort to avoid the kind of differentiation of assessment by social class that has allowed many lower-class students to fall through the cracks of public education. For example, in Anyon’s (1980, 1981) study of fifth-grade classrooms in schools catering to different social classes, students in working-class schools tended to be evaluated on whether or not they had followed the correct steps rather than on whether or not their answers were correct. Middle-class students tended to be evaluated on whether they had done the assignment and “understood it.” In contrast, students in upper-class schools tended to be evaluated on their ability to think critically, express themselves well, and apply ideas and concepts.

One criticism of the one-size-fits-all use of standardized tests, as articulated by many critics (see, for example, Meier & Wood, 2004), is that judgments are made by comparing how much students know in 1 year (e.g., the fourth grade this year) with how much a different group of students (e.g., the fourth grade next year) know in other years. Increasingly, however, educators and planners are becoming interested in different approaches. Such changes are suggested, in part, because it is becoming increasingly clear that the skills needed in the 21st century may very well not be amenable to paper-and-pencil tests. For example, a government report even three decades ago (“What Work Requires of Schools,” 1991) suggested that the following skills would be needed in the workforce in the future: the ability to identify, analyze, plan, and allocate resources; the ability to work effectively with others; the ability to acquire and evaluate information; the ability to understand complex interrelationships; and the ability to work with a variety of technologies.

Jamie Grill/JGI/Blend Images LLC

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An analysis of six frameworks for 21st century skills lists 13 skills that the authors think are going to be necessary in this century: collaboration and teamwork, creativity and imagination, critical thinking, problem solving, flexibility and adaptability, global and cultural awareness, information literacy, leadership, civic literacy and citizenship, oral and written communication skills, social responsibility and ethics, technology literacy, and initiative (Potter, Whitener, & Sikorsky, 2014). These kinds of skills have several attributes in common:

They are not easily measured by standardized tests.

They are skills that are necessary when the society is changing rapidly and there are fewer familiar ways of responding to problems.

They take into account and we, as a society, are unsure what life will be like in 10 years, or 5 years, or even 1 year. For example, we were not anticipating a worldwide pandemic that put teachers and students out of school altogether.

Similarly, in her book, The Flat World and Education, Linda Darling-Hammond (2010) listed six sets of skills that are already required in the work world of the 21st century—the capacity to design, evaluate, and manage one’s own work so that it continually improves; frame, investigate, and solve problems using a wide range of tools and resources; collaborate strategically with others; communicate effectively in many forms; find, analyze, and use information for many purposes; and develop new products and ideas.

As more and more educators and policymakers have observed the need to create assessments that will better align with curriculum needs and will also provide students and teachers with deeper knowledge and more flexible approaches to the demonstration of that knowledge, teachers and learners are beginning to craft new ways of evaluating students’ work. Hopefully, this movement will gain strength, results will be shared, and teachers and students will, together, design a wide variety of new ways to measure students’ progress.

Perspectives on Stratification: Social Class and Social Status

Previous chapters have suggested that differences in school achievement may be attributed to a variety of cultural influences. Two of those influences are the economic and cultural aspects of social class and social status.

As a result of the major expansion of the American middle class in the early and middle years of the 20th century, many Americans believed that they lived in a society in which the opportunity to rise on the social and economic scales was open to anyone who wanted to work hard. Indeed, American ideology promotes the idea that through proper attention, diligent effort, and some luck (which Americans also believe in), an individual may “rise above” the social class into which he or she is born. Part of what has been called an “American religion” (Bellah, 1976), this faith in the reality of upward mobility may partially account for the relative lack of attention given to the concept of social class in much of the educational and psychological literature in the United States (Brislin, 1988).

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Certainly it accounts for the difficulty encountered by history, sociology, and education professors in helping young people understand the bases of class differences in this society. Nevertheless, as we all know, there are significant variations in economic standards of living, status of occupation, and extent of expectations for upward mobility among U.S. citizens. And, as we have learned in the first decades of the 21st century, there is growing inequality among America’s people: indeed, upper-income households have seen more rapid growth in income in the past 40 years, income growth has been most rapid for the top 5% of families, the wealth divide among upper-income families and middle- and lower-income families is sharp and rising, and the richest are getting richer faster (Pew Research Center, 2020).

Definitions of Social Class

Social class has been defined in a number of ways, all of which refer in some sense to a hierarchical stratification or “layering” of people in social groups, communities, and societies. Assignment to social class categories is one of several stratification systems that can be used to distinguish one individual or group from another in such a way as to assign “worth.” The urge to organize people in layers almost appears to be a human characteristic. Indeed, it has been said that whenever there are more than three people in a group there will be stratification; someone will be more respected, more powerful, or more “worthy” than the rest. Although many Americans would identify class membership in terms of income (Gilbert & Kahl, 1982), it is important to understand that money alone does not determine a person’s social class. Rather, social class standing depends on a combination of prestige, power, influence, and income (Webb & Sherman, 1989).

