The Politics of Middle-Class Success in an Inner-City Public School

Abstract

Recent ethnography of minority and working-class schooling has shown how wider structural factors like class stratification, poverty, and racism influence observable patterns of failure and under achievement in the classroom. In contrast, ethnography in middle-class schools and classrooms has not seriously probed similar structural bases of middle-class children's success, instead attributing this success to a presumed equivalence between the “middle-class culture” of the children's homes and the culture of the school and its staff. This study traces the history and effects of middle-class involvement in the public elementary school of a gentrifying inner-city neighborhood in New York City. Segregated into their special classrooms with distinctive curriculum and organization, the school's middle-class children were more successful than their poor and working-class peers. Their success was not the result, in Bourdieu's terms, of the “cultural capital” afforded by their middle-class upbringing. The school staff, in fact, disapproved of many elements of the children's class culture. Rather, the children's successful standing within the school had been the object, and achievement, of their parents' long-standing political struggles against the school's staff and other parents. This case illustrates that school success is as much an active social construction—both inside and outside the school—as school failure has been shown to be.