The Multiracial Urban High School: Fearing Peers and Trusting Friends (Palgrave Studies in Urban Education)

The Multiracial Urban High School Palgrave Studies in Urban Education Series Editors: Alan R. Sadovnik and Susan F. S...

Author: Susan Rakosi Rosenbloom

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The Multiracial Urban High School

Palgrave Studies in Urban Education Series Editors: Alan R. Sadovnik and Susan F. Semel Reforming Boston Schools, 1930–2006: Overcoming Corruption and Racial Segregation By Joseph Marr Cronin (April 2008) What Mothers Say about Special Education: From the 1960s to the Present By Jan W. Valle (March 2009) Charter Schools: From Reform Imagery to Reform Reality By Jeanne M. Powers (June 2009) Becoming an Engineer in Public Universities: Pathways for Women and Minorities Edited by Kathryn M. Borman, Will Tyson, and Rhoda H. Halperin (May 2010) The Multiracial Urban High School: Fearing Peers and Trusting Friends Susan Rakosi Rosenbloom (October 2010) The History of “Zero Tolerance” in American Public Schooling By Judith Kafka (forthcoming)

The Multiracial Urban High School Fearing Peers and Trusting Friends

Susan Rakosi Rosenbloom

THE MULTIRACIAL URBAN HIGH SCHOOL

Copyright © Susan Rakosi Rosenbloom, 2010. All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–62201–2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rosenbloom, Susan Rakosi. The multiracial urban high school : fearing peers and trusting friends / Susan Rakosi Rosenbloom. p. cm.—(Palgrave studies in urban education series) ISBN 978–0–230–62201–2 (hardback) 1. Minority high school students—United States—Interviews. 2. Urban high schools—United States—Case studies. 3. Interpersonal relations in adolescence—United States—Case studies. I. Title. LC3731.R67 2010 373.1829—dc22

2010009107

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: October 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Con t e n t s

Series Editors’ Foreword

vii

One

Rethinking High School as a Relational Journey

1

Two

Immigrant Dream and/or Educational Delusion?

43

Three

“It’s a Bad School Because of the Kids”

67

Four

Listening to Friendships: Longitudinal Case Studies of Friendship Patterns—Isidora, Reginald, Mei Ling, and Lena

93

Five

“It’s Like I’m in a Stereotype” (Co-authored with Niobe Way)

Six

What If You Can’t Learn Anywhere? Trapped by School Choice

151

Peer Power Undermined

173

Seven Index

131

185

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Se r i e s Edi tor s’ For e wor d

The Multiracial Urban High School: Fearing Peers and Trusting Friends is an important addition to research on high school peer networks that for the most part has focused on individual choices and used a social psychological framework. Susan Rakosi Rosenbloom provides an important corrective to this literature by using a sociological analysis that argues that peer networks and friendships are the outcomes of school organizational structures and are deeply embedded in social class and race relations. Moreover, she relates school structure to the larger social and economic structures in which social class and racial stratification are rooted. Rosenbloom has provided a detailed and nuanced analysis of the ways in which organizational context and school processes affect how high school students choose friends and how these friendships result in powerful peer networks that can either support or limit academic success and life chances. More importantly, she demonstrates how peer networks are crucial to the development of social capital, which, according to both Bourdieu and Coleman, albeit from very different theoretical perspectives, is central to social mobility (Coleman) or social class reproduction (Bourdieu). Further, through an analysis of the social class and racial foundation of these peer networks, Rosenbloom provides support for research on the negative effects of segregation, including work by Gary Orfield at the UCLA Civil Rights Project (formerly at Harvard), Roslyn Mickelson, and Amy Stuart Wells. Through a detailed theoretically and methodologically rigorous qualitative case study of Last Choice High School, a large comprehensive zoned high school in New York City, Rosenbloom demonstrates the complexities of urban schooling and the consequences (intended or unintended) of public school choice policies. At the time of the study, Last Choice High School was one of the few remaining large comprehensive

viii / series editors’ foreword

high schools in New York City as most of them have been split into smaller schools within schools, as a consequence of the small school movement that originated in the 1980s and escalated through the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As part of a complex public school choice policy for admission to New York City high schools, there are elite specialty high schools such Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech, small magnet and theme-based high schools, as well as public charter schools as an alternative to these. Furthermore, there is an array of elite independent schools such as Dalton, Collegiate, and Horace Mann where the affluent send their children and for whom public education is never a consideration; Last Choice High School and other zoned comprehensive high schools have become what some argue are a “dumping ground” or “dropout factory” for the city’s poorest and most challenged students. It is within this context, that Rosenbloom’s book must be understood. Drawing upon her longitudinal interviews and rich ethnographic insights, she teases out a number of important processes that students at Last Choice High School experience. This volume is an example of the strength of sociological analysis and the craft of solid qualitative case studies. Unlike some qualitative studies that do not transcend the level of description, Rosenbloom’s work provides a rigorous sociological analysis of the processes that affect low-income students of color in a large urban high school. Her book demonstrates how race and social class are inexorably linked to peer networks and how school organization and processes too often limit the educational aspirations and ultimate destinations of these students. It should be read by anyone interested in the urban educational policy debates as it indicates that the current federal and state policies that see testing as a solution to educational inequality will have limited success given their failure to understand the complexities of schooling. It is an important addition to the Palgrave Series on Urban Education and the literature on urban schooling. On a personal note, it gives me, Sadovnik, great pleasure to see its publication come to fruition as it began, as did my first book, as a doctoral dissertation completed at New York University’s Sociology Department under the supervision of Caroline Hodges Persell. Her book Education and Inequality, which I worked on as a graduate research assistant, has influenced a generation of sociologists of education. As doctoral faculty,

series editors’ foreword / ix

myself at Rutgers-Newark and Semel at CUNY Graduate Center, we recognize how our own work and mentorship shapes the next generation of sociologists of education and educational researchers. This book is a testimony to such work. A LAN R. SADOVNIK AND SUSAN F. SEMEL March 4, 2010 New York City


Ch a p t e r O n e R e t h i n k i ng H ig h Sc hool a s a R e l at iona l Jou r n e y

Susan: Can you tell me about the different groups in school? Reginald: All right, you got . . . different types of groups . . . a group of people who don’t care about school, who walk around the hallways. You got a group that want to do well in school . . . Susan: . . . Let’s talk about the group that . . . don’t care about school . . . Reginald: They . . . go to lunch . . . if the security guards happen to catch them, they go to class . . . They’ll just disrupt the class, throw books around, stuff like that. I pay no mind to them. Susan: . . . What types of people are they? Reginald: . . . Well, one, I don’t think they care about themselves. Two, most of them is blacks and Hispanics. Like . . . mostly, the highest rate . . . of people in a group that go to class is Chinese people. Blacks, Hispanics, hang out in the hallway, playing around, going to (the) lunchroom . . . three times a day.1

Reginald was a smart, sociable, and confident black high school junior, with lots of friends in school and in his neighborhood.2 Similar to many other students interviewed, he also differentiated the good and bad groups of students by race and ethnicity. Over four years, I listened attentively to students such as Reginald as they explained a commonly held belief that African American and Latino students were the “bad or loud” and disruptive students in comparison to the Asian American students who were “good or quiet,” obedient, and academically successful. These categories were constructed around oppositional peer groups based on race and ethnicity and were repeated by students from all racial and ethnic backgrounds. These racial and ethnic peer groups differed from the usual classbased categories found in previous research in high schools.3 Peer

2 / the multiracial urban high school

groups such as the Penelope Eckert’s study of jocks and the burnouts, Paul Willis’ ethnography of lads and the ear’oles, and William Foot Whyte’s seminal work on Doc’s gang and the college boys were all based on school-related categories such as extracurricular activities, college attendance, or relationships with teachers. Most of these studies were limited to comparing youth from working class and middle class backgrounds, where the reproduction of class was chiefly attributed to interactions with adults in school and the organization of the school.4 These influential studies defined how mechanisms in school, through social interactions with adults, contributed to the American system of class and occupational stratification. Almost all of these studies of peer groups are now over twenty years old and—most importantly—they are limited to mostly white populations in suburban or small towns. Since these studies were completed, there have been major demographic shifts in the American population that altered the racial and ethnic populations in urban school systems. These shifts include Latino and Asian immigration to cities, concentrated poverty in urban areas, and white suburbanization.5 Currently the population of non-white students in American public schools is about 41 percent.6 American public schools are now multiracial: Latinos and blacks comprise more than one-third of the student population and in some regions of the country, such as the western states, Asian American students outnumber black students.7 From 1970 to 2002 the Latino enrollment in New York public schools increased by 73 percent.8 Consequently, the social interactions in multiracial urban schools that include immigrant students are increasingly relevant. My research documents adolescents’ experiences with friends and peers from 1996 to 2000, in a large multiracial high school in New York City. The school that I call Last Choice High School (LCHS) had about 2,700 students that was 15 percent African American, 48 percent Puerto Rican and Dominican American, and 36 percent Asian American.9 Every year, for four years, I interviewed the same students to talk about how their experiences in school shaped their close friendships and how their friendships changed over time. I encouraged them to talk about the social landscape in high school including their relationships with peers and how they differed from friendships. I wanted to understand from their perspective, the meanings they gave to their relational journey through high school. By relational journey, I refer

rethinking high school as a relational journey / 3

to the four-year-long process of attending high school and interacting with teachers and peers. The term emphasizes aspects of high school that are about how social relationships develop and change over time instead of those parts of schooling connected solely to academic pursuits, although it is my contention that social relationships in school affect academic outcomes. Ongoing Racial and Ethnic Inequalities in Public Schools Reginald’s racialized view of peer groups at school raised new and provocative questions about the categorization of peer groups in multiracial and multiethnic schools that also includes immigrant students. Reginald’s peers in school were African American, Puerto Rican, Dominican American, and Asian American.10 Some such as the Asian American and Dominican American students were recent immigrants while other Asian American students were American Born Chinese (ABC) or second- or third-generation Puerto Rican Americans. Many of the African American students were American born, but some, like Reginald, had one or both parents who were born in the Caribbean or of Caribbean descent. At LCHS, peer groups organized by class-based differences was minimized, but differences based on race, ethnicity, culture, and recentness of immigration were prominent. I wondered how Reginald and students like him negotiated the school terrain when they observed and reported their peers disrupting their ability to learn in class. How did a student like Reginald, who was trying to thrive in school, respond to the school context when he assessed that his African American and Latino peers did not “care about themselves?” In the more than fifty years since the Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) decision, researchers and educators have assessed the impact of court ordered desegregation plans on the American educational system. From the 1950s to the 1980s there were some gains in desegregation among blacks and whites but since then the segregation of blacks and Latinos have increased in public schools.11 Understanding the implications of dismantling Brown vs. Board of Education is critical for two reasons: (1) It suggests that Civil Rights era beliefs are currently less likely to be realized through public schools in creating an authentic multiracial and multicultural society and; (2) For minorities, attending highly segregated schools is closely linked to the presence of peers with


high rates of poverty.12 Both of these conditions are predicated on the persistence of high degrees of residential segregation.13 Urban schools that are racially and ethnically segregated have lower achievement scores, less experienced and credentialed teachers, and higher dropout rates.14 Racial and ethnic minority students who come from the poorest families attend highly segregated schools with the most serious educational problems. For example, in 1996–1997, 46 percent of Latinos and 43 percent of blacks nationwide were likely to attend schools where the average student was poor, as measured by the percentage of students receiving free and reduced lunch15 ; 88 percent of schools considered high minority (over 90 percent of students are minority) were also designated high poverty schools.16 Nationally, Asian Americans are less likely to attend high poverty schools in comparison to blacks and Latinos; however this is not the case for Asian Americans who are Limited English Proficiency (LEP) and English Language Learners (ELL). Similar to LCHS, extreme poverty schools also have a high concentration of LEP and ELL students and these predominantly Asian and Latino immigrants are more likely to attend highly segregated and isolated schools than English speakers.17 From 1998 to 1999, almost 50 percent of the students were English Language Learners at LCHS while citywide the population was about 16 percent and in similar schools it was about 30 percent.18 About 31 percent of the students arrived in the United States in the last three years in comparison to similar schools where about half that number was designated as recent immigrants. During the same years, the percentage of English Language Learners who attained proficiency was 2.4 percent at LCHS in comparison to similar schools where 11.3 percent of students attained proficiency.19 Not only did recent immigrant students constitute a greater proportion of the student population at LCHS than most high schools in the city but also as English Language Learners they did not perform as well as students from similar high schools. The students at LCHS, where over 90 percent of students received free lunch, were the unfortunate recipients of a double whammy: they came from disadvantaged backgrounds and they attended a large, urban school with high dropout rates and low graduation rates. Furthermore, the school was responsible for educating a large population of immigrant students, many of who were very recent immigrants. This means that students who attended LCHS had more needs and fewer resources


than students in similar schools. Furthermore, their parents did no know much about navigating the school system and were likely not to speak English at home. Students relied on teachers and the guidance department to explain how the school system worked and the requirements needed to graduate high school. It was common for students not to know about the different kinds of New York State diplomas, the various tests needed to graduate high school, and post-secondary school options. Most students and their parents did not know how to fill out financial aid forms, and the importance of the taking the SATS or participating in extracurricular activities. Much of the information that is taken for granted about how to succeed in school was not part of the skills and knowledge parents could offer their children. The activation of these resources, referred to as a “cultural capital,” explains how middle and upper class parents offer advantages to their children to succeed in school.20 Consequently, one possibility for students to find out this kind of information was to have close connections and relationships with peers and adults in school. However, LCHS was not an environment that was conducive to building ongoing and supportive relationships. When Reginald racialized the peer groups in school, white students were not part of his mental map. Although the majority of teachers and administrators at LCHS were white, there were no white students. Consequently, this book moves discussion of race and ethnic interactions in school beyond a black and white framework that is not as relevant in many racially and ethnically segregated public schools as it has been in the past; presently, racial and ethnic minority students in large urban school districts attend schools with other minorities. In other words, minorities are the majority in these schools. Still, it is important to emphasize that the people in this study exist within an overarching racial social system of white supremacy. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva defines the racial social system as “the totality of the social relations and practices that reinforce white privilege.”21 Though Reginald may not interact with white peers at school, many of his experiences in school, including his racial categorization and his attendance at a failing neighborhood school, are the product of a racial social system that denies him many of the privileges white students routinely receive. Though white students were not physically present at LCHS and this book focuses on the social interactions among minority


and immigrant youth, much of the students’ construction of their social world was inherently connected to the privileges of white youth and the construction of whiteness. Reginald and other students in this study talked about their interracial interactions in school. They observed racial and ethnic segregation and discrimination among groups in school although they maintained their belief in “American egalitarianism” or the belief that we are all equal.22 They claimed to be “colorblind” or not see race, at the same time they also had firsthand experiences of discrimination. The African American and Latino students also talked about discrimination from adults such as teachers, police officers, and shopkeepers, while the Asian American students talked about physical and verbal harassment from their peers in school.23 Reginald learned stereotypes and prejudices similar to those that blacks and whites learned about one another in previous eras, but now it was wrapped in coded language to reference more recent immigrant groups. There are several distinguishing characteristics that contextualize the racialized landscape for minority youth in highly segregated schools (defined as over 90 percent minorities). First, white students were not included in Reginald’s racialized landscape. Second, the school was not truly integrated among the various racial and ethnic groups. Third, given conditions of structural racism coupled with white privilege, minorities in highly segregated schools did not receive equal resources. Indeed, the students at LCHS did not receive the same advantages as peers who attended specialized schools, magnet schools, or suburban schools. Neighborhood schools, the worst in the city system, serve students with the most needs and yet receive the least amount of resources.24 In students’ interviews, “blaming the victim” was the dominant ideology and frame repeated to explain LCHS’s failure to educate students. Few people, students or faculty, talked about alternatives to “blaming the victim” such as structural inequalities.25 Sociologically, “framing” refers to the way people label and identify their worldview by relying on interpretations or maps that organize their experiences into discrete chunks of information. Frames produce meaning because they simplify large experiences by orienting individuals to potential action and shared common meanings.26 A shared worldview is a critical ingredient necessary for groups to identify with one another, to share common grievances, and to propose solutions. When people frame their


worlds similarly, they are more likely to trust each other because they share values and are likely to believe that others’ are looking out for them. The shared frame at LCHS meant that only “losers” attended a zoned high school, the lowest status schools in the NYC school system. Consequently, interactions with random peers were fraught with concern for physical and emotional safety. Students entered school in 9th grade wary of their peers and over the next four years did not reassess or change their view of each other. Though their experiences with close friends changed and developed over the four years, students repeated an almost identical mantra about not trusting their peers or other kids at school. “The Good Kids and the Bad Kids” Deeply intrigued by the common use of “good kids and bad kids,” I wondered how students were able to make friends from their peer group if they had such a low opinion of them. After all, we know that students choose friends from the people they interact with on a regular basis in school.27 But how would students behave if they were suspicious of their peers? Would they want to have friends in school or even go to school to be with their friends? I encouraged students to speak frankly and thoughtfully about their relationships with peers. I was also curious about how the organization of the school and the structure of the school system contributed to the racialized and hierarchical structure among student peer groups. Furthermore, how did students interpret each others behaviors in ways that explored their understanding of the school and the educational system in New York City? The organization of elite schools and highly racially segregated neighborhood schools appeared to work against students with the most needs. The good kid/bad kid peer group categories appeared to devalue the African American and Latino students’ efforts for social and academic success; it perpetuated harmful stereotypes that they were uneducable. These peer groups also granted the Asian Americans model minority status and placed them at the lowest rungs of the school’s social hierarchy. As a sociologist I am trained to investigate interactions between individual beliefs and behaviors, and structural conditions such as cultural, institutional, and organizational features of the school. Most students and many teachers, however, did not share a sociological view


of the world they experienced in school; instead, they saw individual choices and behaviors. Despite my theoretical understanding of the structural and institutional conditions that shaped students’ actions, I wanted to know how students experienced and understood these conditions. I wondered how students framed their world, particularly their peers’ behaviors in school. When Reginald repeated the good kid/bad kid rhetoric for the third year in a row, I contrasted these statements with the sensitivity with which Reginald talked about his close friends. I considered how Reginald was able to have so many friends in school and in his neighborhood, if he believed many of his peers were not worthy of his friendship. How or why would someone want to make friends from a group of students who, by everyone’s account, cannot be trusted, have minimal potential, and, as Reginald says, “don’t care about themselves.” It reminds me of the now clichéd quip, attributed to Groucho Marx, about not wanting to be a member of a club that was willing to have him as a member. Rephrasing it, I ask whether a student would want to attend a school or be associated with people who he or she perceived as “bad kids.” I find that students initially did not want to attend their neighborhood school but had no other options. There were also ways in which students’ experiences at LCHS significantly differed from the Groucho Marx saying. Despite their suspicion of peers, my findings reveal that students desperately wanted to have close friends. Indeed, most of the students in this study had close friends to talk about every year. They wanted to be in the club, even if they had many reasons to believe that members of the club, particularly those they did not already know from their neighborhood, were not to be respected. In other words, they feared their peers but trusted their friends. This book describes the reasons why students feared their peers to show how it contributed to a racial ideology that blamed peers for the schools’ failing. I assert that learning to distrust peers in schools has political implications that shape students’ potential for collective action. I begin the book by asking why students appear resilient enough to form friendships but not able to overcome their distrust of peers. I also investigate the structural conditions in school that shape students perceptions of their peers. I explore youths’ subjective understanding and interpretation of their social worlds in school and how the organization of the school and the citywide school system influenced their


friendships and peer groups. In particular, this study focuses on the racial and ethnic dynamics and hierarchies of peer relations in school. When talking about their relationships with best or close friends, students reported a range of experiences from not having any friends to having the same best friend since elementary school. However, most students in the study responded similarly to Reginald when talking about their peers in school. They told me kids in their school cannot be trusted and they felt suspicious of their peers—yet most depended on and cared about their close friends. Furthermore, many students perceived their peers along dichotomous, racial and ethnic categories, “the good kids and the bad kids,” using coded language and stereotypes for the highly achieving Asian American model minority and the less academically successful African American and Latino students. The weak ties with peers I refer to as “fearing peers” have implications for other aspects of youths’ lives and futures; the lack of collective identity when students distrusted peers has future consequences for their sense of political engagement and efficacy. The lack of strong ties also has social and psychological consequences such as feeling lonely, isolated, or fearful. When students distrusted their peers they were less likely to feel a sense of attachment or bond with others from similar backgrounds, including those from the same class, race and ethnicity, and neighborhood. They did not develop the sense of “we-ness” seminal sociologists such as Emile Durkheim called “collective conscience” or Karl Marx referred to as “class consciousness.” Though collective identity is most often invoked in social or national identity movements, it can also be developed in smaller groups such as cliques or gangs.28 This book explores the progression of collective identity—more specifically, collective dis-identification or the process through which students learned to disconnect from their peers and perceive them as “bad kids.” I explore the racial and ethnic separation resulting from this process and the connection to class and racial stratification. Similar to Valenzuela (1999) who found it useful to conceptualize “social decapitalization” as the lessening of social capital, I find that turning collective identity on its head is constructive to identify how social relationships among youth can be fractured, preventing them from constructing peers as allies who share common grievances. Without a very basic shared sense of collective identity, it is unlikely they will consider their peers as having similar political concerns that can be utilized


to respond to their common plight of living in the ghetto, attending underfunded schools, and experiencing discrimination. The concept of collective dis-identity and how it contributed to social reproduction in poor, urban, multiracial high schools adds another dimension to how social reproduction works everyday in schools. The problems of urban schools that educate predominantly poor, racial and ethnic minority and immigrant adolescents are well documented in previous studies: inadequate and unequal resources, economic segregation and marginalization, deteriorating infrastructure, environmental hazards, violence, high dropout rates, and official “silencing” of the magnitude of the problems.29 These severe academic problems are frequently compounded by weak social relationships in schools dominated by distrust, violence, and discrimination; they also teach students about their place in the American social structure and hierarchy of class and race. I find that a school that is failing academically also produced a climate where students learned to distrust their peers. The affect of failing schools on adolescents’ sense of trust, belonging, and connection with peers is a less recognized, hidden cost of academically failing schools. LCHS discouraged students from building trusting and caring relationships with peers from similar poor and working class backgrounds, as well as those from diverse racial and ethnic groups. The existence of strong social ties has implications for identifying with a larger group, feeling a connection to school, gaining academic and emotional support, as well as for finding out information not readily available from close friends.30 These conditions also have future political implications for the extent students felt their peers shared their worldview, a feeling that is a necessary precondition for political action. Furthermore, students individualized the academic failure they experienced at school, blaming their peers for what was essentially the schools’ and society’s willingness to accept the existence of underfunded and poorly functioning schools for immigrant, poor, and minority youth. The current research brings together four areas of study to politicize students’ social relationships in school: (1) Studies of adolescent friendships that distinguish relationships between friends and peers; (2) Racial and ethnic stratification in school that explores how the construction of racialized peer groups contributes to racial and ethnic hierarchies, segregation, and discrimination; (3) Social reproduction that analyzes the social relations of ruling in school including how the organization of


the school system and the school shape peer relationships and collective identity; (4) Civic disengagement that investigates the implications of weakened social ties for students’ social and political interests. In the following sections, I explore each of these ideas to argue that the organization of social relationships in public schools have political and social implications for minority youth. The Difference between Friends and Peers In the poem A Poison Tree, William Blake writes, I was angry with my friend. I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe. I told it not, my wrath did grow. And I water’d it in fears, Night & morning with my tears And I sunned it with smiles And with soft deceitful wiles And it grew both day and night Till it bore an apple bright. And my foe beheld it shine, And he knew that it was mine. And into my garden stole When the night had veiled the pole: In the morning glad I see My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

In this poem Blake implies that his ability to openly communicate with his friend about his anger cleared the air between them and allowed their friendship to flourish. In contrast, he was unable to talk with his foe about his feelings, becoming fearful and devious in his interactions. Accordingly, the anger he felt for his enemy took hold of him and made him want to seek revenge. When his foe imbibed his deceit and lies by eating the poisonous apple from his tree, Blake’s need for revenge was fulfilled. However, the planning and waiting to enact his revenge implicates Blake, who nurtured the poisonous apple. This poem suggests that even though Blake got his revenge, he is tainted by participating in an evil act. A Poison Tree persuades me to consider the implications for students who hold similar resentments against their peers. What does fearing


peers imply for students’ futures and their interactions with others in school? Although they might not explicitly seek revenge, does blaming peers fester and what happens to these powerful emotions? In this book, I suggest these feeling are related to students’ potential disconnection from their peers, including their willingness to trust them, see their fates as connected, and work together toward improving conditions they jointly experience. Though “blaming the victim” is a sociological concept that explains attitudes toward peers and A Poison Tree is a creative interpretation of festering fury and revenge, they both imply the deeply human need to understand anger with others. This book describes and explores the cultural and institutional sources of students’ faulting peers for the school’s failure. Like all social relationships, friendships change over time, and students discussed how previously supportive friendships became distant or how they met new friends who shared values about school. There were occasions when trust developed to bring two people closer in a way they had not previously experienced. My descriptions about students’ struggle to maintain friends significantly differed from a limited understanding of friendships as either positive or negative influences.31 Unlike quantitative studies about friendship, my study does not presume that friendships progress in a singular direction; in real life solid friendships can become contentious for periods of time or feelings of love and support can replace more distant feelings. The purpose of my in-depth research is to consider friendships as a significant social relationship in adolescents’ lives by investigating the complexity and multifaceted nature of the four-year relational journey through high school. By listening to students’ opinions and experiences, I gained insight into adolescents’ personal experiences with friendships and learned how the institutional context shaped their experiences. Teachers and administrators did not disavow students from their negative perceptions of peers and generally offered a similar view of the “bad kids” that ruined the school for everyone else. Distrusting attitudes toward peers occurred in a particular type of large, urban school educating predominantly poor and minority adolescents. I describe a fundamental tension in students’ lives—they struggled to maintain close friendships at the same time believing the often repeated rhetoric that their peers cannot be trusted. In other words, they feared their peers but had close and loving friends. I found most students


blamed their peers for the poor quality of their education and the hostile environment they experienced in school. Peer blame is one type of relational tension explored in this study. Other research establishes the relational tensions between teachers and students, particularly when they come from different cultural backgrounds.32 For example, Lisa Delpit summarizes one of the relational problems between students and adults in predominantly minority, urban schools as “educating other people’s children.”33 This term refers to the implications of predominantly white and middle class teachers educating mostly poor and working class minority students from cultural backgrounds that differ from those of the teachers. Students’ don’t feel cared for, their cultural differences are misunderstood, ignored, or identified as problematic.34 Frequently, these kinds of cultural misunderstandings lead to teachers perceiving minority students as misbehaving. In my study, some students reported similar concerns: they wanted to know their teachers cared for them but instead felt they were indifferent. Although teacherstudent relationships are clearly a key area of concern, the focus of this book is on peer relationships. Still, it is necessary to note that students’ experiences in school and their perceptions of peers were influenced by their relationships with teachers. Students blamed their peers, fellow victims, instead of seeing commonalities. They might have shared experiences structured by attending a factory-like high school or coming from similar socioeconomic backgrounds. However, this did not occur. Instead students received a poorquality education as evidenced by Board of Education data such as low graduation rates and percentage of students receiving Regents diploma and the high number of students’ overage for grade. To begin to comprehend the magnitude of educational failure, consider the 9th grade class that comprised 1,229 students in 1996 from which only 174 students graduated in 2000, after four years at LCHS.35 Probably the most revealing indication of school failure was the public designation of School under Registration Review (SURR) in October 1997 by the New York State Education Department for failing to meet the State’s minimum performance standards. In many ways, it was not surprising that most students had minimal understanding about the structural inequalities that produced educational failure, but it was unexpected that students were also denied tight-knit peer relationships. I found this educational failure to have occurred in an environment of suspicion and distrust.


Learning Racial and Ethnic Separation Through their relationships in school over four years, adolescents learned about themselves and others, and their beliefs and values about friendships were shaped. In racially and ethnically diverse schools, students are also trained in life lessons about how to live and to interact with people from cultures and backgrounds that differ from their own. This occurs through daily interactions such as seeing each other in the hallways or interacting in class. The social foundations of high school can develop embracing attitudes about diversity or it may lead students to be suspicious of people who are not members of their racial and ethnic group. It can promote clannishness, discrimination, segregation, loneliness, and isolation, or it can encourage skills that celebrate multiculturalism, connectedness, diversity, collective identity, and empowerment. Developing a healthy social foundation in all high schools is imperative, but in multiracial and immigrant schools the formation of interracial friendships requires active attention to the ways policies, the organizational structure of the school, school systems, and classroom interactions shape possibilities for these types of friendships.36 Schools and communities that successfully integrate racially and ethnically diverse people maintain and refine practices and procedures that assess how everyday decisions might impact desired goals such as achieving diversity. These kinds of discussions were clearly not part of the daily functioning of LCHS. Instead racial and ethnic segregation among students was not acknowledged or discussed. The lack of a strong social foundation in high school has particularly negative implications for students from under-resourced schools than for students from privileged ones; poorer students are more likely to rely on interactions with peers and adults in school to obtain information about college or work, as well as on resources such as health care, social workers, and daily meals. When the public sphere does not provide these resources or inadequately provides them, poor and minority youth are all the more disadvantaged. Students from privileged backgrounds have friends and family members who can provide them with the resources and information they need, even if their well-resourced schools do not offer ample services. A weak social foundation in high school particularly disadvantages poor and minority students in comparison to their


more privileged peers because they rely on school for more services, attend schools that have less resources for the kinds of services they need (extracurricular activities, guidance counselors, SAT training, etc.), and their families and friends are less likely to be able counteract the shortcomings of the public school. From this perspective, it appears even more necessary for poor and minority students to have access to peers and adults with whom they can build strong relationships, get assistance, and learn how to navigate the complicated world of adolescence, high school, and transitions beyond high school. Yet, there were many hurdles that prevented the development of strong and caring relationships both between teachers and students and among peers. At LCHS, race and ethnicity was one of the most obvious barriers that limited interracial peer interactions and contributed to the social and academic hierarchy among students. At LCHS there were immigrants from various countries such as China and the Dominican Republic. Some of these students were very recent immigrants while others were second- and third-generation Americans. There were also many students from Puerto Rico, a commonwealth of the United States, some who had recently arrived and others who were second- and third-generation Nuyoricans (children and grandchildren of the large Puerto Rican migration to United States that began in the 1930s and ended in the 1960s). Some Puerto Rican and Dominican American students spoke Spanish and others did not. Racial and ethnic interactions also included students who defined themselves as African Americans, both descendents of slaves and recent immigrants from the Caribbean. The racial and ethnic categories of students at LCHS were further complicated by degrees of assimilation, hybridity, language acquisition, and self-identification. The use of simplified racial and ethnic categories such as those commonly used in the U.S. census is a problematic and contentious issue. Among several other crucial concerns is the fact that large categories such as Hispanic or Asian American include people from vastly different backgrounds and countries and assume that individual racial and ethnic identity fits neatly into singular categories.37 Racial and ethnic categories that classify people are likely to change over time as class and social status change or as laws defining these categories are altered.38 Racial and ethnic categories are not genetically verifiable but rather understood as social, economic, and historical constructions—that is,


as social constructions. Despite these formidable problems, race and ethnicity are social categories that people rely on and use to describe and understand their social worlds. Racial and ethnic characteristics also defined a larger social structure and context that shaped the lives of people in the school. These social categories influenced who was considered “bad/good,” who entered honors classes, who graduated, and who was expected to get pregnant and drop out. To understand racial and ethnic interactions in a multiracial high school is to consider not only how students actively shaped ideas about race and ethnicity but also how they received others’ ideas about what it means to be an adolescent from a specific racial and ethnic minority group. Students relied on stereotypes about their own and other groups; they also resisted and complicated stereotypes, particularly those that described their own racial and ethnic group. An approach to understanding how students negotiated existing stereotypes was to thoughtfully and actively listen to how students framed their experiences. This included carefully attending to variations among students’ discussions about discrimination and stereotypes to capture both their individual experiences as well as the structural conditions that shaped their understanding. The racialization of the “good kid/bad kid” rhetoric, however, existed not only in the words, thoughts, and interactions of students at LCHS. We live in a world where race is a master status or a primary indicator of identity. Like gender, it is a part of identity that is, for the most part, visible to others. As a master status, race and gender shape how people treat one another and interact, particularly in public spaces.39 Despite the salience of race as a master status, many white people (and some minorities) are likely to claim a colorblind view of interracial interactions.40 A colorblind ideology claims that an individual does not notice or see race. People who utilize a colorblind ideology are likely to claim that everyone should be treated equally or that they as individuals treat everyone equally. As a result of wishing race to disappear, they do not have to hold themselves accountable or acknowledge the privileges white people receive. Another limitation of a colorblind ideology is that it claims to ignore the cultural differences that are intrinsic to racial and ethnic identity. By refusing to acknowledge race or ethnicity, a person is also ignoring valuable aspects of culture and identity. Though an individual may claim to be colorblind or, in essence, “not racist,” there are systemic and institutional racial and ethnic inequalities that


do not disappear. So, although white middle-class individuals can deny direct responsibility for the poor schooling a minority student receives at LCHS, by relying on a colorblind ideology, they can also ignore the kinds of privileges upheld by the structure of a racist school system that gives better and more options for their children’s education. The colorblind view of race and ethnicity also smoothly integrates with an American ethic of individual responsibility that ignores structural inequalities. If success or failure is based on individual effort, then inequalities in resources is irrelevant. As Americans, the minority youth in this study struggled with believing in a colorblind ideology but at the same time experienced discrimination. They relied on an ethic of individual responsibility but simultaneously understood where LCHS fit into the hierarchy of public schools. Similarly, many adolescents in this study struggled with stereotypes about minority youth. They relied on these stereotypes to define others but at the same time frequently resisted stereotypes that applied to them or their close friends. Many African American and Latino students also felt that adults, particularly whites, did not trust them. They felt this not only in school but also in stores when they were followed around by shopkeepers. In his interview, an insightful and eloquent Dominican American student named Benjamin said, “I feel like I’m in a stereotype.” In the full quote in chapter five about racial and ethnic discrimination, he reflects on how others perceive him and simultaneously rejects their categorization. Benjamin’s sophisticated analysis is evocative of W.E.B. DuBois’ “double consciousness.”41 Benjamin was able to see himself through the eyes of white people and at the same time realize that he was not who they thought he was. Patricia Hill Collins presents the idea of “controlling images” or stereotyped representations that are perpetuated by dominant groups about black women. “Controlling images” work to obscure the reality of being a racial and ethnic minority by relying on stereotypes that hide existing inequalities. White portrayals of black women, such as “welfare queen” or “the Mammy,” are purposefully misleading images that whites in positions of power use to dominate public perceptions and representation of black women. “Controlling images” of minority teenagers in American culture and political discourse convey that black teenagers are guilty until proven innocent and that black males are wild, threatening, and violent.42 These stereotypes prevent adults, especially white adults, from seeing the kinds of experiences and inequalities that


