Ain't no makin'it: Aspirations & attainment in a low-income neighborhood

(2018) - Jay Macleod

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Tags:: #paper #SocialHistory #Attainment #SocialClass #Ethnicity #Inequality #Education
Cite Key:: [@macleodAinNoMakin2018]

Abstract

Notes

• Anything is possible in America if we have the faith, the will, and the heart (Ronald Reagon 1985)

• Strong relationship between aspirations and occupational outcomes

• The world of these youths is defined by the physical boundaries of the housing development

• Residence in public housing is often an emblem of failure, shame, and humiliation

• Reproduction theory attempts to show how and why the USA can be depicted as the place where the ''rich get richer''

• Intense participant observation

• Schools actually reinforce social inequality while pretending to-do the opposite

• Marx writes in Capital , “The capitalist process of production . . . produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation itself; on the one hand the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer.”

  • Producing reserve armies of labour

• Bowles and Gintis argue that strong structural similarities can be seen in

  • The organisation of power and authority in the school and in the workplace

  • The students lack of control of curriculum and the workers lack of control of the content of his job

  • The role of grades and other rewards in school and the role of wages as extrinsic motivational systems

  • Competition among students and the specialisation of subjects and the competition among workers and the fragmented nature of jobs (Hierarchies are the same)

• Schools serving working class neighbourhoods are more regimented and emphasise rules and behavioural control

• Schools functions at a material level to ensure successful accumulation of capital by providing employers with trained workers but also functions at an ideological level to promote the attitudes and values required by a capitalist economy

• Ethnography by Willis of agency of workign calss boys rejecting the school

  • Inadvertany confirming the status quo dominant ideology

• Bourdieu

  • Forges an original theory in which class structure place s amore nuanced role but one that does not preclude deterministic elements

  • Children of upper class origins, according to Bourdieu, inherit substantially different cultural capital than do working class children

  • Giroux contends ''students whose families have a tenuous connection to forms of cultural capital highly called by the dominant society are at a decided disadvantage''

    • Academic performance is then turned back into economic capital by the acquisition of superior jobs

  • Bourdieu’s theory consists of four main points. First, distinctive cultural capital is transmitted by each social class. Second, the school systematically valorises upper-class cultural capital and depreciates the cultural capital of the lower classes. Third, differential academic achievement is retranslated back into economic wealth— the job market remunerates the superior academic credentials earned mainly by the upper classes. Finally, the school legitimates this process “by making social hierarchies and the reproduction of those hierarchies appear to be based upon the hierarchy of ‘gifts,’ merits, or skills established and ratified by its sanctions, or, in a word, by converting social hierarchies into academic hierarchies.”

  • Children's academic performance is more strongly related to parents educational history than to parents occupational status

  • Class based differences in cultural capital tend to have a decreasing importance as one ascends the educational ladder

  • Schools are seen as part of a larger social universe of symbolic institutions that, rather than impose docility and oppression, reproduce existing power relations subtly via the production and distribution of a dominant culture that tacitly confirms what it means to be educated

  • the concept of habitus, which he defines as “a system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions.”

  • Bernstein and Heath

  • Class membership generates distinctive forms of speech patterns through family socialisation

  • Linguistic codes, which ultimately are rooted in the social division of labour, derive from the social relations and roles within families

  • Heath examines two working class communities one white the other not

  • The mismatch between language used a home and language at school is  a stumbling block for working class and non-white groups

• Willis

  • Rejection of so much of the content and form of day to day educational life bears on the almost unconscious realisation that, as a class, schooling will not enable them to go much further than they already are

  • Lads equate manual labour with masculinity

  • Subordinate groups can produce alternative cultural forms containing meanings endemic to the working class

  • No clear separation between agency and structure

• Giroux

  • Culturalism begins at the right place but does not go far enough theoretically- it does not dig into subjectivity in order to find its objective elements

  • Response rooted in moral and political indignation

• Social reproduction in Clarendon heights

  • Occupational aspirations, as a mediating link between socioeconomic patterns and individuals at the cultural level play a crucial role in the reproduction of class inequality

