Overview

Dividing Classes offers a first-hand ethnographic account to examine the relationship between social class structures and educational success. Instead of studying the historically marginalized lower classes, this book asserts the need to look beyond poor peoples' values of dominant groups to explain the reproduction of social class. Drawing on interviews with 31 administrators, principals, and teachers and 20 middle-class mothers in a small town, Ellen Brantlinger discovers the considerable power the middle class wields in determining school policy and practice to secure educational advantages for their children. With the insight gained from this perspective, the roots of increasingly conservative educational policy and the idea of class as an organising category in education are critically examined.

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9780415932981

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Reviews

Dividing Classes forces us to confront perhaps the most troubling and least studied challenge to equitable schooling: Middle-class Americans' presumption that their own superiority accounts for their school success and the life chances that successful schooling brings. In her penetrating account of affluent, mostly liberal, mothers and education professionals, Brantlinger shows how powerfully the ideology of meritocracy undercuts the educational opportunities of low-income young people. Most important she illuminates how this undercutting works through the seemingly innocent, day-to-day talk and actions of middle-class Americans that consistently advantage society's already-advantaged young people. -- Jeannie Oakes, Presidential Professor of Educational Equity, UCLA Describes how members of the educated middle class act to secure the best of what schools have to offer for their own children and how they rationalize their actions. -- Journal of Economic Literature

Author Information

Ellen Brantlinger is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Indiana University, Bloomington.

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