minority teenagers endure. The “bad kids” rhetoric was a part of the “controlling images” that dominated students’ and teachers’ perceptions of the Latino and African American students. It obscured the school’s, the school system’s, and society’s structure of white privilege that maintains schools that are in reality dropout warehouses for poor and minority youth. The organization of the school and the structure of NYC school system reinforced and reproduced racial and ethnic stereotypes and inequalities in multiple ways. One way was through the process of school choice whereby only students who were not admitted to better schools ended up in their neighborhood schools. Students reported that in junior high school everyone tried to avoid neighborhood schools, particularly those in poor and minority neighborhoods. The overcrowding in the beginning of the year, transient students, and lack of necessities such as lockers, toilet paper, and working bathrooms were just some of the observations the students made to describe how LCHS contributed to feelings of frustration and anger. Latino and African American students talked about discrimination from teachers who had low expectations for them while Asian American students found the teachers to be encouraging but feared physical and verbal harassment from their peers.43 These were just some of the ways the school contributed to the racialization of peers and upheld and reproduced societal stereotypes. Moreover, direct and subtle messages to students told them their education was valued less than that of students who attended more prestigious schools, that they could not be trusted and required police surveillance. The school building was a mess: broken windows, falling ceilings, and no outdoor recreational space. Students complained bitterly about using old textbooks, teachers who did not teach, and receiving minimal guidance support. Police officers walked the halls and surrounded the building during class changes; police cars were strategically parked along transportation routes. In the beginning of the school year in 1996, bomb threats caused daily evacuations of the school. The same year students were mugged for jewelry or money in or near school. Furthermore, there were messages from some parents, teachers, shop owners, police, and the media that insisted urban, minority adolescent youth should not be trusted. It was, therefore, unexpected that, given these negative conditions and unrelenting stereotypes, students


struggled to have close friendships and many maintained the same friendships for over four years. This study documents the characteristics of these friendships and how students struggled to maintain friends despite conditions in school and society that bred mistrust. The Social Relations of Ruling and Schooling School is the primary extra-familial institution where students spend about 40 percent of their waking hours in the company of friends, peers, and teachers.44 In school adolescents learn more than the subjects taught in the classroom or those measured by standardized testing. Students also develop relationally: they engage socially, learn to trust their friends, and get along with others. They are socialized into the norms and expectations for social relationships outside the confines of their families. This book investigates how students understand and experience their social relationships with each other and what they learn about social relationships in school. From a macro-sociological perspective, I build connections between the social worlds that poor and working class minority students experience in a large, public high school and the concept of collective dis-identity. I argue that instead of building a strong collective identity that has the potential for political mobilization and future connections to jobs, LCHS allowed students to disconnect from each other. Consequently students learned to blame their peers for the serious problems such as classroom disruptions and fights between students they observed daily in school. Instead of developing a systemic analysis of inequalities in society, they learned to denigrate their peers, blame the victim, and view their peers’ behavior as responsible for what was essentially institutional and system-wide educational failure. The title of this chapter, “Rethinking High School as a Relational Journey,” refers to the long-lasting process of interactions and connections with friends and, to a lesser degree, with teachers that occur in high school. This research suggests that if educators and practitioners think about high school as a relational journey, there are fruitful possibilities for improving students’ academic and social experiences. The current educational emphasis to improve learning through higher scores on standardized testing downplays one of the most important reasons students attend school—to spend time with friends. Schools have a relational component, an aspect of life in schools that is often


given short-shrift in favor of discussions about more tangible outcomes such as test scores. Though students in this study talked about wanting teachers who “cared,” policy discussions and reform initiatives were developed without attention to ways in which relationships can be nourished. Even more broadly and perhaps audaciously, the educator and researcher Nell Noddings, who also wrote about the importance of caring in education, asks how schools can achieve happiness. When she discusses her research about schools and happiness, a common response is to insist that the two ideas do not belong together because for most people it is difficult to imagine school as a joyous place. In calling for more “aims-talk,” a reflective and ongoing discussion and evaluation about the goals of education, Noddings suggests that happiness should be a legitimate goal of education. Essential to happiness is the satisfaction of needs that are rooted in social relationships.45 I find her approach compelling because it suggests not only that knowing how to have fulfilling relationships is useful knowledge in itself but also that schools can work with students to develop these skills that will also lead toward happier and healthier lives. In many ways her perspective justifies what students already claim—that they attend school to spend time with their friends. The trusting, supportive, and enjoyable friendships that students reported they needed and desired are more likely to occur if schools consciously build classroom interactions, extracurricular programs, and relationships that promote solid and trusting interactions. The silver-tongued boxer Muhammad Ali was purported to have said, “Friendship . . . is not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.”46 In one sense, I agree with Muhammad Ali that friendship is not something that is formally taught in school. Yet, informally, the rules of friendship, including aspects of social life in high school concerning trust, gender, racial and ethnic identity, and sexuality, are painstakingly negotiated among adolescents in high school.47 Even though educators rarely acknowledge their influence in producing happiness (or misery, as is more often the case) or shaping friendship experiences, schools like all institutions are solidly enmeshed in relational practices. Through their policies, practices, norms, and rules, both formal and informal, schools shape social relationships. Whether it is a teacher consciously deciding to use collaborative learning techniques that encourage students to work together in small groups, or reliance


on informal norms about where bilingual or special education students are supposed to sit in the cafeteria, these conditions informed students’ proximity to each other and the context in which they interacted. Some educators may claim their goals are solely to educate the mind; however, it is a fallacy to believe that minds are disconnected from physical bodies who sit in the classroom with social and emotional needs. As such, the “aims-talk” in this book is the consideration of how strong social relationships not only are essential to education but also have broader implications in terms of building group identity that are precursors to students’ sense of belonging and participation in school, and ultimately in community life. In a beleaguered urban high school, I observed that smart, motivated, and well-intentioned teachers and administrators spend much of their time fixing broken windows, to use a current policing strategy. The idea behind fixing broken windows was to immediately address small incidents to prevent larger disasters. At LCHS the potential for larger disasters should not be minimized. Administrators and teachers anxiously worked to prevent violence among students and fought for desperately needed funds. They worried and complained about the daily physical maintenance of the building including leaking ceilings, broken glass and elevators, too little or too much heat throughout the building, and the constant repairs needed to maintain an outdated building. The unyielding pressures to improve test scores in order to avoid state takeover also weighed heavily on administrator’s time. Consequently, it may seem to some like the privilege of the academic ivory tower for veteran public school teachers and administrators to contemplate happiness or to think about how the organizational structure of the school or classroom is likely to produce particular types of social relationships. During the two years I worked at LCHS, prior to becoming a researcher, I left the building each day exhausted, frequently unable to fall asleep because I could not stop thinking about the daily crisis. The trauma of the student who confessed she was physically abused by her parents but was afraid to talk with social services was difficult to put aside for seemingly distant research about how social relations matter. Yet, I will argue that teaching and learning cannot be separated from the social relationships involved in educating students. Furthermore, it is precisely the organization of these social relations in school that trained students to accept their designated position in the American system of class as well as racial and ethnic hierarchy.


For Bowles and Gintis, and others who expanded and clarified their correspondence model, it is through social relationships that students learned the values and personality characteristics necessary to maintain and reproduce the capitalist division of labor.48 Schools produce certain types of social relationships that are necessary for individuals to willingly conform to the system of job allocation. The social relationships in the college-tracked classes socialized upper class youth to question authority and think creatively, preparing them for work without oversight. Rigid discipline and dull tasks prepared working class youth for repetitive, blue collar jobs with tight social control and supervision.49 In these influential studies, the significant social relationship and interaction were between teachers and students. Social relationships between the teacher and the student modeled future interactions between the boss and the worker. Correspondence theories, however, did not consider how students were socialized to interact with each other in school, including the future social and political implications of their peer interactions. In large, alienating public schools, students had few opportunities to understand how they shared a common plight; instead they learned to blame each other. As such, how schools shaped social relations among poor, racial and ethnic minority youth is political because these social connections have the potential to build a shared sense of collective identity. In boarding schools, particularly those on the east coast, collective identity is forged to produce a shared set of intellectual beliefs and cultural values.50 Through a rigorous curriculum, time spent in a “total institution,” and shared rituals, students learned the values of the upper class. These shared cultural beliefs are the glue that binds students to the upper-echelons of economic life—the privileged few who were trained to become the ruling class.51 Friendships were critical to this process because “they can be seen as the cement which binds together the bricks of social structure.”52 The present study documents a similar sociological process—the social construction of collective identity; however, the results differ greatly from those in boarding schools. The inability to form collective identity prevents youth from considering collective social action to advocate for their needs; consequently, they reproduce the political, social, and economic inequalities they were born into. Understanding how the process of collective identity is prevented from developing in one school contributes to ongoing sociological


endeavors to understand how systems of inequalities, based on social locations such as class and race and ethnicity, are reproduced from generation to generation. Reproduction theories, resistance theories, and research in social movements examine why people who have the least to gain from existing economic and social inequalities are unable, for the most part, to successfully challenge or alter these structures?53 Socialized to believe that their peers cannot be trusted, students do not have the belief that collectively they have the potential to change the existing structure, nor do they have the skills and know-how to make that change. I argue that the organizational structure of schools and school systems shapes the social relationships among youth in a way that contributes to students’ perceptions of political inefficacy. Much research examines the schools’ role in shaping students’ future political behavior based on their participation in formal training such as civic engagement classes and extracurricular activities and on their ability to voice dissent in the classroom.54 The current study focuses on the kinds of everyday interactions and social relationships among peers that develop in school; I explore the characteristics of these kinds of informal relationships because they are a seedbed of collectively motivated actions. This book documents how these everyday understandings of social relationships help explain why poor and minority youth do not more actively reject a system that offers them less opportunities than youth from wealthier families. The title of this chapter, “Rethinking High School as a Relational Journey,” challenges people who teach, work with, and represent the needs and rights of adolescents to consider how more trusting relationships can be developed in their respective realms and the political implications of such a task. It suggests that adults and students can rethink the institutions we created in a way that fortifies relationships and builds trust. Many of the students in this study found LCHS to be anonymous, scary, unsafe, frustrating, alienating, or dull. To rethink also suggests that something was wrong or needed to be fixed. By all accounts, the findings from my study suggest we need to, at the very least, engage in a lot of rethinking. A significant contribution of this book is reorienting public discussion about what is wrong with public schools from the “bad kids” to the organization of the school system and the social structure of the school. This new way of thinking suggests “aims talks” that puts social relationships front and center, along


with educational goals, as a way of thinking about how friendships contribute to social reproduction. High school is an opportunity for adults to socialize youth into a world where each individual is valued. Instead as a society, we conflate institutional failure with individual failure so that many students believed “school is what you make of it,” even as they observed the majority of their peers dropout. Darder explains how this works for bicultural students: When bicultural students perform poorly, it is clearly considered the students’ fault. The fact that the opportunities to succeed in the dominant culture are unequally distributed is ignored in the context of traditional educational discourse. This individualization of responsibility serves effectively to diffuse class and race identity and interclass/race hostility. As such, it effectively provides an acceptable justification for the unequal distribution of resources in American society.55

When students learned to distrust their peers, to racially and ethnically segregate, and to blame one another for problems in school, they upheld a framework or “acceptable justification” for an educational system that worked to their disadvantage. Furthermore, few formal activities or adults in school worked to question or dismantle the given racial and ethnic hierarchy in school, even though everyone was aware of its existence. As a society, many also think about educational failure in instrumental terms such as the loss of future potential or economic earnings. A high school drop out could have made important contributions or earned enough to avoid welfare. Rarely do we as a society consider the costs of educational failure in terms of lost relationships or—as Noddings’ suggests—failure to achieve happiness.56 A failing school, LCHS had brilliant and caring teachers frustrated by their inability to effect change. There were students who felt their futures were squandered by uninspired teachers and disruptive peers. In everyday discussions in a failing school, there was enough blame-talk to go around: “the kids today,” “the unions are too powerful,” “too many resources towards special education,” and “teachers just want a paycheck.” The teachers and students I studied spent the longest part of their day together in an environment most found hostile and uncaring. Students not only failed scholastic tests but also routinely reported using trust


tests to protect themselves from each other. The tragedy of a failing school was not limited to personal or economic outcomes most often associated with educational failure but also included considerable social consequences such as lost opportunities for supportive and caring relationships. I explore how a failing high school enabled weak social relationships to thrive and suggest that similar conditions in public schools contribute to American youths’ increasing disengagement from participating in civic life. Civic Engagement, Collective Dis-Identification, and Theorizing “We-ness” For the students in this study, feelings of distrust among peers occurred during adolescence when having friendships and commonalities with people from the same age group has increased significance. Erik Erickson described identity formation during adolescence as a process of looking beyond the individual self by planning for adulthood and future goals. The formation of political identity is central to his conceptualization of individual identity. Political identity is an assessment of how an individual is connected to and feels about their community, and where and how they fit into the broader social structure. Thinking about their future role in the world, adolescents struggle to understand and assess the beliefs and values of their communities.57 A host of studies suggests that participation in civic experiences during this critical time of identity formation orient youth toward future political beliefs and actions. Participation in civic experiences at an early age is correlated with psychological outcomes such as increased self-esteem, personal competence, as well as social integration and participation in community organizations during adulthood.58 For example, college students who participated in Freedom Summer in 1964 described themselves and their generation as having the abilities and influence to alter the political orientation and goals of the country.59 Another study, based on a large, representative national sample, finds that extensive and close interactions with others (including peers and family, religious groups) and participation in extracurricular activities lead to greater likelihood of civic involvement in young adulthood.60


In a large, cross-national study exploring the developmental experiences that promote civic ethic among youth, researchers find that familial beliefs about community involvement, volunteer experiences, peer solidarity, and the school context are correlates of civic engagement.61 Across every country, family support for an ethic of civic responsibility is the most robust predictor of youth civic engagement. After family ethic, youth reported that their sense of connection at school, including membership and caring by peers, was most strongly indicative of the development of civic commitment. The exploration of school context investigates two aspects of schooling: the degree to which students are able to voice dissenting opinions in the classroom and students’ sense of membership and identification with peers in school. The authors write, Political goals are typically achieved through collective action. But a sense of solidarity with others and identification with group goals are prerequisites for collective action . . . If students perceive their schools as settings where identification with the institution and a commitment to the common good are widely shared, do such school climates generalize to the young person’s commitments to the broader polity? 62

This empirical study is one of the first to quantify peer solidarity in school as a critical and understudied predictor of civic engagement. The findings suggest that solidarity among peers, especially when it cuts across cliques, is necessary for students’ involvement in civic engagement. Youth need opportunities both in school and in their communities to participate and volunteer in public life. This allows them to interact with others who come from backgrounds that may differ from their own. In studies of youth civic engagement, typically the emphasis is on the kinds of civic classes or extracurricular activities that shape civic engagement. Although it is clear that involvement in these kinds of activities develops explicit understandings about civic engagement, how to build collective identity is not as obvious. Constance Flanagan and Nakesha Faison refer to this political and emotional connection to others as “civic attachment,” a feeling that each individual’s voice is recognized and matters in shaping public affairs—it’s the feeling that makes someone want to be part of the community.63 This empirical research and previous work by Constance Flanagan lay the groundwork for understanding how youth develop connection


to the public good through their relationships with others, including family and peers. The family ethic is well-established, but how schools develop a sense of belonging or attachment to the larger group is less apparent. There are several possible reasons why we know little about youth collective identity: (1) Youth culture is purposefully hidden from adults, making it more difficult to understand how peers influence each other; (2) Most studies of civic engagement focus on adult participation in civic activities, frequently reduced to citizenship-related obligations such as voting or military service that exclude youth; and (3) Studies of youth social relationships in schools tend to focus on close friendships, excluding the sense of attachment to generalized other students (peers) with whom they are not intimate to help them. According to Constance Flanagan, researchers become concerned with youths’ commitment to the polity during historical periods of political instability. One body of research began in the post–World War II era and the second occurred in the late 1960s. Once again researchers are interested in the socialization practices and cultural shifts that indicate a decrease in youth civic engagement.64 Recent survey research theorizes that as American society becomes more materialistic, youth are less interested and involved with voluntary organizations.65 Survey data suggests that all Americans, including youth, are less civically engaged, more isolated, and less socially trusting than they were in previous generations.66 In 2006, most youth were disengaged from civic activities according to a survey of 1,700 youth by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE). Disengagement (and engagement) varied by race and ethnicity: 52.6 percent of African Americans, 67.1 percent of Latinos, 53.9 percent of Asian Americans, and 56.3 percent of whites were considered to be “disengaged” according to a typology classifying youth as disengaged, civic specialist, electoral specialist, and dual activist.67 Previous research about youth socialization to political engagement has not focused on students’ everyday lives in formative institutions, such as schools, nor has it connected students’ political engagement to the qualities and characteristics of their social ties with peers.68 Schools are mediating institutions, along with families and religious institutions, whose norms and values shape how students understand their social and political worlds; they socialize youth into political consciousness.


The degree of trust fostered in public schools through students’ experiences interacting, bonding, sharing, and learning from peers is essential to their development of collective identity, and willingness to engage in their community. One of the reasons why today’s youth are more politically disengaged and disinterested in civic activities than youth from previous generations is influenced by how they are taught and experience social relations with their peers in public schools. This approach to considering civic disengagement is innovative because it emphasizes how everyday interactions with peers contribute to attitudes about others and how the school environment shapes these interactions. Although this study cannot speak to the larger trends in youth and adult civic disengagement in the wider population, it offers in-depth insight into how the process developed over time in one school. I find immigrant and minority adolescents attending a large, urban high school learned to view their peer groups based on racial and ethnic stereotypes. Most students had minimal long-term involvement working together in extracurricular activities with shared interests and goals. Instead, school developed a negative sense of collective identity that impeded the development of the strong social ties researchers find are needed to instigate student involvement in public interest, such as serving their country, working toward environmental change, and helping the poor.69 The purpose of this book is to describe students’ social relationships, including those with friends and peers, and to explore how their experiences in school mediated these relationships; it focuses on the social and political consequences of distrustful peer relations, and how the lack of a sense of connection among immigrant and minority youth in a urban high school shaped their sense of collective identity or, more precisely, collective dis-identification. The School and the Study Together the high school students and I embarked on a yearly ritual of finding a private place to talk in the cavernous public high school. LCHS was a behemoth structure, about one city block long and wide, five stories tall, with a fenced-in rooftop that was supposed to be used for students’ recreation.70 At the time of the study, students were not allowed to use the rooftop because it was not structurally sound.


Throughout all of the years of the study construction scaffolding surrounded the building. The neighborhood was known for its succession of immigrant groups, and its well-established settlement and social service agencies. Many of these agencies had representatives in the school providing desperately needed services such as taking students to a free health care clinic, discussing teenage pregnancy and birth control, providing access to social workers who communicated with students and their families in Mandarin, Cantonese, Bengali, and Spanish. There was also a free dental clinic in a converted classroom that often surprised first-time visitors who were jarred by seeing dental services publicly displayed. There was a lot of disruptively loud construction near the building because the tenements near the school were being renovated into expensive apartments, as some parts of the community were gentrified. Many of the Latino and African American students in this study lived in the low-rise housing projects nearby and some of the Asian American students lived in crowded conditions in tenements similar to those that were renovated. The school received attention in the 1980s when a well-known journalist wrote an account of a thoughtful white teacher’s daily experiences and interactions with immigrant and minority youth, working in a chaotic and underfunded school that made her job exhausting, frustrating, and challenging. Written from the perspective of a dedicated teacher, it told a story about how she engaged students in the classroom and closely mentored them through life’s travails. It was about the lives of students who struggled and the teacher who inspired them and shared their uphill battle in the quest to realize the American Dream. Despite LCHS’s academic shortcomings, it was an “indispensable institution” in the community. For many students it was where they received two free meals a day, free health and dental care, and connection to a host of social services they would otherwise not have.71 Most people who worked or lived in the neighborhood knew someone who went to the school. It was common for people to say, “the school used to be really good but now it’s gone downhill.” As much of research about school choice concludes, well-resourced, upper middle class parents with knowledge about the school system avoid sending their kids to failing neighborhood schools such as LCHS (Gill et al. 2001). Unequivocally, the school had a poor reputation: it was known to be violent and a school where many students cut classes


and eventually dropped out of school. In junior high school, when NYC students considered their options for high school by participating in the school choice program, the students in this study reported they did not want to attend LCHS. According to the school choice policy, students could apply to other schools, supposedly better ones, and if they were rejected from these schools they were assured acceptance at their neighborhood school. As a result, for most of the students in this study, particularly those who did not attend as English Language Learners, LCHS was a school of last choice. Most of the students in this study tried to attend better schools but were rejected and ended-up at LCHS. I find their status as “non-admits” to other schools influenced their perceptions of peers and life in school because students believed only kids with “minimal potential” attended neighborhood schools. In 9th and 10th grade the research team used a small conflict resolution room and in 11th and 12th grade we cleaned out an abandoned prop room in the unfinished attic of the school to privately conduct interviews. From 1996 to 2000, I asked students the same questions about their peer groups or using the vernacular; I also asked about groups of people who hang out together in school. I also talked to students about their best and close friends, and the differences between relationships with peers and those with friends. Toward the end of four years of interviewing the same students, some began to remember and anticipate my questions. Knowing I would ask them to further explain some detail or revisit a topic from the previous year, the students at LCHS were generous and offered me deep insight into their worlds. When we relived and compared their experiences from previous years’ interviews, it sometimes felt nostalgic, funny, and at times heart-wrenching. I shared a time in many students’ lives when they struggled with complicated social relationships and frustrating experiences in school. Some of the students in the study I knew from two years of working as a project coordinator for Project SafetyNet, an anti-violence AmeriCorps program. AmeriCorps, envisioned as a domestic Peace Corps, was President Bill Clinton’s first initiative upon entering office in 1993. It offered undergraduate and graduate students like me opportunities to work in public institutions in exchange for tuition and a stipend. Organized with four graduate students and forty enthusiastic but mostly inexperienced undergraduates from all walks of life at


New York University, the program’s funding lasted for only two years. AmeriCorps’ main mission was to reduce violence through training students in conflict resolution skills and coordinating mediation centers in two separate buildings. I felt well prepared for this job because my previous work experience in Yonkers, New York, was also in developing and coordinating conflict resolution programs in high schools. At LCHS, AmeriCorps operated two tutoring and mentoring centers in several languages: Bengali, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Spanish. Tutoring in any subject or language was available to students during lunch periods and after school. Working with English teachers, we provided theatrical performances based on the literature students were reading. Art programs, sports teams, and several clubs including environmental, Latino, African American, Asian American, multicultural, and dance themes provided students with lots of choices of enrichment activities. Unfortunately, these enrichment activities lasted for only two years and most of them ended after AmeriCorps lost its funding. AmeriCorps workers’ status in school differed from that of teachers. Though the college students frequently participated in classes working with teachers, most were visibly younger than the teachers and formed more informal relationships with students. The undergraduates were not significantly older than the high school students and several of the Asian American college students had not only recently immigrated to NYC but also graduated from LCHS a year or two earlier. In general, the AmeriCorps students came from significantly wealthier families in comparison to the working class and poor high school students. Though racially and ethnically diverse, the majority of college students were white and suburban. Tellingly, the undergraduates’ penchant for exposing waists adorned with belly-button rings in school was enough of a problem for administrators to react. In other words, there was a shared youth camaraderie and culture that, in a sense, freed the high school and college students’ relationships. Though I worked full-time and was clearly older than the undergraduates, who worked about ten hours a week, my status also differed from teachers. In the first two years at LCHS, I was privy to students’ personal information as well as administrators’ political insight necessary to run a successful program. I felt informed about school life even though I was clearly neither a teacher nor a union member. As the


child of two NYC public school teachers, I was knowledgeable about the frustration and gratification experienced by teachers; I frequently relied on this insider perspective during controversial episodes with faculty. By the time I became a researcher, no longer working in the school full-time, my status changed to semi-outsider. Because it was a large school that worked with many social service agencies, occasionally some faculty was not fully aware that I no longer worked in the school. However, most teachers knew the AmeriCorps program was no longer funded. As such, I was a familiar face but not a part of the community as I had once been. Toward the end of the four years of research, which lasted from 1996 to 2000, my knowledge of school life was mostly informed by students and teachers, as opposed to firsthand observation and experience. The present chapter provides an overview of the book to establish the importance of considering social relationships as critical to adolescents’ experiences in school. In chapter two, “Immigrant Dream and/ or Educational Delusion?”, I describe LCHS’s physical structure, history, and location in an immigrant neighborhood. In chapter three, “It’s a Bad School Because of the Kids,” I describe adolescents’ experiences and perceptions of their peers including their interactions and the strategies they used to avoid hostile interactions; I use this chapter to set the framework of racialization and fear of peers. In chapter four, “Listening to Friendships: Longitudinal Case Studies of Friendship Patterns—Isidora, Reginald, Mei Ling, and Lena” I draw on case studies to describe trusting friendships, employing four-year longitudinal case studies to explore three patterns of trusting friends. In the subsection Choosing School and Loosing Friends I introduce Isidora, a Latina, who struggled to disconnect from her junior high school friends and find new friends who shared her academic goals. Reginald’s case study, “I’m an Open Person,” documents his competency in keeping close friends at home and at school. The last case study, “Get Me Involved,” concerns Mei Ling and Lena, two Chinese American female students who feel they are on the fringe of their friendship group. These case studies demonstrate how adolescents maintained close friendships despite conditions such as fearing peers, high dropout rates, rampant cutting, and parental concern. In chapter five, “I Feel Like I’m in a Stereotype,” and chapter six, “What If You Can’t Learn Anywhere? Trapped by School Choice,” I move from students’ generalized descriptions of their


peers and friendships to considering how they perceived structural and contextual conditions in school such as racial and ethnic discrimination and the school choice policy to influence their social relationships in school. Chapter four focuses on variations in racial and ethnic discrimination and on segregation among the racial and ethnic groups in school. In chapter five, I use exploratory data about students’ experiences with school choice to understand how this policy influenced their social relationships in school. In chapter seven, the conclusion, “Peer Power Undermined,” I summarize the main theoretical findings including how attending large anonymous public high schools contributed to students’ sense of disengagement from each other and the social and political implications of disconnecting from peers. Notes 1. Interview #179 Time 3. 2. All names including the school’s are pseudonyms. I use the term black to describe Reginald because that was how he described himself. Elsewhere in the book, I use African American. See note 10 below for further discussion. 3. (Coleman 1960; Coleman 1988; Eckert 1989; Whyte 1943; Willis 1977) 4. Exceptions are Whyte’s study of Italian immigrants in Boston and Eckert’s focus on peer group interactions. 5. (Foner 1999; Jackson 2004; Kirp, Dwyer, and Rosenthal 1997; Massey 1996; Orfield and Lee 2005) 6. (Orfield and Lee 2005:10) 7. (Orfield and Lee 2005:10) 8. (Orfield and Lee 2005:11) 9. The number of students in the school varied from 1,600 to 2,400 during the four years of the study and depending on the time of year. LCHS is a pseudonym. All student names are pseudonyms and identifying characteristics have been slightly altered. 10. After much consideration, I chose these terms because they most clearly and easily represent all of the students in each category. However, they differ from how students referred to themselves. African American students predominantly called themselves black. Dominican American and Puerto Rican American students were likely to refer to themselves as Dominican, Puerto Rican, or Spanish. Although, there was a range of exceptions, such as a Dominican American student who referred to himself as black or a Puerto Rican American girl who referred to racial and ethnic category as “human.” Few students described themselves as Latino. Elsewhere, particularly when referring to national data, I use


11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

the term Latino. Most of the Asian American students in the school were Chinese American, but there were several students who were from Vietnam or Hong Kong. (At the time of this study, Hong Kong was not part of China). Chinese American students mostly described themselves as Chinese. I choose to use the hyphen to emphasize these students are American. (Frankenberg, Lee, and Orfield 2003; Orfield 1993; Orfield and Ford Foundation. 1981; Orfield and Joint Center for Political Studies (U.S.) 1983; Orfield and Lee 2005; Orfield and Taylor 1979) (Frankenberg, Lee, and Orfield 2003; Orfield and Joint Center for Political Studies (U.S.) 1983; Orfield and Lee 2004) (Massey and Denton 1998) (Frankenberg, Lee, and Orfield 2003; Orfield and Joint Center for Political Studies (U.S.) 1983; Orfield and Lee 2004). In comparison to similar and city schools in general, LCHS had more experienced teachers (both more than 2 years in school and 5 years anywhere), more permanently licensed and permanently assigned teachers, with masters degree or higher. In other words, teacher turnover and credentials were better than most schools in the city (1998). (Orfield and Lee 2005:17) (Orfield and Lee 2005:16) (Lee 2004; Orfield and Lee 2005:17) (Accountability 1998–1999) Similar schools are defined as having a similar percentage of students receiving the Free Lunch Program and a similar percentage of students who are English Language Learners. (Accountability 1998–1999) (Lareau 2003) (Bonilla-Silva 2006:9) (Myrdal 1944) (Rosenbloom and Way 2004) (Fine 1991; Kozol 1991). For a discussion of the funding inequalities between NYC public schools and suburban schools, see the Campaign for Fiscal Equity website and reports http://www.cfequity.org/ns-legislation. htm. Accessed March 3, 2008. (Ryan 1972) (Benford and Snow 2000; Goffman 1974) (Allan 1998; Hallinan 1976; Hallinan and Williams 1989) (Snow 2001) (Fine 1991; Kozol 1991; Noguera 2003; Valenzuela 1999) (Flanagan, Bowes, Jonsson, Csapo, and Sheblanova 1998; Stanton-Salazar and Spina 2005; Wentzel and Caldwell 1997) For example, see (Giordano, Cernkovich, and Pugh 1986) (Ladson-Billings 1994)

rethinking high school as a relational journey / 35 33. (Delpit 1995) 34. (Chesler, Lewis, and Crowfoot 2005; Krysan and Lewis 2004; LadsonBillings 1994; Lewis 2003; Noddings 1992; Valenzuela 1999; Way 1998b). 35. I discuss the implications of this data for graduation rates in chapter six. 36. (Schofield 1989; Schofield and McGivern 1979) 37. (Morning 2005) 38. (Brodkin 2000; Omni and Winant 1986) 39. (Anderson 1990; Gardner 1980) 40. (Bonilla-Silva 2006; Feagin and Sikes 1994; Feagin and Vera 1995; Korgen 2002) 41. (DuBois 1969) 42. (Collins 1991) (Gardner 1980; Welch, Price, and Yankey 2002) 43. (Rosenbloom and Way 2004) 44. (Schneider and Stevenson 1999:191) 45. (Noddings 2004) 46. (Ali 1993) 47. (Bryk and Schneider 2004; Eder 1995; Schofield 1989; Way 1998a; Way and Chu 2004) 48. (Anyon 1980; 1976; Oakes 1982) 49. (Anyon 1980; Oakes 1982) 50. (Cookson and Persell 1985) 51. (Cookson and Persell 1985) 52. (Jerome 1984:715) 53. (Katznelson and Weir 1985; Piven and Cloward 1977; Willis 1977) 54. (Flanagan et al. 1998; Smith 1999; Yates and Youniss 1998) 55. (Darder 1991:6) 56. (Noddings 2004) 57. (Erikson 1968) 58. (Flanagan et al. 1998; McAdam 1988; Smith 1999l; Yates and Youniss 1998) 59. (McAdam 1988) 60. (Smith 1999) 61. (Flanagan et al. 1998) 62. (Flanagan et al. 1998:7) 63. (Flanagan and Faison 2001) 64. (Flanagan 2003) 65. (Smith 1999) 66. (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Brashears 2006; Putnam 1993; Putnam 2000; Rahn and Transue 1998) 67. (Marcelo, Lopez, and Kirby 2007) 68. (Flanagan 2003:257) 69. (Flanagan et al. 1998)

36 / the multiracial urban high school 70. After the study was completed, I found out that the attic was renovated and turned into a workout space. I also noticed a playground with handball and basketball courts near the school that was for LCHS students. 71. (Noguera 2003)

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rethinking high school as a relational journey / 41 Wentzel, Kathryn R., and Kathryn Caldwell. 1997. “Friendships, Peer Acceptance, and Group Membership: Relations to Academic Achievement in Middle School.” Child Development 68:1198–1209. Whyte, W. F. 1943. Street Corner Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Willis, Paul. 1977. Learning to Labor: How Working-Class Kids Get WorkingClass Jobs. New York: Columbia University Press. Yates, Miranda, and James Youniss. 1998. “Community Service and Political Identity Development in Adolescence.” Journal of Social Issues 54: 495–512.


Ch a p t e r Two I m m ig r a n t D r e a m a n d/or Educ at iona l D e lusion?

