Research Catalog

Title

Dividing classes : how the middle class negotiates and rationalizes school advantage / Ellen Brantlinger.

Author

Brantlinger, Ellen A.

Publication

New York : RoutledgeFalmer, 2003.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xii, 250 pages; 24 cm

Summary

This text 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, it 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 Indian town in which the author lives, 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 organizing category in education are critically examined.

Subject

• Educational sociology > United States
• Students > United States > Social conditions
• Social stratification > United States
• Middle class > United States
• Educational sociology
• Middle class
• Social stratification
• Students > Social conditions
• Mittelstand
• Schulsoziologie
• Middenklassen
• Studieresultaten
• United States
• USA

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 200-233) and indexes.

Contents

Class position, social life, and school outcomes -- Examining social class reproduction at micro and emic levels: A critical, interpretive study -- Affluent mothers narrate their own and other people's children -- Conflicted pedagogical and curricular perspectives of middle-class mothers -- Positions and outlooks of teachers at different schools -- Impact of teacher position on divided classes -- Succumbing to demands: Administrators under pressure -- School board perceptions of policy and power / Michelle Henderson -- Conclusion: Choosing a Democratic, communitarian ethic for schools and society.

ISBN

• 0415932971
• 9780415932974
• 041593298X
• 9780415932981
• 9780203465479
• 0203465474

LCCN

2002036705

OCLC

• ocm50761027
• 50761027
• SCSB-8906507

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library