Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 59, No. 4, 2003, pp. 677--692 Privileging Class: Toward a Critical Psychology of Social Class in the Context of Education Joan M. Ostrove∗ Macalester College Elizabeth R. Cole University of Michigan This issue of the Journal of Social Issues explores psychological meanings of social class in the context of education. In this article we propose an outline for a critical psychology of social class and discuss why education is a useful context for examining relations between class and individual psychology. We consider how research and theory in the study of race and gender can and cannot inform a psychology of social class. We introduce three themes that organize the issue and the articles that illustrate them. The articles in this issue address all levels of education, include data from within and outside of the United States, and investigate perspectives of individuals from a range of social class groups. “What I remember most about school was that if you were poor you got no respect and no encouragement. I mean if you didn’t have cute ringlets, an ironed new uniform, starched shirts, and a mother and father who gave money to the church, you weren’t a teacher’s pet and that meant you weren’t encouraged.” —a working-class woman respondent interviewed in Luttrell, 1993 Class differences were boundaries no one wanted to face or talk about. It was easier to downplay them, to act as though we were all from privileged ∗ Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Joan Ostrove, Department of Psychology, Macalester College, 1600 Grand Avenue, St Paul, MN 55105 [e-mail: ostrove@ macalester.edu]. We would like to thank Heather Bullock, Irene Frieze, Abby Stewart, and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Elizabeth Cole’s contributions were supported in part by a grant from the Spencer Foundation. 677  C 2003 The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues 678 Ostrove and Cole backgrounds, to work around them, to confront them privately in the solitude of one’s room, or to pretend that just being chosen to study at such an institution meant that those of us who did not come from such privilege were already in transition toward privilege . . . . It was a kind of treason not to believe that it was better to be identified with the world of material privilege than with the world of the working class, the poor. —hooks, 1989 Every day, in schools and other educational institutions, individuals notice social class, and in doing so create, maintain, and—at times—challenge its psychological meanings. The context of education, therefore, is an ideal stage on which to watch the dynamics and contradictions of class play out in both individual and social psychology. In this article, and in this issue of the Journal of Social Issues, we aim to “privilege class,” to foreground the psychological implications of the class-saturated educational contexts in which individuals develop their own identities and come to understand their place in society. Doing so requires that we break the silence around class that hooks (1989) and others (e.g., Dews & Law, 1995; Tokarczyk & Fay, 1993) argue characterizes the social climate and academic discourse in higher education, and all too often pervades the work of psychologists as well (Lott, 2002). In developing this issue of JSI, we wanted to expand the possibilities for psychologists to see ourselves as responsible for understanding the implications of class at both the individual and group levels. It was our intention to highlight the ways in which “class matters” (hooks, 2000) to all people at every position in a class-stratified society. We aimed to represent a variety of methodological strategies for studying social class, and to highlight the ways in which class must be understood in conjunction with other social identities such as gender and race. In soliciting articles, it became clear that those psychologists who examine psychological meanings of social class often do so in the context of education; it also became clear that schools are an important site of both pain and possibility for understanding individuals’ psychological experiences as members of particular social class groups. In the United States, for example, institutions of education— especially public schools—are the very embodiment of the belief that the United States is a classless society. In their discussion of the ethos of meritocracy in the United States, Fine and Burns (this issue) note that despite the fact that education is intended to be the great equalizer, more often it serves to reproduce the class structure across generations. Sites of education, therefore, are a rich laboratory in which to study the experience of class. In the following sections, we develop an argument for why it is important for psychologists to study class, examine the psychology of social class in the context of education, and describe the organization of this issue of JSI. Privileging Class 679 Toward a Critical Psychology of Social Class There is a small amount literature on the relationship between psychology and social structure that emphasizes the importance of studying social class (e.g., Bronfenbrenner, 1984; Centers, 1949; House, 1977; Hyman, 1942; Kohn, 1989; Ryff, 1987). Researchers in this tradition have studied the relationship between social class (or status) and values (e.g., Inkeles, 1960; Kohn, 1969), childrearing practices (e.g., Bronfenbrenner, 1958; Tudge, Hogan, Snezhkova, Kulakova, & Etz, 2000), people’s perceptions of their own and others’ class position (e.g., Coleman & Rainwater, 1978; Jackman & Jackman, 1983), mental and physical health (e.g., Adler et al., 1994; Hollingshead & Redlich, 1958; Wohlfarth, 1997), and other domains (see Argyle, 1994, for a review). However, by and large, psychologists have tended to leave the study of social class to sociologists, usually regarding social class as a variable to be statistically controlled for, if they attend to class at all. At a time when psychology as a discipline has increasingly defined itself as interested in the ways race, class, and gender critically shape our psychological experiences, it seems that class is the least explored of these three. In contrast to the blossoming of research on the psychology of race and gender that has taken place over the past 25 or so years (evidenced, for example, by the existence of specialized academic courses and journals devoted to the psychology of these social categories such as Journal of Black Psychology and Psychology of Women Quarterly), there has been relatively little interest in class among psychologists in the United States. For example, recent annual reviews of research about identities in psychology (Frable, 1997) and sociology (Howard, 2000) support the contention that class identities have received considerably less scholarly attention than both identities based on gender and identities based on race. This paucity of research on class may reflect the broader political zeitgeist in the United States. Beginning in the late 1950s, mass social movements aimed to gain rights for those who are marginalized or oppressed due to gender (e.g., the women’s movement) and race (e.g., the movements for civil rights and Black power, the Chicano liberation movement, the American Indian Movement) and to redefine and re-value their social identities. The literatures in the psychology of gender and of race have grown considerably since that time. Some of this research suggests that these movements have been instrumental in raising the consciousness and developing the social identities of these groups (e.g. Cross, 1991; Downing & Roush, 1985; Sellers, Smith, Shelton, Rowley, & Chavous, 1998). However, in the same historical period, there has been a decline in class-based organizing, and even movements on behalf of poor people have not focused on identity to the same degree that these other movements have (Cohen, 1985). Indeed, Adair (2002, p. 467) describes the ways in which “communal affiliation” among poor people that might allow for collective organizing is systematically discouraged in 680 Ostrove and Cole places like social service agencies. In this political context, and in a social climate in which the majority of people in the United States believe that upward mobility is a birthright (Hochschild, 1995), it is perhaps not surprising that psychologists have given less attention to class than they have to race and gender. We propose that what is needed is a critical psychology of social class; that is, a systematic research-based literature focused on the exploration of the psychological meaning of social class to diverse groups of people. In addition to understanding the implications of material inequality and differential access to resources, a critical psychology of social class would need to address the relationship between variables related to class—identity, attitudes, and the experience of discrimination—and the various areas of functioning that have long interested social, personality, and clinical psychologists (e.g. self-esteem, well-being, altruistic behavior, etc.). The study of social class must, also, move conceptually beyond a focus on class differences (see Cole & Stewart, 2001) or class as a descriptor or demographic control variable (Frable, 1997) to investigate class as a social identity. That is, a critical psychology of social class must pay special attention to an individual’s understanding of him or herself as occupying a classed location, and the values and attitudes associated with that location (to paraphrase Tajfel, 1972). This issue of JSI is an effort to engage psychologists in a critical study of social class. The work that psychologists have already done to explore the meaning of race and gender can help us begin to sketch a roadmap for this project. Class is, however, different from these other categories and raises special issues that distinguish it from gender and race. In the next section, we explore each of these ideas in turn. Lessons from Studies of Gender and Race As with race and gender, individuals experience privilege or disadvantage based on their class membership. Certainly, this has tangible, material consequences for individuals and their families. As is also true of race and gender, individuals may be discriminated against on the basis of class (see, e.g., Adair, 2002; Lott, 2002; Moon & Rolison, 1998; Sennett & Cobb, 1972). Yet for the most part, to psychologists, the effects of classism—the injuries of class—remain hidden (Sennett & Cobb, 1972). Also like race and gender, class is a powerful social category that shapes individuals’ experience of themselves in the world: as Steedman (1986), an historian, observed, “Class and gender, and their articulations, are the bits and pieces from which psychological selfhood is made” (p. 7). A psychology of social class must begin to understand what class means to those whom we study. It must go beyond categorization to investigate the consequences of identification and the ways in which people see themselves in relation to members of other social class groups. Press and Cole (1999) looked at women’s identification with social class groups, rather than to class membership itself, and Privileging Class 681 demonstrated the ways in which these identities were meaningfully related to their attitudes towards abortion. Similarly, just as there is a growing literature documenting the costs of sexist and racist discrimination on those who experience it (Klonoff & Landrine, 1997; Krieger & Sidney, 1996; Williams & Collins, 1995), Croizet and Claire (1998) demonstrated that current theorizing on the costs of discrimination is also relevant to social class. They found that stereotype threat, a theoretical construct developed to understand the academic underperformance of African Americans (Steele, 1997), also had a negative effect on working-class students’ performance on a standardized test. This suggests that membership in the working class can have a negative effect on students’ performance not only through material deprivation and substandard schooling (Hochschild, this issue), but also through psychological mechanisms by which students are aware—consciously or otherwise—that their performance may confirm negative stereotypes about poor people. This increased self-consciousness could cause them to “choke” under the pressure of an academic testing situation (Gladwell, 2000; Steele, 1997). The study of race and gender, and in particular, the study of women of color, has yielded the important insight that social identities are always experienced in conjunction with each other; for example, one cannot experience a racial identity that is genderless (Collins, 2000). This insight has been variously termed “multiple jeopardy” (King, 1988) or “intersectionality” (Crenshaw, 1994). A critical psychology of class will address the ways that class intersects with race, gender, and other identities because failure to investigate intersectionality results in research that ignores intra-group differences (Crenshaw, 1994). For example, Pattillo-McCoy (1999) has demonstrated that Black middle-class neighborhoods are different from predominantly White neighborhoods that would be similarly categorized in terms of class based on demographic measures; her ethnographic fieldwork documented the ways that persistent residential racial segregation shaped the social and cultural landscape of a Black middle-class neighborhood. Similarly, Raffo’s collection (1997) documented distinctive class-based experiences of lesbians and gay men. We can point to several features of class that suggest that the idea of intersectionality is key to developing a critical psychology of social class. First, many terms that laypeople use to describe ethnic groups are class coded (Bettie, 2000; Ortner, 1998), as in “WASP;” also, class-based descriptors may be racially coded, as in “inner-city resident.” How does the popular use of such signifiers conflate race and class in the minds both of those who use the terms, and of those who are labeled by them? Second, racial identity may significantly affect the experience and meaning of class identity. For example, Tatum (2000) illustrated that middle-class Black parents who moved to predominantly White suburbs for the educational opportunities offered also feared that the move would negatively affect their children’s development of a healthy racial identity. Finally, Fine (1997) has shown that racially-based inequality in public schools reproduces class structure, and that students are willing participants in this process. In her study, White and 682 Ostrove and Cole Black students tracked themselves into the separate college prep and vocational curricula in their high school based on their social perceptions about which track was appropriate for students like themselves. Thus, the psychological experience of social class cannot be meaningfully understood outside of the context of race and other social identities with which class interacts. The study of class, however, differs from that of race and gender in important ways. One way in which studies of class tend to differ from those of race and gender concerns the ways in which these social identities are defined and measured. In general, there is considerably more variability in and discussion about how to define and assess social class than there is with respect to race or gender (which is not to say that there are not controversies or disagreements in those two domains [e.g. Kessler, 1990; Zuckerman, 1990]). Race and gender are (almost) always assessed in psychological research by self-report; class may be assessed by both “objective” measures or by subjective ones (see, e.g., Centers, 1949; Jackman & Jackman, 1973; Ostrove, Adler, Kuppermann, & Washington, 2000). Class is often operationalized as socioeconomic status (SES), although the two concepts are not conceptually identical. SES attempts to characterize dimensions along which individuals are stratified and it is relatively easily measured through objective indicators such as income, occupation, or level of education (for a comprehensive review see Krieger, Williams, & Moss, 1997). Objective SES indicators capture specific economic and social resources, and also reflect the hierarchical ranking inherent in the current class structure in the United States. They tend not to be theoretically grounded in ways that discussions of class and, often, gender and race are. Like definitions of gender and race, references to “class” (as opposed to SES) imply a particular relationship between social groups characterized by discrimination (Moon & Rolison, 1998), power, and/or exploitation (Wright, 2000; see Smith, 1985, and Williams, 1990, for a discussion of the distinctions between SES and class). The possibility for mobility is another way in which the study of class is strikingly different from race and gender: It is much more difficult to change one’s race or gender than it (apparently) is to change one’s social class. Stories of, for example, light-skinned Blacks passing as White and of “masculine” women passing as men (Sloop, 2000; Streeter, 1996) provide important—and complicated—testimonies to the fact that some members of subordinate groups desire the power, privilege, and opportunities associated with Whiteness and maleness. However, the desire and intention to change one’s gender, for example, is considered under some extreme circumstances to warrant a psychiatric diagnosis (e.g., “gender identity disorder”). In contrast, the desire (or “aspiration”) to change one’s social class—at least in the “upward direction”—is generally commendable (if not expected), and is even described as “the American dream” (e.g., Hochschild, 1995). As hooks (1989) notes, however, mobility via higher education is not without negative consequences, “No wonder our working-class parents from poor backgrounds feared our entry into Privileging Class 683 [the world of elite higher education], intuiting perhaps that we might learn to be ashamed of where we had come from, that we might never return home, or come back only to lord it over them” (p. 75; see also Dews & Law, 1995). In the United States, strong ideologies surrounding mobility and meritocracy encourage people to make individual (rather than structural) attributions for the causes of social class position (Langston, 1992; Ortner, 1991). In contrast, race and gender are more commonly thought to have biological or social origins rather than characterological ones. For example, although we often hear wealth explained in terms of ambition and poverty in terms of laziness, and we hear the claim that members of certain ethnic or racial groups are poor because they are lazy, no one makes the claim that a person belongs to a certain ethnic group because he or she is lazy ( just as one would never argue that ambitiousness makes people White). Thus, the ideology surrounding class locates the causes of class stratification solely in the behavior or the personality of individuals; yet the class system itself exerts pressure on individual psychology, influencing the ways people view themselves and others (e.g., Leahy, 1983; Sennett & Cobb, 1972). Some psychologists have argued that the tendency of poor and working-class (and other oppressed) people to maintain a belief in a just and meritocratic world despite evidence to the contrary represents “false consciousness.” Augoustinos (1999) critiqued the premise that these beliefs indicate that people have faulty cognitions or are unable to engage in critical thought. Instead she viewed these beliefs as a testament to the power of the ideology that is itself created by structural inequalities. Also, her argument helps us ask questions about how the self-concepts of middle-class and upper-class people are themselves shaped by their positions in the class structure (e.g., Marx, 1844/1978; Sennett & Cobb, 1972). Psychological Meanings of Social Class in the Context of Education Universal access to public elementary and secondary school in the United States is a central pillar supporting the American dream, the belief that upward mobility is available to all who would aspire to it through some combination of hard work and individual traits, such as perseverance and intelligence (Hochschild, 1995). Schools both attempt to offer opportunity and, whether intentionally or not, often simultaneously reproduce existing class stratification (Anyon, 1997; Bowen & Bok, 1998; Domhoff, 1983). In the process, schools themselves may erect barriers that impede some individuals’ access to particular opportunities (see, e.g., Adair, 2001). Schools are often the sites in which some are deemed able to progress and worthy of success, while others are considered intellectually inferior and incapable of achievement in ways that tend to be systematically related to social class (Fine, 1991; Lott, 2001; Oakes, 1985). This, in addition to the social implications of class status among schoolchildren, is poignantly illustrated by Adair (2002), who explains 684 Ostrove and Cole We [poor students] were read as unworthy, laughable and often dangerous. Our schoolmates laughed at our “ugly shoes,” our crooked and ill-serviced teeth and the way we “stank,” as teachers excoriated us for our inability to concentrate in school, our “refusal” to come to class prepared with proper school supplies, an our unethical behavior