In 1929, the same year as the stock market crash in New York City, Last Choice High School’s imposing structure, one city block long and wide and five stories high, was completed. Since I started working there in 1995 and until the time of this writing, it was in disrepair, with scaffolding permanently surrounding the building. It was an outdated behemoth, well-known in the neighborhood where everyone had an opinion about it. Older, white people talked about its heyday and how wonderful it was “back in the day.” Younger, Puerto Ricans and Dominican Americans talked about their friends and relatives who went there and hated it. Some talked about the friendships they’ve maintained for years. They told stories about violence, unfairness, gangs, cutting classes, and low graduation rates. It was, to most people, including those in the present study, a place to avoid attending. However, academic failure did not always define LCHS; initially German and Irish students were the dominant ethnic groups and throughout the 1930s and 1940s Jewish as well as Eastern and Southern European immigrants also graduated from the school and eventually moved out of the neighborhood. By the 1970s, the students were African American, Chinese American, Bengali, and Latino and for a short period of time Vietnamese. Although the school was not known for its academics, architectural beauty, or any other outstanding feature, it differed from other NYC public schools because of its reputation as a historically immigrant school in a classic immigrant neighborhood. Several famous personalities graduated from the school; the school’s location in the heart of immigrant NYC unrelentingly defined its student population from the day it opened. For some, LCHS was a testament to how immigrants


moved out of the ghetto into middle or working class America; it was and still is, for some students in my study, their ticket out of the immigrant enclave. Unequivocally, the school Americanized and educated many immigrants, preparing them to enter city and state colleges. For others, especially those whose families never left the surrounding neighborhood, it was a symbol of broken dreams, a failing school system, and the continuity of poverty across generations. When I started working at LCHS, 9th and 10th graders attended school in a separate building I call the Addition; 11th and 12th graders attended classes in the Central building. The Central building had four floors, an empty pool, a woodshop, music rooms, a large student cafeteria, and a small teacher’s cafeteria. The building itself attested to its long history as a school for poor and working class immigrants. A cavernous auditorium, with a balcony, boasted Works Projects Administration murals of the academic disciplines. The entrances to the boys and girls gym were adorned with artisan woodcuts of athletes in sports gear. The ground floor prominently displayed 8X10, professional photographs of notable adult graduates famous in theater, the arts, and medicine. Most all of these photographs were of white men who attended the school over fifty years ago. Displayed, but not mounted in showcases, were the photographs of recent high achieving African American, Latino, and Asian American students. Other displays throughout the school adorned the hallways. Some bulletin boards displayed the same public service posters year after year. Marketed to a teen audience, the posters warned of the dangers of teenage pregnancy, smoking, AIDS, and alcohol and drug abuse. For a while, someone photocopied handmade signs about the cruelties of pit-bull fighting. Other display cases were informational or exhibited students’ work. The informational displays advertised club meetings, activities, grades on exams, and state and final exam schedules. Some were educational showing how recycling reduces garbage in landfills, or maps exhibiting the location of students’ country of origin. A particularly depressing hallway bulletin board remained the same for four years. It was conspicuous to me because it was symbolic of the school’s dysfunction. Someone took the time to print a large banner on the computer that said, “Math Symbols.” Underneath the banner were full-page symbols such as X, #, %. At best, the bulletin board was an attempt to decorate and inform. At worst it was uninspiring and simplistic. The instructional level of this and other displays continued to

immigrant dream and/or educational delusion? / 45

haunt me. The idea of math symbols was part of an elementary school curriculum but certainly not pertinent to high school–level math. Paying close attention to displays of students’ work, I was continually surprised by the low academic level and degree of inspiration. Like the Addition, a hundred-year-old elementary school, the Central building lacked sufficient locker space for students. Consequently, students carried around their books and coats all day. Obviously this was an annoyance for students; some hid their heads in puffy and enveloping winter jackets during class. The school’s two elevators often broke down, making it difficult for students and faculty who could not climb four flights of steps. Scaffolding seemed to be permanently placed around the building while construction ebbed and flowed over the years but never really finished. To a degree, the building maintained the signs of faded elegance: the grandeur of the building, public art, and a huge, albeit technologically outdated, auditorium. About sixty years ago, it had some of the features needed to be a beacon unto the community. Faded elegance was lost on most students who emphasized how insulted they felt attending school in this building. The only outdoor recreation space was located on the roof, which consisted of fenced-in basketball courts. Unfortunately, the roof was rarely available to students and usually closed due to structural concerns. A public parking lot across the street from the school served as the only available outdoor space for students to congregate. Often police cars strategically parked in and around the lot to intimidate, monitor, and prevent students from loitering or socializing. Other aspects of the building made it uninviting: A guard station greeted students as they first entered the school. Students displayed identification card upon entering; during the course of the research metal detectors were also installed in the front entrance. Everyday the process of individually checking identification cards and the contents of backpacks caused long lines and delays. Students complained about having to come twenty minutes early to school to get through security. Students participated in a “degradation ceremony” as their belongings were searched upon entering school.1 Having their backpack scanned and inspected by guards, removing outer layers of coats, and displaying a student identification card were all part of a ritual that made students feel they were not trusted. The purpose of “degradation ceremony” is to lower the status of an individual, particularly in public places, by treating in a manner that communicates to the individual


that they have a lower value than others. Though the intention of the guard station was to ensure the safety of people entering the school, the implications of the process told students they were not trusted. There were metal grates on all of the ground-floor windows of the school making the building look impenetrable, like a prison. Ironically, a local tour company mentioned on its walking tour of the neighborhood that the schools location once housed a prison. This tidbit of history was not lost on some of the students who used it as both symbolic and literal evidence of the indignities suffered in the school. When asked to describe the school, most students referred to the deterioration of the physical building, but there were several who simply replied, “prison.” As explored in the upcoming chapters, it is within this context that students utilized the “good kid and bad kid framework,” devising strategies to avoid hostile interactions and to stay out of trouble but still have close friends. Almost every student interviewed commented on the deteriorating facilities, the dirt, the peeling paint, collapsing ceilings, and overcrowding. Overcrowding was a major problem in the Central building mostly during the beginning of the semester before large numbers of students stopped attending classes. It was common for students not to have a seat in class at the beginning of the semester but as the semester wore on there were plenty of extra seats. When the Addition closed, all of the 9th and 10th graders were sent to the now constantly overcrowded Central building. Hallways were noticeably more clogged; it was difficult to safely use the stairways and hard to get into the bathrooms when classes changed. To the uninitiated, the chaos and thickness of human bodies moving en masse when classes changed were overwhelming. There were many problems with the maintenance of both buildings: overflowing garbage cans, dirt and garbage on the floor; broken windows, doors, and bathroom facilities; water leaks; and windows painted shut. Instead of categorizing all of the building’s problems and disrepair, I focus on two egregious signs of physical decay: the garbage-strewn courtyard and the inaccessible bathrooms. The Addition consisted of four floors, more or less forming an L shape. Most of the classrooms in the building had ceiling-high windows that looked out onto a courtyard and some had exquisite views of the cityscape. Approaching the school from the subway, the courtyard was the first to come into view. The courtyard retained a cement structure that at one time might have


been a fountain or part of a playground apparatus. Broken glass, bags of garbage spilled onto the sidewalk, overgrown weeds, and cracked cement dominated the area. A fence prevented access to the courtyard from outside of the school, and the doors inside the school that opened onto the courtyard were locked. Consequently, there was no outdoor space that students could use during lunch or a free period without leaving the school grounds. When the weather was inviting there was no space in the school to play or to congregate outdoors. The abandoned lot attached to the school was particularly deplorable and the school gym was also inadequate. The gym was small with padded vertical beams everywhere making it difficult and dangerous to play sports. An outdoor space could have ameliorated some of the inadequacies of the gym. In September 1999, when most of the students in my study left the Addition and attended school at the Central building, the Addition was disconnected from LCHS. Over 650 students and 70 staff members moved from the Addition to the Central building.2 The Central building that held 1,600 students was overcrowded with 2,250 students.3 A small, alternative school started a new school in the same building. Investigating the possibilities for rehabilitating the garbagestrewn lot, they found that it was the only lot connected to a school that was officially part of the Department of Parks instead of the Board of Education. This made it even more difficult for the school to take it over and convert it into a useful space. At the time of this writing, the lot remains unchanged. The bathrooms, the second outstanding sign of the schools’ disrepair, were more an indicator of the administration and faculty’s disregard for students’ basic physical needs, and less a result of the poor physical maintenance of the building. A building with four floors, housing about 600–700 students, had only one bathroom for each sex. These bathrooms were located on the ground floor next to the cafeteria. Though the school was built with bathrooms on every floor, students cannot use them. Over the years, as problems occurred in bathrooms, the bathrooms were locked to prevent students from using them, leaving open just those next to the cafeteria. Some bathrooms became faculty bathrooms and others were used for storage. The bathrooms on the ground floor were dirty, flooded with water, and dangerous and rarely had soap or toilet paper. When available, a


roll of toilet paper was kept with the guards who stood at the entrance to the school near the bathrooms. In order to use toilet paper, students had to walk across the cafeteria, get the toilet paper, and walk back across the cafeteria to the bathroom. Most students found this ritual degrading and responded by refusing to use the bathrooms. When students needed to use the bathroom when they were on the higher floors of the building they often found it is impossible to go down and up four flights of stairs between classes without arriving late to their next class. The American Dream or the Continuity of Poverty across Generations? In many respects, the answer to the aforementioned section title and question was not complicated. According to empirical data of graduation and drop out rates as well as interviews with students, the school was failing. However, its legacy as an immigrant school and the reality that many Chinese American immigrants learned English, graduated, and went to college perpetuated the belief in the American Dream. Yes, for some, particularly recent immigrants from China, LCHS fostered their entrance into college and, most likely, the middle class. However, for most, LCHS was more of a “dropout factory.” As such there were two dominating contradictory images of the school in the media and the public perception: academic failure and academic success. The first refers to discipline problems, violence, low test scores, and low graduation rates. In the New York Times and previous research about LCHS, an often-repeated story of academic failure highlights educational incompetence and disparity with a well-known story of a disintegrating educational system. The indignities reported in these stories change over time: a box-cutter slashing in 1993, 60 percent of the senior class not graduating on time in 1996, students’ schedules not meeting state standards for the minimal number of hours spent in school in 1996, and the promise of large amounts of Soros Foundation money in 2000 to break down this large school into several smaller ones.4 LCHS is a textbook case of the problems of large, comprehensive urban schools. For example, 55.1 percent of incoming 9th graders are overage for grade, only 4 percent of 9th graders pass the Regents


Comprehensive Examination in Sequential Math, and 32 percent of 12th graders pass the Regents Comprehensive Examination in English.5 In 1997, only 24 (11.9 percent of graduates) students received a Regents diploma, which means passing state exams that test minimal competency in subject areas; 177 (87.6 percent) of the graduating students received a local diploma (also called RCT) including Special Education diplomas.6 The competing, well-worn public images in newspaper articles about this school and from my own observations depict the American immigrant success story. For instance, an inspiring teacher at LCHS is the subject of a book written by a well-known newspaper journalist. The book documents the daily lives of the teachers and their interactions with students. As a perceptive journalistic account of the school in the 1980s, the book exposes the everyday indignities and joys of being a teacher as well as the problems faced by students and teachers. In this book and a follow-up story about the successes of these immigrant students, we learn that several students, whose life stories are documented in the book, became successful, productive citizens. The story highlights immigrant success. It reaffirms that though the school system is renowned for its failures, there are also many accomplishments. A more recent example of the immigrant success story is a student from LCHS who wins a prestigious writing contest on the topic “A Woman I Admire.” The first place winner writes about Emily Dickinson and the second and third place winners write about their mothers. The Asian American recent immigrant student writes, One day, sometime last year, I overhear my mom talking on the phone with my grandmother. Mom is crying. “Oh, how I wish I didn’t leave Hong Kong,” she tells my grandmother. “I miss you so much. But I wanted what is best for my children. I know that in Hong Kong it would be almost impossible for them to get into college. But they hate it here, especially my daughter. Not a day goes by that she doesn’t berate me for leaving Hong Kong. Was I so wrong to want the best for my children?”

This student’s parents both work 12-hour days in the garment industry near LCHS. If the family had stayed in their native Hong Kong, the mother in the story would not have had to work. This student’s graduation from high school and entrance into college exemplifies the immigrant success story.


Over time, LCHS maintains the character of an immigrant school, but there are critical economic and educational shifts. Since the 1970s the economy in many cities changes from manufacturing to service. Many of the factories that employ uneducated, poor, and working class people in this neighborhood close, move outside the city, or relocate to countries where labor is cheaper. The once plentiful manufacturing jobs, which open the way for economic mobility, are no longer available.7 Both the immigrant and native-born parents of these students work long hours, in non-union jobs, and mostly without benefits. Many parents and some students in the study work in sweatshops.8 The economy of the neighborhood and the city as a whole is not prepared to employ unskilled labor or even offer unionized jobs for skilled labor. These immigrants have fewer opportunities for upward mobility in comparison to their predecessors. The education system also changed as the school choice plan in NYC separated students into three types of high schools after junior high in a neighborhood school. The lowest category of schools, neighborhood or zoned, was where students who are rejected from better schools attended. In NYC, school choice resulted in legendarily fierce competition among students who vied for acceptance at prestigious “star” public schools.9 Yet, about 40–45 percent of students in the NYC system attended neighborhood schools, known as the least academically successful schools in the city.10 Prior to the enactment of the school choice plan most students from the local neighborhood attended LCHS, ensuring that the students who became manual laborers and those who went to college attended the same school. Now students who had options to attend better public schools or private schools did not attend LCHS. The students left at LCHS have no other choices. Official and Unofficial Academic Failure John Devine’s model of the types of high schools in NYC categorizes them into a triangle with three tiers: the small number of prestigious specialized high schools are at the top; in the middle are the “educational option”; and the largest category at the base of the triangle is the “lower tier.”11 The Board of Education’s corresponding terms for these high schools were specialized high schools, vocational option and academic-comprehensive, zoned or neighborhood schools. At the top


of the triangle, the four “star schools” educated the brightest students from across the city; these schools required competitive entrance exams and high grades. The educational option schools were sometimes called magnet schools because they had specialized career-training programs. Magnet schools were considered academically better than the lowesttier schools, they were highly desirable alternatives to neighborhood schools. At the base of the triangle were the neighborhood schools, where most of the students in the NYC public school system attended school. The structure of this educational system creamed the best students in each neighborhood, first to the specialized high schools and then to the magnet schools; the remaining students attended the local or neighborhood schools. The approximately 2,200–3,200 students at LCHS attended the lower echelons of the “lower tier.”12 LCHS was an academic and comprehensive school attended primarily by students from the surrounding neighborhood and housing projects.13 In general, lower-tier schools were large, overcrowded, and located in the most deteriorated, segregated, and violent neighborhoods in the city. Researchers find they have the highest dropout rates, lowest graduation rates, weakest performance on tests, and the poorest attendance patterns.14 They not only were plagued with academic deficiencies but also had higher assault and weapon possession rates than other schools, more substitute teachers, and less funding. Most neighborhood schools had metal detectors at their entrances with a team of guards policing the students.15 In her ethnography of a comprehensive public school in NYC, Michelle Fine summarized differential resources among types of schools within the NYC public education system: In complex ways, urban comprehensive high schools do not serve public interests. In gross educational or economic terms, the evidence is most compelling. The resources allocated to comprehensive high schools are inequitable relative to more privileged schools, and even more inadequate considering the academic and social difficulties many of these youths experience.16

Probably the single most revealing academic information about LCHS was that in October 1997, the New York State Education Department publicly identified the school as failing to meet the State’s minimum


performance standards. LCHS was designated a School under Registration Review (SURR), a designation that required administrators to make significant changes or else the school was threatened with state takeover. While there were many violations of state standards, several were egregious. In 1996–1997, the 11th graders failed to meet the state’s minimal requirements in reading and writing. A report indicated low student attendance rates and pervasive class cutting. The administrative and organizational structure of the school was investigated for not providing clear roles and accountability. Among many other criticisms was the observation that the library was below state standards and did not provide adequate resources for the substantial ELL (English Language Learner) population. In the following years several changes were made that improved the schools’ standing with the state: most mainstream and ELL students were given two periods of English classes every day; the library was updated with more resources and computers; a new teacher’s training center was created to improve teaching, lesson plans, and use of technology; and in 1999, a school leadership team was organized. Consequently, slight improvements in students’ test scores prevented the state takeover. In 2000 (the last year of the interviews), 93 percent of the student body was eligible for federal assistance through the free lunch program. Similar schools in the city have 52.7 percent of students eligible for free lunch.17 Compared to similar city schools where 31.6 percent of the incoming 9th and 10th graders were overage for grade, at LCHS it was 55.2 percent.18 Approximately 22.4 percent of the incoming students19 and 58 percent of the total student population20 were categorized as English Language Learners (ELL), which predominantly included Chinese American students. About 80 percent of the students came from homes where languages other than English were primarily spoken.21 Compared to students from similar neighborhood schools, LCHS students came from poorer families, were older, and were more likely to need ELL classes. The population that entered the school already accrued significant deficits in many academic skills in comparison to other students in similar high schools in the city. According to BOE records, 90 percent of LCHS students graduated and the same number continued to higher education. These statistics were highly political and also misleading because they were based on the number of students in January of their senior year who planned to


graduate in June of the same year.22 Michelle Fine documented similar obfuscation practices in reporting the graduation rates at the neighborhood high school she studied.23 Official graduation rates were not calculated comparing the original 9th grade cohort with the number of students graduating four years later. Another BOE report found that 27.6 percent of students who entered in 9th, 10th, and 11th grade received a diploma or equivalency diploma.24 About 24 percent dropped out and did not enroll in another school and 48.6 percent were still enrolled after four years. In comparison, citywide 49.9 percent of students graduated, 19.3 percent dropped out, and 30.8 percent were still enrolled after four years.25 National statistics of dropout and graduation rates were significantly better than LCHS. In October 2000, high school completion rates for students between the ages of 18 and 24 indicated that nationwide 86.5 percent completed high school.26 The graduation rates for the school were astoundingly low, although typical for similar comprehensive high schools in NYC. The 9th grade class that began with 1,229 students in 1996 culminated with only 174 students graduating in 2000, after four years at LCHS. These numbers were taken from the school’s published information of the number of 9th graders and the school’s list of graduating students. The 14 percent of students who graduated in four years did not account for students who were still enrolled at LCHS or who transferred. This number simply indicates the number of students who began 9th grade in LCHS and graduated four years later from LCHS.27 It does, however, indicate that the graduation rate was grossly miscalculated and much lower than presented by the BOE. Analyzing the race and ethnicity of the graduating class, an observer might assume that over two-thirds of students in the school were Asian American as opposed to a little more than one-third of the school (36 percent). Although African Americans and Latinos comprised 15 percent and 48 percent of the school population respectively, only 7 percent blacks and 22 percent Latinos graduated in the class of 2000. Nationally, the same year, 64.1 percent of Hispanics, 83.7 percent of African Americans, and 94.6 percent of Asians graduated from high school.28 Furthermore, of the 348 awards given out to the senior class of 2000, African Americans received 6.6 percent, Latinos obtained 18.10 percent, and Asian Americans accepted 70 percent. (About 5.7 percent were given to students from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds).


After counting who graduated in four years, who won the awards at graduation, and who attended four-year colleges or universities (as opposed to community college, the military, or employment), it was clear that the Asian American students graduated at higher rates, received more honors, and attended more prestigious schools than the Latino and black students. Of the small percentage of Latino and black students who graduated, fewer gained admissions to schools as respected as the schools the Asian American students attended. Policing an Academically Failing School To state it bluntly, adults are concerned about youth congregating in groups and in public spaces. Whether it occurs in the working and middle class, northern New Jersey suburban town described by Donna Gaines in Teenage Wasteland or in NYC public schools where inner-city kids are increasingly policed using paramilitaristic forms of surveillance and force, the fear of groups of youth persists in diverse settings.29 Aaron Kupchik and Torin Monaghan argue that within the context of a postindustrial economy the “new American high school” includes increased surveillance and policing techniques that naturalize the presence of control regimes in students’ everyday lives.30 Power and authority in schools are transferred from teachers, social workers, students, and parents to police officers, who utilize the most technologically advanced techniques to control and monitor student behavior.31 Large high schools in poor neighborhoods where working class and poor, minority and immigrant youth are concentrated are more likely to experience increases in school violence, thus justifying the high costs of such policing and surveillance tactics.32 LCHS had many of the characteristics of the “new American high school” that trained students to interact with surveillance and control regimes such as the police and the prison system. As described earlier in this chapter, several aspects of the school’s physical building made it uninviting and prison-like. At LCHS police cars surrounded the building during the beginning and the end of the day, metal detectors flanked the entrance to the building, and guards with walkie-talkies patrolled the hallways. The male voices overheard on the walkie-talkies reverberated in the empty hallways between classes. It was common to see police officers both in and near the school building.


Students who were late on their way to school or absent from classes without prior permission were frequently stopped by truancy officers who took them in a police van and brought them “downtown.” At the downtown police station their parents were called and told to pick up their child. However, students also reported many cases of unfair treatment. For example, a student wrote the following letter to the editor of the school paper: Dear Editor, I did not have to be school today until 9:30. At 9:19, as I was crossing Main Street, I was stopped by a police officer who directed me to get into a paddy van. I tried to explain to him that I didn’t have to be in school until 9:30, but he insisted that I was playing hooky. He took me, along with a dozen other students to Arts High School. Only then did he call LCHS and find out that I was telling the truth. This was very upsetting and embarrassing. If police officers are going to pick kids up for not being in school, they need to be aware of schools’ schedules. N. Gutierrez33

In their interviews students complained about truancy officers and police officers who wrongly accused them of illegal behavior such as coming to school late or cutting classes. Students regularly interacted with police officers, truancy officers, and deans of discipline who communicated through their interactions that students were not to be trusted. Some students reported that they found the presence of police officers reassuring, but others were concerned about the symbolic significance of being surrounded by police officers—it meant they were not trusted. Furthermore, there were times when students felt unjustly and wrongly accused by them. Issues of student mobility, truancy, cutting, and arriving late to class were serious problems. These issues were discussed as significant obstacles that needed attention in an assessment by the State Education Department when LCHS was identified as needing increased monitoring by the state.34 The SURR process requires a review team to visit the school to observe and interview teachers and administrators. Their report discusses problems and potential ways to fix them. The school was identified for state takeover because of substandard test results in


reading and writing. For example, out of the students who make it to the 12th grade, only 32 percent pass the New York State Regents exam, a minimum competency test. Citywide the passing rate was 58 percent during 1996–1997. The school was cited as having “one of the lowest four-year graduation rates of any regular Manhattan high school.”35 The report said that a significant number of students do not drop out, yet they also do not pass enough classes to graduate. Consequently, it was common for administrators and official reports not to refer to students by their grade designation but rather by their credit accumulation or by saying students are “approximately age-equivalent to 9th and 10th graders.”36 In other words, grade designations were irrelevant because so many students did not earn enough credits to be considered in the grade that corresponded with their age or the number of years spent at the school. These students were likely to intermittently attend school, leaving and returning, or trying again the following year. “Over the Counter Students” was a commonly used term to refer to the large number of students, about 1,000, who entered or left LCHS during the middle of the year. In a school with about 2,800 students, about 1,000 were in a state of mobility. This number included students who recently relocated to the United States, returned to their home country, or transferred out to or transferred from other schools. It also included students who stopped attending for periods of time but did not drop out. “Long Term Absences” (LTA) was the official term used for these students. Some returned to school several weeks or months later, trying to make up missed class work. According to the SURR report, the highly mobile population meant that enrollment ballooned during the beginning of the year and then waned as students disappeared. The report found that classes in the Addition consisted of about half of the students on the attendance roster. Teachers also had minimal information about students who did not show up in class and the school was cited for not having a timely and accurate procedure to address attendance problems. Interestingly, teachers told the state reviewers that attendance and truancy problems were not relevant for the school’s Limited English Proficiency (LEP) students (the predominantly Chinese American recent immigrants and those who were not fully mainstreamed into English-speaking classes).37 In the report the problematized students did not include the predominantly recent immigrant Chinese American students.


The Surrounding Neighborhoods LCHS is located in what is known as an immigrant neighborhood that in the past accommodated the arrival of a succession of Eastern and Southern European immigrant groups. Throughout the school’s history it is known for successfully educating immigrants, many of whom are Jewish. As such the school has a legacy of ties to Jewish charitable organizations as well as settlement homes that are located in the neighborhood. The school also has strong institutional ties to Chinese American social service and community organizations that provide many services geared toward the recent immigrant population. Noticeably missing are community networks to Latino and African American community organizations. In the past immigrants lived in the tenement buildings designed as rentals for the poor and working class. For the most part, this housing stock remains. While some of the tenement buildings directly across from the school are refurbished in a wave of gentrification, most of the tenement housing is intact. Many of the students in this study live in these tenements while others live in nearby public housing. Decent public housing surrounds the schools’ neighborhood, as do middle class apartment cooperatives built and at one time owned by a large union. Very few of the minority students in this study live in this middle class union housing. It is a neighborhood with more public housing, public works, social service agencies, and union housing than others in the city. In the late 1990s, pockets of the neighborhood surrounding the school were gentrified. A museum commemorating immigrant life brings third- and fourth-generation white immigrants from the suburbs back to the “old neighborhood” to consume nostalgia. While the museum commemorates life in the tenements, many recent Latino and Asian immigrants presently live in buildings and conditions that are not that much improved from the turn of the century. Particularly, many Chinese Americans live in substandard and crowded housing, while more established Latino immigrants live in public housing. The museum is located on a historic shopping district known for its cheap deals on clothing, luggage, bras, underwear, fabric, and leather. It is common to see tourists traverse this street grasping for a feel of old New York. This street is located close to LCHS. The same neighborhood can often have diverse associations or meanings for different people. For those second-, third-, and


fourth-generation, white, Eastern and Southern European immigrants, the neighborhood is a place of nostalgia, whose harshness is long forgotten as these families move out of the ghetto and into the suburbs. For them the neighborhood represents an idealized world of their family’s past. It is easy to forget there are others who still endure the hardships of tenement housing, public housing, legal and illegal immigration, failing schools, poor municipal services, and sweatshop labor. Many do not see the present in their framing of the past. For recent immigrants and some second- and third-generation immigrants who never left the neighborhood, the place is still a ghetto ripe with everyday struggles. The Global and Local Economy The school was directly surrounded by an older, religious Jewish neighborhood that at one time was thriving. Now it consisted of many elderly and religious Jews; an expanding Asian neighborhood encroached upon this dwindling Jewish community.38 The Asian neighborhood was a thriving center of commerce including both major international concerns and small immigrant businesses. Consequently, it was described as having similar characteristics to large cities in third world countries that have a bifurcated structure of a lower and upper economy.39 The upper parts of the economy included international importing and manufacturing companies and the lower echelons of the economy, where the parents’ of the students who attended LCHS worked, included sweatshops, restaurants, and unskilled manufacturing. In the past, immigrant men and women in this neighborhood found jobs in manufacturing as dock workers and manual workers in small machine shops. Historically, the neighborhood was known for garment manufacturing in large sweatshops and through piecework at home. Over time, manufacturing jobs left and residents no longer worked close to where they lived. However, with the recent influx of large numbers of Chinese and Latino immigrants, a whole new wave of illegal sweatshop labor developed right near LCHS.40 Many of the parents of the Asian American students and some of the students themselves worked in the illegal sweatshop economy. In fact, the streets between the Central building and the Addition were particularly significant to the low-wage, illegal worker economy in the city and other parts of the country because employment agencies lined the streets. Undocumented


and illegal Fuzhounese immigrants found temporary and low-skill jobs working in restaurants throughout the East Coast; hourly wages ran as low as $2.55. Women experienced similar working conditions mostly in sweatshops and the garment industry. The children of these “indentured servants” attended LCHS.41 The neighborhood surrounding the Central and the Addition differ noticeably. The Central building is located on the edge of the older and more established Chinese neighborhood while the Addition is surrounded by public housing. The more established Chinese neighborhood is settled by previous generations of Chinese immigrants from Canton, now Fuzhounese immigrants live in the neighborhood between the two school buildings. Emigrating from the Chinese province of Fujian, almost 90 percent of the recent Chinese immigrants are from the rural counties outside of the capital city of Fuzhou. The same streets where the Fuzhounese immigrants now settle once belonged to Chinese immigrants from Vietnam and Malaysia.42 The Vietnamese and Malaysian children of these immigrants once attended LCHS in large numbers. Now there are only a few students left in the neighborhood from these ethnic groups and most of the Chinese students who attended LCHS are from rural Fujian. By the 1990s, local demographic changes were such that most of the Chinese immigrants in this neighborhood could speak Fuzhounese and did not understand the Cantonese-speaking teachers. As recently as 1997, there were only a few Fuzhounese-speaking teachers in all of New York public schools.43 The Fuzhounese immigrants are physically isolated from the more established Chinese community as well as linguistically isolated from the community-based services started by Cantonese speakers. The older Cantonese community resists their growing influence and increasing numbers. The Cantonese stereotype the Fuzhounese as agents of tong wars, gamblers, and perpetrators of violent crimes such as kidnapping and torture.44 Also close to LCHS was a large and established Puerto Rican neighborhood. The history of immigration of Puerto Ricans to this neighborhood differs significantly from that of the previous European immigrant groups and present-day Chinese Americans. Puerto Rican immigration is more episodic, spreads out over a longer period of time, and at times shows patterns of return migration. The costs of immigration are not reversible as people move back and forth between New


York and Puerto Rico.45 This pattern of immigration is influenced by Puerto Ricans’ legal status as American citizens, granted in 1917. By 1970, there were over 800,000 Puerto Ricans living in New York, representing 59 percent of Puerto Ricans in the country.46 By the mid-1990s, four-fifths of the people living in public housing close to the school were Puerto Rican.47 This particular Puerto Rican enclave is a cultural and political center of Puerto Rican life in New York. It began, however, as a satellite barrio for other neighborhoods in the city. Many more recent Dominican immigrants also live in this neighborhood with Puerto Ricans. There is a belief that Dominican immigrants follow Puerto Ricans and rely on their linguistic support and knowledge of the city to survive in NYC.48 Eventually, many Dominicans moved to other neighborhoods where they built enclaves dominated by Dominican-owned businesses. Though some Dominican American students lived close to the school in the predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood, the majority lived in a populous Dominican neighborhood. Similarly many of the African American students in this study travel from other parts of the city. These Dominican and African American students try to avoid attending their neighborhood school because they believe the neighborhood schools downtown are safer and less crowded as well as offer an opportunity to attend school in a different neighborhood. There are also about 750,000 legal and illegal Dominican immigrants in NYC.49 Over half of all Dominican immigrants came to the United States between 1980 and 1990.50 These numbers however, are disputed among Dominican American leaders who claim that due to the large number of illegal immigrants, the numbers of Dominicans may be two or three times higher. In general, the Dominican students attending LCHS are more recent immigrants than second- and sometimes third-generation Puerto Rican New Yorkers. However, there are far fewer Spanish language bilingual classes in comparison to Chinese language bilingual classes. Dominicans Americans are and continue to be an understudied immigrant group in NYC public schools. Around 1995–1996, the largest recent immigrant groups in NYC public schools are from the Dominican Republic (28,290), former Soviet Union (8,855), Jamaica (8,658), China (7,928), Guyana (6,632), and Haiti (6,012).51 Using census data, Hernandez estimates that 104,000 Dominican children


attend the NYC public schools.52 About one in every four public school students is of Dominican descent. Large numbers of recent immigrants from the Dominican Republic attending public school has led to severe overcrowding in Dominican neighborhood schools. In 1992–1993, the neighborhood schools in the most populous Dominican neighborhood were operating at 153 percent capacity.53 These overcrowded schools may help to explain why many students chose not to attend their neighborhood school and instead travel to another neighborhood school. In sum, LCHS was a place of several contradictions. The building itself was imposing, expressing high ambitions for public education in a traditionally immigrant neighborhood. Yet, its current state of disrepair revealed years of neglect for the poorest and most marginalized students in the NYC public school system. Some students, particularly Chinese immigrants, thrived in high school and graduated with an education that prepared them to enter college. Nonetheless, the drop out rate was high, much higher than calculated in official reports. The images of the high-achieving, recent immigrant students hid the failures of the African American and Latino students who were left behind. The awards and ceremonies that praised one group’s accomplishments could not be recognized without understanding the ways in which they were connected to the lowered ambitions and diminished success rates of others. Despite current politicized discussions about multicultural education and bilingual education, minority and immigrant students’ experiences at Last Choice was constructed around a rigid system of racial and ethnic segregation that was more reminiscent of the public education system prior to desegregation. That is, though the school was located in a racially and ethnically diverse state, city, and community, it appeared to have many similarities to a system of enforced apartheid than to an idealistic notion of racial interactions in post–Civil Rights America. In the following chapter I describe how the social structure of the school was organized around racial and ethnic categories that defined and codified peer groups. Notes 1. (Garfinkel 1956) 2. High School Annual School Report 1999–2000, New York City Division of Assessment and Accountability, accessed February 2002 from www. nysenet.edu.

