Brackets are used in the field notes to set off text inserted by me, usually for clarification, such as when a person’s name is used in place of a personal pronoun, or as a side comment I added during the writing of the book. Parentheses are used to show the field-worker’s side comments, which were inserted at the time the field notes were written.
6. For example, on a spelling test, a third-grader composed a sentence in which he said that he wanted to kill his teacher. This unusual incident generated considerable discussion in the hallways.
7. The average housing value at Swan was around $160,500 in the 1990 census compared to $75,000 in the Lower Richmond area. Compared to many urban areas, housing prices were modest in this geographical region, a pattern that continues to the present.
8. Parent volunteers for organized activities had similar complaints. A father who oversees the local Cub Scout troops is dismayed by the number of parents who “drop [their] kid off and use the time to go do errands.”
9. There were differences in important aspects of school life. There was more emphasis on order and control of children’s bodies at Lower Richmond than at Swan. In Lower Richmond, for example, lining up children in an orderly way took longer and involved more teacher input than at Swan School. (There were also separate girls’ and boys’ lines at Lower Richmond, while at Swan there was one, gender integrated, line.) Yard duty teachers yelled more on the playground at Lower Richmond than at Swan school and physical fights were much more frequent at Lower Richmond. These differences in practices, however, should not obscure the important point of the cultural repertoires that teachers sought to enact and envisioned as most appropriate for children. In this regard, as well as in their own personal lives, educators supported the concerted cultivation of children’s talents, particularly the development of their reasoning skills.
10. See Jean Anyon, Ghetto Schooling, and Jonathon Kozol, Savage Inequalities. See also the U. S. Department of Education, The Condition of Education, 2001.
11. An exposition of how these beliefs developed, were transmitted, were contested, and changed over time is beyond the scope of this work. Still, it is apparent that professionals’ standards are shaped by multiple forces. These include what teachers learned from their professional training (i.e., teacher education programs), from the publications by National Teachers’ Organizations, from district in-service trainings and materials, and from informal conversation with teachers and administrators.
12. See especially Shirley Brice Heath, Ways with Words.
13. See Joyce Epstein and Mavis G. Sanders, “Connecting Home, School, and Community,” as well as Annette Lareau, Home Advantage.
14. In this book, all statistics, unless otherwise noted, are targeted to 1993–1995 (usually 1995), which was the time of data collection. William Kornblum, Sociology: The Central Questions, p. 159.
15. Childhood poverty has been demonstrated to predict a host of negative life outcomes, including lower levels of health, scores on standardized tests, school grades, and emotional well-being. See Greg J. Duncan and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, eds., Consequences of Growing Up Poor. For a comparative view of poverty rates in the United States and other industrialized countries, see Rainwater and Smeeding, “Doing Poorly.”
16. See Greg J. Duncan and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, eds., Consequences of Growing Up Poor. In 1997, 20% of all children were officially poor, but for white children the figure was 16% and for Black children it was 37%; for Black children under the age of six, 40% were poor. Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and John Schmitt, The State of Working America 1998–1999, p. 281.
17. For example between 1989 and 1997 the wealth of the top fifth of the country grew by 9% while it declined by 6% for the bottom tenth of the population. Mishel et al., The State of Working America, p, 264. See also Michael Hout and Claude S. Fischer, “A Century of Inequality.”
18. See Dalton Conley, Being Black, Living in the Red, and Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth.
19. The high school dropout rate in 1995 was 9% for whites and 12% for Black youth; by the end of the decade it had dropped slightly for white youth and increased slightly for Black youth. See U. S. Department of Education, The Condition of Education, 2001, p. 142.
20. In 1995, 28% of young people 25–29 had completed a bachelor’s degree; by 2000 it had risen to 33%. There is a significant difference between the proportion of white high school graduates who eventually earn college degrees (31% in 1995, 36% in 2001) and Black high school graduates who eventually earn degrees (18% in 1995, and 21% in 2001). For the adult population as a whole, (ages 25–64) the proportion of college graduates is 24%. See U. S. Department of Education, Condition of Education 1995, pp. 245–249, and U. S. Department of Education, Condition of Education 2001, pp. 142, 150–151.
21. See Dalton Conley, Being Black, Living in the Red, as well as U. S. Department of Education, The Condition of Education, 2001.
22. See William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, The Shape of the River.
23. See Donald Barlett and James B. Steele, America: What Went Wrong? and Arne Kalleberg, Barbara F. Reskin, and Ken Hudson, “Bad Jobs in America.”
24. For example, only 51% of children of high school dropouts can recognize the colors red, yellow, blue, and green by name, but the figures for high school graduates is 78%, for parents with some college it is 92%, and for college graduates it is 95%. For knowing all of the letters of the alphabet, the respective figures are 9%, 19%, 29%, and 42%. U. S. Department of Education, Condition of Education 1995, p. 182.
25. See U. S. Department of Education, Condition of Education, 1995 and Entwhistle et al., Children, Schools, and Inequality. At the same level of parental education, white students generally receive higher scores than do Black students. See also Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips, eds., The Black-White Test Score Gap.
26. In 1995, 61% of high school graduates enrolled in college; for children of high school dropouts, the rate was 27%, for children of high school graduates 47%, and for children of college graduates, 88%. U. S. Department of Education, Condition of Education, 2001, p. 147.
27. As Paul Kingston has noted (personal communication) the relationship between parents’ educational level and occupational level is far from automatic. There is a considerable amount of downward mobility. Also, there is variation among brothers and sisters in the same family. Still, parents’ social class position remains one of the most powerful predictors of children’s educational success and life outcomes. See Paul Kingston’s book The Classless Society for an elaboration of this position as well as Christopher Jencks et al., Inequality, and Who Gets Ahead?