Traditional class markers in the United States include family income, prestige of one’s father’s or mother’s occupation, prestige of one’s neighborhood, the power one has to achieve one’s ends in times of conflict, and the level of schooling achieved by one’s parents. Among other nations and cultures, markers of one’s social class may include such determiners as bloodline and status of the family name, the caste into which one was born, the degree to which one engages in physical labor, and the amount of time that one might devote to scholarly or leisurely activities of one’s choosing (Brislin, 1988).

One reason that social class is so difficult to talk about and truly understand is that while class distinctions are real and observable in concrete daily experience, they are also highly abstract. It is no accident that social class categories are mostly “assigned” by others (often sociologists), for social class in the real world is often in the eyes of the beholder.

Nevertheless, for purposes of analysis, American society can be divided into five social classes. At the top is a very small upper class, or social elite, consisting of people who have generally inherited social and economic privilege from others. Second is a somewhat larger upper-middle class whose members often are professionals, corporate managers, and leading scientists. This group usually has benefited from extensive higher education, and while family history is not so important, manners, tastes, and patterns of behavior are. The third (or middle) social class is generally comprised of people employed in white-collar occupations earning middle incomes—small business owners, teachers, social workers, nurses, sales and clerical workers, bank tellers, and so forth. This class has been the largest of the social classes in the United States (at least until recent years) and encompasses a wide range of occupations and incomes. Central to the values of the “typical” middle class is a “desire to belong and be respectable … friendliness and openness are valued and attention is paid to ‘keeping up appearances’” (Webb & Sherman, 1989, p. 407).

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Fourth in the hierarchy of social class is the working or lower middle class, whose members have been largely blue-collar workers (industrial wage earners) or employees in low-paid service occupations. Working-class families often have to struggle with poor job security, limited fringe benefits, longer hours of work, and more dangerous or “dirtier” work than people in the classes above them. It is not surprising, then, that members of the working class often feel more alienation from the social mainstream. Finally, fifth in the hierarchy is the lower class, which includes both the so-called working poor and those who belong to what has been termed the underclass—a designation that refers to people who have been in poverty for so long that they seem unable to take any advantage at all of mobility options and thus lie nearly outside the class system. Clearly, poverty is both the chief characteristic and the chief problem of this group.

Changes in the Definition of Social Class

As the American economy has become more and more global, as many of the manufacturing jobs that once powered the growth of the middle class are moved abroad, and as new technologies have both eliminated traditional kinds of work (think of the small dairy farmer in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, now being replaced by agribusiness dairy farms) and created the need for highly skilled people who can use technology to solve problems on a global scale and with global collaboration, new possibilities of social stratification have come into play. These have not been set in stone as yet, but there are interesting conceptions being put forth by economic thinkers.

Robert B. Reich, former secretary of labor under President Clinton, was one of the first to set out some new categories similar to class, but based on what work they did (Reich, 1992). His three categories were:

Routine producers, which included not only manufacturing (or “blue collar” workers) but also “white collar” data processors, and primary care physicians who provided “routine” medical care and sent more complicated cases to specialists.

In-person servers, which included not only restaurant, hotel, and retail workers, but also librarians, and those who serve the rapidly growing elderly population as nurses, home health care workers, and nursing home staff.

Symbolic analysts, which included a relatively new group of people, knowledge workers who manipulate symbols for a living, such as scientists, engineers, journalists, investment people, bankers, consultants, and (maybe) college professors.

While these three categories do not easily replace traditional social class categories, they do suggest a major shift in thinking about stratification systems that may very well lead to new definitions of social class. Furthermore, the notion of the precariat as an emerging “class-like” global phenomenon may help to explain some of the social disruption that we see on the front pages of our newspapers today. It seems well worth watching.

The Precariat

A much more recent view is taken by the British economist, Guy Standing, who not only changes the names of identified classes, but asserts that the world is witnessing the emergence of an altogether new class. He calls this class “the precariat” (Standing, 2016).

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Observing enormous structural changes brought about by globalization, Standing proposes five levels of stratification in contemporary societies:

At the very top, a tiny number of wealthy elite global citizens able to influence governments everywhere and to indulge in munificent philanthropic gestures (p. 8).

Next to the elite is the salariat, concentrated in large corporations, government agencies, and public administration, living in stable, full-time employment, with pensions, paid holidays, and other benefits, often subsidized by the state (p. 6).

Next to the salariat comes the proficians, a term that combines the traditional ideas of “professional” and “technician” but covers those with bundles of skills that they can market, earning high incomes on contract, as consultants or independent own-account workers. They live with the expectation and desire to move around, without an impulse for long-term, full-time employment in a single enterprise. Contemporary examples might be college professors, or information technologists who move from employer to employer, or work for themselves (p. 7).

Below the proficians is a shrinking “core” of manual employees, the essence of the old “working class.” Built for them were the welfare states and systems of labor regulation. But the millions of industrial laborers who formed great unions have shriveled and lost their sense of solidarity (except perhaps, in the United States; teachers who still support and are supported by teachers’ unions, although they are under continual attack from other sectors in the society).