62 / the multiracial urban high school 3. High School Annual School Report 1999–2000, page 14. 4. (Devine 1996; Dillon 1993; Goodman 1997; Steinberg 1995) 5. Annual School Report 1996–1997. New York City Board of Education, Manhattan Superintendency, Division of Assessment and Accountability, New York City. 6. According the NYC Board of Education, To earn a Local Diploma, a pupil must complete 18 1/2 units of study. These must include four units in English, four units in social studies, two units in science, two units in mathematics, one unit in art and/or music, and one-half unit in health education. A diploma candidate must also complete additional coursework in one or more of these subject areas. A three-course sequence in occupational education may be used to satisfy part of this additional course work requirement. Each graduate must show competence in English language arts, mathematics, science, global studies, and U.S. history and government. To earn a Regents Diploma, a pupil generally must complete three units in a language other than English. Each Regents diploma candidate must pass the Regents examination, if any, for each course used to satisfy regular diploma requirements. Most students who receive Regents diplomas pass at least eight Regents examinations: English, Global Studies, U.S. History and Government, Mathematics I and II, a language other than English, and two science examinations. Many of these students also pass the other science and mathematics Regents examinations. Regents diploma candidates may also use Regents-level art, music, or occupational education courses to satisfy requirements, although there are no Regents examinations in these areas. (1997). By 2003 RCT or local diplomas are no longer an option in NYC schools. Students must pass Regents exams in order to graduate 7. (Anderson 1990; Kasarda 1989) 8. In her interview an Asian American student discussed her experiences working in sweatshops with her mother during her summer vacation. 9. (For descriptions see Attewell 2001; Berger 2002; Hartocollis 2002; Medina 2002) 10. (Goodnough 2003) 11. Devine 1996. 12. Where LCHS fell within the category of lower tier was a debatable question. Devine (1996) argued that it fit in the upper echelons because it had a high rate of passing the math Regents among Asian Americans. However, he also observed huge racial disparities in graduation rates. At the time of this study, which focused on violence in public schools, LCHS did not have metal detectors. This was a significant factor in his choice to rank the school in the upper echelons of the lower tier. The lack of metal detectors was mostly due to the principal who wanted to maintain


13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

the original appearance of the school. This principal also did not like the message that metal detectors sent to students. During the course of my study metal detectors were installed when the aforementioned principal retired. In the following years, the school was placed on a list of the worst city schools under review for state takeover. In my opinion, the school’s deterioration placed it squarely in the lowest echelons of the lower tier. A small contingent of mostly Dominican and African American students attended LCHS by commuting downtown from a distant uptown neighborhood. Generally, these students applied to many schools but could only attend the zone schools in their borough of residence. In all of the other boroughs students could not choose which neighborhood school they wanted to attend; they had to attend the one in their immediate neighborhood. In the borough where LCHS was located students could choose from several zone or neighborhood schools that may or may not be in their immediate neighborhood. In choosing between their neighborhood school or any other neighborhood school, they felt LCHS was their best option. (Anyon 1997; Devine 1996; Fine 1991; Kozol 1991) (Devine 1996) (Fine 1991) High School Annual School Report 1999–2000. High School Annual School Report 1999–2000. High School Annual School Report 1999–2000. High School Annual School Report 1999–2000. High School Annual School Report 1999–2000. High School Annual School Report 1999–2000. See Orfield et al. 2004 for comprehensive discussion. Fine 1989. This rate included students who attended GED classes also located in the same school. High School Annual School Report 1999–2000. (Kaufman, Alt, and MPR Associates 2001) Some of these students changed school and eventually graduated from other schools. This rate only reflected students who graduated (on graduation day) after attending LCHS for four years. This was not a statistic published by the school or BOE but was necessary to calculate to gain a more realistic drop out rate. (Kaufman 2001:19) My numbers were based on the numbers of students at graduation after four years. This did not include students who graduated from other schools or received a GED (Devine 1996; Kupchik and Monahan 2006) (Kupchik and Monahan 2006; Nolan and Anyon 2004) (Devine 1996)

64 / the multiracial urban high school 32. (Devine 1996; Kupchik and Monahan 2006) 33. LCHS World, student paper, June 1999, p. 4. 34. Registration Review Report, The New York State Education Department, April 1998. 35. Registration Review Report, The New York State Education Department, April 1998, page 2. 36. Registration Review Report, The New York State Education Department, April 1998, page 1. 37. Registration Review Report, The New York State Education Department, April 1998, page 2 and 6. 38. (Kwong 1997:21) 39. (Lin 1995) 40. (Kwong 1997) 41. (Kwong 1997:35–37) 42. (Kwong 1997:20) 43. (Kwong 1997:109) 44. (Kwong 1997:20) 45. (Mele 1994:127–128) 46. (Mele 1994:128–129) 47. (Mele 1994:137) 48. (Pessar 1997:137) 49. (Pessar 1996) 50. (Grasmuck and Pessar 1996:290) 51. (Hernandez 1997:15) 52. (Hernandez 1997) 53. (Hernandez 1997:16)

References “1996–1997 Annual School Report.” 1997. New York City Board of Education, Manhattan Superintendency, Division of Assessment and Accountability, New York City. Anderson, Elijah. 1990. Street Wise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Anyon, Jean. 1997. Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Educational Reform. New York: Teachers College Press. Attewell, Paul. 2001. “The Winner-Take-All High School: Organizational Adaptations to the Educational Stratification.” Sociology of Education 74:267–295. Berger, Leslie. 2002. “School Maze,” pp. City 1 in The New York Times. New York. Devine, John. 1996. Maximum Security: The Culture of Violence in Inner-City Schools. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dillon, Sam. 1993. “Asbestos in the School; Disorder on Day 1 in New York Schools,” pp. 1, Section A in The New York Times. New York.

immigrant dream and/or educational delusion? / 65 Fine, Michelle. 1989. “Silencing and Nurturing Voice in an Improbable Context: Urban Adolescents in Public School,” pp. 152–173 in Critical Pedagogy, the State, and Cultural Struggle, edited by H. A. Giroux and P. McLaren. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 1991. Framing Dropouts: Notes on the Politics of an Urban High School. Albany: SUNY Press. Garfinkel, Harold. 1956. “Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies.” American Journal of Sociology 61:420–424. Goodman, Lawrence. 1997. “School’s High Road Longer Route, but Last Stop till Graduation,” pp. 34 in Daily News. New York. Goodnough, Abby. 2003. “Many Are Shut Out in High School Choice,” pp. B3 in The New York Times. New York. Grasmuck, Sherri, and Patricia Pessar. 1996. “First and Second Generation Settlement of Dominicans in the United States: 1960–1990.” in Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race and Ethnicity in America, edited by S. Pedraza and R. Rumbaut. Belmont, CA : Wadsworth Press. Hartocollis, Anemona. 2002. “Date of Exam for Elite Schools Is Moved Up, Disturbing Parents,” pp. B1 in The New York Times. New York. Hernandez, Ramona. 1997. Dominican New Yorkers: A Socioeconomic Profile, 1997. New York: CUNY Dominican Studies Institute. Kasarda, John D. 1989. “Urban Industrial Transition and the Underclass.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 501:26–47. Kaufman, Philip, Martha Naomi Alt, and MPR Associates Inc. 2001. “Dropout Rates in the United States: 2000.” National Center for Education Statistics, Washington, DC. Kozol, Jonathan. 1991. Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s School. New York: Crown. Kupchik, Aaron, and Torin Monahan. 2006. “The New American School: Preparation for Post-industrial Discipline.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 27:617–631. Kwong, Peter. 1997. Forbidden Workers: Illegal Chinese Immigrants and American Labor. New York: W. W. Norton. Lin, Jan. 1995. “Polarized Development and Urban Change in New York’s Chinatown.” Urban Affairs Review 30:332–354. Medina, Jennifer. 2002. “Stress Just Part of the Test for Selective High Schools,” pp. B1 in The New York Times. New York City. Mele, Christopher. 1994. “Neighborhood ‘Burn-Out’: Puerto Ricans at the End of the Queue.” in From Urban Village to East Village, edited by J. L. Abu-Lughod. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Nolan, K., and J. Anyon. 2004. “Learning to Do Time,” pp. 133–149 in Learning to Labor in New Times, edited by N. Dolby, G. Dimitriadis, and P. Willis. New York: Routledge. Orfield, Gary, Daniel Losen, Johanna Wald, and Christopher B. Swanson. 2004. “Losing Our Future: How Minority Youth Are Being Left Behind by the Graduation Rate Crisis.” Cambridge MA: The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, The Urban Institute, Advocates for Children of New York, The Civil Society Institute.

66 / the multiracial urban high school Pessar, Patricia R. 1997. “Dominicans Forging an Ethnic Community in New York,” pp. 131–149 in Beyond Black and White: New Faces and Voices in U.S. Schools, edited by M. Sellar and L. Weis. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 1996. A Visa for a Dream: Dominicans in the United States. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Steinberg, Jacques. 1995. “State Asks Why Some Students Don’t Spend More Time in Class,” p. 4, Section B; in The New York Times. New York.

Ch a p t e r Th r e e “It ’s a Bad Sc hool Bec ause of t h e K i d s”

This chapter frames students’ worldview about their peers by describing a key component of their relational world in high school–fearing peers. Distrust among peers was pervasive at Last Choice High School. I argue that students’ distrust of others developed not only from experiences in their neighborhood and the advice that parents and teachers gave, but also from how they interpreted the academic failure and environment they observed in school. So many youth dropped out, got into fights, repeatedly cut class, and failed classes that students relied on a cultural script about “bad kids” at school. By “cultural script” I refer to an accepted and well-known way of understanding and thinking about certain kinds of youth. According to this framework, it was the characteristics of “bad kids” that explained rampant failure and proved that they ruined the school for others. “Bad kids” also racialized widespread academic failure by blaming the characteristics of peer groups that were organized by racial and ethnic categories. Relying on students’ descriptions of peer groups, I describe how the idea of peer groups of “bad kids and good kids” was linked to the racial and ethnic hierarchy in school. This chapter explores students’ descriptions of the peer context at LCHS. I use students’ perceptions of their peers to demonstrate their reliance on dichotomous and opposing peer categories: “the good kids and the bad kids.” These peer groups were racialized, based on social and academic stereotypes about differences among racial and ethnic groups in school. Students reported that “good kids” referred to the Chinese American model minority as the high academic achievers who were quiet, listened in class, and were considered well-behaved. The African American and Latino students, with higher dropout rates,


were described as the “bad kids,” those who displayed anti-academic behavior. I argue that in an academically failing, multiracial, urban school, peer groups were defined by racialized categories that relied on stereotypes about academic and social competencies. The local understanding of these categories was created and sustained within the particular context of NYC, the neighborhood, and the students’ interactions with teachers and each other. These categories were also maintained by reliance on the myth of the Asian model minority, the structure of the school and school system, and variations in the source and experience of discrimination. In the chapter five, “Racial and Ethnic Discrimination among Peer Groups,” I explore how students describe their experiences of discrimination amongst themselves and with adults. In this chapter, to demonstrate how students negotiated the hostile school climate, I explore two strategies used by students to minimize aggressive interactions with peers: “the code of the street” in school and “trust tests.”1 I show how Elijah Anderson’s “code of the street” was deployed in school and how “trust tests” helped students overcome the defensive stance dictated by the code to decide who they could trust.2 These informal rules of behavior were used to avoid fights and to overcome the enveloping sense of distrust so that students could have friends. I find that students blamed the schools’ academic problems on the “bad kids”; consequently they engaged in a process of “blaming the victim,” a commonly used analytic device that individualizes failure. Racialized Peer Groups, Segregation, and the Academic Hierarchy The stability of the “bad kid/good kid” framework was evidenced in its repetition in students’ interviews from year to year. During her secondyear interview, Nikki, an African American female, was asked to talk about her peers in school; she said, They bad . . . they ridiculous . . . they loud, lazy . . . Too much into themselves, and don’t think about other people. They make noise at the back of the classroom. The teacher be like “shut up,”. . . they keep talking, and then they think that teacher is wrong. Cause they talk too much, and I be saying like, why don’t they just shut up so we can do the work.3

“it’s a bad school because of the kids” / 69

In the above quote, Nikki’s responses to questions about peers at school resembled those of many other students; her discussion of her peers remained constant over time as she described their negative behaviors. The following year Nikki replied to the same question: . . . They’re not going nowhere. They’ll be in this school forever . . . Maybe you don’t know this, they’re disrespectful and loud. They think they know it all. Interviewer: But do you think . . . what you say, they’re not going anywhere, has to do with them or with the school? Nikki: With them. Sometimes teachers actually do be trying, and they . . . can’t get through to them, if their friends are in the classroom . . . If it’s a bunch of them in one room, you’re not learning nothing. And that affects everybody else who’s trying to learn . . . Some of them don’t need to be in this school.4

Like many other students, Nikki described her peers’ behavior as antiacademic, using words such as “loud,” “lazy,” “noisy,” and “disrespectful.” Her description of peers remains similar from one year to the next by focusing on their negative qualities that prevent other students from learning. When she talked about her peers her frustration and anger, expressed through the rising sound of her voice, boiled over. “Bad kids” were also described by other students as “dumb,” “tough,” “troublemakers,” “gang members,” and “uncontrollable.” Peers displayed disrespectful behavior to teachers and students by preventing others from learning in class. Even though Nikki criticized teachers in other parts of her interview, she also saw teachers as trying to teach but unable to control the “bad kids.” Nikki described students’ brazen misconduct as particularly uncontrollable when they were together in a group. She viewed students’ academic failure as their own fault or choice. Although she heavily criticized teachers in other parts of her interview, in this quote, she did not implicate the school or teachers. When Nikki talked about the “bad kids” she was implicitly referring to what many other students also talked about in their interviews—“the good kids.” The “good kids” possessed many of the opposite characteristics of bad kids, particularly as related to attitudes about school. “Good kids” were quiet, hardworking, and respectful of teachers. They were not in gangs, did not get into trouble, or have problems with teachers.


Frequently, they were described as unsociable, nerdy, unfashionable, and nervous. An optimistic view of the “bad kids” was that they were considered gregarious and outgoing, while “good kids” spent too much time studying and so they did not have a social life. Utilizing a framework of opposites meant that “good kids” exemplified many of the opposite traits of “bad kids.” There were variations of the “good kid/bad kid” dichotomy: the “loud kids/quiet kids,” and the students who “cared about school” and those who did “not care about school.” This peer framework was a shared understanding that was often presented as if it was timeless (i.e., there were always “good kids” and “bad kids” in school). The “loud kid/quiet kid” dichotomy was also used to distinguish among racial and ethnic categories at LCHS; the Chinese American students were the quiet, obedient, good students who cared about school while the Latino and the African American students were defined as the loud, bad students who did not care about school. As such, the “bad kid/good kid” cultural script was coded language referencing commonly understood racial and ethnic stereotypes. This conceptual framework racializing the “bad kids and the good kids” contributed to the normalization of racial and ethnic segregation and to minimizing cross-ethnic relationships. In the hallways it was common to observe separate groups of Chinese American, Latino, and African American students walking together. Occasionally, African American and Latino students interacted in the hallway or classroom but it was rare to see Chinese American students talking with Latinos and African Americans. Many Chinese American students were in the process of learning English and attended classes mostly with other Chinese American students. Recent Dominican immigrants also took separate English classes with other Spanish-speaking students who were almost all Dominican American. As other researchers have found, it is common for classes that are tracked by ability to be segregated by race and ethnicity. Whites and middle class students are disproportionately in gifted, AP, and honors classes and minorities, working class, and poor students are found predominantly in vocational or special education classes.5 As a large comprehensive high school, LCHS had a similar system of tracking that segregated students by race and ethnicity. However, the primary difference was that Chinese American students were generally in the academically privileged position similar to that of whites. More Chinese


Americans were found in the honors, AP, and gifted classes than Latinos and African Americans. As discussed in chapter two, “Immigrant Dream and/or Educational Delusion?,” Chinese Americans graduated at a higher rate, received more honors, and were more likely to attend college, including more prestigious schools, in comparison to Latino and African American students. Honors and rewards at school—in poetry competitions, citywide academic challenges such as math contests, and scholarships and awards from various community-based organizations—were most likely to be given to Chinese American students. Morning announcements at school and the school paper often mentioned Chinese American students winning awards, obtaining scholarships, and receiving recognition for academic achievements. Students from other racial and ethnic groups occasionally received similar honors, but not as frequently as Chinese American students. An example of the kinds of prestigious awards achieved by the Chinese American students is the New York City junior math competition. LCHS students won this competition two years in a row; this was a remarkable feat considering the level of competition and participation by highly selective and specialized high schools emphasizing math skills. The picture in the student paper showing the winning math team illustrated twenty-two Chinese American faces, girls and boys, with Chinese names; the accompanying article mentioned that all of the students immigrated to the United States in the past five years.6 Framing the Chinese American academic achievement through the lens of immigration was common and these students’ success contributed to the reproduction of the Asian model minority. Teachers and administrators were thrilled by this prestigious honor but the solely Chinese American composition of the math team was not acknowledged; nor was the implicit question raised to African American and Latino students asking why Chinese American recent immigrants were able to succeed in math but not them. It was not just the recent Chinese American immigrants who remained segregated in classrooms for students learning English. Chinese American students who were not English Language Learners were also segregated in their mainstream classes. Observation of the classroom seating patterns, particularly when students chose where to sit, revealed that students from the same racial group (and sometimes gender) sat next to one another. For example, one day graduating seniors


were called over the loudspeaker to go to the auditorium for a group photograph for the yearbook. I observed a scene unfold that highlighted the degree of racial and ethnic segregation. As students walked down the aisles of the auditorium and assembled on the high risers, I noticed that the largest group of students was Chinese American. They formed a large group standing next to each other. In smaller but mostly separate groups were African American and Latino students. The physical separation of racial and ethnic groups during a short-lived and innocuous event, taking a class picture, struck me as revealing. It was not that I was unaccustomed to the school’s racial and ethnic segregation after spending hours observing classrooms and talking to students about peer groups. Everyday I observed racial and ethnic segregation in the cafeteria, in the classroom, and outside of school. In many of these locations students from various racial and ethnic backgrounds were in the same physical locations but chose to organize themselves into separate spaces. The yearbook photo session was revealing because I saw it progress over just a couple of minutes and because it visually and concretely confirmed the racial and ethnic segregation students talked about in their interviews.7 In particular, the Chinese American students were the most segregated from the rest of the students. For some of the Chinese American students this was because they were recent immigrants who were still learning English. Even students who were considered fluent in English sometimes felt awkward talking to those whom they referred to as “American” students. Their heavy accents or uncertainty about how to express themselves in English meant some were hesitant to speak with non-Chinese peers. American Born Chinese (ABC) voiced frustration that their non-Chinese peers could not tell the difference between recent immigrants and those who were born in the United States. Many ABCs felt that “Americans” dressed fashionably and were less likely to describe themselves as having “traditional” Chinese values. When non-Chinese peers could not read the outward signs of their identity, they felt misunderstood. As explored in chapter four, “I Feel Like I’m in a Stereotype,” another reason many Chinese American students refrained from interacting with non-Chinese peers concerns the degree of physical and verbal harassment they experience from the latter everyday in school. There was more interaction among the African American and Latino students than there was between these two groups and the Chinese


American students. Reginald, an African American, claimed he felt more comfortable with Latinos because he grew up with them and they lived in his neighborhood. There were few Chinese American families in his neighborhood. The sense of connection and identification between African American and Latinos was prominent for Dominican American students. Some Dominican American students, who were dark-skinned, identified with African Americans. Benjamin, a student discussed below, is an example of a Dominican American student who strongly connected to African American culture and music. This was also the case for many Puerto Rican or Nuyorican students at LCHS. Many were second- or third-generation youth who enjoyed African American, urban, popular culture such as rap music. There were some ABC students who were interested in rap, but for the most part it was African Americans and Latinos who demonstrated the most passionate connection. Students of Chinese descent were more likely to be interested in Asian forms of popular culture such as reading manga or watching anime. Though the overarching structure of the schools’ tracks was segregated by race and ethnicity, there were classes where students from various racial and ethnic groups came together. Benjamin, a Dominican American who self-identified as black, was asked whether he had ever been discriminated against because of his culture or ethnicity. Benjamin replied “yes” and said, Lots of times. Even really, I think, by teachers sometimes . . . Interviewer: So what kinds of things do they say or do that make you feel discriminated against? Benjamin: . . . They always bring up . . . look how good the Chinese kid is doing, look how good (they) are doing . . . And I just get upset . . . I don’t know you could just like tell, that they act differently. Like a Chinese kid might have the same grade as me but she’ll always bring up (the Chinese kid). Why don’t you do like him? . . . You get ignored or you always brought out for something (bad).8

Benjamin described how the academic success of the Chinese American students worked against teachers recognizing his academic success. In chapter five, “It’s Like I’m in a Stereotype,” Niobe Way and I documented variations in the source of discrimination among the same students in the present study. When asked to talk about discrimination many African American and Latino students commented that teachers


had low expectations for their academic success or did not care about them. African American and Latino students also talked about being harassed by police, followed and observed by shopkeepers in stores in their neighborhood and around school. In comparison, Chinese American students found teachers supportive but reported harassment from peers. Mei Ling, a Chinese American girl who took some classes with Benjamin and his close friend Reginald, commented that students in her classes sometimes discriminated against the Chinese American students. She said that when she or her friend asked a lot of questions or enthusiastically participated in class, Benjamin rolled his eyes and made mocking facial expressions to Reginald and others. She felt annoyed when he whispered to his friends, talked, or interrupted class. Though she was not sure if this meant Benjamin was racist, it might mean he thought the Chinese American students were asking questions to win the teachers’ favor.9 Megan, a Chinese American student, was asked, “what do you think people who are not Chinese in America, like African American people or Puerto Rican people . . . think of Chinese families? How do they see Chinese?” Megan replied, Well in this school . . . the other kids see the Chinese . . . as like annoying. Cause they’re like, we’re goody two shoes, we do our work, we get good grades, we never get in trouble with B’s and stuff. Which is not that true. Cause like the Chinese do . . . excel, really excel and it gives the ones that drop out a really bad [time]. You don’t see many in between . . . Well in this school you don’t see many but in other schools there might be . . . But in this school like they’re either all bilingual or cutting school or working really hard . . . All of the other[s] [are] like in the top percentage in the school. Cause like the school sucks and it’s really easy to get high grades. Cause if I were in another school, I guess I would be getting like average grades, like in the middle. I guess they . . . see Chinese as annoying cause we get better grades . . . We work hard, we don’t cause trouble for the teacher. They’re kind of angry cause they’re always getting into trouble and it’s their own fault sometimes.10

Many Chinese American students were acutely aware of the stereotype that all Chinese American students succeeded in school, particularly in math and science.11 Mei Ling and Megan thought this was an untrue stereotype because they knew Chinese American students


who joined gangs, dropped out of school, and cut classes. As such they recognized the diversity among Chinese Americans, particularly the differences between the very recent immigrants, called Fresh off the Boat (FOB) and American Born Chinese (ABC). At the same time, they also observed many more African American and Latino students who dropped out of school and disrupted classes. They also knew that Chinese American students dominated the honors classes, graduated at higher rates, and received most of the academic awards. Megan stated a perception about her peers and academic achievement that many Chinese American students shared. They recognized there was less competition in this school compared to others because many Latino and African American students frequently cut classes and dropout rates were high.12 Studying and behaving in class at LCHS resulted in better grades than they would have received in other schools where there was more competition. That is, the combination of teachers who had high expectations for the Chinese American students’ academic success and their ability to obtain high grades was partially due to the lack of competition from Latino and African American students. For example, a Chinese American student at LCHS might be pushed into honors classes or if remaining in mainstream classes would have minimal competition. In effect, they benefited not only from the myth of the Asian model minority but also from the academic failure of the Latino and African American students. Megan and some of the other Chinese American students believed that the Chinese American students received higher grades because they worked hard and did not cause the teachers any problems; none of the Chinese American students described favoritism by the teachers as a reason for their higher grades. In sum, the construction of peer categories at LCHS reflected a racial and ethnic hierarchy based on perceptions of academic success and failure. The peer groups were coded language that referenced perceptions about racial and ethnic groups. They were also organized by stereotypes about racial and ethnic groups including the myth of the Asian model minority. In the following section, I explore the contextual features of the school and its environment that contributed to peers’ distrust of each other and the construction of “bad kids.” Police surveillance, high mobility rates among students, and academic failure were significant problems at LCHS that contributed to students’ perception


that their peers were untrustworthy. The “code of the street” in school and “trust tests” were used by students to decrease the possibility of hostile interactions with peers. Avoidance Strategies: The “Code of the Streets” in School and “Trust Tests”13 In “Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community” and other articles, Elijah Anderson explores how poor inner-city blacks utilize a code of behavior or informal rules that are the foundation to social interactions on the street.14 The code dictates interpersonal interactions in public and regulates the use of violence. Understanding the “code of the streets” is necessary for everyday interactions among youth, particularly those who don’t know one another. Even “respectable” parents, who may disagree with the “street” code, are likely to teach it to their children so they can navigate the social world. For Anderson, the code emanates from a profound mistrust of the police and the judicial system that represent the dominant white society. Because they cannot rely on the police to respond to their needs, residents of poor communities feel they must protect themselves and their families. Anderson writes, Lack of police accountability has in fact been incorporated into the status system: the person who is believed capable of ‘taking care of himself ’ is accorded a certain deference, which translates into a sense of physical and psychological control.15

The “code of the streets” is a set of rules about when and how to display deference, maintain “face,” and avoid, utilize, or expect violence. It is also a cultural system of cues and reading others’ behaviors, dress, eye contact, and interactions to know whether they are potential friends or foes. Though interactions on the street and those in school differed in several ways, rules about behavior on the street were familiar to students who used it in their neighborhoods and incorporated several aspects of it into their daily interactions in school. One of the most profound aspects of the street code that were transported into school was a general mistrust of others. This sense of mistrust toward other students was evident in students’ 9th grade interviews when they first entered school. As with the “code of the streets,” students began interactions with peers from a defensive posture, analyzing an individuals’


stance, behavior, dress, and demeanor for cues about their intentions. This offered information about others in school—the extent to which they might be trusted or could be relegated into one of the peer group categories. Presentation of self and the ability to read others’ presentation of themselves were some of the skills necessary to successfully interact with unknown and potentially untrustworthy peers. Yet, there was also a major difference between the need to employ the “code of the streets” in school and the basis of the “new American High School.” The use of high-tech mechanisms to observe students, such as surveillance cameras, suggests that students were watched by police officers very closely. That is, it wasn’t the lack of police presence in school but rather the need to have police presence, the abnegation of students’ physical safety to non-school professionals, that implied to students that they could not be trusted (Devine 1996; Kupchik and Monaghan 2006). Robert, a second-generation Puerto Rican, liked to wear all black with flashy, gold jewelry and sometimes wore fangs over his teeth. At times he looked disaffected and strange, with a tinge of the outcast in his self-presentation. He wrote poetry and was deeply passionate about rap. Since he was light-skinned, others in school frequently thought he was white. In his interview he reported that students he did not know regularly made negative comments about his being white. These comments were most likely to come from African American and Latino peers but not from Chinese Americans. His quote below exemplifies several of the common themes found in other students’ interviews. In his junior year I asked Robert whether he would recommend the school to a friend and he started talking about the rules he follows to stay out of trouble. He said, It’s a good school. It got a bad reputation now. One of the worst schools . . . I mean like when I came over here I was thinking that I have to be quiet with my head down when walking the hallway . . . They made it seem like if you are walking the hallway, you gotta hold your head down. If they see a chain or something they’ll snatch it. It’s not that bad. Susan: Who told you that you had to keep your head down? Robert: It’s just the reputation it has in the neighborhood. Everybody always talks about LCHS. Like my aunt was like, “oh you’re going to be fine just as long as you don’t talk to anybody.” Cause she came here and she was like the quiet type. She didn’t talk to nobody . . . When I was in junior high school everybody was like, “I’m not going to

78 / the multiracial urban high school LCHS, I’m not going to LCHS.” I came here because there’s no other school accepted me. Susan: What do you have to know to get along here? Robert: . . . You got to know people from before. You can’t come to this school and expect to meet everybody . . . And if you don’t know anybody, just stay quiet. Susan: So if you stay quiet you’ll get along here? Robert: You just go through the day without speaking to anybody.16

The idea of walking in the hallways with his “head down” is similar to Anderson’s discussion of showing deference and not making eye contact on the street. By keeping his head down and sometimes wearing a hooded jacket that covered much of his face, Robert was protecting himself from being accused of looking at someone the wrong way. He wanted to quietly and unobtrusively pass by others in the hallways without being noticed or calling attention as someone who was either too brash or easily intimidated. Either “presentation of self” could make others believe he was looking for a fight or was not aware of the rules of interpersonal interactions; he situated his “presentation of self” to avoid being a potential target. By not talking to people he didn’t already know, he negotiated strategies for staying out of trouble and interacting with untrustworthy people. This meant he was less likely or willing to strike up random conversations with new people. These strategies made him feel safer in an environment that many described as unsafe and unpredictable. Robert’s statement about getting along in school is valuable because it raised several issues that were similar to those that other students were dealing with. First, Robert was afraid of LCHS’s violent reputation, “one of the worst schools,” but he also thought its reputation was worse than his experience there. Second, his opinion of the school was based on advice received from his young aunt who recently attended LCHS. The rules he followed were developed from family advice, the schools’ reputation in the neighborhood, and his understanding of local context. Finally, he talked about how his peers wanted to avoid attending LCHS but were rejected from all of the schools to which they applied. In chapter six, “What If You Can’t Learn Anywhere: Trapped by School Choice,” I explore how the experience of being a “non-admit” influenced students’ perceptions of their peers.


Many students developed similarly guarded friendship strategies that they believed decreased their chances of getting into fights. Another strategy Robert and several other boys used was to not hang out with large groups of friends. Students were worried that spending time with several other boys, particularly in public places, was more likely to make them a target for a fight. In a large group, it was more likely that a member of their group might start a fight with someone else and they might feel obligated to jump in to defend that member. Though they did not always follow this rule, male students mentioned they tried not to spend time with a group of other boys. Later that year, I asked Robert to talk about what it’s like to be at LCHS. He said, The environment is okay. Sometimes you got to watch your back cause, of course, it’s those people, you know, the troublemakers. Susan: What do you mean you have to watch your back? Robert: . . . Cause there always troublemakers in school, especially this school. You could see them like almost everyday . . . after school in the parking lot. . . . You always got to watch out for the gangs cause usually they hang out in the parking lot after school. Then you got to watch what colors you wear around this school.17

Robert assumed I knew there were troublemakers in the school when he said, “of course, it’s those people, you know.” When Robert talked to me, he used language and a tone that naturalized and normalized the presence of gang members in school as a known aspect of his world at school. He problematized and described some of his peers using a language that made their presence seem both ubiquitous and normal. Similar to other students in the study, Valeria worried about inadvertently or accidentally getting into a fight or making trouble. I asked Valeria what advice she would give a friend about getting along at LCHS. Valeria replied, Just keep to yourself, and as long as you do your work and you try not to have problems cause there’s been a lot of fights here for stupid reasons . . . Susan: So why does she have to keep to herself? Valeria: Like be friendly but what I mean by keep to herself is to try not to make trouble. Susan: Is that what you did?

80 / the multiracial urban high school Valeria: . . . I didn’t make myself seem like I’m better than anybody cause a lot of people don’t like that in this place. So when they see you acting better than somebody they always try to put you down.18

Valeria and Robert constructed their peers as obstacles to negotiate because the school was violent and unpredictable and they needed to protect themselves. Her cautious instructions about getting along with peers were curiously out of character because I thought of Valeria as a vivacious and trusting person who easily made friends. Even though she described herself as an optimistic and sociable person who trusts others, her advice about how to act in school was measured, restrained, and fearful. Given the general framework that peers in school were bad and potentially violent, students carefully negotiated their interactions with each other. For some students, interaction with peers—particularly in shared spaces of the school such as the hallways and the cafeteria, or outdoor spaces such as the parking lot near the school—was cautiously monitored. These informal rules restricted students’ physical behaviors including how to walk in the hallway, how to hold their heads, and where to look. The “code of the streets,” however, cannot explain how students are able to make friends. If students followed these rules, they would be isolated and lonely. Consequently, students need strategies that allowed them to know who could be trusted. Students regulated their emotional and social interactions, carefully monitoring the amount and extent of self-disclosure with peers by relying on “trust tests” to determine an individual’s trustworthiness. While both “trust tests” and “code of the streets” were defense mechanisms, “trust tests” were a strategy designed to help students know they could turn peers into friends. As students described them, “trust tests” consisted of revealing either false information or a small amount of true personal information to a peer in school. After the information is revealed, the student waits to find out if the information remains confidential or is gossiped about. Prior to sharing more personal information with the same person, a “trust test” allows a suspicious teenager to feel more assured that personal information will not be revealed or gossiped about.19 Year after year, a pervasive sense of mistrust of other kids emanated from students’ interviews. It was especially apparent when they were asked to describe


the characteristics of students in school. For some, mistrust of peers was based in previous experiences of betrayal; for others, suspicion existed even though they themselves had not been personally harmed. Feelings of faith and trust in others are learned behaviors that generalize a sense of security and safety in interactions. Trust and mistrust are social behaviors that can be conceptualized beyond specific people or situations—they embody an individual’s generalized worldview and belief in sustaining respectful and mutually advantageous relationships.20 There has been much interest about the benefits and necessity of trust for supporting and enhancing community life and democracy.21 Through trusting and cooperative behaviors people can increase their social capital.22 Social capital refers to local, face-to-face interactions embedded in social relationships among people who know and trust one another. Strong social capital provides people with mutual assistance through shared norms of reciprocity and fairness. Yet, this sense of trust was precisely what seemed to be missing among students’ interactions with their peers. In a hostile school environment where students frequently fought, where teachers found it difficult to control classroom behaviors, and where police monitored the hallways, students did not feel secure. The sense of not trusting others was especially apparent when students spoke of how they needed to use “trust tests” prior to revealing personal information. In her second-year interview, Sara was asked whether she always feels that people in general should not be trusted. She replied, . . . I test them to see if I could trust them. I’ll tell them something like a little bit personal and if I hear it around the school I won’t trust that person. Interviewer: And if they pass that test what happens? Sara: I trust them. Interviewer: So you would tell more personal things? Sara: Not personal, but like talk to them. Interviewer: Do you test people in other ways like that to see if you could trust them? Sara: Yeah, because most people these days you can’t really trust them not even to say one word . . . Cause most of the time they treat you bad.23

Sara used a clichéd language, common among many students, when she said that friends “these days” cannot be trusted. During the same


interview she talks about her close friends who are “not like people that go setting off rumors.”24 Unlike most people, her close friends were an exception in that they could be trusted and she could share her secrets with them. As with many students in the study, her friends were an exception to the generalized “bad kids” who should not be trusted. That same year she experienced a friendship betrayal when she discovered a friend was lying about her. The “trust test” was not able to protect Sara from gossip. Sara articulated a common occurrence among adolescents, particularly the Latina students in this study; they experienced their closest and most intimate friendships with the same girlfriends with whom they also experienced their most painful rejection and betrayal. “Trust tests” were part of a fight-avoidance strategy, like talking only to people they already know, hanging out in small groups, and keeping one’s head down in the hallway. As a commonly used strategy, it was considered a normalized part of students’ behavior. Students understood, from firsthand experience, the need to be careful about whom they befriended, what they revealed, and how intimate they were willing to become. Upon meeting peers, they were cautious about divulging personal information too quickly. Having experienced a previous betrayal of trust or feeling afraid their personal information could be used against them in the future, students were wary about whom they trusted with their secrets and how much information they shared. The “trust test” was a defensive mechanism Sara used to protect herself from feeling vulnerable to betrayal. Within the context of how students assessed their environment, it made sense to test another’s intentions prior to sharing personal information. One explanation why students had such consistently negative opinions of peers was that the school’s negative reputation preceded their attendance.25 The behemoth, block–long and wide building was a prominent part of the neighborhood; everyone in the neighborhood had an opinion about the school, especially a relative or a friend who once attended it. As such, LCHS’s poor reputation preceded and dominated students’ opinions during their early years of high school. The conditions they found in the school, particularly those related to building upkeep, were proof of its appalling reputation. Over four years, their own experiences did not negate, challenge, or question LCHS’s local reputation. Consequently, students entered high school distrusting their peers and, over time, developed and honed strategies and skills to avoid hostile interactions.


