Chris Graham --Van Galen Notes

Late to Class: Social Class and Schooling in the New Economy by Jane Van Galen

“Nowhere is there a more intense silence about the realities of class differences than in educational settings” ---Bell Hooks

· How can formal schooling level the playing fields in a rapidly changing economic landscape where the social gap between the “haves” and “have nots” is ever widening?

1. We believe that school can enable all motivated young people to attain the American dream of self-directed success.

2. We tend to avoid questioning why so many hard-working families have found success elusive in the first place.

· For many years parents performed manual labor to enable their children to aspire to more. Now due to the shift to a serviced-based economy, children need to become educated in order to attain upward social mobility.

1. Wages have frozen…some people work multiple jobs

2. Cost of school has risen

Ø These two factors attribute to the decreased value of the high school diploma and even the undergrad college degree

· In this new economy schools must do more than promise success to students who work hard…they must give students the tools necessary to achieve success at the collegiate level

Ø This means that educators will be better served by understanding more about how social class shapes educational access, aspiration, and achievement

· Social class is not just based on income

1. Degree of one’s personal power

2. Extent to which one’s work creates dignity and respect

Ø 62% of the workforce is “working class” exercising little control over working conditions or other workers

· “Class matters to us not only because of differences in material wealth and economic security, but also because it affects our access to things, relationships, experiences, and practices which we have reason to value, and hence our chances of living a fulfilling life…”

· Young people tend to interpret their own and their parents’ struggles in a shifting economy as evidence of their relative worth and ability.

· Aspiring to “more” may be essential for survival in the new economy.

Most job growth in the US is not among high-wage/high-tech jobs…its among low wage/low skill jobs that do not pay enough to raise a family…outsourcing, volatility in technology, and the stock market has lead to an increasing vulnerability among jobs requiring educated people.

· Middle Class = includes anyone independent of public assistance or trust funds

· Most children in struggling homes are white

· Higher test scores alone are not enough….even poor students who have closed the achievement gap still need to close the attainment gap.

· The number of people who are “moving-up” to jobs that pay more than one’s parents’ has declined

· How can children make sense of advice that hard work breeds success while they watch their hard working parents struggle?

· Poor and working class students often settle for what “people like us” deserve

· Upward social mobility is the rarity rather than the norm

· “out of the classroom” support structures are one way we can build up the student’s self efficacy…let them share with us their struggle and hardships so that they may take pride in their successes despite their hardships and gain support from others

· “Pedagogy of respect” = literacy work that focuses on what we can learn from the gardener outside or the electrician working in the library

· Huge challenge is countering popular rhetoric that basically everyone is middle class…its just not true…also all members of our society are exposed to the materialistic culture of our upper class…example: expensive fashion, cars, mansions