Below these four groups is emerging the growing precariat, which has class characteristics. It consists of people who lack both employment and job security, and income vulnerability. In addition, they lack a work-based identity. Examples of the varied people who occupy the precariat might be the teenager who flits in and out of the Internet café while surviving on fleeting jobs; or the migrant who uses his wits to survive, networking feverishly while worrying about the police; the single mother fretting where the money for next week’s food bill is coming from; or the man in his 60s who takes casual jobs to pay his medical bills (pp. 11–15).

Both the stratification concepts of Reich and Standing break down or interrupt the traditional notion of upper, middle, and lower class designations that have been very popular and relatively accurate ways of describing class in industrial societies. But in a “knowledge” society, a “global” society, and a “postindustrial” society—these designations may be fluid—growing or diminishing as social circumstances change. What is reasonably clear is that our ideas of social class are changing, along with our ideas about most things that we’ve grown up with. Neither Reich nor Standing has succeeded in re-naming or re-describing social class in the 21st century, but they are probably harbingers of those to come.

Furthermore, it is quite likely that the prospects for individuals to move up or down in the social structure have themselves declined, thus placing an arrow at the heart of one of the most treasured American ideas—that the next generation will do better than the current one. Indeed, a 2015 Pew Research Poll brought the news that the proportion of the American population in the middle class has declined; while membership in both the lower and upper classes has grown. According to the Pew study, in 2015, 20% of American adults were in the lowest income tier, up from 16% in 1971. On the opposite side, 9% were in the upper tier, more than double the 4% share in 1971. At the same time, the shares of adults in the lower-middle or upper-middle income tiers were nearly unchanged (Pew, 2015).

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Given the changes in both ideas of social class and changes in family structure, it is well for teachers and other educators to think seriously about what a rise in poverty, the diminishing of optimism, and the very real threat to the American consumer economy in lower consumer confidence and the absence of discretionary income means for the educational enterprise.

Social Stratification in a Global Context

Perhaps the best way to think about global stratification is to envision three categories of nations, organized by their degree of wealth or poverty, their level of industrialization, the size of their economies, and other related factors (Barkan, 2017).

After World War II, the favorite way of classifying the nations of the world was First World, Second World, and Third World. The First World consisted of the nations of North America, Europe, Japan, and other English-speaking countries around the world. The Second World consisted of the nations of the Soviet Union. The Third World consisted of all the rest, nearly all of them from Central and South America, Africa, and Asia. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, these terms fell into disuse.

Subsequently, for a while the classification system labeled all nations either developed, developing, or undeveloped, but these terms were deemed too hierarchical, and have also begun to fall out of favor. Today, a growing terminology ranks nations into the classification system as wealthy (or high-income) nations, middle-income (upper and lower middle) nations, and poor (or low-income nations). In the end, most important differences among nations—military might, economies, educational and cultural production, scientific status—come from the degree of wealth they have.

Wealthy nations are the most industrialized nations. Although wealthy nations constitute only about one-fifth of the world’s population, they hold about four-fifths of the world’s entire wealth. They are the leading nations in industry, high finance, and information technology. Although each of the world’s wealthy nations is internally stratified to a greater or lesser degree, these nations as a group live a much more comfortable existence than middle-income nations and, especially, poor nations. People in wealthy nations are more educated and healthier, and they enjoy longer lives. At the same time, wealthy nations use up more than their fair share of the world’s natural resources, and their high level of industrialization causes them to pollute and otherwise contribute to climate change to a far greater degree than is true of nations in the other two categories (Barkan, 2017).

Middle income nations have less industry than wealthy nations but more than poor nations. Much of Central and South America, Eastern Europe, and parts of Africa and Asia constitute the upper and lower middle-income nations, and they make up about one third of the world’s population. Poor nations have the least industry, and are the largest agricultural nations. This category encompasses much of Africa and parts of Asia, and consists of about half of the world’s population.

The effects of global stratification are many, including the differences it makes in health and illness, infant mortality, life expectancy, and other life chances. As the distribution of resources becomes more and more unequal the well-being of human beings also becomes unequal. As it does with individuals, when nations experience inequality in resources, their populations suffer. Access to necessary resources—food, housing, the stories of their heritage, work, and particularly, education has life-long consequences for both individuals and societies (Global Stratification and Inequality, 2017).

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Social Status

As discussed in Chapter 3, the term social status refers to a hierarchical position determined not so much by one’s wealth (or lack of it) but by the prestige, social esteem, and honor accorded one within one’s own social milieu. It is quite possible, in fact, to have high social status without having commensurate income. Members of the clergy are good examples of this condition, as are, quite often, teachers. Conversely, it is also possible to have a great deal of money but occupy a low-status position, at least in terms of general community norms, for example, drug lords and leaders of gangs.

In the social hierarchy of schools, individual students usually achieve high status because of roles they assume, such as star athlete, academic achiever, cheerleading captain, and so forth. Interestingly, the social status of a particular student often differs from the point of view of students and of teachers. Thus students may often accord athletes with high status, whereas teachers generally accord high status to students who achieve well academically. In neither case are economic considerations necessarily predominant, or even present.