It is difficult to pinpoint the source of this mistrust and how or why “trust tests” became an expected part of the student community’s rituals of interaction. For Elijah Anderson these rituals are connected to a hostile and violent street context where police cannot be relied upon to maintain order.26 One approach to understanding the ubiquity of “trust tests” is to refer to research that finds mistrust is more likely to develop in neighborhoods where individuals feel powerless to control a threatening environment and where resources are scarce.27 Particularly in poor neighborhoods everyday interactions and outward signs of disorder such as neglected buildings, public drinking and drug use, crime, vandalism, graffiti, and noise make residents think others are out of control, disorderly, and cannot be trusted. Under these conditions, suspicion that others might cause harm is prevalent. Although research about trust and neighborhood disorder concerns the characteristics of communities, students described LCHS using many similar signs of external disorder such as feeling that school was threatening and violent. As described elsewhere in chapter two, “Immigrant Dream and/or Educational Delusion?”, students were particularly outraged by the physical condition of the building, outdated books, lack of bathrooms in the Addition, and the garbage. These conditions indicated to students that their education was not valued and made them feel their education was neglected or cheap. Furthermore, many students lived in poor and high-crime neighborhoods that have many of the same characteristics that breed mistrust. Overcoming Distrust In American culture, adults are, at best, ambivalent about adolescent peer relationships and, at worst, explicitly fearful about peers’ negative influences. As a result, adolescents receive strong warnings from adults that are meant to protect them from their friends.28 American parents are apprehensive about youths’ friendships particularly during adolescence; adults frequently view teens’ peer groups as the instigator of problematic behavior such as drug and alcohol abuse, anti-academic attitudes, sex, and/or reckless driving.29 In both popular culture representation and research about adolescence, friendships are frequently problematized and pathologized, more so than for older or younger people in our society.30 Although research finds there are many benefits to friendships at all stages of the life course, it is teenage friendships that are often


suspect or bracketed as problematic.31 In this study students agreed and repeated yearly that most kids at LCHS were “bad kids” and there were minimal differences in their descriptions over four years. These cultural and adult perceptions about negative peer influences may partially explain how and where the youth in this study developed some of their ideas about distrusting peers in school. In high-crime and poor neighborhoods, parents may socialize their children not to trust others and to avoid interactions with people they do not already know.32 Given that many students in this study lived in violent neighborhoods, housing projects, and crowded tenements, it is likely that distrusting messages were reinforced by family and community members. Students also learned to have doubts about their peers because of how youth are treated in school. Everyday when students entered LCHS they were greeted by police surrounding the school, guards at the entrance, metal detectors, and lack of outdoor space to congregate. The physical condition of the building was horrendous: peeling paint, broken windows, garbage both in and around the school, leaking ceilings, rooms that were too hot or too cold, and a host of other problems. These conditions overtly and subtly conveyed the message to students that they were not worthy of more beautiful surroundings. In her fourth-year interview, Milena, a Puerto Rican female, was talking about how she began to feel closer to her friend Tanya. She explained that during her senior year at LCHS they talked to each other more and Tanya told her everything. In the past, Milena said, I wouldn’t like tell her every problem that I had, I would just keep it inside of me or I would write it down . . . [Now] I know . . . that I could talk to her and communicate with her. Interviewer: Why do you think you became more intimate with her over time Milena: . . . Cause I got to know what kind of person she was . . . I saw she wasn’t always screaming, she’s calm, she don’t . . . act like a loud person . . . and she looks very understanding.33

As Milena spent more time with Tanya she learned to see her as an individual or full person who differed from her preconceived expectations or caricature. Milena’s description of her new feelings of closeness for Tanya was explicitly compared to her negative perceptions of peers in schools. Similar to others in the study, she believed her close friend was


an exception to the other kids in school who she categorized as “screaming” and “loud.” Many students, like Milena, described their close and best friends by emphasizing how their friends differed from the typical “bad kids” at school. Best or close friends became the “exception” to the typical “bad kid.” In their interviews students did not describe peers in glowing or even positive terms such as “smart,” “trustworthy,” “supportive,” “helpful,” or “focused on school.” Talking about peers in school did not evoke a discussion of camaraderie, commonalities, and/or fellowship. In her research, Niobe Way finds that students in poor, urban schools are “relationally resilient” in their abilities to overcome distrusting peer relations to have friends.34 Considering friends “fictive kin” or building the cohesiveness necessary to maintain close friendships under conditions of outside threat might be some ways students overcome a hostile context to have friends. The body of Niobe Way’s research emphasizes students’ courage despite conditions in their lives that work against trusting others. Adolescents in low-income and under-resourced environments maintain friendships in spite of direct messages from parents, teachers, and society that say peers cannot be trusted.35 Consequently, Way’s research is a powerful reminder that the fear of peers is generally overcome by students who are able to have strong and loving close friendships. Blaming Peers After analyzing students’ lived experiences with peers in school, I found most students held them responsible for the hostile environment and rampant academic failure. The tendency to “blame the victim” did not change over the four years I interviewed them; this suggests that perceptions of peers remained stable.36 Furthermore, the exhibited behaviors of the “good kids” or the “quiet kids” were the same behaviors that most students equated with the Chinese Americans and the qualities students believed were needed to be a successful student. Many African Americans, Latinos, and some Chinese Americans felt the Chinese American students succeeded in school because they were passive and well-behaved: they listened and respected teachers and did not cause trouble. By being “quiet” the Chinese American students were defined in opposition to the primarily “loud” and “bad” African American and


Latino students, who talked in class, disrupted the teachers, and did not do their work. These characteristics of racial and ethnic groups were linked to academic achievement and, indeed, also explained why some students succeeded and others failed. By being too loud in the classroom, acting out, and disturbing the teachers, African American and Latino students’ behaviors were problematized and they were held responsible for school failure. The characteristics of peer groups also elucidated a social hierarchy that pitted the two groups against each other. “Loud kids” referred not only to students with low academic achievement but also to those who were social, had friends, enjoyed life, were outgoing, talked to anyone, and revealed others’ secrets. “Quiet kids” were shy, asocial, nerdy, and afraid of interacting with peers who frequently harassed them. Most students did not formulate a sophisticated or systemic analysis of how the educational system worked against them. They did not understand the ways in which educational failure is built into the structure of the educational system or how it worked systematically to minimize the educational opportunities of poor, immigrant, working class, and minority youth. Adolescents, who are in the process of learning to think abstractly about their social location and their relationship to society, had a difficult time framing problems in school as anything but individual choice. Without the conceptual framework to understand broader social and economic inequalities, they blamed their peers who were also fellow victims. The complicated problems in the school were most readily understood through an ideology of individualism commonly used to explain many other American social problems such as poverty.37 C. Wright Mills classic book The Sociological Imagination explores how a sociological perspective elucidates the conditions that shape an individual’s life.38 A cornerstone of sociological thought, the “sociological imagination” means analyzing how an individual’s personal experience is shaped by social and historical context beyond his/her control and familiarity. The sociological imagination is a blueprint for integrating individual biography with the social forces that shape individual experience. When I explain the sociological imagination to students, I use the following quote about unemployment because students can relate to it and find it convincing. Mills writes, When, in a city of 100,000, only one man is unemployed, that is his personal trouble, and for its relief we properly look to the character of

“it’s a bad school because of the kids” / 87 the man, his skills, and his immediate opportunities. But when in a nation of 50 million employees, 15 million men are unemployed, that is an issue, and we may not hope to find its solution within the range of opportunities open to any one individual. The very structure of opportunities has collapsed. Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of possible solutions require us to consider the economic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the personal situation and character of a scatter of individuals.39

With this example, Mills compels us to move beyond individual circumstances to think about social structure to consider how personal experiences, particularly those we classify as individual failures, can be understood as the result of institutional contradiction or historical change. He argues that people are not trained to view their personal woes or fortunes as the outcome of distant social forces they cannot easily identify. Instead, individuals are likely to view their life experience through the narrow lens of their immediate surroundings: family, neighborhood, friends, and work. This limited perspective makes people feel trapped, their local blinders preventing them from seeing commonalities with others that are structured around historical, societal, and global influences. Mill’s quote about the structural causes of unemployment can be used to understand academic failure at LCHS by substituting the word “unemployment” with words such as “high school dropout,” “cutting class,” or “educational failure.” So many adolescents at LCHS were unsuccessful at being effective students and graduating high school that to blame the “character” of the majority of students ignores the educational structure that produced these failures. Understanding Mill’s sociological imagination is the foundation to many sociological concepts; however, it is not an idea that most people develop through an analysis of their own situation and condition. So, in many ways it is logical that the students in this study understood their world using the analytical tools that most people utilize. The lack of structural analysis meant that they “blamed the victim” for the academic failure they observed in school. The school, parents, and society in general frame discussions about academic attitudes toward school as personal choices. Students believed that each of their peers chose to be a “good kid” or a “bad kid” by independently deciding whether he/she was going to be a good or a bad student. This was reflected in some students’ attitudes that “school is


what you make of it” and “I can succeed anywhere.” “Good kids and bad kids” was a limited and dichotomous choice based on extremes of academic behavior that implied the school gave all students equal opportunities to succeed. LCHS, however, did not explicitly create and reinforce these polar categories; instead, it bred conditions and opportunities in school that allowed and encouraged adolescents to define themselves and each other within these limited and stereotyped categories. The school offered few opposing ideologies or opportunities for students to interact in ways that might challenge the established social dynamics. LCHS did not have to actively promote the rhetoric of “good kids” and “bad kids” because students accepted this framework and used it to describe themselves and their relationships with each other. Concluding Comments In this chapter I convey students’ descriptions of their peers into opposing categories “the good kids and the bad kids”; I show how these categories were racialized through limited and dichotomous racial and ethnic stereotypes. I also explore two strategies students used to negotiate peer interactions: “the code of the street” in school and “trust tests.” I explain how the construction of dichotomous peer groups supported an ideology of “blaming the victim” that held peers responsible for the school’s failure. According to this ideology, individuals are faulted for educational failure instead of recognizing broader social forces that limit and restrict individual choices and behaviors. Though I detail students’ experiences as voiced in their interviews, it is necessary to reinforce that their experiences occurred within a school context, educational system, and culture that explicitly and implicitly told students they were not trusted. Students were reminded, both overtly and covertly, that their education in a neighborhood school was less valued than that of students who attended better schools. I find students had an uneven awareness of the contextual factors that influenced their relationships and experiences in school. By uneven, I refer to the tensions that exist between what students said in their interviews, and the cultural scripts, ideologies, and beliefs that shaped their opinions. Students’ opinions were based on their experiences, observations, and everyday lives; however, beliefs and attitudes that exist in the broader culture too had a significant impact. A purpose of this chapter


is to explore how students perceived theirs peers, while acknowledging how these opinions were shaped by the contextual and structural conditions of their lives. Elucidating the social forces that shaped their opinions about peers does not invalidate students’ experiences; rather, it frames their worldview within a sociological framework. In this chapter I show how students’ negative conceptions of peer groups in school were based on racial and ethnic stereotypes and the myth of the model minority. Many students were unaware about how the peer categories they used everyday, “the goods kids/the bad kids,” were embedded in racial and ethnic stereotypes about their own and others’ racial and ethnic group. Their negative perceptions were based on their observation and personal experiences; however, whether or not they realized it, negative perceptions were also influenced by social forces such as stereotypes, adult messages, and cultural fears about minority youth. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

(Anderson 1990; Anderson 1994; Anderson 1995) (Anderson 1990) Interview #99 Time 2. Interview #99 Time 3. (Oakes 1985; Olsen 1997; Staiger 2006) LCHS World, March 1999, LCHS World, February 2000, Student paper. (Rosenbloom 2007) Interview #106 Time 2. Interview #114 Time 2. Interview #155 Time 2. These stereotypes are shown to hurt students who need extra help or who do not excel at school (Lee 1994) and obscure differences among Asian Americans including the high poverty rates and low high-school completion rates for Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians (Tatum 1997:161). According to my calculations, and not the officially published graduation rates, only 14 percent of the students who began high school in 9th grade graduated four years later. (Anderson 1990). Thank you to Dr. Kesha Moore for advising me to connect my findings with Elijah Anderson’s research. (Anderson 1990; Anderson 1994; Anderson 1995; Lopez and Kirby 2005) (Anderson 1994) Interview #216 Time 3.

90 / the multiracial urban high school 17. Interview #214 Time 3. 18. Interview #26 Time 2. 19. (Rosenbloom 2007; Rosenbloom and Way 2004; Stanton-Salazar and Spina 2005; Way, Gingold, Rotenberg, and Kuriakose 2005) 20. (Coleman 1988; Ross, Pribesh, and Mirowsky 2001) 21. (Mills 1959; Putnam 1993; Putnam, Feldstein, and Cohen 2003) 22. (Coleman 1988; Putnam 1993) 23. Interview #268 Time 2. 24. Interview #268 Time 2. 25. Some of the Dominican American and African American students commuted from uptown, but most students lived in the vicinity of the school. 26. (Anderson 1990) 27. (Ross, Pribesh, and Mirowsky 2001) 28. (Crosnoe 2000; Stanton-Salazar and Spina 2005) 29. (Stanton-Salazar and Spina 2005) 30. (Arnett 1999; Crosnoe 2000) 31. (Blieszner and Adams 1992; Crosnoe 2000) 32. (Anderson 1990) 33. Interview #1660 Time 4 34. (Way 2004; Way, Gingold, Rotenberg, and Kuriakose 2005) 35. (Way 1998; Way 2004; Way, Gingold, Rotenberg, and Kuriakose 2005) 36. (Ryan 1972) 37. (Ryan 1972; Stack 1970) 38. (Mills 1959) 39. (Mills 1959)

References Anderson, Elijah. 1990. Street Wise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1994. “The Code of the Streets.” The Atlantic, March, pp. 1–18. ———. 1995. “Street Etiquette and Street Wisdom,” pp. 331–354 in Metropolis Center and Symbol of our Times, edited by P. Kasinitz. New York: New York University Press. Arnett, J. 1999. “Adolescent Storm and Stress, Reconsidered.” American Psychologist 54:317–326. Blieszner, Rosemary, and Rebecca G. Adams. 1992. Adult Friendship. Newbury Park: Sage. Coleman, James S. 1988. “Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital.” American Journal of Sociology 94:95–120. Crosnoe, Robert. 2000. “Friendships in Childhood and Adolescence: The Life Course and New Directions.” Social Psychology Quarterly 63:377–391. Devine, John. 1996. Maximum Security: The Culture of Violence in Inner-City Schools. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

“it’s a bad school because of the kids” / 91 Kupchik, Aaron, and Torin Monahan. 2006. “The New American School: Preparation for Post-industrial Discipline.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 27:617–631. Lee, Stacey J. 1994. “Behind the Model-Minority Stereotype: Voices of High-and Low-Achieving Asian American Students.” Anthropology and Educational Quarterly 25:413–429. Lopez, Mark Hugo, and Emily Kirby. 2005. “Electoral Engagement among Minority Youth Fact Sheet.” CIRCLE. Accessed on January 2004. Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Oakes, Jeannie. 1985. Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Olsen, Laurie. 1997. Made in America: Immigrant Students in our Public High School. New York: The New Press. Putnam, Robert D. 1993. “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital.” Journal of Democracy 6:65–78. Putnam, Robert D., Lewis M. Feldstein, and Don Cohen. 2003. Better Together: Restoring the American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Rosenbloom, Susan Rakosi. 2007. “Fearing Peers and Trusting Friends: Relational Resistance in an Urban High School.” in American Sociological Association Annual Meeting. New York. Rosenbloom, Susan Rakosi, and Niobe Way. 2004. “Beyond Black and White: Chinese American, African American, and Latino Experiences of Ethnicity in an Urban High School.” in Society for Research on Adolescence Eight Biennial Meeting. Chicago. Ross, Catherine E., Shana Pribesh, and John Mirowsky. 2001. “Powerlessness and the Amplification of Threat: Neighborhood Disadvantage, Disorder, and Mistrust.” American Sociological Review 66:568–591. Ryan, William. 1972. Blaming the Victim. New York: Vintage Books. Stack, Carol B. 1970. All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. New York: Harper and Row. Staiger, Annegret Daniela. 2006. Learning Difference: Race and Schooling in the Multiracial Metropolis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Stanton-Salazar, Ricardo D., and Stephanie Urso Spina. 2005. “Adolescent Peer Networks as a Context for Social and Emotional Support.” Youth and Society 36:379–417. Way, Niobe. 1998. Everyday Courage: The Lives and Stories of Urban Teenagers. New York: New York University Press. ———. 2004. “Intimacy, Desire, and Distrust in the Friendships of Adolescent Boys.” in Adolescent Boys: Exploring Diverse Cultures of Boyhood, edited by N. Way and J. Chu. New York: New York University Press. Way, Niobe, Rachel Gingold, Mariana Rotenberg, and Geena Kuriakose. 2005. “Close Friendships among Urban, Ethnic-Minority Adolescents,” pp. 61–78 in The Experiences of Close Friendships in Adolescence, vol. 107, edited by N. Way and J. V. Hamm. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.


Ch a p t e r Fou r L i st e n i ng t o Fr i e n d sh i p s: Longi t u di nal Ca se St u di e s of Fr i e n d sh i p Pat t e r ns—Isi dor a, R e gi na ld, M e i Li ng, a n d Le na

In this chapter, I explore the longitudinal case studies of four students, Isidora, Reginald, Lena and Mei Lin, and a combined description of two of them, Lena and Mei Lin. In each section I describe their experiences with close friends and best friends. The purpose of this chapter is to use case studies to add depth, richness, and intimacy to our understanding of students’ lives and their close friendships. Despite the similarities in how students in this study talked about their peers (as discussed in the previous chapter, “It’s a Bad School Because of the Kids”), their intimate experiences with school friends significantly differed. I emphasize how students’ friendships were embedded and integrated into all aspects of their lives including how they felt about school and their desire to succeed at school. Students framed friendships as part of a set of relationships within a particular context that did not exist in isolation from other relationships, such as those with parents, siblings, or teachers. I find that students deeply cared about the advice and messages from others about how to get along with friends in school. Students considered their parents advice, even if they did not always agree or questioned the extent their parents understood what it meant to be a teenager in this day and age. In various ways, parents’ ideas about their children’s friendships influenced their attitudes about friends even if they did not always agree. Longitudinal case studies are a useful form of analysis of social relationships because they accentuate how friendships unfold over time including ways in which some friendships slowly dissipated


while new friendships emerged. In-depth analysis of a student’s interviews reveals complicated changes in relationships. For example, when Isidora disconnected from her childhood friends, she simultaneously developed new ones. The strength of longitudinal interviews is that they captured students’ nuanced experiences, such as Reginald’s competence in making friends in various locations but maintaining his most trusting friendships with his neighborhood friends. For Mei Lin, the sense of distrust and competition with her close friends prevented her from feeling the closeness and intimacy she deeply desired. These intricate emotions and relationships that developed over time and after several years of having friends suggest that longitudinal case studies are particularly suited to understanding relationships. Isidora “If you don’t have friends, you ain’t got nothing” As high school progressed, Isidora developed from trying to maintain her friendships to eventually disconnecting from them, but remaining cordial or “hi/bye” friends. Isidora’s case study revealed a struggle to decide whether, and how, she could remain connected to her childhood friends without participating in activities such as cutting classes that would jeopardize her academic ambitions. Isidora’s case study demonstrated the complexity of her relationship with her friends, how it changed over four years, and how she struggled to maintain friendships. It demonstrates her determination to have friends who positively influenced her behavior in school while trying to keep the appearance of cordial relationships with her old friends. “Before we used to be real together”/Choosing School and Loosing Friends In her first interview in 9th grade, Isidora, an expressive, smart, and attractive teen, was asked whether she thought friendships were important. She replied, Yeah, if you don’t have a friend you ain’t got nothing, nobody to talk about. You don’t always trust your parents to tell them things. You usually need a friend to be telling them, cause they know what you go

listening to friendships / 95 through. They sometimes go through the same thing. But your parents is like, they were born before, they don’t know what you go through now . . . So its better having a friend . . . I’m saying, you don’t always wanna tell your parents stuff. Like, your parents be always telling you stuff they did before, they be like, “use condoms” or “don’t smoke.” Like, my mother be like, “say no” . . . or stuff like that, . . . Your friends understand . . . the way you feel. So you . . . listen more to your friends cause you hang out with them more. You don’t usually tell your parents stuff. Like if you smoke, you ain’t gonna go telling your parents, “oh I smoked.” You usually do it with a friend or you tell your friend. And sometimes your friends don’t like it (smoking) so, like if your friend don’t like it, you be like, “oh, all right,” so you hang out with them. Cause you sometimes hang out with the wrong people that do bad things. You usually be with a friend, and your friend usually understand you. Interviewer: So you think that what friends are doing, affects a lot of what you do and you kinda want to hang out with people who think about the same things that you do and think the same way about smoking or sex, or things like that? Isidora: Mmm hmm. Cause . . . my friends, they be like, “come on smoke” or stuff like that. They usually pressure you. So . . . , you don’t want to feel bad, you don’t wanna feel old, . . . you feel dumb, like not doing it. So you go ahead and do it. And then . . . some people, after they do it, they regret it. So . . . it’s better if you know they’re gonna go do it, not to go with them or something.1

Isidora began her interview in 9th grade by taking a strong position about the necessity of having friends she can relate to better than she connects with her parents. She listened more to her friends than her parents because she spent more time with her friends and talked with them about participating in activities her parents condemned; her friends too had similar experiences. She progressed from valuing her friends’ insider knowledge of her experiences to her concern that this level of intimacy with friends was also problematic. She did not want to feel old or dumb by listening solely to her parents, but she also did not want the anxiety of being pressured by her friends to join in activities such as smoking. Four years later in a poignant section of the interview I asked Isidora the same question: Are friendships important? At first she responded typically by saying that she’d rather go shopping with a friend because it’s more fun and a friend can give her advice. After interviewing Isidora for three years, I knew her answer to this question was much more complicated than she first admitted. Since she had tremendous struggles


with her friends, I encouraged her to further consider my question. I asked, Do you really, really, really think that friendships are important? Or, on a scale of one to ten where one is not important and ten is super important . . . Isidora: I guess it’s seven Susan: Seven okay, tell me why it’s seven. Isidora: I don’t find friendships like really, really, really important. It’s just good to have friends. Susan: Why don’t you think it’s really, really important? Isidora: Maybe cause I don’t have a lot of friends. Or maybe I don’t really chill with a lot of friends. Susan: When you were really close with the whole group of girls did you think friendship was important then? Isidora: Well, I thought it was important but not to a point where I would drop out of high school because of them or ruin my life or cut for them. I turned them down.2

After four years of high school, Isidora believed friendships were important but she was not willing to let friendships “ruin my life.” She selfidentified as someone who did not have a lot of friends because she resolved to graduate high school; she was certain that she would not jeopardize graduating high school to hang out with her friends. The two quotes above document the beginning and the ending of Isidora’s relational struggle throughout high school: she felt she had to choose— either remain with her close friends from elementary school and risk academic failure or distance herself from them to graduate from high school. She also developed a sophisticated analysis of the types of friendships she wanted, as is evident in her defining a friend as someone who wants the best for her and shared her values about school. In 9th grade, Isidora, who was born in Venezuela and came to the United States as a baby, entered LCHS with a tight-knit group of neighborhood friends: Melissa, Danielle, Charlene, and Milena. Most of her friends were Puerto Ricans that Isidora knew from elementary and junior high school. Isidora lived in a middle-class apartment building because her stepfather worked in the building. Her closest friends did not live in her immediate neighborhood but in the housing projects and apartments nearby. In 9th grade, Isidora was talking about her friend

listening to friendships / 97

Melissa, the friend she felt the closest to, and compared her friendship with Melissa to her relationship with her other friends. She said, I tell her stuff that I don’t tell the other girls like what happens with my boyfriend. If I break up with him, I be telling her, and she be like, . . . “it’s all right.” Or, she be telling me what she does in the day or what happens in her family, and I try to give her advice.3

The same year she talked about what she liked about her friendship with Melissa. She said, I don’t know, that I could trust her. I know that if I tell her something, like she ain’t gonna go out telling another friend. Or, I know . . . somebody else ain’t gonna find out. Cause if I tell somebody else I know, that person might tell her boyfriend. Usually girls, just tell their boyfriends everything, what happens in school or something. . . . Right now she don’t got a boyfriend but I know I could trust her even if she had a boyfriend. She wouldn’t tell a thing.4

Isidora felt close to Melissa, who she knew for a long time, because she trusted her with intimate information and relied on her for emotional support. Unlike most of her female peers who could not be trusted because they betrayed girls’ secrets to boyfriends, Melissa did not divulge secrets. As with many students in this study, a close friend such as Melissa was to Isidora was an exception among most girls and peers who could not be trusted with personal information. In 9th and 10th grade Isidora had a 79 and an 80 yearly average respectively. Like many students I interviewed, she felt her schoolwork was significantly harder during her junior year, resulting in a 71.8 average. She graduated with a 78 average. During 9th grade Isidora described her frustration in school: the school was “old” and lacked an auditorium. Sometimes she had trouble memorizing information for tests particularly in her honors classes where she frequently felt inadequate because she did not attain the grades she wanted. Like several of the Latinas in the study, she felt torn because she wanted and was expected to help her mother at home after school, but she also needed to focus on school work. She described competing obligations on her time such as housework, cooking, and childcare, on the one hand, and study, work after school, and extracurricular activities, on the other.


Sophomore Year By her sophomore year Isidora began to confront tensions in her relationships that were caused by differences in academic values among her group of friends and her boyfriend, who was a high school drop out without a job. She made strong, negative judgments about her friends’ and boyfriend’s lack of academic aspirations in comparison to her own. In 10th grade I asked Isidora the first question from the interview protocol: What are your friendships like with other girls? She replied, Well, with my friends it’s really not a good relationship. It’s just that they wanna cut all the time. You see I don’t wanna take bull because I know a lot of people who tell you “no” it’s not good to cut. I think you could have friendships for the rest of your life. I think friendship is a matter of caring for another person. It is not just like, “oh come on, let’s cut or smoke or whatever.” That’s what my friends do all the time. They cut and they’re still in 9th grade. They will be 16 and 17 and still in 9th grade. I don’t wanna take that road. I’ll be with them but not to cut. I go hang out just after school. Susan: Was that different before, were you hanging out with them more? Has it always been like that? Isidora: No, I used to hang out with them more. Now they’re like, “come on you always dissing us.” I’ll be like, “no I’ve got a test.” I lie. I’ll say, “my mom is coming and she is checking on me.” That way they don’t think I don’t want to hang out with them. Before we used to be real together. It’s like me and a little group and we are always together. We go out shopping. Now, things changed. Things getting more for me—you know working from three to five and doing my homework and helping my mother . . . Susan: So they cut classes and go to parties? Isidora: Yeah like with guys that are 21 and they have parties with their friends. Susan: So you feel that sometimes it’s easier to lie to them? Isidora: Well, yeah, I guess. I’m still friends with them but not like before. They’ll believe me but at a point I know they’ll say, “oh she just don’t wanna go.” Susan: And you don’t want them to think that of you? Isidora: Well, I really don’t care, cause it’s my future. I don’t think about what they’re thinking of me. I know they’re my friends. We’ve been friends since like third or fourth grade so they probably understand me. They just wanna have fun now. They don’t understand that they are grown up and they don’t graduate. They don’t see how the world is getting hard out there. They’re just thinking about friends and about fun.5


In this quote Isidora contrasted her individual success or her own activities (school, work, helping at home) when she said, “things getting more for me,” and how it used to be with her friends when they were “real together.” Isidora defined a friendship as caring about the other person’s future by encouraging them to pursue positive future goals. Her friends “should” show they truly care for her by not wanting her to cut or to become a high school dropout. Though she was aware that her friends did not encourage her to do what was best for her, Isidora also maintained that her friends understand her. Nevertheless Isidora felt so pressured by her friends to cut that she lied to them even though they knew she was lying. Isidora worked to maintain a semblance of the previous friendship by managing her friends’ impression—she hung out with them after school and blamed her mother’s vigilance for not being able to cut. Though Isidora said she did not care what her friends thought about her and maintained that they were still her friends, these claims, combined with the rest of the interview, illustrated her ambiguity that began in 10th grade. During the same year, I asked Isidora to talk about her friend Melissa, whom she discussed the previous year. She said, Oh yeah, forget it, she just went off the wrong road. She’s constantly cutting too. She just got mixed up with wrong people. We used to really have fun. I mean me and her we still talk to each other. We say, “hi.” But she’ll like cut too much. I mean she don’t wanna be in class. I can’t be with a friend where I am gonna end up cutting all the time and getting letters to my house. We still friends but she hangs out with other people. She’ll be downstairs in the lunchroom. I don’t think I wanna take that road. Now that we have separate classes every time we’ll be talking, “oh how are you doing?” She’ll say, “do you wanna get outta here?” I’ll say, “no I’ve got to go to class.” She’ll say, “OK forget it.” Susan: So last year she was in more of your classes? Isidora: Yeah she used to go to more of her classes. Now it’s like I don’t know the people she is hanging out with. I guess she’s hanging out with people that cut too much. I guess she wants to cut. Susan: When did this happen? Isidora: During the school year but it started this year. Last year I used to be in more classes with her. She used to go to every class and we used see each other in the lunchroom and then we used to walk home. It changed because I think she got mixed up with some girls that were cutting for the longest time. When she got mixed up with them she started cutting with them. So I say “hi” to all friends.

100 / the multiracial urban high school Susan: Did you have an argument about it or like did you just stop hanging out? Isidora: No. Since we had different classes you know and she had like different classes we only saw each other in the lunchroom. My other friends are there and we just like say “hi” and everything Susan: Did you both find different friends or did she start hanging out with different people first or how did that happen? Isidora: No, first the friends I knew I’ve seen them at lunch so I just started being with them. Then all of a sudden I changed my class program. Then she had lunch in my period and then she would like come in with different people. She would be with these three different girls. So I say, “hi Melissa.” She’ll say, “hi how are you doing.” Then she’ll just sit somewhere else and I’ll sit somewhere. We always say “hi” you know. Interviewer: Does she know why you stopped hanging out with her? Isidora: Yeah cause I’m like, “stop cutting and everything.” She’ll say, “I know, I know. You know I’m just having fun.” I’ll say, “you better start getting your act together Melissa.” She says, “I know . . . next year, don’t worry.” I’ll say, “oh when next year?” I’ll say that in my mind but I don’t think she’s thinking about the future. She just thinking about fun like everybody else. It’s not all about fun like I said before.6

Though Melissa and Isidora’s friendship remained cordial, their opportunities for spending time with each other diminished because they attended fewer classes together. In the beginning of this quote Isidora moved back and forth between critical, judgmental statements about Melissa and statements referring to the strength of their previous relationships, as well as their infrequent conversations. In this section of her interview, she mentioned five times that she always said “hi” to Melissa and her other former friends even though she did not approve of their attitude toward school. The same year that Isidora began to feel more distanced from her childhood friends, she also assessed that her relationship with her boyfriend was ending. Isidora was asked to describe how her relationship with her boyfriend compared with her friendship with her best friend, Melissa. She said, Well him, he is always demanding. He’s wants things his way and it’s just like everything is not his way. He dropped out of school. I’ll be telling him please go back to school. You are not gonna get nowhere. I think

listening to friendships / 101 he only got to the 10th grade. I’m not gonna have no future with you cause I’m here studying hard and passing all my classes. He don’t even wanna get a job. I can’t be with you if you gonna keep on not going to school. He’ll say, “OK, I’ll get a job or something.” I’ll be like, “no it’s not about that, it’s about your education.” Interviewer: Right, when did he drop out? Isidora: I think a year and a half already. I keep telling him it’s not late yet, go back to school, get an education. I really don’t think he wants to go back to school. I’ll be thinking about these things. My mother says you can’t have a good future with him. I would tell him that it’s not like I’m getting married. I don’t think my relationship with him will last that long if it’s gonna be like that. Cause I work really hard in school and study hard to have a good future. I don’t wanna grow up and support him. I want him, but if he really wants to be with me, I tell him to go back to school and get an education. It’s not all about money now. I know it’s not gonna last . . . 7

Though Isidora did not exactly answer the question comparing her best friend to her boyfriend, she offered insight into how her boyfriend’s lack of education and ambition caused her to question the relationship’s longevity. She felt her boyfriend should be educated and not just get a job to make money. She valued education not only to secure a “good future” but also for its own sake. Throughout her interview, Isidora felt she should work hard now to get an education, so that her future would be easier. She talked about the difference in goals between herself and her boyfriend, saying that she focused on “passing all of my classes” while her boyfriend was reluctant to get a job or graduate from high school. Though Isidora was a smart student in some honors classes, she described her attempt at “passing” all of her classes rather than something more ambitious, such as college or a career. Even though her ambitions were higher than those of her boyfriend and most of her friends, simply passing all of her classes was a diminished expectation for Isidora. By 10th grade Isidora defined a moral line of acceptable behavior and attitudes toward school. Having friends who cut and a dropout boyfriend was not acceptable. She saw her best friend Melissa less and still talked with her about not cutting classes. Though they were not as close as they used to be, their friendship was still amiable. In her sophomore year, Isidora was careful to maintain relations with her old friends so as not to completely cut them off. When I asked her how her friendships


had changed since 9th grade, Isidora explained that her group had split and that half of them were “lost.” Her friends were interested only in cutting and “everything has changed.” Tenth grade marked an important time in Isidora’s relationship with her friends. After two years of cutting and feeling pressured to spend time with them, she saw how her efforts in school could be threatened if she joined them. Yet, she did not want to completely disconnect from her friends by simply ignoring them. Her whole world felt different as she separated from her friends and boyfriend. These experiences suggested that for students such as Isidora and the other young women in a category I labeled contentious, succeeding in school came at a relational cost. Isidora described her relational journey as one in which she increasingly disconnected from her childhood friends to declare herself a student. She felt she must become more individualistic and less oriented toward her childhood friends to achieve academically. That is, she saw graduating from high school and maintaining her childhood friends as a zero sum game. Though she did make new friends, these friendships were not as intimate as her childhood friends. Success in school or being a student required Isidora to shift her identity: to be less oriented toward her friends from the past, to think about the future, to graduate from high school, and to make new friends. Succeeding in school was not just a simple matter of studying or working hard; it required a renegotiation of friendships and selfidentity as a student. “Let’s Stay in School, It Will be Better” During her sophomore year Isidora talked about a new close friend, Valeria, who she met at an after-school program. I asked Isidora how she and Valeria were similar and Isidora said, Well, we both like think of school all the time. We both don’t think about cutting all the time. We won’t say, “oh let’s go together, let’s just have fun and go cut.” No we’ll be like, “oh let’s stay in school, it will be better.” Sometimes she’ll say, “I feel like going home” and I’ll say, “No let’s stay to the next period and lets finish the rest of the day. It’s only a couple of more hours.” . . . She’ll say, “OK you’re right, let’s do this and then we’d walk home or we go to the after-school program.” I’ll say, “Ok, come on and we meet up.” So she’ll say, “Yeah, you’re right . . .”8


Valeria and Isidora were still tempted to cut classes, but together they encouraged each other to attend classes and rewarded themselves by spending time together after school. Supporting each other to attend classes by doing it together emphasized how Isidora and Valeria affirmed each other’s goals of graduating from high school. Valeria, Isidora, and Isidora’s parents felt it was acceptable to occasionally cut classes but agreed it shouldn’t become a habit. When I asked Isidora to explain why she trusted Valeria more than her other friends, Isidora said that her other friends just wanted to have fun. Although Valeria wanted to have fun she also went to church and did not consistently cut classes. It was revealing that Isidora said she was similar to Valeria because they both thought about school all the time. Analyzing their grades or how close Valeria came to not graduating, it might be easy to assume that a student with an average in the 70s might not care much about school. Yet Isidora had one of the highest averages in comparison to other Latino and African American students in the study. She also consciously decided to leave her friends to succeed in school. In most other schools, Isidora’s grades would be mediocre at best, but at NHS she was one of the few Latinas in the honors program. Isidora was simultaneously anxious about her work, frustrated with the school, and certain that she wanted to graduate high school. The similarities she shared with Valeria were valuing education, staying in school, and feeling discouraged by the school. They both talked about working really hard but not doing as well as they expected. Isidora’s mother and stepfather told her to stay away from friends who were not doing well in school. During her second-year interview, I asked her what her mother thought about the kinds of friends she should have and how these friends affected her becoming serious about school. (She mentioned in a previous part of the interview that she wanted to become more serious about school). She replied, . . . She knows all my friends. She’ll see friends that I graduated with from the 8th grade. I got one of these friends who got a baby when she was 14 or 15. I know she had a baby this year. She had to come out of school as soon as we graduated out of 8th grade. I was the one in my school that had a boyfriend and everything. We were serious; so everybody thought that I was gonna get pregnant first. Then everybody sees me and was like, oh this friend is pregnant and we were all surprised. I mean it must have been bad for her because it was going all over my other school from

104 / the multiracial urban high school elementary school and junior high school. Everybody was talking about her even my mother heard about it. My mother said she wouldn’t like me to have friends like that. I got this other friend that dropped out of school. My stepfather said he saw her out there and she’ll be with one guy then another. He said, you shouldn’t really be with those kind of friends. I’ll be like, “I know.” I just say “hi” to them and not act like I don’t know them. I don’t think my mother would allow me to really be with them that much. They might even encourage me to cut or something or drop out of school too. So my mother will say “no”. . . 9