  • The relationship between aspirations and opportunity is at the root of the education mortality of the working classes

• Hallway hangers sub culture to be bad is to be good

• Fighting ability is the deciding factor for status demarcation within the group

• ''they want us to deal the drugs so they can buy them''

• ''brotherhood'' as inconsistent with middle class values

• Frustrations of life in the heights is characterised by racist attitudes

• Brothers accommodate themselves to accepted standards of behaviour and strive to fulfil socially approved roles

• Not a distinctive subculture

• As the focal socialising agency, especially in the early years of a child's life, the family plays a crucial role in the process of social reproduction

• Given that work determines ones social class, the perpetuation of class inequality requires that boys like the hallway hangers and the brothers go on to jobs that are comparable in status to the occupations of their parents

• In articulating ones aspirations, an individual weighs his or her preferences more heavily; expectations are tempered by perceived capabilities and available opportunities

  • Even their aspirations are crushed by their estimation of the job market- Hallway hangers

• Brothers display none of the cockiness about their own capabilities that the Hallway Hangers exhibit. They attribute lack of success on the job market exclusively to personal inadequacy

• Teachers attempt to secure discipline by reinforcing the achievement ideology

• The problem is not that lower class children are inferior in some way; the problem is that by the definitions and standards of the school, they consistently are evaluated as deficient

• DiMaggio found that the impact of cultural capital on high school grades is ''very significant'' which confirms ''rather dramatically the utility of the perspective advanced here (Bourdieu)''

• The hallway hangers do not buy the achievement ideology because they foresee substantial barriers to their economic success, barriers this ideology fails to mention

  • Cost-benefit analysis

• Howard London found that subtle class antagonism between students and teachers was at the root of problems in conduct

• An additional and essential component of social reproduction is the process by which individuals in a stratified social order come to accept their own position and the inequalities of the social order as legitimate

• Inequality can thus be legitimised

• Weber - ideology is the myth by which the powerful ensure belief in the validity of their domination

  • Every highly privileged group develops the myth of its natural superiority

• Bourdieu argues that their subjective hopes should be as modest as their objective chances are slim

  • Works for Hallway Hangers but not Brothers

• Rosenbaum 1976, guidance councillors applied subtle and non-so-subtle techniques to channel students into particular tracks and keep them there, sometimes against students wishes

• The hallway hangers ''choose'' to enter the lower working class because of a socially reproduced notion of machismo

• Acceptance of the achievement ideology can ring true for the Brothers because they can point to racial discrimination to which they can point to as a cause for families relative poverty

  • Not representative of blacks generally, it is because of the antithesis within the hallway hangers that the Brothers produce their own reinforced social order

• As long as Bourdieu's concept of habitus is fleshed out empirically and deepen theoretically to accommodate these factors, it is a valuable descriptive device for understanding the social world of Clarendon Heights

• Giroux ''while school cultures may take complex and heterogenous forms, the principle that remains constant is that they are situated within a network of power relations from which they cannot escape''

• Paraphrase Marx, we must understand that teenage peer groups make their own history, but not under circumstances of their own choosing

• Both groups end up with the same outcomes

Summary

Macleod argues that occupational aspirations are the missing and mediating link between socioeconomic patterns, and individuals at the cultural level play a crucial role in the reproduction of class inequality. Aspirations and opportunity are hitherto central to the educational mortality facing the working class. The problem with education is not that lower class children are inferior in some way; the problem is that by the definitions and standards set by the school they are evaluated as inferior. An essential part of social stratification that people forget is that social reproduction requires individuals within the stratified social order to accept their own position and the inequalities that they face as legitimate. Inequality thus can be legitimatised. As Giroux states schools are ''situated within a network of power relations from which they cannot escape''. Bourdieu's argument that subjective hopes should be modest based on slim objective chances works for the Hallway Hangers but not for the Brothers- acceptance of the achievement ideology is woven into racial discrimination being pointed to as a reason for their current class position- this is based upon their own conceived social order in antithesis to the Hallway Hangers.