While social status has never been thought to be particularly important—indeed, it has been largely hidden!—in schools, there is a new definition of status that may have some bearing on students and teachers. On Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, “status” seems to mean something like “the state you (or one of your friends) is in at the moment of posting.” And, in any case, most school-age students have left Facebook to their parents and moved on to Tik Tok and Instagram. But the idea of status is still temporary at best.

Thus, the meaning of status shifts from being a social, collective, shared set of characteristics to being an individual, always changing, relatively whimsical action, belief, feeling, or thought. Given the ubiquity of Twitter, Tik Tok, and Instagram among students, however, one can speculate that the notion of a static “status” based on social prestige may be losing traction in favor of a dynamic, self-renewing, self-defining individual state that is, nevertheless, shared by countless “friends”—perhaps all over the world.

All of which, of course, is not to say that social class and at least several degrees of social status don’t necessarily go hand in hand. To the extent, for example, that teachers believe that middle- and upper-middle-class students will achieve more than working and lower-class students, such expectations are often reflected in reality.

Perspectives on Teaching and Evaluation in the Context of Social Class

As noted in Chapter 4, students in schools not only bring their class identities to school with them, but also define themselves by creating in-school groups with which they identify. Like social class, these in-groups are usually hierarchical—which ones are “on top,” and which are lower on the social ladder vary from school to school, but they are very powerful. Indeed, one way to help students understand the concept of social class in the larger society is to ask them about these groups in their school. Further, ask them how easy or difficult it is to move from one group to another. Teachers, too, are aware of their students’ “place” in the social hierarchy, both in-school and out-of-school, and—often unwittingly—associate a student’s “place” with their own expectations.

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The Importance of Teacher Expectations

Teacher expectations regarding the possibilities and potential of academic success for individual students are a critical factor in student achievement. Teacher expectation refers to the attributions that teachers make about the future behavior or academic achievement of their students, based on what they presently know about them. Teacher expectation effects refer to student outcomes that occur because of the actions taken by teachers in response to their own expectations (Good & Brophy, 1987).

Erik Isakson/Blend Images LLC

An important type of teacher expectation is the self-fulfilling prophecy. In this effect, a false or untrue belief leads to specific behavior that causes that expectation to become true. For instance, if false rumors begin to spread that the stock market is going to crash and if millions of people then rush to sell off their stock holdings, the market may in fact crash. The outcome, however, is not due to any event that was predicted accurately but because people responded to the false information that was rumored.

In the classroom setting, teachers may tell themselves about the potential for success or failure of the students in their charge. For instance, assume that a teacher looks at her roster for the upcoming year and sees that she will have in her classroom a particular student, named Sasha, whose sister, Kristina, was in her classroom 2 years earlier. Assume further that Kristina had a difficult year. Not only did she struggle academically, but (perhaps as a result of academic failure) she also had behavior problems. This teacher, vividly remembering her problems with Kristina, may expect that Sasha will repeat the pattern. When Sasha walks into the classroom at the start of the year, the teacher may greet her in a cool manner, may be hesitant to approach her, and may even avoid personal contact with her as much as possible. Such behavior on the part of the teacher may alienate Sasha, may make her feel as if she doesn’t belong, and may generate many feelings of anxiety and uncertainty. These feelings may, in turn, result in certain acting-out behaviors on Sasha’s part. The teacher may then have set the stage for a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Just the opposite can also be true. A teacher may, for whatever reason, believe a certain child will be a good student when in fact he or she may be just about average. This belief may translate into particular actions on the part of the teacher that demonstrate care and concern and an expectation of success to the student. The teacher may call on this particular student to read more than other students, may trust this student with particular responsibilities, and may afford greater attention and privilege to this student, which may, in turn, result in increased gains in achievement. This outcome may not have happened if the teacher did not have high expectations for this student.

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The Culturally Responsive Teacher

Although Americans are not used to thinking (or talking) about social class as a cultural category, it is relatively easy to think about the relationship between social class and school achievement because there is so much data on the subject, particularly with respect to poverty. Nevertheless, there is a class aspect of culture observable in different forms in both rural and urban settings around the world. In the United States, we might think of all but middle-class children as living in “another country,” from which, at age 5, they are suddenly transported every day to a highly middle-class setting—the school—where they are expected to not only have but also honor the knowledge, attitudes, and values of this new place. This conception is as true for upper-class children as it is for lower-class children, although many upper-class children attend private rather than public schools, in part for this very reason.

For the culturally responsive teacher, however, any aspect of a student’s social context—class, race, ethnicity, gender, language, and so forth—is important to note and to take into consideration when planning instruction as well as assessment. Villegas and Lucas (2007) listed six characteristics of a culturally responsive teacher:

They understand how their learners construct knowledge. They are interested in how students connect new knowledge to prior knowledge and beliefs, and help students “build bridges between what they already know about a topic and what they need to learn about it” (p. 29).

They learn about their students’ lives. To understand how learners construct knowledge, culturally responsive teachers make it a point to learn about their students’ family makeup, their interests, concerns, strengths, and problem-solving strategies.