This quote illustrated how close Isidora came to following a path similar to that of some of her friends and emphasizes the significance of Isidora’s staunch claim during her sophomore year to be a student. This decision was as much a rejection of other identities (teenage mother, high school dropout, cutter) as it was an acceptance of an identity as student. In the quote above, Isidora explained how others expected that she too would get pregnant. Choosing to define herself as a student, leaving friends whose behaviors were too risky, and making new friends who shared her values about school showed the extent that Isidora worked against others’ expectations and stereotypes. She described her parents as understanding her friendship ordeals and encouraging her academically, she also defied stereotypes that Latinas, especially those who had boyfriends, get pregnant, have the baby, and drop out of school. Her stepfather’s advice that she shouldn’t remain friends with young women who were sexually active or “slutty” was meant to protect Isidora. However, for Isidora that was easier said than done. Even though her friend encouraged her to cut classes and potentially drop out of school, she defiantly refused to “act like I don’t know them.” In other words, it would be too painful for her to completely sever her ties with her old friends. Sadly, even though Isidora worked hard to define herself as a student, the same year her attendance records were confused with those of someone else with a surname same as hers. Consequently her parents received a letter stating she cut classes for a week. In the interview she was visibly upset and outraged by this mix-up and angrily talked about how the school was so disorganized that a lot of undeserving people received the same letter. This event contributed to her frustration with the incompetent school. Every year Isidora talked about the


disorganization, the wrongful cutting incident, and then all of the other aspects of school she found upsetting and aggravating. She said, . . . so many things going on in bathrooms . . . like cigarettes. Before last year there used to be toilet paper in the bathroom. Now (you have to go to the) front desk and then get (toilet) paper. I mean nobody needs to know . . . that you just went to the bathroom. And you know, I hate the smell. I hardly like using the bathroom . . . your clothes smell like cigarettes . . . 10

When I asked her what she liked about school, she said nonchalantly, “nothing really,” commenting on the poor condition of the building and students fighting. Every year Isidora reported disliking the same aspects of school, and she struggled to attend classes and graduate. Junior Year During her junior year Isidora moved from the Addition to Central and found the larger building confusing. In her interview she talked about still disliking school, commenting on the lack of lockers to store coats and books, and the overcrowded conditions. She would not recommend the school to others because it’s a “bad school”: the building is hazardous due to broken glass in the stairwells and heavy fire doors that swing open. She admitted there were some worthy programs, referring to her AP and honors classes. She appreciated that at Central she had the opportunity to see her guidance counselor every semester because in the Addition she was rarely able to see her guidance counselor. When asked to give advice to someone attending NHS, the otherwise verbose student repeatedly said, “I don’t know, probably because they’ll be pressured to cut or just drop out.” By Isidora’s junior year her relationship with her friends from elementary and junior high school was worse. Again, in the very first part of the interview, when I asked Isidora to talk about her friendships with other girls, she discussed how she still felt pressured by them. During this interview she reassured herself (and perhaps me) that she was not going to let their pressure influence her. When asked to discuss the tensions she felt when her friends wanted her to cut


class, she began by reliving the pressure she felt during her freshman year. She replied, When I first go to high school, they be like, “Why you always front me? You never cut with us.” I can’t, I got responsibilities. Because I didn’t want to cut classes with them. So they didn’t want to talk to me. Susan: Right, well tell me about that, ‘cause I’m interested in that. Isidora: Their cutting cost so much. One of my friends she’s nineteen and she’s still in the 9th grade. So I’ll have physics and they have biology. They are left behind. Susan: So how does that affect your friendship? Isidora: We all have a biology teacher that we used to be friends with. I told them if you go to class we could go to biology together. But, they wouldn’t meet. We used to see each other more often, talk more. But now, cause I’m at a higher level, I hardly get to see them like I used to.11

In this quote Isidora is referring to a young, good-looking and popular, African American, male biology teacher. I observed him teach using cooperative and interactive classroom activities. Although she tried to persuade her friends to go to this charismatic teacher’s class, her friends refused. Even though her friends cut classes, they remained in or around school but never took classes with Isidora. Attending class together—a significant activity they once shared—was no longer a possibility. Isidora also questioned the costs of cutting in terms of the likelihood that her friends will never graduate from high school. Because I was really interested in how Isidora slowly disengaged from her friends, I asked her to elaborate: Susan: You said there was a point where you guys had a split and you kinda backed out? Isidora: Yeah. Susan: Tell me what happened. Isidora: Because they thought I was bitching at them. They said, “you never come with us.” I said, “I can’t because I’ve got to stick to studying.” I didn’t let it get to me. I said, “next time.” They said, “next time.” They make a big deal out of it. Susan: What do you mean “next time, next time?” Isidora: When they cut or when they go to a winter party they’ll say, “you’ll come next time.” So I say, “okay.” I just say “yeah” cause they make a big deal out of it. Then when the next semester came, they

listening to friendships / 107 didn’t have a free lunch period, or anything like that. So we didn’t talk to each other. We just see each other in the hallways. They cut, and I rarely saw them.12

Isidora’s strategy of continuously delaying her friends’ requests, by saying she would cut with them “next time,” eventually did not work. At some point, they called her bluff and “called her out,” by identifying her procrastination strategy. They no longer interacted in school: they did not share lunch or classes and now had different friends. The same year I asked Isidora why it was so important for her friends that she cut with them. She said, I don’t know. I guess they want me to have a good time with them. I don’t know. I think the reason they cut is because their parents don’t let them go out. They feel like they are trapped. One of my friends was studying for a test and her parents wouldn’t let her go out at all. So she probably felt trapped and the only way she had time to herself was through school. Maybe she thought if I cut school that’s the only way I could go outside. So they probably felt like that. I don’t even care if her mother doesn’t let her go out, I still wouldn’t cut school. But I know most of them. They cut because their parents are real strict and never let them go out . . . I mean they really pressure me. They say like, “oh come on, if not, we’re not going to be your friend.”13

In her junior year Isidora expressed the extent of the pressure from her friends. Though she resolutely did not let their influence affect her academic aspirations, she was still upset that they threatened to completely end the friendship. Comparing her mother to her friends’ mothers, in terms of letting their daughters make their own decisions and spend time socializing outside of the home, Isidora analyzed her friends’ reasons for cutting. Even though she thought it was unfair for parents to restrict their daughters socializing, her friends still should not cut. Since she described attending classes and graduating from high school as her personal responsibility, she saw her friends as failing themselves. Isidora described a close and trusting relationship with her mother, who taught her that she should want to excel in school for herself and not to please her parents. As such, Isidora described her motivation behind taking honors classes, passing all of her classes, and graduating from high school as goals she set for herself to secure her future.


Senior Year In her senior year of high school Isidora responded to the question asking her to describe her friends by saying that she no longer had any in school. Whereas the preceding year she described her friends as pressuring her to cut classes and spend time together, in her senior year Isidora did not consider them friends. Since they dropped out of school, she occasionally saw them in the neighborhood or near school. Her friend Valeria, to whom she felt close the previous year, had a serious boyfriend, took classes after school (p.m. classes), and now lived far from school. Valeria’s busy schedule and new boyfriend left minimal time to spend with Isidora. Though they remained friends, when Valeria did have free time, Isidora was hesitant to ask for plans because she did not want to impinge on Valeria’s time with her boyfriend and soon to be husband. In their senior year, Valeria was married, and Isidora was in the bridal party. The same year Isidora talked about feeling connected to the people in her honors classes as they all struggled to graduate, work after school, and have fun together. Isidora, and several of the students in her honors class, had part-time jobs at a nearby children’s museum and she generally felt closer to her friends from class. Since cutting class was an increasingly important topic in Isidora’s yearly interviews and it strained her friendships, I asked her to discuss it further. As she talked about girls and cutting class, I wondered if she felt that all girls will potentially try to get her to cut classes. She began talking about a new friend she liked and said, No I don’t think all girls are like that, cause I know some girls from my class and they go to class everyday and . . . they (are) fun too. It’s just that they don’t like to chill or stuff. Cause I have this one friend (Giselle), she goes to class and she’s mad smart. Like she don’t . . . chill with a group of friends. So she goes to after-school programs and . . . she does her homework. Susan: She’s in your classes? Isidora: Some. Susan: So do you consider Giselle a friend? Isidora: Yeah she’s very funny . . . She’s like, “oh you changed me,” cause now I make her laugh and stuff cause before she used to be mad serious and I was like, “you gotta loosen up!” . . . Like before I don’t know if she was embarrassed to laugh in front of the teacher or like she was afraid she was going to get in trouble. So then she’s like

listening to friendships / 109 thanks to me and my other friend, this guy. She’s like, “now I loosen up more. . . . I laugh, I have a lot of fun.” Susan: That’s nice, that’s nice. So when do you see Giselle? Isidora: I see her everyday in school. She hardly ever misses school. Susan: And do you ever see her outside of school? Isidora: No, not really, cause I work after school and she goes to College Now [a college preparation program]—the after-school thing. Susan: Do you guys talk to each other or see each other on the weekend or . . . ? Isidora: No. I usually work or I have to stay home babysitting or something.14

Isidora seemed to enjoy and respect Giselle, who she saw everyday in class. Yet, because Giselle did not like to hang out with a group of friends and Isidora felt restrained by the demands of school, work, and family responsibilities, their friendship seemed to lack intimacy because they did not spend time together outside of school. Spending time with friends outside of school was frequently a sign that a friendship had progressed to a deeper level; yet, this did not seem to happen between Isidora and her new friends. In the combined case study of Lena and Mei Ling a similar desire to move school friendships to the next level by spending time together outside of school is also evident. I asked Isidora how her friendships with the group of friends she started high school with changed from her junior year to her senior year. She replied: We don’t talk to each other no more. They turned conceited. Now like I see them on the street and they say “hi,” but it’s not like before. I heard about one of them. She left school and now she’s with another man and he’s forty years old. So she saw me and one of my friends in the street and she didn’t even want to say hi to me. I was like, wow they changed . . . The last time I saw Danielle was in a club. I was like, “hi, how are you doing” and all this. And she was like, “oh hi” and stuff, but ever since then I haven’t seen her. Susan: Okay, So now you are not talking to them at all? Isidora: No Interviewer: Were you talking to them last year? Isidora: Yeah I was. Susan: Okay, so what happened? Isidora: When they were in school I used to throw parties and they always used to come to my parties or they always invited me to their parties. But now it’s not like that no more. We all broke apart.

110 / the multiracial urban high school Susan: Right, right. Why do you think the group broke apart and why do you think that you don’t talk to them anymore? Isidora: I broke off because I always used to like dis [disrespect] them. They always used to say, “let’s go to a hooky party and I’d say no I got a big test.” I used to lie. Then after that they just stopped talking to me. They knew I was fronting (lying to) them. I don’t care. But in the long run I’m happy that I didn’t go to those parties. Now I’m a senior and I’m gonna graduate soon. And my friend Charlene, she’s still a sophomore. She said, “oh, now I have to do all this extra work and stuff. I wish I was where you are at.” She’s said, “that was good that I told them no cutting.” Cause now I’m almost out of here but they dropped. Half of them I don’t even see no more. I think they dropped out or they probably go to another school. I don’t know. And if they are going to another school they are still sophomores or freshmen.15

After four years of studying, while her friends from elementary school were cutting, Isidora felt a sense of vindication about graduating high school and believed she made the right decision to be a serious student. She was also more aware that her strategy of lying to her friends did not work to stave off their demands to cut. Finally, the relationships were severed when one friend refused to greet Isidora in the street. Even though Isidora wanted to remain cordial with them, her disapproval of their academic choices, lack of daily interaction at school, and different life paths ended the friendships. Reginald “I’m an Open Person” In 9th grade, Reginald was a tall, lanky, and somewhat awkward African American student who felt very close to his mother and older brother. He was comfortable, easygoing, friendly, and casual, especially as he got older and became more confident. Due to his rapid growth over four years, he could be easily seen towering above others in the hallways while walking and jostling with a group of boys. In 9th grade, Reginald began high school with his brother and some of his brother’s friends who were in the Central building. During his junior year, when he moved from the Addition to the Central this group graduated from high school and left the NYC for a college in upstate New York. Reginald also knew some people from his uptown neighborhood


and junior high school who attended NHS downtown. Consequently, he entered high school having several male friends from his neighborhood. One of his closest friends in 9th grade was Benjamin, another student in the study who also lived in his neighborhood and had gone to the same elementary school (but not junior high school). Reginald reported feeling comfortable and knowing lots of different people in various social groups. Reginald not only followed his brother’s footsteps to LCHS but also attended the same community college as him in upstate New York. Though Reginald and Benjamin remained friends for the four years of this study, they were not as close as they were in the beginning of high school. During his freshman and sophomore years of high school Reginald said that he recommend the school to others because he liked the teachers and students but he would not recommend the “small” and “gloomy” Addition because it was “uncomfortable” and had no breathing space. He thought a good teacher was someone like Mr. B, because, “he’s not always worrying about grades, about tests and stuff. . . . We have a conversation in his classes. But we’re learning at the same time. I don’t like teachers that are so uptight, like worrying about grades so much, projects and stuff.”16 During 9th and 10th grade Reginald had a 73.5 and a 76.7 average respectively. By 11th and 12th grade his grades dropped to 65.4 and 69 respectively and he graduated with a 71.7 average. He also recommended NHS because other schools had much worse gang problems. He said, Its like fifty percent, sixty percent gang members in other schools. Susan: And here, what would you say it was? Reginald: Like twenty percent, like ten percent, like fifteen percent. Its, very, very low. Like around my way [neighborhood] . . . its just too many gangs. There’s mad cops around my neighborhood.17

Reginald and other African American and Dominican American students from uptown perceived attending NHS downtown as safer even though it meant about a two-hour daily commute. Yearly, in his interviews Reginald talked about liking teachers, enjoying school, and being treated respectfully by the guards and administrators. Even though he also described problems with “bad kids,” gangs, students dropping out, and teachers who favored the Chinese students in math class, he felt he could overcome these obstacles. Unlike many others’


observations, Reginald’s complaints about the physical condition of the school were minimal. When Reginald talked about what being African American meant to him he said, it’s about “struggle” and that African Americans are expected to overcome barriers.18 Though Reginald did not directly link his positive views about school and willingness to struggle to get an education, the connection seemed implicit in his approach to school and his father’s stern vigilance. In 9th grade Reginald was asked to talk about his best friend Benjamin, who he saw everyday and knew for eight years since they also attended elementary school together. Reginald said, I like my relationship with Benjamin, ‘cause we (are) very close, we knew each other for a long time, he likes the stuff that I like . . . Interviewer: How are you guys very close? . . . Reginald: . . . I’m close like a brother to him . . . We always hanging together . . . we always talk about stuff, playing’ around, just like I’ll do stuff with my brother . . . It’s close, it’s tight, he don’t lie. If there’s something about me he’ll tell me straight up. Interviewer: Can you give me an example of when he’s told you something straight up? Reginald: Nah, he hasn’t told me nothing straight up, but if something was wrong, he’d just tell me . . . Interviewer: Why do you think your friendship with Benjamin is closer than your other friendships? Reginald: . . . I have other friends but, not as close as Benjamin. Cause other friends lie . . . they lie, they’ll try to say stuff about somebody else and I don’t like that . . . 19

Like Isidora’s description of her best friend in comparison to her close friends, Reginald’s statement that Benjamin was an exception to his other friends because he did not lie or gossip is noteworthy. The trust that Reginald had in Benjamin was implicit although he could not describe an example of Benjamin being “straight-up” or a time when their friendship was tested. Reginald’s comparison of his friendship with Benjamin to his relationship with his older brother, whom he can tell anything, meant that Reginald and Benjamin were so close they consider each other family. Though they remained close until 10th grade, by 11th grade, according to Reginald’s interview, their relationship began to change.


The same year, the interviewer asked Reginald to talk about his ideal friendship. He said he wants an, honest friendship . . . ’Cause I don’t like nobody lying, talking about somebody else . . . ’Cause I don’t like that, . . . that’s like saying bad stuff about other people and I don’t like that. It gets me mad, I don’t know why. Interviewer: Why does it get you so mad? Reginald: Cause it’s like they often tell lies about my friends and that stuff ain’t true. So I’ll be like, “why, why are you lying about him?” Interviewer: What do they say? Reginald: They’ll be like, “he ain’t good, he’s whacked, he always stays home. C’mon let’s go, let’s leave him. He ain’t got no money, he ain’t got no games. C’mon let’s go.” Stuff like that they be lying about it20

In his interviews from freshman year to senior year, Reginald expressed almost the same ideas about an ideal friend. He valued friendships that were honest and straightforward and did not include gossip or backstabbing. He positioned himself as a mediator between friends, trying to smooth disagreements when friends wanted to participate in different activities or when someone did not have enough money to pay for an activity. Although he talked about the same group of close friends from his neighborhood every year, he did not always trust each of them as much as he trusted his best friends. Best Friends Every year Reginald’s best friends were either Benjamin or Tonychan, who embodied Reginald’s idea of what an ideal friendship should be like.21 Reginald had satisfying relationships and felt confident trusting his best friends who spent time at his house and knew his parents. During his sophomore year Reginald said he considered Benjamin and Tonychan his best friends. The interviewer asked Reginald to discuss whom he felt closer to and to compare his best friendships. Reginald said that Tonychan was his better best friend. He said, . . . Cause I knew Benjamin since kindergarten, but for a while, I just stopped . . . chilling with him. It was about when I was in sixth grade . . . to like eighth grade. Cause we went to different (junior high) schools. We still had a close friendship but it wasn’t so close. And my

114 / the multiracial urban high school friend Tonychan, he used to live right next to me and we used to go to the same (junior high) school . . . I could tell Benjamin anything . . . I could tell Tonychan anything. I feel more comfortable telling Tonychan anything for some reason. Interviewer: Do you know why that is? Reginald: I feel like I probably know him a little more. Interviewer: What’s it like now that you and Tonychan go to . . . different high schools . . . and you and Benjamin go to the same school? Reginald: I think its equal . . . because I see Benjamin more. I could still see Tonychan more but not as much. We still got a close friendship. Interviewer: So . . . even though you don’t see Tonychan as much as Benjamin do you still feel closer to him? Reginald: Yeah, in a way. Yeah in a way . . . I’m still close to Benjamin, though. But I still feel closer to Tonychan.22

Reginald’s comparison between his two friends and their school histories demonstrated not only how attending the same school brought friends together and kept them interacting but also how individual characteristics influenced closeness. After his sophomore year, Reginald felt closer to Tonychan and felt more distanced from Benjamin even though he saw him everyday in class. Reginald described feeling closer to all of his friends as he got older, but Benjamin was the only friend who he remained close to but at times also felt distanced from. During his sophomore and junior years, Benjamin became heavily involved in a fringe (and, many would argue, zealous) religious group and denounced his Catholic upbringing. Reginald agreed with some, but not all, aspects of Benjamin’s new religion but it was clearly part of a shift in their relationship. At this time, Reginald also resisted weekly attendance at Church with his mother. Though they remained friends and they both discussed feeling close to each other in their interviews, they now had different best friends. In his interview Benjamin described Reginald as too concerned with worldly pursuits he no longer approved of such as desiring and buying expensive clothing and fooling around with young women. Benjamin now felt closer to his friends from his prayer group and found Reginald’s playful and silly behaviors slightly annoying. During his junior and senior year Reginald talked about his neighbor (but not schoolmate) Tonychan as his best friend. Though Benjamin talked about his new friends as his best friends, both Reginald and Benjamin mentioned each other. Though they still saw each other every day in class, they were not as close as they used to be


and they both attributed their distance to Benjamin’s religious conversion. Neither Reginald nor Benjamin described feeling hurt, nor did they say anything negative about each other and both said they would always be friends. During his junior year, I asked Reginald how he knows he can trust Tonychan. He said, One day . . . my older . . . brother got into a fight. So then I jumped in, and then . . . my friend Tonychan jumped in. And then it happened to Tonychan. Tonychan had to fight, too, and I jumped in, trying to break it up. Susan: Why was it important that he jumped in? Reginald: Because . . . I probably really would have been hurt. You know, just to see him jump in means a lot. Susan: Has there ever been any other way in which something you’ve done shows you that you can trust him? Reginald: I can trust him with my money. One day he needed some money to get . . . some shoes . . . and a shirt for an interview. So I gave him eighty dollars. The next week he just paid me back. Susan: Has there been a time when you didn’t trust him? Reginald: No, not really.23

Knowing that his best friend would protect him during a fight made sense in the context of a school and neighborhood where fighting occurred regularly and where gangs were a normal part of the landscape. Every year in his interviews Reginald described some of the same features of friendship: he trusted his best friends because they helped him out during a fight and returned borrowed money; he thought in an ideal friendship people should not talk behind each other’s back or lie. In his sophomore year he was asked what he did not like about the teachers and the students in the school Reginald responded, I like almost all the teachers. But it’s just the students. Like before last year everything was cool. Like everything was all right. Most of the fighting is the students who are in gangs. Now, most of the students are just in gangs and . . . they wanna have fights. Most people drop out. A lot of people dropping out here. They be staying outside in front of the building. Before everybody used to be in school, doing their work . . . Interviewer: And how do you fit in? Like how do you avoid being in gangs? And how do you deal with it?

116 / the multiracial urban high school Reginald: My parents and my friends. Cause they’re always setting a good example for me. Cause I was raised like that. That’s why. Interviewer: But like is it, kids don’t . . . Reginald: (finishes sentence for interviewer) Like do they mess with me? Nah. I know how they can be at the same time (what they’re like). They don’t be doing nothing to none of my friends. But most of them I know. I have some friends that be in gangs. I know them. I be like, “yo why are you in a gang?” They wanna be in it for protection . . . If I got problems then I could just settle it. In school, they ain’t gonna do nothing . . . . Mostly everybody that I know . . . are Bloods in this school. I be like, “why you need (a) gang for?” For protection. Like in the beginning of the school year, there were mad slashes (using a boxcutter to cut someone) and stuff. I was like, “they stupid.” I don’t even know why, all of it is fake24

In this quote Reginald described the same feeling as did Isidora: They both declared that after the first two years of high school everything changed. Now students were overtly displaying anti-academic behavior and Reginald blamed the problems in school on the other students. Although Reginald had friends who were in gangs, he named his friends and parents as setting a good example for him to avoid being in a gang. Reginald believed that students join gangs for protection from people who want to fight. Interestingly, he also argues that best friends serve a similar purpose by jumping in during a fight. He also knew that his best friends offered the same protection that people who joined gangs sought. Though Reginald worried about getting into fights in school, he also felt protected by his friends. Reginald had friends in school who were members of gangs and students who were in the process of becoming high school dropouts. The people he knew who were in gangs were not his best friends or close friends from his neighborhood but peers he knew from school. Reginald did not feel pressured to join a gang or cut classes in the same way that Isidora described she was. Isidora did not talk in the same sense as Reginald did about physical vulnerability that he experienced under pressure to fight and in the presence of gangs in school. While Isidora struggled with pressures from friends to cut and social expectations that she will get pregnant, Reginald appeared content in his friendships at home and at school and generally had positive comments about his experiences with teachers in school. It was his relationship with his father that was the most distressing to Reginald, particularly in the context of friends and school.


Parents Advice about Friends and School As a young high school student Reginald formed a breakdancing troupe with his neighborhood friends that practiced in the community center near his home. Tonychan and his “dance friends” remained the core of his neighborhood friendship group over four years. Even after he had been in high school for four years, he still felt closer to his friends from his neighborhood. Although he liked his friends from school and trusted many of them, he did not feel as close to them as he did to his neighborhood friends. In his sophomore year interview when Reginald was asked what his father thought about his friendships he replied with certainty that his father did not want him to hang out with the wrong crowd, particularly with his dance friends because they smoked and were not on course at school.25 In the same interview, when Reginald was asked whether his father liked his best friend Tonychan who was part of the dance group, Reginald replied affirmatively; his father liked Tonychan “cause he knows about him, like he’s doing good in school.” Referring to his friends from the dance troop he repeated that his father did not like them, or his other friends in general.26 Reginald knew definitely that his father was basing his like of Tonychan and his dislike of his dance friends on their commitment to school. Academic success was a strong indicator of his father’s like or dislike of Reginald’s friends. In his sophomore year, when asked whether his father thought that friends were important, Reginald replied, Yeah because friends gonna send me in the direction that I’m not going to be doing bad. If one of my friends, or somebody who’s dropping out, smokes, he’s gonna do bad in school. My father really takes it seriously. Interviewer: So, he thinks about it seriously? So, what do you think he thinks about friendships? Reginald: Going to school, he wants a friend that goes to school, that is doing good in school.27

Friendships and academic success were intertwined to such an extent that his father monitored Reginald’s friendships because they could pull Reginald in the wrong direction. Unlike Isidora who generally agreed with her parents’ assessment of her friends, Reginald often disagreed with his father’s estimation of his friends. Furthermore, Reginald felt strongly that he was capable of not letting his friends influence his academic ambitions.


Junior Year During his junior year, Reginald discussed the time when his father found out that Tonyhan was cutting classes. I asked Reginald what his father thought about his friends. Reginald: He think(s) Tonychan’s good, he’s tight with him, and everything. But Tonychan sometimes he be cutting school and I be telling him not to cut school. My father doesn’t like that. I’m saying, my father doesn’t know, but, I know he knows. I know he could tell. Susan: What does Tonychan do when he cuts school? Reginald: Probably, you know, go chill at somebody else’s house, or he’ll just go back home. Susan: Yeah. But you know that your Dad knows that he cuts school? Reginald: Yeah ‘cause he’s seen him one time. Susan: Yeah. So what did your Dad say about that? Reginald: I’m saying he lied, my friend lied, but my father knows he’s cutting school. Susan: Your friend lied to your Dad? Reginald: Yeah. Susan: And your Dad knew anyway? Reginald: Yeah. Susan: And what did your Dad say that made you think he knew about it? Reginald: He was like I seen your friend. He didn’t go to school today. Do you know why he didn’t go to school today? I’m like, nah, I don’t know. But then Tonychan told my father that I knew that he was sick. And I didn’t know that he was sick, so then my father found out 28

Reginald’s father was so concerned with Reginald’ friends’ behavior in school that he verified Tonychan’s story by contacting his parents to find out whether Tonychan had a legitimate reason for not being in school. He not only monitored his son’s behavior but also watched Tonychan. It was clear that Reginald’s father was upset about Tonychan cutting classes. The same year, Reginald said that Tonychan was enrolled in GED classes because he was under too much pressure at home and needed to make up a lot of credits so that he could attend college on time with Reginald. Similar to Isidora and Valeria encouraging each other to go to classes (described in the previous case study), aspects of Reginald and Tonychan’s friendship were connected to studying together and helping each other with schoolwork.


Reginald’s father’s vigilance and at times distrust also negatively influenced his relationship with his son. During his junior year Reginald said that he would like to be more relaxed and open with him in the way that he talked to his mother. Much to Reginald’s disappointment, their conversations almost always revolved around going to classes, graduating, studying for the SATs, going to college, and becoming a doctor. His father’s sermons about friends and school made Reginald feel distant from him because they couldn’t casually talk and spend time together. Reginald also said that he knew his father’s way of caring for him was to push him to succeed and to stay out of trouble and that his father’s advice will help him in the future. When he was asked what he liked about his relationship with his father he said, He’s serious. He’s serious about school and I like that. Like other fathers that I know they act like they just don’t care. Like their Daddy just let them stay out ‘till three o’clock in the morning . . . I don’t be liking that. He wouldn’t like it that I would end up dropping out. My curfew’s like twelve or eleven. Other people be staying out till like two o’clock in the morning. Interviewer: Why do you like that he’s serious? Reginald: ‘Cause if he wasn’t . . . I know I wouldn’t be in school or I would’ve still been in school but I would’ve been doing bad. Interviewer: So he pushes you and you like that? Reginald: Yeah.29

The people who were dropping out are close friends that Reginald interacted with and this concerned his father. Comparing his father’s rigidity to what he perceived as his friends’ fathers’ lack of concern for their children, Reginald wanted the structure that his father demanded. Still, every year Reginald talked about feeling distanced from his father, wanting to be closer, and wishing they could spend time together like they used to when he was younger. During his junior and senior years Reginald reported that his friendships got “tighter” because “most of them I’m in the same classes with and we probably do homework together or go out or something.”30 Throughout his interviews Reginald talked about doing his homework when he spent time at Tonychan’s house or with his friends from school. When I asked him during his senior year how it’s been making friends at LCHS, he said, it’s “easy.” When I asked him why it was easy, he said, “I’m an open person. I like to


have jobs. Most of friends they like that. I’m not uptight. I like to bug out.” During his junior year, I asked Reginald whether there was anything in this school that made it easier for him to make friends. His first response was that he was not shy. I asked him whether there was anything else that the school did that makes it easier for him to make friends, he said, Well . . . it depends what classes you got with somebody. Or, if you’re in a certain type of program then it’ll be easier to make friends. Like . . . AmeriCorps. If you’re going to AmeriCorps, eventually you’ll have friends. You’re in the same type of program . . . Susan: So when you were in AmeriCorps how did that affect your friendships? Reginald: I started to know more people when I was going to AmeriCorps, so my friendships got tighter. Susan: . . . Is that where you met your friends now? Reginald: Not all of my friends. That’s where I met some of my friends. Other of my friends I already knew from outside of the school or I knew from my classes.31

Reginald’s response to these questions seemed almost straight out of the literature on friendships in school because he maintained his friendships with people he knew from his classes, extracurricular activities, and school programs such as the AmeriCorps that I coordinated. For Reginald school shaped his friendships by offering him a place to meet and interact with meet people he generally liked. Yet he first answered the question by saying that he can make friends because of his personality (he’s not shy). He did not consciously connect his feelings about being in school, his sense of belonging or safety, with his ability to make friends. In comparison to other students in the school who were severely critical of the teachers and the building, Reginald seemed content with his education, his friends, and himself. Though he had close friends in school, this was not the full story of Reginald’s confidence in his friendships—he maintained his closest friends in his neighborhood. In his senior year I asked Reginald to compare his friends from his neighborhood to his friends in school. Reginald: Closer are my friends in neighborhood, of course. Susan: Neighborhood? Okay, why of course? Reginald: Well, ‘cause I know them all. I’m around them more, we hang around with people after school.

listening to friendships / 121 Susan: So you think in five years, you’ll still be in touch with your friends in school? Reginald: I don’t know, I really don’t think so. I doubt it. If I see them around, but I doubt it.32

After four years and having made close friends in school, Reginald still felt more closely connected to his neighborhood friends in comparison to his school friends. It would be simple if I could say that he did not have very close friends in school because he did not feel comfortable or have a sense of belonging in school. This was not the case for Reginald because though many other people have strongly critical and negative opinions of school, Reginald liked school and his teachers. Instead, I suspect that his neighborhood was the most comfortable environment for him to build friendships. Lena and Mei Ling Insecure Friendships Lena, a talkative, outspoken, and confident Chinese American student, described herself and was described by others as “bossy,” particularly in her earlier interview. In her 10th grade interview Lena was asked whether there was anything she did not like about her friendships with her close friends. She said, No. I guess it’s fine the way it is . . . . They talk to each other more often during class and I do not like to do that . . . They sit next to each other and they just chat, chat, chat . . . with the boys sitting behind them they just talk, talk, talk. But I personally know that I’m not good in Chemistry so I have to pay extra attention to the teacher. If not, I’ll be paying attention to them. I don’t know how they get away with it without listening to the class. They still pass their test . . . Interviewer: Does it bother you that they are really talkative and close and chatty with each other? Lena: I don’t mind that they’re talkative but it’s just like I would like them to involve me in things, that’s all . . . If they have something funny going on they should tell me. Get me involved, maybe give me a few laughs . . . and I want to know what they’re talking about or thinking of instead of being an outsider.33

Lena often felt purposefully excluded, and in this quote she put the onus on her friends to get her involved in the conversation. Though she was a


forceful person who described herself as dominating group projects, she was also vulnerable when she described herself as an outsider among her close friends in school. In a similar situation, Mei Ling described trying to break into her friends’ conversation but not feeling competent talking to a group of people. She felt incapable of discussing subjects like movies, fashion, and music that her friends enjoyed—topics that were not related to school work. Both Lena and Mei Ling described feeling anxious when talking with their friends in a group because they were nervous their friends preferred to talk with someone else. Throughout their four years of interviews, Mei Ling and Lena had friends but they did not always feel comfortable or confident with these friendships. Mei Ling and Lena were Chinese immigrants, lived in the neighborhood of the school, and had friends who were predominantly Chinese American. In their interviews, similar to Reginald (discussed above), Mei Ling and Lena usually talked about the same best friends and close friends every year; they knew some of their closest friends since elementary and junior high school. Mei Ling and Lena, both high academic achievers, were planning to leave home to attend college. During their junior and senior years of high school they questioned how attending college away from their high school friends would affect their friendships. They planned to attend college away from home and felt it was unlikely they would maintain their friendships from high school. Lena and Mei Ling felt significantly different from their friends and they both described themselves as more serious about school than their friends: they laughed less and were generally not interested in topics their friends liked. They both described feeling more mature than their friends. Lena said she was more serious than her friends who were humorous. Mei Ling mentioned repeatedly throughout all four of her interviews that she really wanted to do well in school and was considered by her close friends to be too studious and only book smart. Feeling older and more mature and serious than their friends, they described themselves as isolated, vulnerable, or marginalized in relation to others. “It’s Hard to Get to the Next Level” During her sophomore year Lena was asked to describe her close friends. She said, I guess, I don’t have like any close, really close best friends . . . I just hang . . . with those people. Even though, I’m looking forward to have

listening to friendships / 123 a close relationship and bonding with my friends. It’s hard to find, not the right person, but to develop that thing. If either me or my friends don’t have the time or she she’s not willing to open up herself to me or something like that.34

“That thing” that Lena struggled with was a feeling of intimacy with a close best friend and knowing that her friend did not gossip about her and listened when she talked. She often felt she was the one pursuing friendships by making phone calls and waiting at home for friends who made plans but did not follow through. She said, We call each other. I mostly call them and I really don’t like that. Cause why should I be the one to pick up the phone and call you? Why can’t you call me sometimes to check how I am doing? I just don’t get it.35

In her senior year interview Lena was talking about trusting her friends and she said she trusted her friends more than her parents. Then she continued to describe the feeling of having a close a friend but not wanting to trust her with secrets. The same year she did not feel the “urge” to share her secrets with her close friend Cindy and sometimes this could be a sign that she really did not trust her friend. The interviewer questioned Lena about why she wanted to share secrets with Cindy in the past but now chose not to. Lena said that she was developing a new “thing” or maybe it’s a “process.” She said, . . . like maybe, I’m like thinking (about) college. I’m going to college, I don’t know where they’re going . . . I don’t think I’m gonna stay in the city, so it’s like the chances are we’re not gonna . . . end up in the same college. So I don’t know . . . if we’ll still be able to keep in contact . . . I’m not that high about the relationship . . . Or maybe (I’m learning from) previous experience, you know, the one with my friend where (she) tells me . . . I’m a dog and like all the other ones. It’s just like (the) same thing, it’s like a trend. I don’t know if I’m the only one. I don’t think I’m the only one who experience that. A trend where . . . with each year in your life, or season in your life, you have this close friend, and then after that, you guys are separated, because you go to a different school, you have a different schedule, so you’re separated. Or maybe it’s your age . . . so that’s why you’re separated. And maybe it’s the way that you think differently now or value things differently that makes your relationship harder to . . . go to the next level. Interviewer: That’s interesting. So what do you trust your friends with then?