when we tried to take more than our allocated share of “free lunch.” Whenever backpacks of library books came up missing, we were publicly interrogated and sent home to “think about” our offenses, often accompanied by notes that reminded my mother that as a poor single parent she should be working twice as hard to make up for the discipline that allegedly walked out the door with my father. When we sat glued to our seats, afraid to stand in front of the class in ragged and ill fitting hand-me-downs, we were held up as examples of unprepared and uncooperative children. And when our grades reflected our otherness, they were used to justify even more elaborate punishment that exacerbated the effects of our growing anomie (p. 457). In Adair’s account, this intense classism among both students and teachers results in a vicious cycle in which working-class or poor students, worn down by the mistreatment and misunderstanding, sometimes “live down” to these pervasive negative expectations. A critical psychology of social class reminds us that there are important individual differences in the ways that students recognize and make sense of the opportunity structure within schools (Fine, Burns, Payne, & Torre, 2002). For example, O’Connor (1999) has demonstrated that low-income African American high school students vary in the narratives they use to explain social opportunity and mobility, and that these narratives are differentially associated with achievement outcomes. Higher education is also an important vehicle for social mobility and for class maintenance. Many people believe that the achievement of a college degree will guarantee the opportunity to move from the working class to the middle class (Coleman & Rainwater, 1978; DeMott, 1990; Higginbotham & Weber, 1992). At the same time, attendance at private secondary schools and elite liberal arts colleges is an important strategy for the maintenance of upper-class status (Domhoff, 1983). Students’ aspirations toward higher education, their daily experiences in college, and their retrospective evaluation of the significance of college attendance are all germane to the psychology of social class. This is true for both those whose class status changes as a result of college education, as well as those for whom class status is maintained through the college education they receive. Education is also a rich context in which to study the psychology of social class because for some students, schools are a site where class differences may be noticed for the first time. Although not all schools are heterogeneous with respect to class, many are. It is in these settings of difference that some students develop an awareness of their own class status and come to struggle with its meaning in their own lives and personal identities, as was illustrated in the two quotations cited at the beginning of this article. Organization of This Issue We have organized this issue into three main sections that help sketch the contours of a psychology of social class in the context of education: (a) Understanding Privileging Class 685 Class: Attitudes, Beliefs, and Attributions, (b) Transitions and Traditions: Class Mobility and Maintenance Through Education, and (c) Transforming Practice and Policy in Public Schools and in Psychology. Understanding Class: Attitudes, Beliefs, and Attributions The first section of this issue focuses on the kinds of attributions individuals make for class position. Why is it that some people are poor and others rich? What accounts for inequality in a given society? People’s explanations for this stratification suggest their sense of the “rules of the game” (Flanagan & Campbell, this issue) and thus have important implications for their perceptions of their own life opportunities. The articles in this section explore how people’s place in the class system influences their views of the nature of inequality. Moreover, some of the articles help us understand whether changing (or attempting to change) one’s position through education is accompanied by a corresponding change in one’s views. In different ways and among very different populations, Bullock and Limbert (this issue), Flanagan and Campbell (this issue), and Mahalingam (this issue) asked their participants to describe reasons for wealth, poverty, and inequality. Each of the articles discusses these attributions with respect to the participants’ relationship to the educational system and speculates on the relationship between attribution and prospects for social change. Bullock and Limbert studied workingclass women enrolled in a short-term vocational training program. The women viewed post-secondary education as difficult to access and believed that wealth was primarily a result of privilege rather than hard work; yet almost paradoxically, they expected that they themselves would be able to obtain college degrees, thus gaining middle-class status. The authors discuss the possibility that this combination of beliefs may undermine the likelihood of engaging in collective class-based political action. Flanagan and Campbell examine the role that educational systems play in teaching young people how to be citizens of the social order across countries that vary with respect to their social and economic histories and policies. For example, they show that not only do young people in the United States and Australia express less support for social entitlements than do youth in countries such as the Czech Republic and Hungary, but also that class and gender make a difference within social order and influence young people’s view of their governments and their schools. Mahalingam explores the intersections of caste and class by assessing whether people believed poverty and wealth were essential or socially constructed. His sample of Brahmins (upper caste) and Dalits (formerly called “untouchable” caste) who were all middle-class college-educated people in India provides us with a picture of how wealth is explained in a context that is both similar to and different from the United States. Compared to Dalits, more Brahmins took an essentialized view, specifically with respect to the nature of being rich. Mahalingam suggests that as a result of recent political consciousness-raising movements (analogous to the 686 Ostrove and Cole Black power movement in the United States), fewer Dalits endorse essentialism, and he makes insightful recommendations for curricular change to encourage structural understanding of inequality. Transitions and Traditions: Class Mobility and Maintenance Through Education Many have argued that the educational system in the United States serves to reproduce the current class structure predicated on inequality, rather than to encourage change (see Giroux, 1983 for a review and critique of social reproduction theory), making the American dream harder to realize than many think. It does this by tracking people according to apparent skill and ability, preparing people for systematically different occupations, and socializing particular ideologies and values (Giroux, 1983; Oakes, 1985). The function and use of education in reproducing class status is as true for working- and middle-class children (see, e.g., Fine, 1997; Gorman, 1998) as it is for children from the upper class (Domhoff, 1983). Some of the articles in this section focus particularly on individuals from upper-class families and their experiences at upper-class educational institutions that were historically set up for the upper class to maintain their social position. Other articles in this section explore individuals’ lived experience of mobility, because many individuals use education as a vehicle for upward mobility, despite the ways in which the educational system facilitates class reproduction. Many of the authors approached this subject by exploring the ways in which people from working-class backgrounds negotiate educational institutions of the middle- and upper-classes. It is often movement from one class position to another that exposes the discriminatory nature of the class system, and the ways in which feelings of inferiority or superiority based on class may be internalized (Russell, 1996; see also Kadi, 1996, on the possibilities for and the potential importance of choosing not to claim a middle-class identity or lifestyle, even after completing post-secondary education). The articles by Kuriloff and Reichert (this issue) and by Ostrove (this issue) compare the experiences of those for whom attendance at elite institutions represented class maintenance with those for whom it represented social mobility. Kuriloff and Reichert explore the dynamics of class and race in the negotiation of the social and academic terrain of an elite private boys’ day school. They argue that the long-standing traditions of the school aimed to instill in its students ideals of manhood centered on excellence, competition, responsibility, and hard work. In some ways, these ideals proved to be almost egalitarian, because all boys, regardless of background, were held to these standards, internalized these values, and were regarded by their teachers and peers as capable of meeting them. These ideals were most clearly lived up to in the domains of academics and sports by all boys. In contrast, the experience of the social domain was quite different for boys from Privileging Class 687 privileged backgrounds than for those who were the first in their families to attend such a school. Importantly, White working-class boys had difficulty articulating their discomfort with their marginalization, whereas boys of color expressed a structural critique grounded in their racial/ethnic experience and identity. Ostrove (this issue) uses quantitative and qualitative data to demonstrate differences among women from different class backgrounds who attended private women’s colleges in the 1960s. She finds that women from working-class backgrounds, reflecting on their experiences in college 30 years after graduation, were most likely to describe a sense of alienation and to see college as an opportunity for mobility. Women from upper-class backgrounds were most likely to mention family tradition and expectation in their representations of college. She discusses these issues with respect to the ways that class helps define who “belongs” and who does not, and also how class issues are complicated by geography at elite New England colleges. Cole and Omari (this issue) use the concept of intersectionality to explore the ways that class identities are distinctive for African Americans. They note that although all Black Americans experience racial discrimination, class and status divisions have long existed within Black communities, and that these distinctions represent