32 In this respect, the comparison ofTroy and Santa Ana high schools in Table 4.1 accurately reflects the national pattern: differences in the factors under administrative control seem too sma11 to account for the massive differences in student outcomes.

Upper-class parents generally have better information about school quality than lower-class parents23 and are better able to afford homes in the right neighborhoods. Jonathan Rothwell of the Brookings Institu-tion found that houses near a high-scoring public school cost more than $200,000 more than comparable houses near low-scoring schools. 24 Other research suggests that when people bid up prices for houses in good school districts, they are really bidding for a district with many affluent, well-educated parents, rather than for the best teacher qual-ity, class size, or per-pupil spending, implying that parents believe that parental inputs are more important than school inputs in determining school quality.25

r city, and so we were familiar with what [our children] would be exposed to-gangs and violence and probably lower-level educa-tion, unfortunately, where the teachers are basically managing the students. We knew exactly what we wanted for our kids. We wanted chem to compete with the kids chat go to Ivy League schools

Santa Ana students are overwhelmingly poor and Latino and heavily Spanish-speaking, whereas Troy students come from ethnically diverse, eco-nomically upscale backgrounds. More striking still are the contrasts in the "output" measures of the two schools-graduation rates, statewide academic and SAT test scores, truancy and suspension rates. Students at Santa Ana are four times more likely than students at Troy to drop out, roughly ten rimes more likely to be truant or suspended, and only one third as likely to take the SAT. If they do take the SAT, on average they score in the bottom quartile nationwide, whereas the average SAT taker at Troy scores in the top 10-15 percent.

Most Latinos in Orange County live in the impoverished cities of the inland valleys of the northern half of the county, among them Santa Ana. A 2004 report by rhe Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government identified Santa Ana as the Most Troubled City in America because of its high unemployment, high poverty rate, undereducated population, and crowded housing. Latinos in Orange County are more likely to live not only in poverty bur also amidst street violence and gang activity. Santa Ana alone is home co 29 street gangs.4

In conclusion, if we do not intentionally unveil the hidden advantages that middle-class and upper-class students have over their low-income peers, we run the risk of indirectly reinforcing these inequalities in our classrooms. Many of us enter the teaching profession to challenge the status quo. Then we get swept up in rules and mandates and procedures, and we lose sight of why we went down this road in the first place. It takes courage to go on our own in a system that perpetuates itself at the expense of poor students. But not challenging this, not aligning ourselves with the strengths of the communities and neighborhoods from where our students come, is going back on our own moral center. It is, in the end, a civic responsibility to ensure that all students have opportunities to imagine lives of great hope.

It is when these two come together that we see how poverty and race intermingle to marginalize students. Low-income students are more likely to achieve positive educational outcomes (e.g., passing test scores or graduating) once their strengths are recognized, affirmed, and rewarded to the same degree that their middle-class peers' are. Because I was respectful and did not disagree with or challenge other students or educators, teachers accepted me. I was one of the "good ones." My compliance and obedience were rewarded with good grades.

In this way I was raised to be compliant, one element of the hidden curriculum in our schools. This insistence on compliance is also one aspect of schooling that keeps some students from feeling they can challenge the very structures that repress them. They often feel silenced and alienated from public education at an early age

They talk about the social distance they feel from their peers who have money. They tell me they often hang out with other poor students to avoid being reminded of what they simply don't have. Many low-income students do not own cars. They are less likely to dine at off-campus restaurants or to have an entire wardrobe of brand-name clothes. They do not go to vacation resorts on spring break. They get tired of being reminded of these differences when they are with wealthier students. The same unease students feel with their more affluent peers can transfer over to their professors. They may not reach out to their professors when they are performing poorly in the class, fearing that they will be judged as lacking in the ability to succeed in school.

Math placement typically serves a benchmark for ninth-grade aca-demic standing, ;rnd the <lisparities in math placement by race arc striking. As is true nationally, white, mid<lle-class, or affluent stu-dents at BHS tend to receive access to advanced math courses early, and thus start their high school careers with a major ndvantage

Tracking on the basis of perceived academic ability is a tradirinn at many American high schools (Oakes, 1985 ), but it has changed over rhe past decades. As awareness has grown about rhe harmful effects of tracking on some students, there has been a shift away from assigning students to rigid tracks that determine all of their classes throughout high school to a more flexible arrangement in which students can vary in track assignment from class to class (Lucas, 1999).

The study generated the often-cited finding that over a year's time, pro-fessional parents utter an average of eleven million words to their toddlers. The corresponding figures for working-class and welfare families were six and three million, respectively. There was a long list of class-related lan-guage differences.2

While income inequality has played a role in widening the educational divide, it is far from the only factor influencing life chances and academic success. Neither Anthony nor Harold had a father living with him most of the time, although both retained connections with their fathers. Single-parent family structures have become the norm for low-income children but are still quite rare among children in high-income families.22 Grow-ing up in a single-parent family appears to have particularly detrimental consequences for male children, in part because they receive less attention than daughters and in part because their behavior is especially sensitive to levels of attention and warmth.