124 / the multiracial urban high school Lena: I trust them when I talk about the guys in our group. I trust that they would . . . give me good feedback about . . . my judgment or decisions and that they would support me in whatever decision that I have. So that’s the thing that I trust them with more than my parents . . . 36

In this one quote Lena referred to some of the significant ideas social science researchers confront when discussing how schools influence friendship. Instead of coming under the “senior year affect” where peer groups coalesce around senior activities and preparation for graduation, Lena viewed her friendships as possibly terminal because she would most likely not see them in college.37 Furthermore, she described close friends as becoming closer or distant depending on changes in aspects of her life and routine such as school, classes, age, and values. She found it was difficult to obtain the intimacy she wanted (“get to the next level”) because organizational features of school made it difficult. She did not focus exclusively on singular aspects of the school or on the individuals who were part of it but rather described several features of both that combined to make it difficult to become more intimate with her friends. Lena and Mei Ling described themselves as wanting to be closer, to share more secrets, and to be more intimate with friends but either their friends prevented them from engaging in these levels of intimacy or they were unable to feel closer to their friends. In their interviews both Lena and Mei Ling described the ideal friendship as a relationship they should have but were not able to obtain. Their expectations about how relationships should be differed from what they were experiencing. In comparison, Reginald described his friendship as ideal. Though all three students had the same trustworthy best friends and close friends from year to year, they also wondered whether they could always trust their friends. Gossip In her fourth year interview Mei Ling talked about feeling close to her best friend Sandra who went to a different school. Sometimes she did not know whether she could really trust Sandra because their friendship was never tested. She also discussed her group of close friends in school who she felt were boring to hang out with because they mostly talked about boys when she should be doing school work. The interviewer


asked her to describe the tension among her close friends. Mei Ling said, It’s gossip . . . Lena and Cindy doesn’t really like Sydney that much because she complains a lot. Sydney doesn’t really like Lena that much because she is a very bossy. It’s like they are not the closest of friends, and when they are together they have to act like they like each other. So I was also a hypocrite because I do that. So I can’t say anything. It’s just that when they are around each other they usually talk about friends that are not there. Interviewer: I see. As soon as somebody leaves its like blah, blah, blah. Mei Ling: Exactly. Every time I leave it gives me a creepy feeling. Ever since I was younger, when I was 10 or 11 or 12, something like that, it made me think that whenever I turn my friends would be talking about me. It’s not like there is no evidence of them talking about me. They do talk about me so I always go crazy. But I guess lately it’s growing less because I don’t really care. Whenever you care a lot they do it. It’s totally some human drive. They just do it when you care. If you don’t care and you don’t bother, you just do what you like, they won’t even bother you.38

Mei Ling, like other students in the study, worried about friends gossiping about her. She also pointed to a sense of phoniness and hypocrisy among her friends, a charade in which she also participated because they reported not liking each other but pretended to get along. She described not feeling secure with her friends and being distrustful of the groups’ interactions. Her fear was that when she felt more connected to them, the inevitable gossip would hurt her feelings. As her interviews progressed and she made plans to leave the city for college, Mei Ling felt less at the mercy of her friends’ gossip and hypocrisy. In their interviews, Lena and Mei Ling wondered and questioned out loud whether their friends gossiped behind their back or whether they would always be friends. They knew about specific instances of gossip and what was said. Part of the dynamics of the group interaction were a steady round of gossip among the group, revelation of information to person discussed, and the ensuing hurt feelings. Mei Ling and Lena both struggled with knowing that their friends gossiped about them and also with perpetuating gossip by participating in it. Students who were similar to Isidora (described above) were likely to get into fights with friends that lasted several years or left them feeling


scarred, angry, and mistrustful of friendships with girls. In contrast, Mei Ling and Lena were more likely to feel unsure about themselves, alienated, isolated, left out, or consistently snubbed by friends. Year after year, the students talked about having friends, being with a group, and yet feeling slight taunts from their friends— such as Lena’s friends not calling her on the phone and forgetting about plans. Mei Ling’s friend did not celebrate her birthday and then asked her to celebrate another friend’s birthday; her friends also teased her about her lack of athletic abilities even though she tried very hard. These slights were extremely hurtful and understood as purposeful and insidious. The result was that over time Lena learned that “your friends will come and go . . . There are people even though . . . you call them friends, they are not. Sometimes you can’t really trust them. They’re not your friends.”39 School Talk: Academic Support and Competition Megan was another Chinese American student who was part of Lena and Mei Ling’s friendship group. In 9th grade she was asked to talk about anything that she did not like about her friendships with other girls. She replied, Yes, like Lena she hates one of my best friends, Kimberly, ‘cause Kimberly was . . . the valedictorian (in junior high school). Well Lena didn’t actually know Kimberly but she kind of thinks Kimberly is selfish . . . but I know Kimberly, she’s very nice. Interviewer: Why do you think she hates her? Megan: Well ‘cause probably she was the valedictorian of the school. Interviewer: And your other friend (Lena) wanted to be valedictorian? Megan: No she didn’t want to. . . . Well, it’s ‘cause she used to be in the bilingual class and so she probably thinks that people in those specialized classes are snobs. ‘Cause a few of them are but Kimberly isn’t one of them. Interviewer: Kimberly was (not) in the bilingual class? Megan: Yeah, she’s like A01 and A02 are like the best classes for that grade and Kimberly’s in A01 . . . . I think she (Lena) just got out of bilingual last year and she went to A10 . . . . Lena thinks that the people in the top two classes, the gifted are snobs. Interviewer: And were you in that class too? Megan: No, I was I was in the class between the kind of academic and Kimberly’s (gifted) class.40


Megan described how Lena’s competitiveness with her close friend made it difficult for her to get along with Lena. The intricate system of tracking where students moved from bilingual classes to mainstream classes created an extenuated hierarchy among the bilingual students that did not exist for the mainstream students. Many of the Asian American students at LCHS were in the process of becoming mainstream students by moving through the bilingual tracking system at different rates depending on their English abilities. The pace at which students moved through the series of bilingual classes (and those in-between bilingual and mainstream) into mainstream was widely known to everyone in the bilingual program. Like Megan, students commented on this extenuated hierarchy by referring to their knowledge of their peers’ academic standing and ability. Throughout their interviews Mei Ling, Lena, and other Chinese American female students talked a lot about school, succeeding in school, and preparing for college. Lena mentioned several times that she was competitive, Mei Ling talked about friends who criticized her for doing well in school, and Megan described how her friends derided her participation in student government. Many Asians in the sample talked about studying with friends and feeling pressured to give their friends help with schoolwork, answers on exams, and homework.41 Mei Ling clearly stated, without prompting, that she did not cheat. These students knew their friends’ grades on tests, scores on college exams, and where their friends wanted to attend college. While there was a degree of helping each other with schoolwork, this “cooperation” was mostly unidirectional with a good student such as Mei Ling always helping poorer students. Mei Ling sometimes felt others expected her help or were friends with her just to get help. While female students such as Isidora, described above, were concerned about friends who were dropping out of school, cutting, or making the minimal requirements, Lena and Mei Ling were well-informed about each other’s levels of academic achievement and academic activities. They knew each other’s grades on specific tests, worked cooperatively on assignments, and studied in groups. Working cooperatively, getting help from peers, and cheating often resulted in higher grades than other students. They were competitive about grades. Several Asian American students in the study, including Lena and Mei Ling,


wondered whether the people they worked with were really their friends or whether they were associating with them just for better grades. As such they wanted to know whether they could talk to their school friends about topics not related to school and spend time with a school friend outside of school. These features of their friendships designated a closer friendship. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Interview #166 Time 1. Interview #166 Time 4. Interview #166 Time 1. Interview #166 Time 1. Interview #166 Time 1. Interview #166 Time 2. Interview #166 Time 2. Interview #166 Time 2. Interview #166 Time 2. Interview #166 Time 2. Interview #166 Time 3. Interview #166 Time 3. Interview #166 Time 3. Interview #166 Time 4. Interview #166 Time 4. Interview #179 Time 2. Interview #179 Time 2. Reginald’s mother was Jamaican American and his father was African American born in the United States. He self-identified as African American. Interview #179 Time 1. Interview #179 Time 1. Tonychan’s pseudonym was Tony Chan but Reginald affectionately blurred his first and second name together. Tonychan was Puerto Rican American and Chinese American and he did not attend school with Reginald. Interview #179 Time 2. Interview #179 Time 3. Interview #179 Time 2. Interview #179 Time 2. Interview #179 Time 2. Interview #179 Time 2. Interview #179 Time 3. Interview #179 Time 2. Interview #179 Time 3.

listening to friendships / 129 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

Interview #179 Time 3. Interview #179 Time 4. Interview #121 Time 2. Interview #121 Time 2. Lena refers to a friend who calls her a dog because she follows her friends too much. Interview #121 Time 2. Interview #121 Time 2 Interview #121 Time 4. (Brown 1989) Interview #155 Time 4. Like Reginald, several other students in the study also reported working on schoolwork with friends. However, the degree and frequency of cooperation and competition are greater among the Chinese American students discussed in this case study.

References Brown, Bradford. 1989. “The Role of Peer Groups in Adolescents’ Adjustment to Secondary School.” in Peer Relationships in Child Development, edited by T. J. Berndt and G. W. Ladd. New York: Wiley.


Ch a p t e r Fi v e “It ’s Li k e I’m i n a St e r eot y p e”1 Co-authored with Niobe Way

When thinking about discrimination in American schools, a common historical reference is to September 1957, when Little Rock Nine, a group of young, African American high school students, walked through a jeering crowd of white students and parents in Alabama. The powerful images of army troops enforcing the court order for desegregation conjure the ongoing struggles of African Americans to integrate the public schools and the fierce rejection by some whites. A more current image of discrimination in schools, however, requires a different conceptual framework. In Higher Learning, John Singleton’s 1995 movie, set at the fictional Columbus University in California, the narrator describes the places on campus where the various racial and ethnic groups congregate. You take a trip around the world. Look there, by the statue, you see them people, that’s Disneyland and there’s Chinatown, and over there, that’s south of the boarder and this right here, is called the Blackhole, cause we black folks.2

Adolescents who attend urban public schools are increasingly experiencing what has been popularly called the “browning of America.” In comparison with previous waves of immigration, the post-1965 wave of immigration (the “new second generation”) is more diverse consisting of people from a larger variety of countries.3 Therefore, adolescents, particularly those in large urban centers, are not typically attending schools that are either segregated or integrated along black/white lines


but have a culturally diverse student body that includes students from Latin American, Central American, Central Asia, South East Asia, West Indies, and the Caribbean Islands. Furthermore, recent immigrant students from these countries also attend school with first-, second-, and third-generation Americans who share their country of origin. Given the rich diversity of the student body and the tensions that are emerging in these schools regarding race and ethnicity, researchers should begin examining the inter- and intra-group relations among students who attend such ethnically and racially diverse schools.4 Asking minority adolescents to talk about discrimination is clearly a loaded topic. Consequently, the definition of discrimination needs to be clear. Many students are hesitant to blame bad behavior on discrimination. For example, Sheera, an African American student, was asked whether she ever experienced discrimination in school. Sheerah: The teachers think that the Chinese kids can do everything. . . . Kids . . . bother the Chinese kids in the hallway . . . You know Chinese kids are quiet in my class so, it’s like, they get a better grade. Interviewer: . . . So you think the teachers discriminate in favor of the Chinese kids? Sheerah: I don’t think they (are) racist. I think . . . it’s just that they . . . give Chinese kids a better grade. Interviewer: Why do you think that is? Sheerah: Cause they (are) quiet . . . and we (are) loud . . . .

Sheerah’s response was typical of many urban students attending multiethnic/racial schools.5 Their experiences of discrimination were often subtle so that it was unclear to the students whether their experiences were, in fact, examples of discrimination. Furthermore, their experiences of discrimination were frequently based not on black/white relations but on relations among and between ethnic minority groups. And finally, discrimination was not simply from adults toward students but between peers as well. These nuances in the experience of discrimination among urban ethnic minority adolescents, however, have not been explored in social science research. The majority of research about racial and ethnic discrimination focuses on black/white relations and does not address the more subtle forms of racism and discrimination

“it’s like i’m in a stereotype” / 133

that often occur in urban high schools. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the ways in which African American, Latino, and Asian American high school students experienced discrimination and racism in an urban high school context. How Is Discrimination Defined? Over time, definitions of discrimination have changed as researchers have grown more attuned to the ways in which discrimination works and is experienced by different ethnic and racial groups. Most recent definitions, however, distinguish between “symbolic” versus “traditional” racism as well as “institutional” versus “individual” discrimination.6 Scholars have used the term “symbolic racism” to distinguish it from more blatant forms of discrimination called “traditional racism.”7 Traditional racism is a shared, common negative attitude toward African Americans; symbolic racism is a more subtle form of behavior. While a traditional racist might assert that whites are smarter than blacks, a symbolic racist would not agree with this statement but would also not support affirmative action plans. It’s not that racism left the scene, “it just changed character.”8 For many whites and some minorities, traditional racism is the only form of racism they define as such, and increasingly researchers find that this form of racism is on the decline.9 Symbolic racism is more difficult to define because it is a subtle form of exclusion, segregation, or support of the status quo. Symbolic racism is often defended philosophically by emphasizing the principles of individual rights over equal rights.10 Institutional discrimination is also considered a different form of discrimination than individual discrimination. A white person bombing a black church is an example of individual discrimination, while black children suffering from the lack of medical services that are made available to them nationwide is institutional discrimination. Although the outcomes of both situations are severe, institutional forms of racism exist in situations where whites may be unaware that they are discriminating against blacks.11 Still, a relationship exists between the individual or micro forms of discrimination and the institutional or macro forms. Both forms are mutually interdependent and part of the same system of inequality.12


Discrimination among Asian Americans, Latinos, and African Americans When Asian American students were asked in their interviews to discuss discrimination, they described stories of harassment and discrimination from their non-Asian American peers in school. When the interviewer asked Cindy, “how do you think being Chinese affects your friends, or your friendships?” she responded: The people in the school, they call me chino, stupid, or geek, or anything like that because I’m Chinese. But it really doesn’t bother me or my friends. Just that some of us then we’ll get really angry and want to beat them up, but I don’t care.

My observations and interviews revealed numerous incidences of physical harassment of the Asian American students by the non-Asian American students in school. Asian American students reported random slapping or pop-shots to the head or body, by both male and female peers as they walked through the hallways. They described this physical form of harassment as unnerving, randomly occurring, and humiliating violations that were particularly harrowing for the boys when females slapped them. As a result of being physically harassed, many of the Asian American males in 9th grade reported wanting to grow taller or larger, or to work out so as to prevent attacks or be ready to physically defend themselves in school. An Asian American male explained that being bigger would prevent physical harassment. It was observed and reported that besides being hit, Asian American students were being pushed, punched, teased, and mocked by their non-Asian American peers. The racial slur “chino” or “geek” was often heard as Asian American students passed by. The physical and verbal harassment of the Asian American students occurred both when adults were present and when they were not. Kit Wah told the interviewer that a male Asian American friend was held at knife point in the gym locker by a student in his class. His friend was robbed several items. All of their Asian American friends knew about the robbery but the student himself was too afraid to tell the authorities in school about the incident. Kit Wah felt that if his friend told the school authorities he would appear weak to his peers and assailant, and the school authorities would not be able to protect him and he would be attacked again.13


Incidents such as these that included having money, jewelry, and jackets stolen are typical events that Asian American students described when discussing how they were victimized for being Asian American in school. African American and Latino students also described having possessions stolen, but Asian American students appeared to be more frequently targeted.14 These events seemed to be a part of the normalized landscape of behaviors that Asian American students endured in this school. Students from all racial and ethnic groups at LCHS noted segregation and discrimination against Asian American students. In their interviews, African American and Latino students pointed to a social hierarchy in school based on the ability to interact with people from many racial and ethnic backgrounds, defending oneself if necessary, and knowledge about how to get along. Low status was relegated to Asian Americans even though they were one of two most populous ethnic groups in the school. When Asian American students did not fight back, they lost face among their peers because they appeared weak, scared, and unwilling to defend themselves. According to the African American and Latino students, when Asian Americans showed that they were scared of their peers and/or could not differentiate between people who would victimize them and those who would not, they further displayed their vulnerability and inability to know how to get along with people from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds. Discrimination by Adults When African American and Latino students were asked about their experiences with discrimination, they described hostile relationships with adults in positions of authority such as police officers, shopkeepers, and teachers in school. Many of the African American and Latino students reported being followed by shopkeepers in stores with friends and sometimes when they were with their parents. Stories were told repeatedly about being harassed by police officers while walking through their neighborhood or hanging out with friends in and around school. The frequency of these hostile encounters sent a clear message of distrust by adults (most of whom were white but some of whom were Asian American, black, or Latino) to African American and Latino students. These events were not isolated or singular but were experienced repeatedly over the years and in different locations. It was important to


note that none of the Asian American students reported experiencing discrimination by teachers, shopkeepers, or police officers. Benjamin described an encounter with the police who patrol the school. He described a situation in which the policemen harassed him on two occasions as he was on his way to school. When Benjamin responded to the officers’ questions, they picked him up for disrespecting their authority and searched through his belongings. Benjamin, a Dominican student who also identified as black, explained candidly how being a black teenager feels. Interviewer: And what do you think, what do you feel about being black? Benjamin: It’s alright. It’s just that there’s a lot of flaws. . . . There’s so much stuff that . . . happens to black people and like I may be just because I’m a black teen now . . . when people seem to think of me in one way . . . as like the other black teens . . . .a lot of black teens do bad stuff . . . and I’m like in a stereotype (emphasis added) and even a lot of stuff that happens you know they just see me as that black teen and stuff ’s a lot of trouble . . . and I’m not (a lot of trouble).

For Benjamin, encounters such as those with the police were examples of how “controlling images” of black teenagers as guilty until proven innocent and of black males as threatening and violent have a negative emotional impact on a young adolescent’s life.15 Benjamin’s poignant feelings about being trapped in a stereotype were shared by numerous black and Latino students in their interview. Anton, an African American student of Caribbean descent, was asked what it means to be African American. He replied, . . . I feel it’s a struggle . . . It is a struggle because . . . if you’re not dressed . . . appropriate, and you go into a store . . . they feel like if you’re Dominican, or you’re black, or Puerto Rican, with your hat backwards, they think you’re gonna steal something . . . That’s the . . . thing, I’m.. really worried about. Interviewer: How do you worry about it? Anton: I’m going to the store . . . I’m just looking at stuff, I don’t buy something . . . I just feel guilty, even though I didn’t steal nothing . . . People looking at me, look at my friends. But if you go to a store . . . you know, dressed nice, slacks, shoes, you know, they think you ain’t gonna steal nothing . . . they just . . . too quick to judge.

“it’s like i’m in a stereotype” / 137 Interviewer: And who is . . . too quick to judge? Anton: Like, anyone, people in general, people who are in control of the store. Interviewer: Yeah. And does it happen in other places like school? Anton: Yeah. It happens everywhere in the world.

Benjamin and Anton’s statements referred not just to one incident with the police or shopkeepers but to how blacks and other minority teenagers are in general treated and the racism implicit in these interactions. They referred to experiences of discrimination that accumulated over time and in different locations. The “cumulative discrimination” experienced by Benjamin and Anton seemed to have a larger impact than a singular incident.16 The Latino and African American students also perceived their teachers as implicitly or explicitly racist or discriminatory. Although students did not necessarily perceive their conflicts with teachers as overt consequences of discrimination, they perceived the adults in school as unjust and implicitly racist. They described their teachers’ low academic expectations and stereotypes about “bad kids” or kids who “start trouble.” They felt that no matter what their actual behavior was in the classroom, they were typically stereotyped by their teachers as “bad kids.” In the eyes of over half of the Latino and black students, the teachers were generally uncaring and ineffective. Valeria described her experiences: I don’t know, some of the teachers don’t care, they don’t teach you. I had some problems with teachers, they just passed me but they did not teach me anything and that’s bad for me, for the state exams. Interviewer: How would you define a good teacher? Valeria: I don’t know. I guess the ones that are stricter and that give you more work. I think that those are good teachers ‘cause they care. But the ones that don’t . . . give you work . . . and its ‘cause they don’t care, they still gonna get paid . . . so they not teaching us anything. And that’s harder for us, not them, because they already been through it . . . They already working in their careers, but we’re the ones that are trying to get up there [become successful].

Students felt that a caring teacher should help students when they didn’t understand the material, control the students in the classroom, and maintain high expectations by encouraging students to study and achieve academically. Yet according to black and Latino students many


teachers were emotionally distant from them, categorized black and Latino students as “uneducable” (in conversations with the researchers), and seemed generally unconcerned with the lack of achievement of their black and Latino students. Some teachers were more overt than others in their insensitive attitudes toward the black and Latino adolescents in their classroom. For example, Ms. Schwartz showed minimal understanding about respecting the diversity of cultures in her classroom. After complimenting Latoya, an African American student, on the attractiveness of her new braids, the teacher asked Latoya how she would wash her head if she kept the braids. Latoya, looking vulnerable, said that she would keep the braids for several months and wet her head in the shower. Ms. Schwartz, looking surprised, exclaimed loudly, “oh that is so dirty, you will have bugs in your hair.” The student appeared alarmed and she and her peers were angered by such a culturally insensitive remark. The consequence of their interactions was that the teacher repeatedly reprimanded Latoya during the class for being a petulant troublemaker. A Chinese American student, Allen told a story about teachers that he didn’t like because they discriminated against African American and Latino students. He said that Mr. Lowe was reviewing a list of materials for a final exam and came to the section on African American history. A student asked a question about an aspect of African American history that was confusing and the teacher responded saying that knowing about African American history was unimportant and it would not help the students in their knowledge of history. Allen understood that the teacher’s statement was not only untrue but also racist. In contrast to the African American and Latino students, most Asian American students reported that the teachers were caring and fair to the Asian American students. The disparity in relationships with teachers between Asian American students and the rest of the students was readily apparent. Mai, a particularly outspoken Asian American female, captured the feelings of many of the Asian American students toward the teacher. Interviewer: How do you think that you are treated in school by the teachers and other staff here? Mai: Well I think they like me cause like I’m always there raising my hand or something. And I know my math teacher she love(s) me . . . I always go.. up to the board. I’m like her number one student right now. Cause I’m getting like all 100’s on the tests . . . And she loves

“it’s like i’m in a stereotype” / 139 that, she’s like . . . someone she can get through to. Everybody else is like dead . . . Teachers like me because I listen. I pay attention. I understand. . . . They want you to understand quicker. So they can get through a different lesson . . . They don’t wanna go slow.

Mai’s feelings of confidence in her academic skills and the consequent positive relationship with teachers may stem from the teachers’ general preference for teaching “immigrant students”—a view that was openly expressed in the faculty lounge and departmental offices. “Immigrant students” generally meant Asian American students who formed the majority of immigrant students in this school. It included both those Asian American students who were immigrants as well as those who were not and referred to well-behaved and hard-working students. This description implicitly contrasted the “lazy” behavior of “other” students with the discipline of the “immigrant students.” These code words for Asian versus black and Latino appeared to be attempts by the teachers to avoid any suggestion of racism—preferring immigrant students over non-immigrant students did not seem to be as racist as preferring Asian students over black and Latino students. Intra-group Relations When students of Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Chinese descent were asked to talk about the different groups in school, they interpreted this question in a local manner referring to within group tensions such as those between Puerto Ricans and Dominicans or between Chinese born in the United States and recently emigrated Chinese. Since Dominicans and Puerto Ricans are from different countries and most Puerto Ricans came to New York City before the Dominicans, it was not surprising that they found differences among themselves. Friction between Puerto Rican and Dominican students included disliking the other groups’ overt display of ethnic pride and/or differences in speaking Spanish too quickly or too loudly. The Chilean American student Isidora, whose case study is explored in chapter three, was asked to describe where she fits in with the segregated groups of Dominicans and Puerto Ricans in school. She said, I hang out with both . . . The group I hang out with is like, mix. It’s, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans . . . But like, you know, you shouldn’t say something about one heritage that would hurt somebody else’s

140 / the multiracial urban high school feelings . . . Cause that’s how fights start . . . Cause last year there was a problem. This girl . . . was proud of being Dominican, there’ nothing wrong with that, you should be proud. So then, this Puerto Rican girl said (to Dominicans) . . . not to get too happy because they were immigrants, that’s how the fight started, she shouldn’t say that . . . just cause you’re Puerto Rican and you (are) part of the United States, doesn’t mean . . . you (are a) big thing . . . That really hurt that person’s feeling, as well as, for the other Dominican kids. So that started a big fight. It’s usually like . . . they would dis(respect) you, or . . . if you’re an immigrant . . . , usually Puerto Ricans, they be saying that to other (people), from other countries.

Throughout her interview Isidora struggled to reconcile her position as a Chilean American whose friends are both Puerto Rican and Dominican. Although she professed in her interviews that everyone gets along, her recollections were replete with stories of fights that created rifts between Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. Isidora struggled with her desire to believe that race and ethnicity were not important for her friends, conceding that for some of her friends and peers in school it did matter. Isidora and others suggested that some of the problems stemmed from varying degrees of feeling more American and recentness of immigration. Puerto Rican students often felt more American and saw Dominicans as less American. Ethnographic and interview data also revealed strain among the Chinese American students. At LCHS, there was a large population of Chinese American ELL (English Language Learners) and a smaller population of English-speaking Asian American students. “Mainstream” (i.e., raised predominantly in the United States) Chinese American students, most of whom emigrated when they were very young, considered themselves ABCs (American Born Chinese) and felt embarrassment, discomfort, and sometimes outrage when they were confused with FOBs (fresh off the boat) or very recent immigrants. The mainstream Chinese American students, using their knowledge of the differences between ABCs and FOBs, were acutely aware of the subtle clues of dress, style, and manner that distinguished them from recently emigrated Chinese Americans. Mainstream Chinese Americans voiced anger at the inability of others in the school to distinguish among groups of Chinese Americans. This frustration was particularly acute for Chinese American boys, who were more likely than the Chinese


American girls to embrace urban youth styles, music, and fashions such as baggy pants.17 Chinese American students in the sample described tensions that related directly to being more Americanized or assimilated than more recently immigrated Chinese American peers. Lena, a recent Chinese immigrant, whose case study is explored in chapter four, described the differences between her and other mainstream Chinese American students in school. Interviewer: So how do you describe yourself? Lena: . . . I grew up in China so . . . I think the way Chinese does . . . I compare myself . . . to people that were my friends. (Refers to Chinese American students) And they grew up here, they just have different things, they might be high confidence, they will do stuff that I won’t do . . . because I grew up in China . . . I have that kind of personality of old-fashioned people . . . Because they grew up here and they use a lot of money . . . and their parents might have money. And they will think that $50 is not that much for clothes . . . For me it’s a lot . . . I think that $50 could buy a lot of things.

Lena articulated the differences between Chinese American students in school who shared similar aspects of her ethnicity, but from whom she felt different psychologically. When talking about herself and friends in school, Lena drew distinctions based on degrees of acculturation by referring to their American consumerism. While research has focused on students’ preferences for same-race or same-ethnicity friends, Lena focused on critical differences among Chinese Americans.18 These differences were crucial to adolescents’ understanding of how it felt to share the same race and ethnicity with friends while experiencing differences based on degrees of acculturation. At LCHS it was unlikely that Lena will become friends with students who are not of Chinese descent. Yet, she also felt isolated from those she was “supposed” to feel close to. Limited to choosing friends based on ethnicity, as opposed to shared interests, many students appeared to find themselves even more isolated when they felt distanced not only from the mainstream culture but also from same-ethnicity peers. When listening to students’ stories it was clear that tensions and divisions within racial or ethnic groups were important aspects of many students’ everyday lived experiences. A theme in students’ discussion


about race and ethnicity was the need for others to acknowledge differences between themselves and others in the same racial or ethnic category. Experiences of race and ethnicity differed by racial and ethnic categorization in the same locale and may be as much about defining the collective identity and differences among the in-group as it was about defining the identity of those outside of the group. When responding to our questions about race and ethnicity and/or about experiences of racism or discrimination, students spoke initially using a colorblind language referencing American equality making comments such as “I have friends of all colors” and “everyone gets along here.” When Nikki, an African American female, was asked whether being African American is important, she said “not really.” When probed about her answer, Nikki said, Nikki: It’s just that you don’t think about it, it don’t matter to me. If I was black, Puerto Rican, it won’t matter to me. Interviewer: Why not? Nikki: I just feel that everybody’s the same no matter what they are.

These adolescents wanted to believe in the American ideals of equality and opportunity for all. However, when probed about the realness of the American voice of equality in relation to their own experiences, students often recalled poignant examples of discrimination. Some students shifted between professing their desire to exist in a colorblind world free of discrimination and using their everyday experiences and reality to talk about the inequalites in their lives challenge the lack of egalitarianism in the United States. Most students expressed this contradiction by sometimes saying that race and ethnicity do not matter and also claiming that they do. In An American Dilemma (1944), Gunnar Myrdal named a fundamental disjunction between the American belief in egalitarian ideas of freedom and equality and the persistence of segregation and prejudice that caused discrimination. The American voice of equality references a dominant belief in American culture that downplays the differences among racial and ethnic groups, often ignores the significance of racism, and fosters the perception of equality among the races. This contradiction described by Myrdal (1944) was heard in many of the students’ interviews.


Isidora, who in the previous section discussed tensions between Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, was asked to describe her personality. Isidora responded, Well, I get along with everybody, you know. Its like, mostly like, the friends I have like, they don’t have to be like a certain color, or something. You know, I get along with everybody. It don’t . . . matter how they are . . . Its like . . . they [peers] don’t get you [like you] because of your color, they way you speak, or like what you are, where you’re from . . . But, you know, I just get along with everybody, I don’t care where they’re from.

In several sections of her interview, whether she described her personality, her friends, or the relationship between friendship and her Chilean heritage, Isidora believed and relied on a value of American egalitarianism. Simultaneously, she struggled with knowing that some of her friends and peers in school did not want to be friends with people from other racial and/or ethnic groups. When she was asked to describe herself, Isidora articulated this struggle: I think I’m a good friend to . . . know cause . . . I give everybody a chance . . . not just because you’re black or you’re Chinese, I’m not gonna talk to you . . . cause I have Chinese friends . . . but you hear . . . “oh they’re stupid, they’re nerds.” I go no, I’ll . . . give everybody a chance not by the way they look . . . some of them are . . . nice . . . you never know they could be your best friend . . .

Isidora also struggled with her own ethnic identity as a Chilean American in a school where most of the Latinos are Dominican or Puerto Rican. Repeatedly saying that it was important not to be ashamed of her heritage, she was also careful not to show excessive pride that may insult her peers. As such, Isidora demonstrated her knowledge of how to behave by not making decisions about others only on the basis of race or ethnicity, not denigrating others’ ethnicity while claiming her own, or not being too assertive about her own ethnicity.19 Other students responded to this implicit and explicit set of behavioral guidelines by assuming that talking about one’s own race or ethnicity or expressing feelings of pride could have negative consequences. For some students in the sample, discussing race and ethnicity could be misunderstood as being


racist. As such, these students prefaced their statements about their experiences of race and ethnicity by saying, “I’m not racist.” Following such proclamations, however, they were willing to discuss their views on race and ethnicity and discrimination. Concluding Comments Variations in the source and experience of discrimination depended on the racial and/or ethnic background of the students involved. African American and Latino students experienced discrimination from adults in positions of authority including teachers, police officers, and shopkeepers, while Asian Americans struggled with discrimination from their peers. Similar findings have been reported in other studies of urban high schools.20 The public nature of the discrimination, in the hallways and on the stairways, and the frequency with which all students reported seeing and experiencing these acts were striking. The observation of discrimination by peers and by teachers created a hostile school climate where everyone observed and knew that students were discriminated against on a regular basis, either by adults or peers. Minimal intervention and lack of response by adults in school, furthermore, appeared to condone the behavior. The distinction in sources and types of discrimination may be crucial toward understanding why some students appear to “overcome” the obstacles presented by discrimination while others seem stymied. Peer discrimination, for example, may have less dire consequences on academic and career outcomes than adult discrimination and may begin to explain why Asian American students often seem more resilient to the effects of discrimination than black or Latino students. Peer discrimination, however, may have very serious effects on peer relations. For example, all students, Asian American, African American, and Latino, valued and wanted to have friends from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. However, only the black and Latino students felt confident and comfortable in their abilities to maintain racially and ethnically diverse friendships (although these friendships rarely included Asian Americans). The Asian American students were more clannish and afraid to interact with African American and Latino students. The lack of racial/ethnic diversity in their friendships was most likely due to the harassment they experienced by their non-Asian peers, and to their own negative stereotypes of black and


Latino students that were rarely challenged because they did not have any friends from these cultural groups (leading to a circular process). Efforts to address problems of discrimination in schools need to recognize the variety of forms of discrimination and how each form may have distinct consequences on the well-being of students. These consequences, furthermore, may be not only academic but social and emotional as well. Discussions with teachers, observational data, and interviews suggested that many of the teachers at LCHS implicitly or explicitly believed in the model minority myth regarding Asian students and, thus, had contentious relationships with Latinos and African Americans. From the African American and Latino students’ perspective, teachers favored and had high academic expectations for Asian American students but not for them. Teachers’ low expectations for African American and Latino students’ achievement and behavior have been previously noted and teachers’ high expectations for Asian American students’ achievement and behavior have also been well documented.21 However, it is the interaction between these two expectations that has rarely been addressed. The stereotypes about one group relied and was built on the stereotypes about the other group. If Asian Americans are hardworking and successful, then African American and Latino students are lazy and unsuccessful. Research about the implications of the Asian American model minority stereotype has underscored how the stereotype prevented teachers from identifying Asian American students who are not doing well in school and/or performed poorly in math and science.22 Less research has emphasized the social consequences of the myth of the model minority for Asian American peer relations and for African American and Latino academic success. The implications of the myth of the model minority are the messages it sends to less academically successful minority groups. Inherent in the argument that creates a pedestal that supports only one race and ethnic group is an “accusing message to blacks, Latinos and American Indians . . . ‘They overcame discrimination—why can’t you?’ ”23 These messages penetrated the social relations among minority teens and fostered a hostile school climate enacted through the harassment of Asian American students by their Latino and African American peers and between predominantly white teachers and African American and Latino students.