They are socioculturally conscious, defined as “the awareness that a person’s worldview is not universal but is profoundly influenced by life experiences, as mediated by a variety of factors, including race, ethnicity, gender, and social class” (p. 31).

They hold affirming views about diversity rather than having a deficit perspective. This is especially important when it is related to the idea of self-fulfilling prophesies because the expectations of teachers are critical to student success.

They use appropriate instructional strategies such as “asking them to discuss what they know about a given topic … embedding new ideas and skills in projects that are meaningful to the students … and … using pertinent examples and analogies from students’ lives” (p. 32).

They are advocates for all students, thus “seeing themselves as part of a community of educators working to make schools more equitable for all students” (p. 32).

As Villegas and Lucas (2007) noted, “Teaching is an ethical activity and teachers have an ethical obligation to help all students learn” (p. 32).

The Debate on Multiple Forms of Assessment: Demand vs. Support

The belief that all children can and should learn is, in essence, at the heart of the idea of multiple forms of assessment. A number of scholars have looked at ways in which this philosophical position can be translated into classroom practice.

Kohn (1999) suggested that certain classroom orientations distinguish between what we as educators expect that students ought to be able to do and how we as educators can support students’ development, thereby helping them to learn. He called these opposing approaches “demand” versus “support.”

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In the demand model, students are perceived as workers who are obligated to do a better job. Students who do not succeed are said to have chosen not to study or not to have earned a given grade. Under such an approach, responsibility is removed from the teacher and attention is deflected away from the curriculum and the context under which learning is meant to occur. In reporting to parents, teachers state whether students did what they were supposed to do. Even programs that reportedly emphasize performance objectives often adopt such an approach under the guise of the common buzzword—outcomes. Unfortunately, in the context of the demand model, many working- and lower-class students appear to choose not to study and thus earn lower grades.

The support model, on the other hand, assumes that students are active contributors to the learning process, or as Nichols and Hazzard (1993) put it, the “adventure of ideas.” Under such an approach, the teacher has a major responsibility to guide and stimulate all students’ natural curiosity and desire to learn and explore the unfamiliar, to construct meaning in their world, and to develop the competence for using words, numbers, and ideas. Teaching and learning become child-centered or student-centered, and the goal becomes helping students build on their desire to make sense of, and to become competent in, their world. Student evaluation becomes, in part, a way to determine how effective we have been as educators. We seek to measure improvement in students because it indicates that we have been successful in engaging students and in creating a context in which they become motivated. Assessment, then, becomes supportive.

Kohn (1999) offered five principles of assessment that follow a supportive model:

1. Assessment should not be overdone

The United States seems to be a test-happy nation, and American young people are the most tested in the world. When students become preoccupied with how they are doing, they begin to lose interest in what they are doing. An excessive concern with performance can erode curiosity and thus reduce the quality of performance. Students excessively concerned with their performance may tend to avoid difficult tasks so they can avoid any negative evaluation.

2. The best evidence we have of whether we are succeeding as educators is to observe the behavior of children

Test scores only tell us if students perform well on that specific test. Most tests are not true indicators of a student’s subsequent ability to perform a specific task. When we observe children actively engaged in dialogue or conversation about a given topic, seeking out answers to their own questions, or reading on their own, we know that we have sparked their interest and that skills are often subsequently acquired.

3. Schools must be transformed into caring, safe communities

Such characteristics are critical for helping students become good learners willing to take risks and seek guidance and support. Only when there is no fear of humiliation or punitive judgment will children be free to acknowledge their mistakes and take the guidance of others. When the environment stresses grades and standardized testing or when teachers feel that a certain amount of curriculum must be covered, pressures increase and, subsequently, learning diminishes.

4. Any responsible discussion about assessment must attend to the quality of the curriculum

The easy question to answer is whether the student has learned anything. The more difficult question to answer is whether the student has been given something worth learning. Research has supported the notion that good teachers already know. That is, when students have interesting things to do, artificial inducements to boost their achievement are not necessary. If the need to evaluate students has directed the design of the curriculum, students will not be actively engaged in their learning.

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5. Students must become part of the discussion in determining the criteria by which their work will be judged and then play a role in that judgment

Such participation gives students greater control over their own education, makes evaluation feel less punitive, and provides an important learning experience in and of itself.

To the extent that educators consider adapting both instructional and assessment strategies in such a way that all children are encouraged and supported in their learning, the public schools will truly continue to be what they have always been in the United States—a place where doors open to children who may not even know those doors are there, and a boost up the social class ladder. As Lugg (2005) noted about the theme of The American Dream and the Public Schools by Jennifer Hochschild and Nathan Scovronick, “regardless of the numerous flaws, public schools are essential to maintaining a vital U.S. democracy, as well as ensuring that the pursuit of the American dream is available for all.”

Social Class and School Funding

One of the most visible ways in which social class is evident with respect to schooling is the result of the American system of funding public schools. Public schooling is a responsibility of the states, and the states have traditionally turned over control of school finances to local districts, which generally fund schools through taxing property. As local districts vary widely in the value of their property, the ability to raise money for education also varies widely. Although most states also have some sort of funding formula through which state money is allocated to local districts, and although federal funding is still available for specific programs in schools (e.g., Title I, special education), it is still the case that the value of local property sets the parameters for how much funding is available for public schools at the local level.