a fault line along which there is still tension. Historically, members of the Black middle class have attempted to encourage education and “respectable” conduct among the Black working class, as a means to “uplift” the race politically. Schools are one site where these conflicts may continue to play out. Cole and Omari describe the experiences of Black students as they pursue class advancement through education, and focus on elite secondary schools and working-class students in colleges and universities. They conclude by problematizing the often unspoken assumption that upward class mobility is an unambiguously positive experience, articulating the possibility that there are hidden costs of this mobility both in terms of psychological well being, and disidentification and political alienation from other African Americans. The final article in this section, by Jones (this issue), focuses on case studies of women academics from working-class backgrounds. Her fine-grained narrative analysis explores the subjective experience of class and race as they inform individual identity. Notably, she discusses a Latina who grew to understand her working-class identity in a elementary classroom for gifted students in which her class was constructed through her racial difference from her classmates. Jones compares this woman’s experiences with those of a woman who grew up in a Black community and attended a school that was heterogeneous with respect to class; thus, she experienced class diversity within one racial group and developed a class identity that was less “raced.” Jones concludes her article with a discussion of how academics from working-class backgrounds use their class identities and those of their students to teach about structural inequality and foster class consciousness. 688 Ostrove and Cole Transforming Practice and Policy in Public Schools and in Psychology Finally, our concluding section includes two articles that critique the current state of policy and practice in public schools, and in the psychological study of social class; both make pointed recommendations for the future. Hochschild (this issue) considers the policy implications of the current state of public education in the United States and Fine and Burns (this issue) reflect on all of the articles in the issue to make important recommendations for policy both within and outside of the discipline of psychology. Hochschild (this issue) gives evidence of the nested inequalities that accrue in the public school system due to residential class and race segregation. She provides an extensive review of policy and practice in public education (e.g., differential funding, tracking, teacher quality) that create this disparity and she makes a proposal for possible change. This article provides a comprehensive picture of the ways that schools often fail their low-income students and the implications for how students might view themselves as a result. Fine and Burns (this issue) similarly address the ways in which public schooling may serve to replicate existing inequalities at the expense of poor and working class students. In contrast to Hochschild’s macro-level approach, however, Fine and Burns (this issue) reflect on the articles within this issue and suggest that the ways in which psychologists think about social class may provide support for these practices at the individual and institutional levels. Perhaps more importantly, they then reflect critically on this issue of JSI to identify its limitations. As members of the professional classes, psychologists’ work may fall prey to their own class biases: Notably, our methodologies may lead to certain blind spots, we may systematically miss—or even misrepresent—important narratives of how class operates for particular groups of people, and we may all too easily place the onus for social change on members of the working class rather than making that responsibility our own. Thus, Fine and Burns point to the strengths of this issue, while simultaneously reminding us of its omissions. Their recommendations point the way toward a psychology of social class that is genuinely critical, and potentially transformative, for psychology, and for education. There are many ways in which the articles in this issue may be read together beyond those suggested by our overall organization of the issue. The articles in this issue by Jones, Cole and Omari, and Mahalingam all pay particular attention to the ways in which class and race (or class and caste) intersect. Those by Ostrove, Bullock and Limbert, and Jones examine class and gender with a particular focus on women’s lives. Kuriloff and Reichert’s article focuses on class and gender in the context of boys’ lives. The articles by Mahalingam and by Flanagan and Campbell provide data from people who live outside of the United States. 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OSTROVE completed her B.A. at Williams College, her Ph.D. in personality psychology and a certificate in women’s studies at the University of Michigan, and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco. She is currently an assistant professor in the psychology department at Macalester College in St Paul, MN. Her work focuses on the connections between psychology and social structure, and she has published in the areas of social class background and the college experience, social class and health, interpersonal implications of the social representation of disability, and women’s midlife personality development. ELIZABETH R. COLE received her Ph.D. in Personality Psychology from the University of Michigan, where she, currently, is an associate professor in the Women’s Studies Program and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies. Her research addresses the ways that individuals’ sense of themselves as connected to social groups is related to their attitudes toward public policy, the roles that they choose to play in the political sphere and how they experience their social environments. She employs both qualitative and quantitative methods. Cole has published in the areas of political participation among women who graduated from college during the late 1960s, and the role of identity and social class in women’s attitudes towards abortion. Her most recent work addresses the relationship between ethnic identity and adjustment and academic achievement among African American students. Equity & Excellence in Education ISSN: 1066-5684 (Print) 1547-3457 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ueee20 Perceiving the Problem of Poverty and Schooling: Deconstructing the Class Stereotypes that MisShape Education Practice and Policy Paul C. Gorski To cite this article: Paul C. Gorski (2012) Perceiving the Problem of Poverty and Schooling: Deconstructing the Class Stereotypes that Mis-Shape Education Practice and Policy, Equity & Excellence in Education, 45:2, 302-319, DOI: 10.1080/10665684.2012.666934 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2012.666934 Published online: 04 May 2012. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 6059 Citing articles: 33 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ueee20 EQUITY & EXCELLENCE IN EDUCATION, 45(2), 302–319, 2012 C University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Education Copyright
ISSN: 1066-5684 print / 1547-3457 online DOI: 10.1080/10665684.2012.666934 Perceiving the Problem of Poverty and Schooling: Deconstructing the Class Stereotypes that Mis-Shape Education Practice and Policy Paul C. Gorski George Mason University A rich history of scholarship has demonstrated the ways in which popular stereotypes of disenfranchised communities, including people living in poverty, affect individual biases and preconceptions. Less attention has been paid to the ways in which such stereotypes help frame policy and practice responses regarding social problems, such as the economic “achievement gap.” The purpose of this essay is to examine the nature of poverty-based stereotyping in the context of popular discourses regarding the education of poor and low-income students. In doing so, I analyze stereotypes commonly used to locate the problem of the economic “achievement gap” as existing within, rather than as pressing upon, poor and low-income families. I then discuss how these stereotypes have fed deficit ideology and, as a result, misdirected policy and practice responses to gross class inequities in U.S. schools. A long-time colleague of mine with a penchant for road rage—I’ll call him Frederick—is fond of flinging the word “jerk” at drivers whose road skills have offended him in some way. That is, he is fond of directing this term at male drivers, or drivers he assumes to be men, and reserves it for them exclusively. When a driver he assumes to be a woman pulls in front of him, neglects to use a turn signal, or drives a few miles per hour under the speed limit, his response differs markedly. Rather than calling her a jerk, he shakes his head, brow furled, and exclaims with exasperation, “Women drivers!” I have challenged Frederick several times on what appears, to me, to be a clear case of gender stereotyping—of a biased worldview that is symptomatic of sexism. He responds to these challenges firmly: “That’s not a stereotype. It’s my experience. Women are bad drivers.” He tends to append to this defense the common refrain, “Plus, there’s a hint of truth in every stereotype; otherwise, why would so many people believe them?” As troubling as his attitude might be, Frederick is not alone in his worldview or in his tendency to see somebody within his gender group who has offended his sensibilities as an outlier, a jerk, while interpreting a female offender as representing all women. A long history of psychosocial research details the human tendency to imagine our own social and cultural identity groups as diverse while we imagine “the other,” people belonging to a social or cultural identity group with which we are less familiar, as being, for all intents and purposes, monolithic (e.g., Clark, Address correspondence to Paul C. Gorski, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MS 5D3, Fairfax, VA 22030. E-mail: pgorski1@gmu.edu DECONSTRUCTING CLASS STEREOTYPES 303 1985; Hurst, 2007; Meiser & Hewstone, 2004). Meanwhile, we tend to attribute more positive characteristics to our in-groups than to our out-groups (DiDonato, Ullrich, & Krueger, 2011; Hewstone, Rubin, & Willis, 2002). In many ways, these seemingly contradictory responses stand to reason in the sense that we know our in-groups better than we know our out-groups. For instance, cognitive reasoning research (De Neys & Vanderpeutte, 2011) has demonstrated that when people find themselves in contexts with which they