Week 3 critical discussion

SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

THEORY, and CULTURAL & SOCIAL

CAPITAL Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld

[email protected]

SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

THEORY

Early Exponents

Samuel Bowles Herbert Gintis

SOCIAL REPRODUCTION THEORY

The theory that schools reproduce the social inequities, especially in terms of socioeconomic class and race, that exist in the larger society.

SOCIAL REPRODUCTION THEORY: School Practices

A. Tracking B. Ability Grouping C. Teacher Expectations D. Counseling Methods E. Unequal Funding

Expenditures

A. TRACKING

A practice found primarily in middle and high schools, divides students into separate and often distinct curricula “tracks.”

“Schools…have a habit of focusing on a select group of students to be groomed for college. Separating students into vocational or college prep classes may be an obvious way to narrow the focus of education, but it also takes away from a student’s self-determination. Not only is it detrimental to the student who is told he [or she] is not ‘college material,’ it can also hurt the student who is told that being a mechanic or working with wood is beneath him [or her].”

Jamie Timmons, Education Student (2002)

“STEREOTYPE VULNERABILITY”

When students of color fear conforming to the myth of intellectual inferiority. They, therefore, decrease their academic efforts in an attempt to protect themselves psychologically from the potentially devastating prospects of trying hard with poor results.

Claude Steele, Professor of Psychology

Stanford University

B. ABILITY GROUPING

Like tracking, ability grouping places students into different classes or groups within a given class based on their abilities. The student’s abilities are determined by a combination of teacher assessment and standardized testing.

“Often, the family income of students parallels the levels of ability grouping and tracking. That is, the higher the family income of the students, the more likely it is that they will be in the higher ability groups or a college-preparatory curriculum. Conversely, the lower the family income of the students, the more likely it is that they will be in the lower ability groups or the vocational curriculum.”

Joel Spring (2002, p. 17)

C. TEACHER EXPECTATIONS

Teachers and other school officials often expect students to act and respond in certain stereotypical ways, often dependent on the students’ socioeconomic and ethnic or racial backgrounds—the “self- fulfilling prophesy.”

Charles & Massey (2003) Survey of 3,924 College Students

“[B]lack people are rated most negatively on traits that are consistent with American racial ideology. White, Latino, and Asian students are all likely to perceive blacks as violence-prone and poor. They also rate black people more negatively than themselves in traits like lazy, unintelligent, and preferring welfare dependence.”

School failure of students of color can be, at least partially, explained by looking at clashes between the students’ cultural background and the dominant culture reflected in the classroom.

McDermott (1997)

Teacher’s expectations, prejudices, and biases have influenced their special education referral decisions of students of color.

Harry (1992)

Percent of White Teachers

1988: 90%

1995: 87%

2000: 90%

2012: 82%

2018: 80%

• U.S.: 51% Students of Color • Significant Number of All Schools Have

NO Teachers of Color

D. COUNSELING METHODS

Counseling methods, by teachers as well as guidance counselors, very often depends on the socioeconomic and/or ethnic or racial background of the students and their parents.

E. UNEQUAL EXPENDITURES

This occurs when school districts with higher rates of taxable wealth have greater educational resources and spend more on students than districts with lower rates of taxable wealth resulting in glaring inequities in spending between school districts.

Karen B. McLean Dade

Additional School Practices that Contribute to Social Reproduction of Societal Inequities in Schools

1. CULTURALLY BIASED CURRICULUM

The curriculum often includes perspectives from mainly the dominant culture (monocultural curriculum) and does not fully incorporate perspectives from outside the mainstream. The knowledge presented has been constructed and reproduced within dominant discourses.

2. CULTURALLY BIASED INSTRUCTION

Instructional pedagogies often reflect mainly dominant perspectives and discourses, which lack in diverse ways of leaning, meaning making, and knowledge construction. Many schools and individual teachers do hot have experience and understanding in “culturally relevant pedagogies”

Gloria Ladson-Billings

3. CULTURALLY BIASED ASSESSMENTS

Many student assessment tools do not understand or address the multiple cultural and learning styles of students, often disadvantaging those outside of dominant cultural identities.

4. HIGHER SUSPENTION & DETENTION RATES &

PENALTIES

Often when manifesting similar behaviors, students of color and students of working class and poor backgrounds often receive harsher punishments and are suspended from school at higher rates than are white and higher income students.

5. RACIAL EPITHETS, PHYSICAL ATTACKS, & STEREOTYPING

Coming from the society at large, students of color are at higher risk for being the targets of racial epithets, physical attacks, and stereotyping not only from other students, but often from teachers, staff, and administrators within schools.

6. LACK OF ANTI-OPPRESSION SCHOOL POLICIES

Though some schools have expressly written policies, which outline strategies to reduce or eliminate the major forms of bias and oppression found within the larger society, many schools have no such policies in place.

7. BIASED TEACHER HIRING PRACTICES

Though not expressed, many schools have hidden biased teacher, staff, and administration hiring practices, thereby seriously continuing the under- representation of non-dominant faculty and staff.

THEORY OF SOCIAL & CULTURAL CAPITAL

PIERRE BOURDIEU (1930-2002)

• French sociologist, anthropologist, & philosopher

• Distinction between material wealth and cultural assets of a particular socioeconomic class

• Culture adds wealth of the higher classes

PIERRE BOURDIEU “A general science of the economy of practices that does not artificially limit itself to those practices that are socially recognised as economic must endeavour to grasp capital, that ‘energy of social physics’... in all of its different forms... I have shown that capital presents itself under three fundamental species (each with its own subtypes), namely, economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital.”

(Bourdieu, in Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992:

118–9)

CENTRAL THEMES

• Culture and education are central in the affirmation of differences between social classes and in the reproduction of those differences.

• Schools reproduce the cultural division of society.

SOCIAL CAPITAL

“Social capital is the sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or a group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition.” (Bourdieu, in Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992: 119)

SOCIAL CAPITAL

In other words, it’s not what you know as much as who you know in your “durable networks” that can give you higher or lower standing, depending on your “network,” in attaining success.

CULTURAL CAPITAL

It represents the collection of non- economic forces, such as family background, social class, varying investments in and commitments to education, different resources, etc. which influence academic and career success.

CULTURAL CAPITAL • These are the non-financial social assets

that promote social mobility beyond economic means.

• It refers to attitudes, knowledge, intellect, values, languages, style of speech and dress, physical appearance, and abilities of primarily the middle classes.

• Schools often devalue the cultures of the working classes.

REFERENCES • Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (1976) Schooling in capitalist America: Educational reform and the

contradictions of economic life. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

• Bourdieu, P. and L. P. D. Wacquant. 1992. An invitation to reflexive sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

• Charles, C. Z. & Massey, D. S. (2003). National longitudinal survey of college freshmen, wave 5. Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

• Dade, K. B. M. (2008). Divine n promise: A difficult journey. Bellingham, WA: Village Books & Paper Dreams.

• Harry, B. (1992). Cultural diversity, families, and the special education system, New York: Teachers College Press.

• Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). But that’s just good teaching! The case for culturally relevant pedagogy. Theory into Practice, Vol. 34(3), Culturally Relevant Teaching. (Summer), 159-165.

• McDermott, R. P. (1997). Achieving school failure 1972-1997. In G. D. Spindler (Ed.), Education and cultural process: Anthropological approaches. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, pp. 110-135.

• Spring, J. (2002). American education. New York: Routledge.

• Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69(5), 797–811.