In the past five decades, numerous court cases have been filed in both state and federal courts seeking in one way or another to change the way in which schools are funded. In one of the earliest cases, Serrano v. Priest (1971), the California Supreme Court declared that the state’s dependence on property taxes to support schools was a violation of equal protection principles in the state constitution. In response, the state legislature put a cap on potential revenues in wealthy districts and increased state aid to poorer districts. Some say that this decision contributed to the California tax revolt of 1978, which resulted in the passage of Proposition 13, an amendment to the state constitution that reduced property taxes by 57% and drastically cut funding for public services, notably, public schools.

In the Rodriguez case in Texas (San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, 1973), the school district argued that using the property tax as the basis for school funding disadvantaged poor children because poor districts didn’t have the tax base that wealthier districts had. Thus, the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law, had been violated. The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed, stating that since there is no federal constitutional right to education, and since the Texas system did not discriminate systematically against all poor people, the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was not violated. The amendment, it was noted, did not require absolute equality.

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These cases did not end the battle for changes in school funding policy. As of 2014 (National Association of State Legislators, 2017), only five states have not filed court cases challenging school funding policies, and only seven have not had such cases decided. In general, these cases have had decidedly mixed results. A more successful outcome was experienced in Kentucky (Rose v. Council for Better Education, 1989), when the Kentucky Supreme Court affirmed a lower court decision that found:

that the system of school financing provided for by the General Assembly is inadequate; places too much emphasis on local school board resources; and results in inadequacies, inequities, and inequalities throughout the state so as to result in an inefficient system of common school education in violation of Kentucky Constitution, Sections 1, 3, and 183 and the equal protection clause and the due process of law clause of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. Additionally the complaint maintains the entire system is not efficient under the mandate of Section 183.

Hopes for the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)

In 1965, when the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act was passed as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society legislation (also known as the War on Poverty), there was great excitement among the population that schools would have the opportunity to really address the effects of poverty on poor children. Title I provided major funding for special reading and math teachers. Title II provided funding for school libraries, particularly audio-visual resources, textbooks, and other instructional materials (and perhaps the beginning of the conversion of school libraries into media centers). Title III provided funds for innovation, at its time the greatest federal investment in innovation ever made in the United States. The idea of Title III was to develop innovative ways of teaching and curriculum development that improved learning and then sharing those ideas with other schools through the National Diffusion Network. That idea also appeared in the form of charter schools in the 1980s, which were originally envisioned as schools that were free to innovate and share new models and methods (Elementary and Secondary Education Act—ESEA, 2001).

Through a succession of reauthorizations, culminating in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, there has been a steady growth in federal funding and federal authority associated with the original law. There has also been a continuing debate about the value of such federal involvement. President Johnson thought that only the deep resources of the federal government were sufficient to make meaningful changes in learning for poor children. Others thought from the beginning that such governmental largess was welfare and would not only greatly enlarge the size of the government but also start a cycle of dependence among the American population. They also pointed out that there is no provision in the Constitution for education: it “belongs to the states.”

In the 55 years since the first Elementary and Secondary Education Act, provisions have been added (programs for migrant, neglected, or delinquent children, the Bilingual Education Act), changed (Title I, various regulations involving funding requirements), and removed (the Bilingual Education Act). Over time, the policies governing the relationship between the federal government and schooling have been susceptible to political winds—sometimes taking funding directly from the federal government and sometimes moving it to the states. Today, the Every Student Succeeds Act is more fully controlled by local districts and states rather than the federal government.

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According to summaries of the law (Education Week, 2016), the Every Student Succeeds Act lifts much of the federal government’s “heavy” hand on education policy. States still have to submit accountability plans that include a variety of goals, both long and short term, and several kinds of indicators that those goals have been met. However, states will decide how much each indicator will be weighted.

States still have to test students in reading and math in grades 3–8, once in high school, and break down data by subgroups of students. Districts can use nationally recognized tests such as the ACT or the SAT for the high school test. Initially, up to seven states may apply to the U.S. Department of Education for permission to try out local tests (or other kinds of assessments) for a limited time.

States are required to adopt “challenging” standards; those might be the Common Core State standards but do not have to be. In addition, the U.S. Secretary of Education cannot force, or even suggest, a particular set of standards for any state. Accountability for English-language learners moves from Title III to Title I, where all other accountability measures are. Only 1% of students overall can be given alternative tests, which is about 10% of special education students.

Teachers will no longer be evaluated on the basis of student outcomes. There will be specific funds to support experiments with a variety of teacher improvement measures, and resources to help teachers receive further education in literacy and STEM.

Finally, ESSA has consolidated many separate programs into a $1.6 billion block grant to states, turned the Preschool Development Grant into law, and created a new evidence-based research and innovation program similar to one that already existed.