are not familiar, their decision-making cognition defaults to intuition and stereotyped beliefs. Meanwhile, they suppress their abilities, which they might demonstrate in more familiar contexts, to draw on “a deliberate, controlled reasoning process” (De Neys & Vanderpeutte, 2011, p. 432). In other words, when we do not know, we use stereotypes to fill in the blanks. However, although the engagement of stereotypes has been shown to be a natural and necessary human response in the face of limited context-specific knowledge—a woman’s stereotype about men might prove to be an over-generalization in most instances but her intuition eventually could protect her from sexual assault—the content of stereotypes are only partially organic, based upon a measured assessment of the totality of one’s experiences. Stereotypes grow, as well, from hegemonic socialization processes and manipulations (Shier, Jones, & Graham, 2010)—what we are taught to think about poor people, for instance, even if we are poor, through celebrations of “meritocracy” or conflations of democracy and capitalism. They grow, as well, from our drive to find self-meaning in clear distinctions between our in-groups and out-groups (Hornsey, 2008). My intention here is to draw upon scholarship about the cognitive and sociopolitical functions of stereotyping to examine common stereotypes about poor people in the U.S., the role of stereotypes in shaping class discourses in the education milieu, and the function of stereotypes in directing or misdirecting policy and practice related to the education of poor and working class students. Although stereotypes inform and misinform thinking across many identities and oppressions, capitalist hegemony has had a particularly powerful silencing effect on contoured discourses about class and poverty in the U.S. (hooks, 2000). Evidence of this condition is illustrated by Ruby Payne’s (2005) position and that of the “culture of poverty” paradigm at the center of today’s discourses on poverty, class, and education (Gorski, 2008a)—a space occupied, just 20 years ago, by Kozol’s (1992) detailed analysis of systemic, “savage,” class inequities in U.S. schools. That this shift can be understood, as well, in the context of growing wealth and income gaps in the U.S., the hastening of deficit discourses about poor people and the U.S. “achievement gap” (Dudley-Marling, 2007; Gorski, 2011), and the corporatization of U.S. schooling (Martin, 2011), underscores hooks’ (2000) warnings about our failure to attend to matters of class with the same vigor as matters of race and gender. I begin by continuing my exploration of the process by which we, as educators, become susceptible to, and, if we are not careful, vessels for, class-based and other stereotypes. Next, I share what I found when I put four of the most common stereotypes about poor people to the test, poring over studies about poverty and schooling in the U.S. to assess whether they hold up to empirical scrutiny. I end by discussing the implications of what I found in relation to the goal of creating equitable schools for low-income students. THE NATURE OF INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP STEREOTYPING One of the keys to distinguishing between stereotyping as a cognitive process for every day, non-exploitative, decision-making (e.g., Where might I find a water fountain in this building?) 304 GORSKI and stereotyping as a symptom of systemic oppression is in determining the extent to which the mechanisms described earlier—hegemonic socialization processes and the drive for group distinction—are in play. These mechanisms, in their rewarding of a sort of selective evidencegathering routine, are at the root of group-level biases (Nesdale & Flesser, 2001). We tend to require less evidence, and less accurate evidence, to convince us of the legitimacy of a stereotype about a group to which we do not belong than to one about our in-groups (Biernat, 2003; Macrae, Milne, & Bodenhausen, 1994; Van Rooy et al., 2003). Social psychologists (Raden, 2003; Tajful & Turner, 1986) have referred to this phenomenon as “in-group bias” because it is based more generally on the tendency to see our identity in-groups more favorably overall than groups with which we do not associate (Gorman, 2005). Certainly, my colleague Frederick has what he considers good evidence that women are bad drivers. But, just as certainly, to extrapolate an experience or two into a generalization about all women, he has to suppress considerable amounts of counter-evidence, such as the number of women drivers he never notices because they do not ignite his road rage. This suppression protects him because, if he generalizes men, he also implicates himself. We all participate in this sort of faulty generalization in one way or another, usually unconsciously (Gorman, 2005). And, as described earlier, this is not always bad in the sense that stereotypes can help us make decisions when gaps exist in our knowledge and experience. For example, stereotyping functions can be helpful when I am searching for a water fountain in an unfamiliar building. Knowing that water fountains often are near restrooms, I follow signs toward the restrooms. However, when stereotypes are applied to groups of people and their relative worth, rather than to buildings and the consistency of their plumbing infrastructures, they are not politically neutral. In the interpersonal case, the socialization behind our stereotypes leads us to seek evidence to cement existing biases (Jervis, 2006). Meanwhile, we often fail to note evidence that does not support these biases. Gorman explains, “People are more likely to notice and remember information that confirms an applicable stereotype than information that disconfirms it” (p. 704). At the individual level, this results in the confirmation of our existing stereotypes. At the systemic level, where individual attitudes coalesce into popular perception, it can have—and has had—serious policy implications, guiding or misguiding how people respond to all matter of social conditions, from the economic achievement gap to the U.S. wealth gap (Cozzarelli, Wilkinson, & Tagler, 2001). Consider, for example, Payne’s (2005) ascent as one of the most popular and prosperous school consultants on poverty and education (Ng & Rury, 2006). Payne enjoys wide and profitable access to school districts across the U.S., despite that the content of her work is grossly inaccurate (Bomer, Dworin, May, & Semingson, 2008) and oppressive (Gorski, 2008a; Osei-Kofi, 2005) and that her teacher workshops have been shown to deepen participants’ negative stereotypes about poor families (Smiley & Helfenbein, 2011). Unfortunately, these conditions appear to be of little mitigating consequence against what has been another finding of scholarship about Payne’s influence on class discourses in education: Her work, steeped in stereotypes about families in poverty, confirms the attitudes and worldviews that many teachers carry into the classroom with them (Redeaux, 2011). In other words, Payne has “common sense” on her side. This phenomenon, the transformation of individual stereotype and bias into “common sense,” occurs across most every identity. Targets can include anybody: white people or people of color; heterosexual people or people identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer; men or women. Of course, stereotypes tend to stick more strongly to disenfranchised communities that do not have the institutional power to popularize a counter-narrative (Salzer, 2000) than to privileged DECONSTRUCTING CLASS STEREOTYPES 305 communities that do have the power, not only to popularize a false narrative, but also to use that narrative to justify their own privilege and, in Woddell and Henry’s (2005) words, “to rationalize discriminatory practices” (p. 302). In the education realm, where conversations about class and poverty have been dominated for the past decade by Payne (Gorski, 2008a; Ng & Rury, 2006; OseiKofi, 2005) and the “culture of poverty” paradigm, a framework that assumes—and wrongfully so (Gorski, 2008b; Rosemblatt, 2009)—that poor people share a consistent, predictable set of values and behaviors, a particularly unrelenting kind of stereotyping has been leveled against students living in poverty. STEREOTYPING POOR PEOPLE When I teach a class or deliver a workshop about poverty, economic justice, and schooling, I often begin by asking participants, usually pre- or in-service teachers, to consider the question, “Why are poor people poor in the U.S.?” Answers vary. However, even when participants identify structural barriers as responsible for a portion or even most poverty they almost always qualify their answers with a litany of stereotypes: Poor people are lazy. They don’t care about education. They’re alcoholics and drug abusers. They don’t want to work; instead, they are addicted to the welfare system. These teachers are not outliers. Most people in the U.S. believe that poor people are poor because of their own deficiencies rather than opportunity inequalities (Rank, Yoon, & Hirschl, 2003). This, however, was not always the case. The now-dominant U.S. view of poor people as morally and intellectually deficient is a relatively new phenomenon (Gorski, 2011), having emerged in the mid-1970s (Rank et al., 2003). Prior to that time, according to Rank et al., research consistently had demonstrated for decades that a majority of people in the U.S. attributed poverty to structural conditions, such as a lack of opportunity, and not to supposed deficiencies among poor people. This shift in mass perception was propagated by several coalescing forces of social conditioning. One such condition was the growing endorsement by right-leaning policymakers of Lewis’s (1961) “culture of poverty” paradigm, which hypothesized that poor people remain poor due largely to a variety of cultural attributes that block them from escaping poverty. According to Lewis, these included an emphasis on the present and neglect of the future, violent tendencies, and a lack of a sense of history. Notably, Lewis’s findings, which dozens of scholars since have attempted, and failed, to replicate, largely were rejected by the social science community by the mid-1970s (see, for instance, Billings, 1974; Harris, 1976; Van Til & Van Til, 1973) and widely criticized among poverty scholars for its generalizations and stereotyping (Rosemblatt, 2009; Ryan, 1971; Valentine, 1968). The popular phrase “blaming the victim” was coined by William Ryan in 1971 in his critical response to the “culture of poverty” paradigm. Still today, the general consensus among poverty researchers is that there is no such thing as a predictable, consistent “culture of poverty” shared by all, or even most, poor people (Adeola, 2005; Bomer et al., 2008). However, that did not stop many prominently-placed conservative policymakers from using it to argue and garner support for a variety of policy initiatives, including those that continue to erode welfare programs (Jennings, 2004). What better way, the thinking went, to redirect “common good” expenditures up the economic pyramid than to paint the populace a picture of poor people as “undeserving” (Gans, 1995), as people who were responsible, not just for their own poverty but also for declining economic conditions (whether real or mythical) in the broader society? 