High-income families report spending twice as much on food and four times as much on housing and clothing as low-income families. Schooling outcomes are likely to be affected most by "child enrichment" expenditures-extracur-ricular activities like the sports Garrett played, high-quality child care for preschoolers, home-learning materials, and Alexander's private school-ing. Anthony's family scraped together enough money to pay his school tuition in his senior year, but Harold's family was having trouble putting enough food on the table.

These kinds of expenses were not unusual for the upper-middle-class families in Lareau's study. All could easily afford comfortable and reliable cars to transport their children from activity to activity. All lived in spa-cious houses in quiet, relatively crime-free neighborhoods.

The study first assessed the children shortly after they began kinder-garten, providing a picture of their skills at the starting line of their for-mal schooling. It shows that children from families in the top 20 percent of the income distribution already outscore children from the bottom 20 percent by 106 points in early literacy. This difference is nearly twice the size of the gap between the average reading skills of white and both black and Hispanic children at that age, and nearly equal to the amount that the typical child learns during kindergarten. Moreover, the reading gap was even larger when the same children were tested in fifth grade. Gaps in mathematics achievement are also substantial.

It is easy to imagine how the childhood circumstances of these two young men may have shaped their fates. Alexander lived in the suburbs while Anthony lived in the city center. Most of Alexander's suburban neighbors lived in families with incomes above the $125,000 that now sep-arates the richest 20 percent of children from the rest. Anthony Mears's school served pupils from families whose incomes were near or below the $27,000 threshold separating the bottom 20 percent (see figure 2.4).

I teach about shifting paradigms and talk about the discomfort it can cause. White students learning to think more critically about ques-tions o f race and racism may go home for the holidays and sud-denly see their parents in a different light. They may recognize nonprogressive thinking, racism, and so on, and it may hurt them that new ways of knowing may crea te estrangement where there was none.

Some express the feeling that they are less likely to suffer any kind of assault if they simply do not assert their subjectivity. They bave told me that many professors never showed any interest in hearing their voices. Accepting the decentering of the West globally, embracing multiculturalism, com pels educators to focus attention on the issue of voice. Who speaks? Who listens? And why?

In much of my writing about pedagogy, particularly in classroom settings with great diversity, I have talked about the need to examine critically the way we as teachers conceptualize what the space for learning should be like. Many professors have con-veyed to me their feeling that the classroom should be a "safe" place;

We proceeded from the standpoint that the vast m,Yority of Oberlin professors, who are overwhelmingly white, were basically well-meaning, concerned about the quality of education students receive on our campus, and therefore Jikely to be supportive of any effort at education for critica! con-sciousness. Together, we decided to have a group of seminars focusing on transformative pedagogy that would be open to all professors. Initially, students were also welcome, but we found that their presence inhibited honest discussion. On the first night, for example, severa! white professors made comments that could be viewed as horribly racist and the students left the group to share what was said around the college.

espite the contemporary focus on multiculturalism in our society, particularly in education, there is not nearly enough practica! discussion of ways classroom settings can be trans-formed so that the learning experience is inclusive. If the effort to respect and honor the social reality and experiences of groups in this society who are nonwhite is to be reflected in a pedagogical process, then as teachers-on all levels, from ele-mentary to university settings-we must acknowledge that our styles of teaching may need to change.

n addition to dealing with any number of indignities as a result of being perceived as somehow undeserving of their admission slots, poor college stu-dents must also face dilemmas that the moneyed do not. Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds suffer not only the damaging comments and class-based assumptions from peers and professors but also the social isolations that stem from the frequent predicament of not having college-experienced family members or friends with whom to relate.

Children reared in poverty disproportionately attend schools with the least-prepared, least-experienced, least-qualified teachers (Irvine, 2003). Staffing and course offerings are crucial in middle school because students who hope to attend college must engage in specific prerequisite courses prior to enter-ing high school if they are to have any chance of competing for admission to top-tiered or even average-quality four-year universities. For instance, my high school offered advanced placement and college-level courses that would grant students "jump-start" credits once admitted to an institution that recognized such credits (which many do). I attended Harvard as an undergraduate and was therefore eligible to forgo an entire semester of courses if I received a score of 4 or 5 on four advanced placement exams. Given that my tuition and fees easily exceeded $50,000 that first year, not having to pay for a full semester's worth of college credit would have benefited my family tremendously.

When they set foot in kindergarten, how many years "behind" are they in learning opportunities, literacy and numeracy development, reading and writ-ing "behaviors," and the many benefits of quality early care? Although the nosy neighbor in our favorite film highlighted the disgustingly expensive extremes to which the wealthy will go to start their children's educational careers off right, the n~tion ~f needing to start every child's education with the highest quality expenences is spot o

Part-time employment is the only sphere in which women outearn men. Their pay on full-time jobs continues to lag, with women earning a mere 81 cents to the dollar when compared to men with equal or fewer credentials (Mundy, 2012). I often share with students that my sister's employer worked her 39 hours per week for years to avoid providing health insurance.