All in all, there seems to be hope that ESSA will correct the excesses of No Child Left Behind, and, at the same, provide considerably more flexibility for teachers, schools, districts, and states to adjust curriculum, teaching, and assessments to local culture and local conditions. Clearly, high school science teacher Ben Webster is holding out a lot of hope for the future!

Ethical Issues

Regardless of the specific means of communicating performance to others, assessment is inherently a subjective process. Ornstein (1994) suggested that the more detailed the reporting method and the more analytic the process, the more likely it is that subjectivity will influence the results. Subjectivity, however, is not always a negative factor. After all, teachers who truly know their students understand their progress in far greater detail than any test might uncover.

It is when subjectivity turns into bias that educators get into trouble. Teachers’ perceptions and subsequent expectations can significantly influence their judgments of scholastic performance. Students with behavior problems, for instance, often face the obstacle that their infractions will overshadow their performance. These effects are especially evident with boys. Such aspects as a student’s handwriting, dress, family background, and so forth can all influence a teacher’s judgment.

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The official labeling of children and identification of cognitive difficulties happens chiefly in the elementary years. Public schools typically label children as mentally retarded when their measured IQ is below 79. Children with African American and Spanish surnames are more likely to score below 79 than are European American counterparts and subsequently are more likely to be placed in special education classes. Children with African American and Spanish surnames are overlabeled as mentally retarded by public agencies; European Americans are underlabeled when compared to the general population. Such a situation suggests that educators are using tools of analysis that favor some students over others or that actively discriminate against some groups. The special education literature is replete with evidence of individuals wrongfully identified as in need of special education services when all that was really at issue was their inability to communicate as expected in the English language at the time the exam was administered. How many children have been cheated or wrongfully labeled as failures because of an inadequate means of assessment?

Imagine, for a moment, that you are viewing the files of the following two students. What kinds of judgments would you make about these children? What kind of academic program would you recommend? Would you expect them to fit in with your regular class program? Would you suggest any special intervention, such as special classes for gifted or handicapped students? Would you recommend any extracurricular activities that would help develop special skills in these children?

Sam Edder did not begin speaking until he was 3 years old. He has always had trouble with school, often remaining withdrawn and unsociable. He was even removed from school at one time because of his emotional instability. Sam’s test scores are well below average except for his performance on creativity measures. In this area he shows some potential. Other than reading intently and playing a musical instrument, Sam seems to have few interests and expresses little in the way of personal or vocational goals. Sam’s parents are of European descent, with high school educations.

Bill Ridell has never spent much time in school. He started late because of an illness and was withdrawn several times because of continued sickness. Bill has been labeled “backward” by school officials. He has suffered from a variety of ailments and is going deaf. Although his creative performance shows some promise, Bill’s IQ score is low (81), as are his scores on other achievement indices. However, Bill enjoys building things and mechanical pursuits, has good manual dexterity, and would like someday to be a scientist or railroad mechanic. Although Bill’s mother is well educated, his father has no formal schooling and is unemployed.

What do you think? What judgments are you able to make about these two children, given this descriptive information? As a teacher, what other information would you like to have? How might you go about working with these children?

This exercise can be used to check the accuracy of your attributions as well as the assumptions you are making. The descriptions of Sam Edder and Bill Ridell are actually case studies of real people. Sam Edder’s file is that of Albert Einstein and Bill Ridell’s is that of Thomas Edison. How quickly did you make faulty attributions about the potential for success of these students? How many other potential geniuses have been overlooked or have slipped through the cracks because of our narrow approaches to assessing and judging students?

Increasingly, teachers are searching for more effective ways to communicate performance to both students and parents. Many issues converge as we consider what it is, exactly, that we wish to communicate to others. Clearly, it is well to remember that—as is the case with all forms of student and teacher differences—social class differences require that attention be paid to subtle and often relatively invisible beliefs and values. Because the United States professes to be a classless society doesn’t make it so; inde ed, the combination of ethnicity and social class may, in the end, give us our most perplexing and most important problems.

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Critical Incident

The Pull of Home

Beth Thomas, one of Ben’s students who had gone on to the university in Burlington to major in Environment Science, was homesick for her small town life and confused by all the strange ways of the university. She was ready to leave the place that enormous amounts of student loans had let her leave home to attend. The last straw had been when her roommate’s car had been broken into and robbed of nearly $500 of clothing, cosmetics, and cash. Beth’s roommate told her father that she’d lost $1,000 worth of belongings, and her dad had quickly sent her a check to cover the losses. The check arrived just as Beth was leaving for her job waiting tables in one of the university dining halls, and her roommate was leaving to buy a satisfyingly large batch of new clothes.

Beth’s younger sister came to see Ben, begging him to write to Beth to encourage her to stay in college. He agreed to write, although he didn’t think it would mean much.

If you were Ben, what would you say in such a letter?

 

Too Much Traveling2

Tommy’s dad is a career Army soldier, and Tommy is a quintessential “Army brat,” having lived in 10 places in 20 years. Although he has gotten used to the traveling, he has had a hard time adjusting to the sharp changes in his social status that come with each move. Until the age of 10 he was oblivious to class differences, but when he hit middle school, he began to notice how he was perceived by others.

