School Performance, Status Relations, and the Structure of Sentiment: Bringing the Teacher Back In

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Research has failed to support the assumption that the academic difficulties of many minority and low-SES youth are due to their outsider standing relative to the middle-class culture that dominates schools. This study suggests that this proposition exaggerates the cultural hegemony of educational operations. Data on children in the first grade of a large, socially heterogeneous urban public school system show that not all teachers are given to status-related biases. Rather, teachers' own social origins exercise a strong influence on how they react to the status attributes of their students. In particular, low-status and minority pupils experience their greatest difficulties in the classrooms of high-status teachers. They are evaluated by their teachers as less mature, their teachers hold lower performance expectations for them, and their teachers score exceptionally low on perceived-school-climate measures. Moreover, year-end marks and standardized-test scores of such pupils apparently are depressed by these indicators of pupil-teacher social distance and teacher disaffection. A model of pupil-teacher background congruence is proposed as an alternative to the cultural hegemony framework, and the implications of such fit for the interpersonal dynamics of the classroom are discussed.