Likewi~e, th~ corres~ondence principle refers to the perpetu-ation of social class stratification by sifting the same types of individuals into various labor classes by design, over time, and in full collusion with the public education system in a capitalist society (Au, 2006). Whereas Bourdieu was con-cerned wit? the trans~ission of cultural values, norms, and capital writ large, !"1arx speci_fically desc~1bed the iiberimportant role of schooling in accomplish-mg the deliberate sortmg and generational reinforcement of the classes.

On the basis of the inability of far too many people of color, as well as a vast number of Whites-neither of whom inherited wealth from their forebears-to purchase homes or, more important, to purchase homes in a "good school dis-trict,,, housing segregation continues to plague the educational and social out-comes of multiple members of the underclass.

Racial minorities (better phrased, "global majorities") are dispro h f . d. d por-tionately represented in poverty. T ere ore, an mor mate an overwhelmingly fewer number of people of color have access to ~enerational wealth based on their recognition as only three-fifths of a human bemg and the subsequent denial of property ownership as a direct result of being property themselves. Masses of people of color who have been denied personhood, rights to stolen lands citizenship, and any number of basic human freedoms based solely on race hav; also been denied generational access to wealth in the form of inherited property and assets

What scores of students-well-meaning educators, all-fail to realize is that public education does not serve its intended function as the great equal-izer. Quite contrarily, schools actually structure inequality (gasp!) in insidiously subtle ways. To introduce countless future teachers to this "radical" notion ' I devised a plan to combat pernicious thinking about poor students, the educa-tional "failures" of poor students, and the "self-inflicted" demise of the poor. Why Are People Poor? An Introduction to Reproduction My new tradition is to begin each foundational course in my program by con-textualizing and historicizing public education. To assist me, I use the diagram shown in Figure 16.1. The topics I address and the stories I tell within each rung of the ladder of structured inequality are candid, personal, and decidedly pointed in order to stimulate discussion. When I begin discussions about poverty and achievement in public schools, my students often ask, "Why do poor students perform poorly?" The question is not about poor students and why they underperform in a system purportedly designed to elevate their opportunities and outcomes. The question is, "Why are people poor?" I insist that we begin with the lowest "rung" on the diagram because there we unpack the existence of a class of "poor people" who seem not to be living up to their potential in a presumably benevolent public education system that was designed-at least in the spirit of Horace Mann-specifically with them in mind. Any serious discussion about the inception of poverty in this country m~st begin by recognizing that class is highly racialized (even globally), and vice versa. The origins of poverty among people of color-specifically descendants of African slaves-are rooted in several centuries of colorized, chattel_ 5l~ve~ with no economic reparation after its formal or informal "end." The maiontyl r poor people in the United States are White, but the majority of people of co 0 ------~•

Horace Mann was on to something. When he witnessed an angry street riot in New England, his conviction that "the educated, the wealthy, the intelligent" had gone morally astray by abandoning the public was fortified {Johnson, 2002, p. 79). Mann chided the economic elite for shirking obligations to their fellow man by favoring private education over common schools. He conceptualized public education as "the great equalizer," or the most powerful mechanism for abating class-based "prejudice and hatred," and, most important, the only means by which those without economic privilege or generational wealth could experience any hope of equal footing.

The reasons for this preference are complicated, in-cluding the incredible diversity of the population and the huge size of the coun-try. Not least important, however, is the fact that local districts mirror and reinforce separation by class and race. Democratic control, therefore, not only provides support for public education but also creates a forum for the occa-sional exercise of bigotry and xenophobia; localism not only accommodates community idiosyncrasies but also serves as a barrier to changes in the distri-bution of students and resources.

The gap between beliefs and actions not only leads to contention and con-fusion, it also generates policies that are irrational in the sense that they are inconsistent with evidence of what works or are not based on any evidence at all. At times policymakers have abandoned proven reforms or have promoted them only over stiff opposition.

any issues in education policy have therefore come down to an apparent choice between the individual success of comparatively privileged students and the collective good of all students or the nation as a whole. Efforts to promote the collective goals of the American dream through public schooling have run up against almost insurmountable barriers when enough people believe (rightly or wrongly, with evidence or without) that those efforts will endanger the com-parative advantage of their children or children like them. At that point a gap

Public schools are where it is all supposed to start-they are the central institutions for bringing both parts of the dream into practice. Americans ex-pect schools not only to help students reach their potential as individuals but

We have a great national opportunity-to ensure that every child, in every school, is challenged by high standards, ... to build a culture of achievement that matches the optimism and aspirations of our country. -President George W Bush, 2000