306 GORSKI Ronald Reagan played, perhaps, the leading role in popularizing today’s stereotypic culture of poverty image of poor people. During his failed bid for the 1976 Republican presidential primary endorsement, Reagan often repeated the story of Linda Taylor, a woman from the south side of Chicago who defrauded the government out of roughly $8,000 in welfare claims by using four aliases. Reagan exaggerated considerably during his speeches, suggesting that Taylor, who he called a “welfare queen,” had collected more than $150,000 and used more than 80 aliases, a mischaracterization uncovered at the time by The Washington Star (“‘Welfare queen’ becomes issue in Reagan campaign,” 1976). Despite failing to survive past the Republican primary, Reagan left an indelible mark on the popular class and poverty discourse with the strategic and repeated use of that term: “welfare queen.” His habitual use of the idiom established it, with all of its stereotypic insinuations, firmly in the U.S. cultural lexicon, where it has remained for more than 30 years, a topic of countless exposés (e.g., Wetzstein, 1997), documentaries (e.g., Stein & Scott, 2002), and TV political commentary show shouting matches. Notably, Reagan pointed the “welfare queen” label, not just at poor people, but at poor, urban, African American women, and particularly those who were single mothers. As would become standard neoliberal strategy for framing domestic economic discourses in the U.S., Reagan aimed public scorn at people who had little power to popularize a counter-narrative. It is notable, as well, that the stereotypes captured by Reagan’s “welfare queen” discourse and those exploited by Payne (2005) and other purveyors of the “culture of poverty” paradigm are virtually indistinguishable, painting poor people as lazy, violent addicts who do not value education, lack communication skills, and take advantage of, even as they disdain, “the system.” Certainly, these stereotypes existed in many people’s minds prior to Lewis’s (1961) introduction of the “culture of poverty” paradigm, Reagan’s run, and the mass media fascination with “welfare queens.” However, these conditions and manipulations comprise, to a considerable extent, the roots of the mass acceptance of the stereotypes of poor people, and the purposeful social conditioning to accept those stereotypes, that persists today. (For a more detailed discussion of this history, see Gorski, 2011.) As mentioned earlier, the tendency to harbor these stereotypes and to base them upon selective evidence-gathering is strongest and most dangerous when done by members of a dominant or privileged group. Non-dominant groups—people of color, poor people, people whose home languages are not English—generally do not have the social or political power to popularize counter-narratives (Godrej, 2011) in order to challenge stereotypes about them. As a result, stigmatizing stereotypes stick more fiercely to poor people than they do to wealthy people, even when the stereotypes are false. Certainly, teachers, most of whom are working- or middle-class, do not constitute a privileged group; growing up in a working-class family, my economic reality much more resembled that of people on the bottom of the economic hierarchy than those at the top. However, middle- and working-class teachers do experience economic privilege in relation to their more economically disadvantaged students, and they, like the general public, are socialized to have and apply these stereotypes (Smith, Allen, & Bowen, 2010). Complicating matters, research has shown that the most commonly held stereotypes are those that distinguish non-dominant groups from the ways in which privileged groups tend to imagine, and wish to project, themselves (Sherman et al., 2009). In this way, stereotypes, as they relate to mental processes, are less about the stereotyper’s desire to accurately portray “the other” than about her or his desire to reinforce a self-image in direct contrast to those people being stereotyped (Fein, von Hippel, & Spencer, 1999; Jervis, 2006; Spencer, Fein, Wolfe, Fong, & Dunn, 1998). DECONSTRUCTING CLASS STEREOTYPES 307 It should come as no surprise, then, that some stereotypes that are associated commonly with poor people, such as a propensity for alcohol abuse, are truer of wealthy people than they are of poor people (Diala et al., 2001; Galea, Ahern, Tracy, & Vlahov, 2007). But how often is this propensity applied universally to wealthy people? How often do we hear, “No wonder so many rich kids don’t do well at college; their parents are all alcoholics.”? It is through this power of the privileged elite to manipulate popular perception that common stereotypes are entrenched in the mainstream psyche. These intricacies in the relationships between stereotypes and sociopolitical framing are important, not only because of their interpersonal implications but also because stereotypes, in the way they inform how individuals process information, affect perceptions about the viability, fairness, and effectiveness (or potential effectiveness) of public policy (Burns & Gimpel, 2000). Illustrating this point, Burns and Gimpel argue, “Those who believe the stereotype that blacks are lazy are likely to be opposed to policies that seek to ameliorate racial discrimination” (p. 204). It is critical to note here that the driving dispositional force is not the accuracy of the stereotype, but the stereotype itself. A teacher might have 5, 10, or 20 low-income students who do not fit a particular stereotype about poor people, but if she or he has 2 or 3 who do fit it, they can become, in the teacher’s mind, sufficient evidence to confirm the stereotype. Jervis (2006) explains, “Given the complexity and ambiguity of our world, it is unfortunately true that beliefs for which a good deal of evidence can be mustered often turn out to be mistaken” (p. 643). The point is that one can find a lot of evidence for nearly anything, but considering that evidence while ignoring twice the contrary evidence does not make something true. Consider a school-based example. There exist several common stereotypes about poor people in the U.S. that suggest that they are inattentive and, as a result, ineffective parents. In education circles, for example, low-income parents or guardians who do not attend parent-teacher conferences can become targets of stereotyping—or worse, targets of blame—not by educators who mean to stifle their students in any way, but by those who are conditioned to gather mental evidence selectively (and especially in ways that attach stereotypes to “the other” rather than themselves). So, whereas a more well-to-do parent or guardian might be pardoned more readily for missing structured opportunities for family involvement—she’s traveling for work—a lowincome parent or guardian’s lack of this sort of involvement might be interpreted as additional evidence of disinterest in her or his child’s education (Pattereson, Hale, & Stessman, 2007). Jervis (2006) explains, “Judgments . . . can be self-reinforcing as ambiguous evidence is taken not only to be consistent with preexisting beliefs, but to confirm them. Logically, the latter is the case only when the evidence both fits with the belief and does not fit the competing ones. But people rarely probe the latter possibility as carefully as they should” (p. 651). To understand the complexity of this stereotyping process, it is important to examine not only the selective evidence-gathering process but also the evidence we might be ignoring altogether to come to the stereotyped conclusion that, for example, poor parents are inattentive. Based on my discourse analyses of Payne’s (2005) work and other poverty discourses in the U.S. (Gorski, 2008a, 2008b, 2011), I have come to see this ignored or omitted evidence as coming in at least two forms. The first of these I call “sociopolitical evidence”—information about the social conditions that influence individuals’ lives and, as a result, their options. To believe, for example, that poor people are poor solely because of their own deficiencies, I must ignore a slew of sociopolitical realities related to poverty and class in the U.S., including inequitable access to schooling and the scarcity of living wage jobs. 308 GORSKI Similarly, to believe that the primary reason poor parents and guardians are less likely than their wealthier counterparts to attend structured opportunities for family involvement is their lack of attentiveness to education, I would need to suppress several sociopolitical factors that may explain some portion of the discrepancy. These might include that they are more likely to work multiple jobs, including evening jobs; that they are more likely to have jobs for which they do not have paid leave; that they are less likely to be able to afford child care or public transportation if necessary to attend; that they are more likely to have experienced, and to continue experiencing, school environments as hostile and unwelcoming (Graham, 2009; Howard, Dresser, & Dunklee, 2009; Van Galen, 2007). In other words, I would need to ignore that these sorts of opportunities tend not to be offered in ways that make them as accessible to families living in poverty as they are to wealthy or even middle-class families. The second type of omitted evidence I call “comparative evidence”—that which directly refutes a stereotype by demonstrating that a phenomenon is no more prevalent in the stereotyped group than it is in the larger society. So, to accept the stereotype that associates substance abuse with poor people, I must suppress evidence, such as that which I see before me (hotels full of colleagues drinking to excess at professional conferences, perhaps) or studies showing that poor people are less likely than their wealthier counterparts to be users or abusers of alcohol (Diala et al., 2001; Galea et al., 2007). (More on this momentarily.) These sorts of misperceptions and missed perceptions have the potential to thwart efforts for class equity in schools. As a result, an examination of the stereotypes