For a while the family lived in a small town in western Pennsylvania, where Tommy’s father, a colonel, was considered part of the local elite. Tommy fondly remembers country club parties with his friends who were the sons and daughters of the local banker and lawyer. But then his father was posted to the Pentagon, where colonels are a dime a dozen. He moved to rental housing in a Virginia suburb and felt excluded from the golden inner circle at his new high school. The family couldn’t get into the “best” country club, his clothes seemed out of fashion, and he developed a sense of resentment that had begun to erode his relationship with his parents.

Tommy struck up the beginnings of a friendship with his social studies teacher, Mr. Gordon. One day after school, he told Mr. Gordon some of what was bothering him.

If you were Mr. Gordon, what might you do to help Tommy understand what he is experiencing?

What advice might you give Tommy to help him feel that he “belongs” in the new environment?

 

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Summary

In this chapter we explored the concepts of social class and social status nationally and globally in terms of their relation to schooling—to its curriculum, both hidden and explicit, to the ways in which schools are funded, and to its implications for the Every Student Succeeds Act, particularly in terms of assessment. Social class is difficult to discuss in the United States because the American “story” presupposes that one’s social class is not important—one can always rise up the social ladder by keeping one’s “nose to the grindstone.”

The degree to which this is not as easy as it sounds is a pervasive theme in the chapter, and the role of assessment is presented as a critical part of both the debate and the substance of school reform issues today. Arguments for and against standardized testing and the arguments for the use of multiple forms of assessment are presented as subjects for discussion, and suggestions are made for a model of supportive assessment as an approach that will help all students learn.

Key Terms

Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)

social class

social status

teacher expectations

working poor

underclass

Institutional Discrimination: Social Class in Focus

Purpose: To distinguish between individual and institutional practices that may discriminate against certain social classes.

Instructions: Institutional discrimination refers to policies and practices of institutions that allow certain discriminatory practices to persist. In this exercise you are presented with a number of situations and are asked to determine if these policies or practices systematically privilege members of certain groups while discriminating against members of other groups. Complete the three questions that follow for each situation that you determine to be an example of institutional discrimination.

Children of teachers employed in this private school receive free tuition. Is this an example of discrimination?

Against which groups, if any, might this policy discriminate?

What is the purpose of the policy?

If the purpose is valid, how else might it be achieved?

A local religious school offers reduced tuition for members of its faith. Is this an example of discrimination?

Against which groups, if any, might this policy discriminate?

What is the purpose of the policy?

If the purpose is valid, how else might it be achieved?

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Because a recent school levy failed, a new school policy states that children who wish to participate in sports or musical performing groups must pay for their own uniforms. Is this an example of discrimination?

Against which groups, if any, might this policy discriminate?

What is the purpose of the policy?

If the purpose is valid, how else might it be achieved?

A teacher awards 10 points out of 100 to boys who wear a jacket and tie and to girls who wear a full-length dress during an oral presentation as part of the final grade in a business speech class. Is this an example of discrimination?

Against which groups, if any, might this policy discriminate?

What is the purpose of the policy?

If the purpose is valid, how else might it be achieved?

Classroom Activities

Engage elementary school students in a discussion of what they understand about a classmate’s circumstances from looking at what they wear. In order to make it less “personal” in the class, a teacher might want to use pictures of students of the same age in various kinds of dress. List their reactions on the board, and discuss, being sure to include in the discussion the notion that some students really don’t pay much attention to what they wear, or don’t much care what others think. Then, ask students whether or not a school dress code might be helpful to children whose families could not afford to buy them many clothes, or to follow the “in” styles that change so often in children’s clothing. Ask students to list pros and cons of a dress code.

Ask students in a high school classroom to discuss the assessments they are familiar with from their own experiences in school. Do they think these assessments actually measure what they know? Which of the various types of assessments (e.g., multiple choice, essay, short answer questions) do they think produce a good representation of their knowledge and skills? Ask them “why” or “why not”? Engage students in a discussion of alternate forms of assessment, for example, portfolio, oral, knowledge application. Do students think alternate forms of assessment should be included in the assessment mix? Ask students to research various forms of assessment and bring findings back to the classroom. What do they conclude?

It is very difficult to discuss social class in the United States, because most people believe that they are “middle class” or will soon become so. One way to get the idea of social stratification across to high school students is to ask students to describe the informal but identifiable social “groups” in their school and who “belongs” to each group. Write the names of these groups on the board as they come in from the students. Then ask students to rank these groups in terms of which are “better” or “worse” to be identified with. Then ask students how easy or difficult it would be for a member of a “lower” group to “move up” to a more prestigious group. Discuss this phenomenon in terms of social class and social status in the wider society.

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Reflective Questions

1. How is rural poverty different from what you know about urban poverty?

2. How might tests be an impediment to effective instruction (i.e., instruction that results in student learning)?

3. A common criticism of multiple forms of assessment is that two teachers using the same assessment procedures may arrive at different evaluations of students’ achievement. Assuming that this criticism has some validity, how might conditions be set so that variation in teachers’ evaluations might be minimized?