that drive educators’ attitudes about students living in poverty is a critical undertaking. In what follows I consider, in that spirit, four of the most common stereotypes about poor people in the U.S. I scrutinize these stereotypes, examining whether they hold up under the analysis of a concerted evidence-gathering process. COMMON STEREOTYPES ABOUT POOR STUDENTS AND THEIR FAMILIES Poor people in the U.S. are stereotyped in innumerable ways (Williams, 2009). Research has shown that these stereotypes are embedded during childhood through a variety of implicit and explicit messages from the media and other institutions and influences (Smith, Allen, & Bowen, 2010). I chose to focus on four specific stereotypes commonly applied to poor people for two reasons. First, space constraints make it impossible to examine the evidence of every stereotype about poor people in a single article. Given this constraint, and due to Payne’s (2005) immense influence in the teacher professional development milieu, I chose four stereotypes that appear prominently, whether implicitly or explicitly, in her literature according to the many published analyses of her work (e.g., Gorski, 2008a; Ng & Rury, 2006; Osei-Kofi, 2005). Stereotype 1: Poor People Do Not Value Education The popular measure of parental attitudes about the importance of education, particularly among teachers, is the extent of parent involvement in their children’s education (Hill & Craft, 2003). This stands to reason, as research has consistently confirmed a correlation between family involvement DECONSTRUCTING CLASS STEREOTYPES 309 and school achievement (Barnard, 2004; Griffith, 1998; J.-S. Lee & Bowen, 2006; Mattingly et al., 2002; Oyserman, Brickman, & Rhodes, 2007). However, notions of parent involvement often are limited in scope, focused upon in-school involvement—the kind of involvement that requires parents and guardians to visit their child’s school or classroom. While it is true that low-income parents and guardians are less likely to participate in this brand of “involvement” (Mattingly et al., 2002; National Center for Educational Statistics, 2005), they engage in home-based involvement strategies, such as encouraging children to read and limiting television watching, more frequently than their wealthier counterparts (J.-S. Lee & Bowen, 2006). It might be easy, given the stereotype that low-income families do not value education, to associate low-income families’ less consistent engagement in on-site, publicly visible, school involvement (such as parent-teacher conferences) with an ethic that devalues education. But to do so would require am omission of considerable evidence to the contrary. First, a sociopolitical omission: As mentioned earlier, low-income parents and guardians experience significant classspecific barriers to school involvement (Gorski, 2008b; Hill & Taylor, 2004; J.-S. Lee & Bowen, 2006). These include consequences associated with the scarcity of living wage jobs, such as the ability to afford child care or public transportation and the ability to afford to take time off from wage work (Gorski, 2008a) as well as the weight of their own negative school experiences (J.-S. Lee & Bowen, 2006). Although some schools and districts have responded to these challenges by providing on-site child care, transportation, and other mitigations, the fact remains that, on average, this type of involvement remains considerably less accessible to poor families than to wealthier ones. Secondly, there simply is no evidence, beyond differences in on-site involvement, that attitudes about the value of education in poor communities differ in any way from those in wealthier communities (Compton-Lilly, 2003; Gorski, 2008b). The evidence suggests that attitudes about the value of education among families in poverty mirror those among families in other socioeconomic strata. In other words, poor people, demonstrating impressive resilience, value education just as much as wealthy people (Compton-Lilly, 2003; Grenfell & James, 1998) despite historic and present class inequities in schools. Stereotype 2: Poor People Are Lazy Another common stereotype about poor people—and particularly poor people of color (Cleaveland, 2008; Seccombe, 2002)—is that they are lazy or have a weak work ethic (Kelly, 2010). Like other stereotypes, this one is less an accurate portrayal of poor people than an illustration of how the privileged manufacture negative images of “the other” to cement and project positive self-images, justify unequal conditions, and blame the disenfranchised for their “misfortune.” Unfortunately, despite its inaccuracy, the “laziness” image of the poor and the stigma attached to it has been shown to have particularly devastating effects on the morale of poor communities (Cleaveland, 2008) while encouraging mass compliance with growing economic stratification (Gorski, 2011). There is no evidence that poor people on average are lazier or have weaker work ethics than people from other socioeconomic groups (Wilson, 1996). To the contrary, there is evidence that poor people work just as hard as—and perhaps harder than—people from higher socioeconomic brackets (Waldron, Roberts, & Reamer, 2004). Poor working adults work, on average, 2,500 hours 310 GORSKI per year—the equivalent of 1.2 full-jobs (Waldron, Roberts, & Reamer, 2004), often patching together several part-time jobs in order to survive. Those people living in poverty who are working part-time are more likely than people from other class conditions to be doing so involuntarily, despite seeking full-time work (Kim, 1999). This is an astounding display of resilience in light of the fact that the working poor are concentrated in the lowest-paying jobs with the most negligible opportunities for advancement—jobs that require the most intense manual labor (Orrenius & Zavodny, 2009) and that offer virtually no benefits (paid sick leave, for instance) (Kim, 1999). More than one out of five jobs in the U.S. pays at a rate that is below the poverty threshold (Waldron et al., 2004). And prospects are steadily growing dimmer, as more and more new jobs pay a poverty-level or lower wage (Reamer et al., 2008). According to the National Employment Law Project (2011), following increased unemployment rates over the last several years, the “recovery” brought back over a million jobs, but a disproportionate number of these jobs were low-wage jobs, which accounted for 23% of job losses prior to 2010, but nearly half of newly available jobs as of 2011. Meanwhile, less than half of the jobs the Department of Labor predicts will be added by 2018 will pay enough to keep a two-worker, two-child, family out of poverty (Wider Opportunities for Women, 2010). Stereotype 3: Poor People Are Substance Abusers As I noted earlier, low-income people in the U.S. are less likely overall to use or abuse alcohol than their wealthier counterparts (Diala et al., 2001; Galea et al., 2007; International Center for Alcohol Policies [ICAP], 2000; Keyes & Hasin, 2008; National Survey on Drug Use and Health [NSDUH], 2004). This is consistent with international patterns of alcohol consumption and addiction. Around the world, alcohol use and addiction are associated positively with income; in other words, the higher somebody’s income, the more likely she or he is to use alcohol or to be an alcoholic (Degenhardt et al., 2008). What we know about youth and alcohol use is a little less definitive. Some studies suggest that, as with the broader population, alcohol consumption and addiction are positively related to income. For example, in their study of two populations of high school students, one predominantly white and economically privileged and the other predominantly African American and lowincome, Chen, Sheth, Krejci, and Wallace (2003) found alcohol consumption to be significantly higher in the former than in the latter. Others, such as the NSDUH (2004) and Monitoring the Future (2008), report that alcohol use among youth is equally distributed across socioeconomic strata. Overall, then, there seems to be no evidence that alcohol use or addiction are more prevalent among low-income people than among those of any other socioeconomic group, rendering any stereotype associating the two as false. This is particularly astounding, and an indication of tremendous resiliency among low-income communities, when we consider that alcohol abuse can be a side-effect of social deprivation (S. Lee & Jeon, 2005). Similarly, there is little evidence that low-income people are more likely overall to use illicit drugs than their wealthier counterparts. Drug use in the U.S. is distributed fairly evenly across income levels (Degenhardt et al., 2008; Saxe, Kadushin, Tighe, Rindskopf, & Beveridge, 2001) regardless of age. In its annual national study of adolescent drug use, Monitoring the Future (2008) found that this pattern holds among high school students in the U.S. as well. DECONSTRUCTING CLASS STEREOTYPES 311 Stereotype 4: Poor People Are Linguistically Deficient Mirroring attitudes in the general public, many educators, from teachers to school psychologists, believe that poor students are linguistically deficient (Miller, Cho, & Bracey, 2005). This is a particularly dangerous stereotype given the extent to which identity is wrapped in language (Fishman, 1989; Gayles & Denerville, 2007; Grant, Oka, & Baker, 2009; Lippi-Green, 1994; Luhman, 1990). Criticizing students’ language can result in feelings of disconnectedness among those who are targeted in this way (Christensen, 2008). In addition, the assumptions underlying the language deficiency stereotype have been shown to negatively impact assessments of student performance when language is assumed to be a marker of intelligence (Bourdieu, 1991; Grant, Oka, & Baker, 2009). At the base of this stereotype are three shaky assumptions: (1) that poor children do not enter school with the volume or type of vocabulary they need to succeed and that this is a reflection of parent disinterest in education, (2) that the use of particular variations of English reflect inferior language capabilities, and (3) that, for those students who speak languages other than English at home, such as children of recent immigrants, English Language Learner (or ELL) status is, itself, a marker of class. The notion that children from impoverished families enter school linguistically deprived, with smaller and less complex vocabularies than their wealthier peers, and that this condition is the fault of family “cultures” that do not value learning, has become part of the “common sense” of the education reform discourse in the U.S., despite that it is based largely on a single study of a few dozen economically diverse families in the Kansas City area (Hart & Risley, 1995), as detailed by Dudley-Marling and Lucas (2009). Certainly it is widely known that low-income and working-class children enter school with less-developed reading skills on average than their wealthier counterparts (Children’s Defense Fund, 2008) and that this initial discrepancy can be a strong predictor of reading proficiency throughout their schooling (Duncan et al., 2007). However, there is no evidence that this discrepancy in reading skills is connected to a language use deficiency or that it reflects parent disinterest in education. As Flessa (2007) explained, One might link poverty to lack of employment opportunities that pay a living wage, in turn to a family’s need to move frequently, in turn to inconsistent school attendance, in turn to low reading scores; or one might link poverty to economically segregated neighborhoods to low school quality to novice teachers to low reading scores. (p. 10) Similarly, based on their study of 1,364 racially diverse public school children, Dupere, Leventhal, Crosnoe, and Dion (2010) concluded that the reading score discrepancy between low-income and wealthier students could be explained largely by the institutions to which they had access since birth. For example, poor and working class families rarely have access to high-quality early childhood education programs—the kind that support children’s language (and other) learning in intensive, engaging ways (Kilburn & Karoly, 2008; Temple, Reynolds, & Arteaga, 2010). The second shaky notion—that particular variations of English indicate superior or inferior language capabilities—is grounded in the assumed existence of “superior” and “inferior” language practices (Carli, Guardiano, Kaucic-Basa, Tessarolo, & Ussai, 2003; Dudley-Marling & Lucas, 2009; Luhman, 1990; Miller, Cho, & Bracey, 2005). Linguists roundly reject the superior/inferior dichotomy, a social construction they call “standard language ideology” in reference to the fallacious term “standard English” (Joseph, 1987; Lippi-Green, 1994). Like most stereotyped beliefs, standard language ideology results from the stereotyper’s desire to associate with the 312 GORSKI dominant “norm,” even when that “norm” is hegemonic, handed down from the power structure (Godley, Carpenter, & Werner, 2007). As synthesized by Woolard and Schieffelin (1994), “Moral indignation over nonstandard forms derives from ideological associations of the standard with the qualities valued within the culture, such as clarity or truthfulness” (p. 64). Linguists have been bemoaning since at least the early 1970s the ways in which students in U.S. schools are taught to misunderstand the nature of language, such as through the false dichotomy of “correct/proper” and “incorrect/improper” language varieties (Burling, 1973). They reject, as well, the belief that language varieties can be ranked as more or less “evolved” in relation to a “standard” variation (Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994). In linguistic reality, all variations of a language and all dialects, from what some people call “Black English Vernacular” (Gayles & Denerville, 2007; Honda, 2001) to the Appalachian English spoken by my maternal grandmother (Luhman, 1990), are highly structured with their own sets of grammatical rules (Miller, Cho, & Bracey, 2005). These variations of English, just like so-called “standard” English, are not markers of intelligence or wealth; rather, they are indications of the regional, cultural, and social contexts in which somebody learned to speak. This is why the denigration of one’s language, both directly and through the imposition of a “standard” which might be understood as the language of one’s oppressor, is a form of what Bourdieu (1982) called “symbolic” domination and social exclusion. As with other social identities and oppressions, the notion of a language “norm” is handed down by the privileged classes, ensuring that their norm is understood as the norm (Speicher & Bielanski, 2000). Schools in the U.S., in their imposition of hegemonic language norms, historically have played a key role in this domination, normed acculturation (Hornberger & Johnson, 2007), and social, political, and economic stratification (Heller, 1995; Pennycook, 2006). “Standard” English hegemony is so heavy in the U.S., and so conflated with notions of a larger U.S. superiority, that state and federal policies and practices, like those banning bilingual education programs in some states (Johnson, 2010) and those instituting English-only testing regimens (Menken, 2008), often are enacted despite overwhelming evidence that they conflict with the most effective pedagogical practices. In turn, many families who live at the intersection where economic, linguistic, and, at times, racial disenfranchisement merge experience yet another form of oppression. Another common language stereotype, propagated widely by Payne (2005), is that children from generational poverty primarily speak with an “informal” register or style (as one might speak with a sibling or close friend) while their middle class and wealthier counterparts speak with a “formal” register (as one might speak during a job interview). However, like other forms of codeswitching—modifying behavior in context-specific ways—all people use a full continuum of language registers (Brizuela, Andersen, & Stallings, 1999), regardless of the variety of language they speak. The false association, for instance, of Appalachian English with informal register demonstrates a mistaken conflation of “formal” with what we call “standard” English. LippiGreen (1994) summarizes: “Linguists proceed on the assumption that all naturally occurring languages . . . are equally functional . . .; there has been no evidence in the many years of inquiry to disprove this basic thesis” (p. 165). STEREOTYPING, DEFICIT IDEOLOGY, AND POLICYMAKING The dangers of class stereotyping are plentiful. At the individual level, stereotypes can make educators unnecessarily afraid or accusatory of our own students—of our most disenfranchised DECONSTRUCTING CLASS STEREOTYPES 313 students—and their families. They can lead educators to express low expectations for lowincome students and their families or to blame them for the very symptoms of their repression. Complicating matters, according to Steele (2010), the stereotyped are attuned to the ways in which they are stereotyped, so that the accuracy of a stereotype largely is meaningless in relation to the toll the stereotype, accurate or not, takes on its target. He explains: This means that whenever we’re in a situation where a bad stereotype could be applied to us—such as those about being old, poor, rich, or female—we know it. We know what “people could think.” We know that anything we do that fits the stereotype could be taken as confirming it. And we know that, for that reason, we could be judged and treated accordingly. (p. 5) The weight of this consciousness—the very possibility of somebody applying a stereotype— can affect students’ cognitive performance and emotional well-being, as research on stereotype susceptibility and stereotype threat has demonstrated (Ambady, Shih, Kim, & Palinsky, 2001; McKown & Weinstein, 2003; Steele, 2010; Steele & Aronson, 1995). At the systemic level, these stereotypes can misdirect well-intentioned efforts to develop and implement effective policies for mitigating or eliminating socioeconomic inequities in schools. Or worse, they put us in the roll of “buffer class” (Kivel, 2006), protecting the elite classes by complying with their strategies for justifying an inequitable system, such as by framing as an “achievement gap” the symptoms of systemic inequities (a lack of access to health care or the scarcity of living wage jobs, for instance) while ignoring those inequities and their implications on schooling. So, for example, if I buy into stereotypes that suggest that parents living in poverty are inattentive to their children’s education or poor role models, and that that is why the “achievement gap” exists, then I might seek to address outcome inequalities such as test score gaps by supporting programs or policies designed to “fix” their parenting. When I do so, and particularly when I do so while I ignore systemic inequities, I am helping to justify the existing conditions. Meanwhile, I am blaming disenfranchised people for their own disenfranchisement. I am blaming them for the ways in which they are locked out of equitable educational opportunity. The ideology that underlies the process of seeking evidence for these sorts of stereotypes and then using that evidence—sound or not—to blame poor people for their poverty or for outcomes resulting from their poverty has been called “deficit ideology” (Gorski, 2011; Sleeter, 2004) or “deficit thinking” (Dudley-Marling & Lucas, 2009; Valencia, 1997; Yosso, 2005). Deficit ideology is a worldview that explains and justifies outcome inequalities—standardized test scores or levels of educational attainment, for example—by pointing to supposed deficiencies within disenfranchised individuals and communities (Brandon, 2003; Gorski, 2011; Valencia, 1997; Weiner, 2003). Additionally, deficit ideology discounts sociopolitical context, such as social conditions that grant some people greater access than others to resources, including high-quality schooling (Brandon, 2003; Dudley-Marling, 2007). The function of deficit ideology is to justify existing conditions, such as the socioeconomic achievement gap, by identifying the problem of inequality as located within, rather than as pressing upon, poor people. Ladson-Billings (2006) suggests that the very practice of using the term “achievement gap” to describe a problem that, ultimately, is less about achievement than about access—access to prenatal care, access to educational (or any) preschool, access to full-day kindergarten, access to fully-equipped and adequately funded schools—is symptomatic of deficit ideology. In essence, deficit ideology defines the problem in terms of students’ inabilities to achieve and their families’ inabilities to help them achieve rather than the many barriers that 314 GORSKI impede their achievement or the hegemony evident in the very way we construct the notion of “achievement.” Unfortunately, in her examination of the deficit discourses framing current understandings of, and responses to, the racial achievement gap, Love (2004) demonstrates the pervasiveness of deficit ideology, even among those purportedly committed to educational equity. This is why a refusal to accept selective evidence, or to base policy or practice on such evidence, is critical to the goal of educational equity. Wh...
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