The faculty at the school rarely acknowledged these poor teacher/ student and student/student relationships or recognized the differences in experiences among racial and ethnic minority groups. The lack of attention to social relationships in the school appeared to adversely affect not only the relations between the teachers and the African American and Latino students, but also the interactions of Asian American students with their peers, which manifested in many ways including their feelings of insecurity and inability to build friendships with students outside of their own racial and ethnic group. According to Allport (1954), in order to promote positive interracial interactions, people need to have contact under specific conditions that include equal status. Due to tracking by ability and ultimately race and ethnicity, students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds had minimal contact with one another in the classroom and were not under conditions of equal status. The various programs segregated students by race and ethnicity and also physically separated students in the school for programs such as English Language Learners, Special Education, vocational training, honors track, GED, and cooperative work. Most extracurricular activities were also segregated by race and ethnicity including the most prominent activities such as the African American club, the Latino club, and the Asian American club. By far the most significant school events were the cultural performances by each of these groups that included members of only one racial and ethnic group. Although race- and ethnicity-based clubs were not in and of themselves problematic, when students had few other opportunities in the classroom to interact with students from other cultures and little interest in other clubs besides those based on racial and ethnic identity, these clubs reinforced the segregation permeating the rest of the interactions in school. Hostile intergroup interactions made the school unsafe for Asian Americans and academically harmful for Latinos and black students. Although the term minority is useful to organize a diverse group of people with common social and political needs, the term can obscure differences such as treatment by those in positions of power. As such, comparisons between the relative successes and failures of minority groups often do not account for tangible variation in barriers. Not only are minority group comparisons often unfair, the success or failure of one group is attributed to the particularities of cultural practices or to individual


merit, again disregarding concrete and systemic differences in treatment. Furthermore assuming coherence or uniformity within a minority group overlooks glaring tensions within the group that often defined social relations from the perspective of those who experience them. Our findings suggested that urban high school students are very much aware of these dynamics. They struggled to live with the contradiction of “American egalitarianism” and the stereotypes, harassment, and discrimination they experienced in their lives. They spoke passionately about the ways in which the assumption of uniformity is harmful and how the interaction between positive and negative stereotypes shapes their daily interactions. They revealed patterns of discriminatory processes that have yet to be noted in the social science literature. Listening to their stories allowed us to begin to understand the ways in which symbolic, traditional, institutional, and individual forms of discrimination work in an urban high school setting that is more diverse and complex, nationally and locally, than ever before. In a school, where Asian American students were academically more successful than Latino and African American students, the inequalities within one school can seem as significant as those between wealthy suburban schools and poor urban schools. Future research should continue to explore the diverse experiences of urban, ethnic minority students in multicultural schools, as well as in other contexts such as employment or housing. Analysis of dynamics within and between racial and ethnic groups in various contexts is an important goal for future research, not as a way of denigrating one group while lauding the accomplishments of another group, but rather as a way of understanding how social processes shape life opportunities. Notes 1. Parts of this chapter were previously published by Susan Rakosi Rosenbloom and Niobe Way. 2004. “Experiences of Discrimination among African American, Asian American, and Latino Adolescents in an Urban High School Students.” Youth and Society 35:420–451. 2. (Singleton 1995) 3. (Portes and Rumbaut 1996) 4. (Conchas and Noguero 2004) 5. (Conchas and Noguero 2004; Way 1998)

148 / the multiracial urban high school 6. (Kinder 1986; Kinder and Sears 1981; McClelland and Auster 1990; McConahay and Hough 1976). 7. (McClelland and Auster 1990:608) 8. (McClelland and Auster 1990:609) 9. (McClelland and Auster 1990:635) 10. (McClelland and Auster 1990:610) 11. (Feagin 1977; Feagin and Feagin 1996; Hamilton and Carmichael 1967) 12. (Feagin and Feagin 1996) 13. After the interview, the interviewer consulted several other members of the research team to decide how to handle this situation. The interviewee was contacted again and asked whether he would be willing to talk to school officials about the robbery. Together the student and the interviewer spoke with school authorities who immediately responded. 14. For example, during their first two years of high school Asian American students were targeted for robberies walking to and from the school. School officials responded by suggesting that Asian American students walk in groups and encouraging students not to wear jewelry to school. In another case a male student was prosecuted for pulling a necklace off a Chinese American student in the hallway. 15. (Collins 1991; Gardner 1980) 16. (Comer 1989; Feagin 1992) 17. Shih (1998) writes that according to the immigrant Chinese students she studied, the term ABC is more complex than just having been born in the United States. ABC can also refer to limited Chinese language ability, cultural identification with Americans, and a dislike for spending time with other Chinese people. Although the term is not necessarily derogatory, immigrant Chinese students can use it negatively when discussing their more Americanized peers (p. 238). 18. (Kandel 1978; MacLeod 1987; Olsen 1997; Tatum 1997) 19. (Peshkin 1991) 20. (see Conchas and Noguero, in press) 21. (Farkas et al. 1990; Goto 1997; Ladson-Billings 1994; Lee 1994; Lipman 1998; Rist 1970) 22. (Lee 1994) 23. (Tatum 1997:160)

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150 / the multiracial urban high school Portes, Alejandro, and Ruben G. Rumbaut. 1996. Immigrant America: A Portrait. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rist, Ray. 1970. “The Self-fulfilling Prophecy of the Ghetto School.” Harvard Educational Review 40:411–451. Shih, Tzymei Alex. 1998. “Finding the Niche: Friendship Formation of Immigrant Adolescents.” Youth & Society 30:209–240. Singleton, John (director), Higher Learning, 1995. Columbia Pictures. Tatum, Beverly. 1997. Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations about Race. New York: Basic Books. Way, Niobe. 1998. Everyday Courage: The Lives and Stories of Urban Teenagers. New York: New York University Press.

Ch a p t e r Si x Wh at I f You Ca n’t Le a r n A n y w h e r e? Tr a pped by Sc hool Choic e

In New York City, a hierarchical structure of schools and immense differences in educational quality exist. At the bottom of the educational hierarchy, neighborhood schools not only struggle with the least resources and students with the most needs but also contend with stigma of attending what are commonly known as “bad” schools.1 The specialized, public high schools in NYC are known for top-quality education and for choosing and producing the finest students and graduates who become vital contributors to society. One can argue that the differences between public high schools within the NYC school system are emblematic of both the worst and the best aspects of urban public education in the United States. Elite public high schools seem to fulfill our need to believe in the meritocratic system of educational attainment and access. Depending on the outcome of standardized testing and grades, students gain entrance into some of the most prestigious public schools in the country. These schools are racially and ethnically diverse filled with bright students born in the United States and abroad. In this chapter, I investigate the experiences of a particular group of students who are frequently overlooked in both public and academic debates about school choice. The students who attend Neighborhood High School are mostly from a group of school choice participants I call “non-admits.” “Non-admits” go through the process of applying to better schools but are rejected and by default attend their neighborhood or zoned school. Furthermore, most did not participate in a wellordered process of investigation about their various school options with knowledgeable adult advisors. Instead, many haphazardly participated


in the school choice process and eventually resigned to attending the neighborhood school they initially tried to avoid. The students at the very bottom of the educational hierarchy received the trappings of choice that emphasize how the school choice process worked to obfuscate their lack of choice; in other words, they became trapped by choice. Though they participated in the school plan, they attended the same neighborhood school they tried to avoid. “Non-admits” are aware of the hierarchical structure of the school system because they tried to avoid their stigmatized neighborhood school. After all, why would they want to attend a high school that was commonly known to be unsafe, dirty, and populated with students who never graduate. Yet, when they were unsuccessful at gaining entrance to a better school, they claimed they can “learn anywhere.” In this chapter, I argue that attending a high school at the bottom of the educational hierarchy contributed to students’ negative perspective of their peers. Students connected an academically failing high school with their perception of peers who could not be trusted and had minimal potential. Parental perceptions about the qualities of “good” and “bad” schools are strongly connected to their beliefs about the race, ethnicity, and class of the students. “Good” and “bad” schools are coded words that speak less about specific qualities of schools and more about the social categories including race and class of the students who attend. The exploratory findings in this chapter suggest that the policy of school choice in the NYC school system adds to students’ perceptions of themselves and others as “having minimal potential.” Being a school choice “non-admit” contributes to students’ understanding of their stigmatized position in the stratified school system and potentially in the American social structure. If the word entitlement encapsulates privileged students’ expectations, then entrapment describes the relationship of working class, poor, and minority students’ experiences with school choice. From students’ perspective, attending a neighborhood high school meant they were surrounded by peers who, like themselves, had already been rejected from better schools. Neighborhood schools, particularly those in minority and low-income communities, have the worst reputation in the academic hierarchy of the public school system in NYC. Students made a connection between attending a zoned or neighborhood school and being surrounded by a particular type of peer group called “bad kids.”

what if you can’t learn anywhere? / 153

“Non-admits” reported that they did not make informed decisions about choosing schools and frequently admitted to not fully understanding how the process worked. When they arrived at Last Choice High School (LCHS), they found programs that differed from the descriptions in the Directory of High Schools. As thick as a telephone book, the Directory of High Schools documents information about all NYC high schools; it was the dominant source of information for most students in the study. This chapter briefly describes the process of school choice in NYC and then explores how students’ experiences participating in this complex process influenced their perceptions of peers. How It Works: Negotiating the Maze of School Choice in NYC In NYC, school choice results in legendary fierce competition among students who vie for acceptance at prestigious “star” public schools.2 These schools, such as Stuyvesant High School, Brooklyn Technical High School, and Bronx High School of Science, require students to take a competitive exam the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT). It was commonly assumed among people who understand the hierarchy of the NYC public schools that students attending specialized high schools have brighter prospects than students attending most neighborhood or zoned schools. In comparison, at the bottom of the school hierarchy students scrambled to avoid attending their neighborhood school, particularly when, like LCHS, it had a negative reputation. Devine stated it plainly, “Being forced . . . to enter the local lower-tier school is widely interpreted as failure.”3 The workings of the admissions process in NYC public schools were hidden and confusing. The Department of Education (DOE) did not report the number of students who do not receive their first, second, or third choice of schools or the percentages of students attending neighborhood schools.4 However, most advocacy groups and researchers agreed that approximately 50 percent of all incoming 9th grade students attended their neighborhood schools. Reports produced by Advocates for Children and Educational Priorities Panel (EPP) investigated the effectiveness of the admissions process in NYC.5 Describing the admissions process as needlessly complicated, confusing, and cumbersome for students, parents, and educators, these reports concluded that school


choice admissions were less a process and more a maze that 100,000 students negotiated yearly.6 The process began when each student who planned to attend a public high school filled out a four-page application, part of a 51-page booklet. In 2002–2003, the Directory of the Public High Schools was 488 pages long and listed 236 high schools in five boroughs.7 About 55 of these high schools, including LCHS, were zoned. Among many other problems discussed in these reports, the directory was difficult to understand, included unneeded details, and lacked complete information about programs.8 For example, definitions of programs were not standardized among schools. An art program could refer to a school with one, two, or three art classes or it could describe a specialized art high school. The foremost problems with the process were the lack of guidance for students as they discussed their options and too few seats in successful schools. Little or no opportunity to talk with guidance counselors for an extended period of time is cited by advocacy organizations as contributing to students’ lack of information about the process, the choices, and how the process works.9 The student to guidance counselor ratio at LCHS was 225:1.10 The lack of seats available in specialized schools was evidenced by the 20,000 students who took the exam to enter the “star” public high schools, when only 3,000 were accepted.11 As the Educational Priorities Panel report found, most students’ goal was not to attend their neighborhood school if it had a poor reputation. Even with the addition of more specialized and small schools by the 1990s, 50 percent of students entering high school ended up in their zoned school but only 20 percent chose to attend their zoned school. This suggests that about 30 percent of students were “non-admits,” a category rarely discussed in highly politicized debates about school.12 Go Somewhere Else Jakeena was a savvy, energetic, and smart teenager who lived with her grandmother after her mother died of AIDS when she was in junior high school. Although she had been at LCHS for three years, she failed so many classes that she only had enough credits to be a sophomore; she knew she was making minimal progress toward graduating. I asked Jakeena whether she would advise a friend to attend LCHS. Her


negative response summed-up many students’ feelings: This school’s not so bad, but I think to recommend it, I wouldn’t. If you can get into a better one, I don’t think this is the school you’d want to be at when you have a lot of potential. You’ll probably want to go somewhere else.13

After three years Jakeena possessed information she did not have in 8th grade when she decided where to attend high school. She realized she must transfer from LCHS to graduate because she was making minimal progress toward graduating and failing many classes.14 Jakeena knew that academic potential is judged by where a student attends school (“. . . I don’t think this is the school you’d want to be at when you have a lot of potential”) and students at LCHS have a disadvantage because they attend a neighborhood school. Unlike other students who said they can “learn anywhere,” by her third year of high school, Jakeena understands how the hierarchy of public schools influenced expectations and possibilities for academic success. Jakeena and other students were trapped in a school with peers they perceived were not expected to succeed academically. Vincent a student born in China, started at LCHS in bilingual education classes but transitioned into mainstream classes. During his third year of high school, he was asked whether he would recommend LCHS to a friend. Vincent: I wouldn’t recommend it. No. Interviewer: Why not? Vincent: . . . Cause the one thing I don’t like about this school is it’s a zone school. Meaning . . . bad kids who were not accepted by other schools come here. They cause trouble. So there’s a lot of tough people . . . Cause they can’t go to any of those (specialized) high schools—a school where they . . . need to be smart to get into . . . the mature students.15

Vincent made a direct connection between a zone or neighborhood school, “bad kids,” and inability to attend better schools. From his perspective, LCHS consisted of “bad kids” who were not smart or mature enough to get into a better school. Jakeena and Vincent revealed their feelings about LCHS in discussions about recommending the school to others and about peers and their experiences in school. Because LCHS was a neighborhood school at the bottom of the educational hierarchy, only students who were rejected


from other schools attended it. Many, but not all, of the students in this study were “non-admits” or unsuccessful “choosers.” They applied to magnet or specialized schools but were rejected. Consequently they ended up in their neighborhood school they tried to avoid. Benjamin, an inquisitive student, developed a strong critique of school choice after four years at LCHS. In 9th grade, Benjamin was a smart, artistic, first-generation Dominican American immigrant living with his mother and older sisters. Benjamin was asked whether he would recommend the school to other students. Benjamin: . . . Not really . . . I’ll tell them . . . to get into a specialized high school. I tried . . . I passed the test and they said . . . schools were full.16 I don’t even sweat it ’cause what I’m doing here I could do at any school. Interviewer: So you feel like it’s ok for you . . . Benjamin: I wanted to get out of this school but the process is so long and big that it’s a pain . . . 17

Like almost all of the students who attended LCHS, Benjamin was rejected from better schools and discussed transferring. In this quote he seemed to take his failure in stride by stating there was no difference between schools, although he also thought other students should try to get into a better school. Like Jakeena, quoted above, Benjamin changed his mind about how school choice influenced his perceptions of peers and chances for academic success. Two years later the limitations of attending a neighborhood high school were clearer for Benjamin. I asked him whether he would recommend the school to a friend. He responded, I would tell him try to find a better school . . . Study hard and try to get into a specialized high school . . . They get all the privileges . . . All these public schools are mainly ghetto based. You gonna have a hard time to do good . . . I don’t care what people say, . . . it’s up to you, and if you really want to do it, you could. But when you got influences around you, . . . it really is hard. There are all these commercials that say if you want to do good, you really could. They got to understand that there are negative influences surrounding us all the time, constantly. And then the teachers are indifferent. They act like sometimes they couldn’t care less. So it’s not always the student’s fault . . . 18

Benjamin changed his understanding about how attending a “ghetto school” limited his opportunities. By his third and fourth year of high


school his responses revealed a jaded perspective. I asked Benjamin, now a senior, whether he would recommend the school to a friend. Benjamin: I would tell him no, go to Stuyvesant (elite public school) . . . Find another school maybe something closer, because I live too far from here. Susan: What made you come . . . here to begin with, knowing it’s far? Benjamin: I was interested in science, biology . . . They had a law program I took criminal and civil law . . . .some computer stuff they had. But I signed up for all of that. It turns out when I got here it’s not what it says. Susan: Did you get any of those courses? Benjamin: Yes I got some of them, civil law and criminal law. I took typing but they didn’t actually give me a computer class. Susan: . . . You came here to . . . get these specific classes? Benjamin: It’s not a surprise; I figured . . . that would happen. It’s like a newspaper item in a store that sells merchandise. They show you something real good and then you get there and it’s not what you expect . . . .19

Though Benjamin began high school optimistic that at a comprehensive school he could take the courses he was interested in or read about in the high school directory, by his senior year he reported feeling duped by false advertising, rejected the idea that success was solely a matter of individual effort, and maintained a cynical view about what to expect from a neighborhood high school. As he progressed through high school Benjamin’s descriptions of the problems with his neighborhood school became harsher and more specific. In comparison to Benjamin’s view, Donna’s opinion about attending a neighborhood high school changed back and forth from blaming herself for her lack of academic success to blaming the teachers and the school. Donna was a sensitive Dominican American student who wrote passionate poetry and lived in public housing close to the school. In her sophomore year, she was asked why she attended LCHS. Donna: I applied for like eight different schools. None of them accepted me. Interviewer: Is it hard to get into schools . . . ? Donna: . . . When I went to eighth grade . . . I started acting bad. I wasn’t doing my work . . . So I got low grades . . . They didn’t accept me. Interviewer: Would you recommend this school to other kids?

158 / the multiracial urban high school Donna: No . . . I haven’t. I really think it’s because of me. Because I have low grades. I’m in classes that are not that good. It makes me feel kind of dumb. . . . (I’m in) regular (mainstream) but they are kind of low.20

Donna struggled to reconcile the opinions of people who told her there were good teachers in the school and her own experiences that did not usually confirm those views. At times, she blamed herself for not getting accepted at a better school and felt “kind of dumb.” In another section of the interview the same year, Donna questioned the quality of the teaching that resulted in not learning very much. Donna was asked what she thought about LCHS. Donna: I heard that the teachers teach good. But almost all the teachers that I have don’t have control of the class . . . they can’t teach good. So I haven’t really learned that much. Interviewer: So you thought it was gonna be good before you came here but then it hasn’t been? Donna: Nah. I didn’t think it was gonna be good because I know everybody before they come here. They say that this school is not good.21

Donna struggled to form her opinion about school: at times blaming herself for not getting into a better school or for not succeeding academically, at times holding her teachers accountable. Prior to attending LCHS, she had low expectations based on the school’s negative reputation. Both Donna and Benjamin attended LCHS because they were rejected from other schools. While Donna blamed herself and sometimes her teachers, Benjamin developed a critical understanding of how the system worked against students who attended underfunded schools in poor neighborhoods. Many students, like Jakeena, Donna, and Benjamin, felt attending a neighborhood school meant others (teachers, the school system) had low expectations for them, and some, like Donna, judged themselves as unworthy of attending a better school. Some but not most students, like Benjamin, responded to the low expectations by becoming politically aware and informed about how the dual structure of “ghetto” schools and elite schools limited his opportunities for academic success. He also saw problems with an achievement ideology defining success based on individual effort and motivation that did not


take the disadvantages of his environment into consideration. Through the years Donna wavered between defining academic success based on individual effort (“doing the work”) and intelligence (“feeling dumb”) and harshly criticizing teachers’ responsibility for her education. At this typical neighborhood high school many students blamed themselves for not getting into a better high school and/or became increasingly critical of school. Negative feelings about their academic abilities and limited academic opportunities in a neighborhood school contributed to some students’ demoralization. Some students who in 9th grade believed they could “learn anywhere” eventually felt academically limited or deceived by unfulfilled promise of specialized programs that did not exist. As such, after 9th grade many students voiced lowered expectations for academic success and heavily criticized the school. Amy Wells finds that students who choose to stay in their neighborhood high school justified their decision by voicing an achievement ideology described as “learn anywhere,” downplaying the necessity of attending a better high school.22 Similarly some students began LCHS with positive academic expectations and maintained these expectations due to the belief that school success required personal initiative as opposed to acceptance at a good school. For them, school was “what you make of it.” Though many of these same students were initially satisfied with the academic environment, they also problematized their peers’ behaviors and attitudes. Furthermore, some students’ “learn anywhere” attitude changed over time and developed into profound criticism of the school, teachers, and occasionally the educational system. Deception and Lack of Information in the Admissions Process Chloe was a soft-spoken, socially isolated, and shy Jamaican American student who after four years attending high school did not have enough credits to graduate and eventually dropped out during the last semester of what would have been her senior year. Afterward, I visited her working at the fast food restaurant I passed on my way home from work. During her third year attending LCHS I asked her whether she would recommend the school to me. Chloe: No, pick some other school . . . I don’t know why I chose this school either. I didn’t see this school before I chose it. Now I regret it.

160 / the multiracial urban high school Susan: How did you choose this school? Chloe: (I looked) in the high school book. . . . . Susan: . . . Who chose Last Choice High School? Chloe: I did . . . Susan: What did your parents say about it? Chloe: That the school was too far, but that’s it . . . Susan: You said you regretted it. Chloe: Yeah. Cause it’s far . . . that’s a lot of work. Susan: So what would you have done? Chloe: I would’ve picked a closer school. Susan: How come you picked this school . . . when your parents said it was too far? Chloe: That was after I picked the school. Susan: Did anyone in your junior high talk to you about choosing this school? Chloe: No. Susan: Not your guidance counselor? Chloe: No. I didn’t have no guidance counselor in junior high . . . If I were to see the school before I picked them, it would’ve been different . . . I thought I was gonna come to (the Central building) when I first came here. They put me in the Addition.23 I was so mad . . . that I picked this school . . . .24

Throughout high school, Chloe moved back and forth between her divorced parents’ homes. These moves had a destabilizing effect on her life and made her commute to school longer. Many students at LCHS were similarly transient and found that their commute to school became more difficult depending on where they moved.25 Oftentimes, students understood transferring was an ordeal, and many heard stories or had firsthand experiences with lost transcripts and/or nontransferable credits. Chloe’s school choice experience was similar to that of many students in this study: she made the decision by herself, the decision seemed to be fairly random; she did not visit the school prior to attending, the only information she had available was the unwieldy Directory of Public High Schools, and she regretted her decision. The result of participating in the school choice process was that she felt angry and duped. Like Chloe and Benjamin, several students reported they felt deceived, uninformed, and/or misinformed about the organization of the school into two buildings and about the information they found in the High School Directory. Prior to attending LCHS, students were not


aware the campus was split into two separate buildings, the Central and the Addition. The Addition housed large incoming classes of 9th and 10th graders who were commonly understood to be the most rowdy and out of control students. Many students thought they would attend the Central building and were not aware they would attend the first two years of high school in the Addition, a hundred-year-old elementary school. On the first day of school their expectations were crushed when they entered a building lacking many of the amenities present in most schools: small hallways, no lockers, no auditorium, and non-movable chairs and desks.26 Many students and faculty resented the decrepit facilities, calling the Addition a “prison” or “Siberia.” This was not the only reason students felt misled and misinformed about LCHS. I asked Valeria, an enthusiastic and optimistic Latina, why she attended LCHS. Rejection from vocationally oriented schools offering training in the health professions, carpentry, or cooking meant she was forced to attend LCHS that did not have the career options she wanted. I asked her whether she would recommend this school to a friend. Valeria: No. I don’t think it has so many programs the way they try to make it seem. Susan: That’s an important point. What do you mean by that? Valeria: The sports and stuff. I know a lot of people that used to be in sports and they had to cancel a lot . . . Susan: So the school says they have all these different programs but they don’t really have them? Valeria: . . . They try to seem like they do. Susan: Like what do they try to seem like they have but they don’t really have? Valeria: There’s programs that aren’t even big, not even people going to participate . . . In the senior pictures, they show all these programs and that’s not true . . . Some of the people that are in the year book are not even seniors . . . I never even saw the swimming team. Susan: Oh they said they had a swimming team? Valeria: They said they aren’t opening it because they didn’t have any coach. Susan: Can you give me other examples? Valeria: Yeah, they say that years ago they used to have cooking here. They don’t have that anymore. When you look in the description of the school they would say they have cooking. I remember seeing that when it was time for me to look for high schools.27


By her senior year Valeria, like Benjamin, became highly critical of school but her comments became more specific over time as she articulated feeling duped and trapped. Valeria described the transitory quality of many programs in school; they existed for a year and then were canceled but remained in the High School Directory. Problems with the application process, rejection from chosen schools, discussions about transferring, and low expectations for high school were prevalent topics in students’ interviews when they were asked why they attended LCHS. Students at LCHS reported making mistakes while navigating the admissions process. Valeria missed the application deadline, Omar accidentally left early from the interview for a specialized arts school, Lora forgot to sign her name on a necessary form, and Chloe randomly chose LCHS by herself. Common to the experiences of students in the neighborhood school was that many had to navigate school choice for themselves with minimal or no assistance from parents, guidance counselors, or other adults. Students did not initially realize the ramifications of making a hasty or uniformed decision. Consider Omar, a creative African American student who played chess, read science fiction, and whose mother helped him decide where to attend high school. By entering LCHS’s “drama program” he expected to take drama classes. I asked Omar whether he would recommend LCHS to other people. Omar: As a last thing, a last resort. Yes, I would. Susan: What about as a first choice? Omar: . . . Look at me. I auditioned for drama, and I’m not even in . . . one drama class.28

Omar thought the description of the drama program at LCHS in the Directory of High Schools made the program seem similar to the one at a well-known elite performing arts high school that rejected him. At LCHS a drama program consisted of one drama class, occasional performances, and a drama club that existed some years but not others. Other students also felt deceived by inaccurate descriptions of programs listed in the Directory of High Schools. Several students in the sample attended LCHS because they wanted to take classes in specific career programs such as art, biomedical sciences, or theater. Relying on information on public high schools published by the DOE, students assumed LCHS maintained these programs from year to year. Students


were disappointed when they discovered the specialized programs they wanted no longer existed, included only one class, or had been significantly diminished. For instance, the school might have one class in biology, art, or a sequence of science classes that could potentially lead to a biomedical career, but there was not a particular program or sequence of classes in biomedical sciences.29 “Bad Kids” in Neighborhood Schools Meurice was a socially mature student who shook my hand after the yearly interview. Meurice was asked what he liked and disliked about the school. Meurice: . . . I like a lot of the people that work in the school. It is a bad school because . . . the kids . . . are bad kids. Like most of the zoned schools, that’s where all the bad kids are. So this school has a bad reputation.30

Typical of many other students in the study, every year of the study Meurice and Vincent viewed the school’s problems as located in the “bad kids” who attended neighborhood schools because they were not smart or mature enough to get into better schools. “Bad kids” included peers who got into trouble, were tough, behaved poorly, did not care about school, were loud, gossipy troublemakers or gang members, and were uncontrollable.31 The idea of “bad kids” attending zoned schools was deeply embedded in their discourse about school and consequently shaped students’ willingness to reveal personal information to peers.32 As discussed in chapter three, “It’s a Bad School Because of the Kids,” the fear of “bad kids” resulted in students’ wariness of peers they did not know prior to school. It should be noted that students’ interaction with peers in school differed greatly from their experiences with best and close friends. Consequently, many students voiced concerns about safety, interactions, and trusting others.33 Many students, both male and female, voiced concerns about safety in and around school as word of mouth spread about violent incidences involving current and former LCHS students.34 Students understood that “good kids” attended better schools and “bad kids” ended-up in neighborhood schools. Students’ discourse


about peers revealed that an unintended consequence of the school choice plan was the feeling of distrust of peers that contributed to their perception of a hostile school climate. The system-wide tracking of students into what many perceived as successful and unsuccessful schools resulted in some students equating unsuccessful schools with untrustworthy and bad people. School choice, like academic tracking, had implications for the social life in school because it brought groups together through a sorting process that had significant bearing on an individual’s academic and future potential. Not only did individuals judge each other based on this sorting, but also low-achieving students blamed themselves and some described themselves as failures. Concluding Comments: Entitlement and Entrapment One of the most contentious educational policies in American politics is school choice. It is particularly divisive because it exists at the intersection of several cherished American values. The experiences of students at LCHS offered a glimpse into how “non-admits” understood their rejection from better schools and how it influenced their social experiences in high school. The research suggests that the stigma of attending a zoned school contributed to negative perceptions of peers and has social costs for students at the bottom of the academic hierarchy. School choice policy is more than a process of sorting students into schools based on their abilities and interests because it creates winners and losers. It also has psychological consequences for individuals’ feelings about themselves and others, and social implications for group relationships. From students’ perspective, the implications of the school choice policy were that it shaped their perceptions of the social climate in school including their degree of trust in others and their sense of emotional safety. Recent research highlights how upper middle class and wealthy youth are socialized by parents and schools to feel entitled to their position in the upper echelons of the social structure.35 Annette Lareau shows how upper middle class parents raise their children using a cultural practice called “concerted cultivation” to teach them how to get institutions and professionals to respond to their individualized needs.36 Parents teach their kids skills such as how to manipulate the system to their personal advantage. In comparison, working class parents use a model called


“natural growth” assuming children will develop healthily if parents provide the basics: love, food, and shelter. According to this model,” educational issues should be left to professionals who know more about what their children need than they do. Peter Cookson and Caroline Persell find elite boarding schools teach youth that they earn their place in the upper echelons of society through an ethic of challenging work and tough play. Students believe they deserve entrance to elite colleges because they earn it and not because privilege buys it.37 This research presents a full understanding of how these students are socialized to feel entitled to their position in the upper echelons of American social structure through the deliberate and successful use of parental cultural and social capital. But how are working class and poor children socialized into their place in the lowest rungs of the social structure and why do they accept their position? These exploratory findings in this chapter suggest that being a school choice “non-admit” contributed to students’ understanding of their lowly position in the stratified school system and eventually in the American social structure. If the word entitlement encapsulates privileged students’ expectations, then entrapment describes the position of working class, poor, and minority students in this study. Most students did not participate in a well-ordered process of investigation into school options: many haphazardly “chose” or more precisely were resigned to attend a school they tried to avoid. The students at the very bottom of the educational hierarchy received the trappings of choice that emphasizes how the school choice process worked to obfuscate their lack of choice. Others have written about the psychosocial correlates of stratification processes such as the “cooling out” function of community colleges.38 Over time students who attend community college with ambitions to attend a four-year college afterward either find a vocation or settle for a two-year degree. Attending a community college leads to a four-year degree for a small percentage of students.39 Similar stratification mechanisms occur for students at the lower levels of the school choice stratification system. Some students in this study develop from believing they can “learn anywhere” to realizing that something is not legitimate or fair and beginning to blame themselves, others, and/or the system. Similar to the “cooling out” process, the trappings of choice might slowly thwart ambitions over time when some students blame themselves for their failure.


The themes evidenced in this research suggest that the consequences of participating in the trappings of choice developed over time and resulted in feeling stuck amongst others with minimal potential. An unintended consequence of school choice was forced participation and rejection for “non admits,” without consideration that raising and then slashing hopes about attending a better school might lead to disillusionment. The unintended consequences seemed to doubly disadvantage students at the very bottom of the educational hierarchy. Not only did they not get to attend the school of their choice but also many believed the school they attended was filled with “bad kids” who could not get into better schools. In a school system like that of NYC, where about half of the students were immigrants or the children of immigrants, students were likely to be responsible for educational decision-making. Native born, poor, working class, and minority students confronted similar limitations in making decisions about school choice. These students were at a distinct disadvantage if they did not have access to clear, accurate, and reliable information about schools, and if they did not know informed adults who could assist them. The larger problem was that there were not enough “good” schools students wanted to attend. Students who were the least academically competitive had to attend school somewhere and only the least desirable schools accepted them. Rarely problematized was the existence of undesirable schools, avoided by savvy parents. A lowly ranked school was further plagued with a reputation of low academic expectations and a peer culture of distrust. Consequently, the most vulnerable students were dumped into the most unsuccessful schools with fewer learning opportunities. As Linda Darling-Hammond summarizes, in the United States we talk a lot about equality of opportunity yet we give the neediest children less opportunities and resources to be successful in school. Instead of referring to an achievement gap between whites and blacks, she calls it an “opportunity gap.” Minority and poor students are burdened with the worst resegregated schools, untrained teachers, fewer resources, less early learning opportunities, low-quality curriculum, and dysfunctional learning environments. She argues that the only way the United States can be competitive in a global economy is to systematically address and overhaul the educational system that perpetuates this widely acknowledged and abhorred “opportunity gap” for our most vulnerable students.40


Notes 1. (Devine 1996; Fine 1991) 2. For descriptions see (Attewell 2001; Berger 2002; Hartocollis 2002; Medina 2002). 3. (Devine 1996:28) During the time of the study (1996–2000) NYC school choice plan did not include private school vouchers, and students automatically gained entrance to their neighborhood school. 4. I was not able to get this information from the DOE, nor was it on their website. Several people told me the DOE did not keep track of this information and that in 2003 a new private vendor took over the application process. This finding was confirmed by Abby Goodnough, education writer at the New York Times (Goodnough 2003). Consequently, I used data published by advocacy organizations (Advocates for Children, Educational Priorities Panel and ACORN) and the New York Times. 5. (Blair 1985; Price 1985; Twin 1991). These reports were the most recent and comprehensive investigations into the admissions policies in New York City Public Schools. In response to the 1985 Educational Priorities Panel report the DOE made several changes documented in the 1991 EPP report (Twin 1991:70). 6. (Blair 1985:55) 7. Families can obtain more information by attending high school fairs, talking to guidance counselors, or through parent information workshops given by advocacy groups. Several child advocacy groups organize workshops for parents, translate DOE materials into several languages, and maintain informative websites about the admissions process. See the websites of Advocates for Children (www.advocatesforchildren.org) or the Educational Priorities Panel (www.edpriorities.org). 8. (Blair 1985: ii, 20) 9. Between the time the unwieldy materials are handed out and the time students need to choose schools, students have two weeks to make their decisions. If guidance counselors begin talking to their students in September they would have only 20 minutes per student to discuss their future goals, school, and career options (1985:ii). Furthermore, students who are accepted into schools are given little time to review their choices or to investigate further before they have to make a decision. Students who are put on waiting lists have 24 hours to reply with their choice of school (1985:27). Other problems include the coordination difficulties of six different offices of the DOE processing the large number of applications, the lack of formal linkages betweens junior high schools and high schools, and the general lack of understanding by guidance staff about how the admissions process works. 10. (1999–2000:14) 11. (Medina 2002)

168 / the multiracial urban high school 12. (Twin 1991:5). In 2003, about 47,000 of the 100,000 8th graders were admitted to one or more of the five schools chosen on their application. The rest of the students either applied only to their neighborhood school or tried to avoid their neighborhood school and were rejected from all of their chosen schools. During this time period, it was usual for about 45 percent of students to be rejected from all of their choices. Though the numbers of “non-admits” varied over time, from 30 to 45 percent, they appeared to be increasing. 13. Interview #94 Time 3. 14. Although Jakeena was able to successfully navigate the transfer process, many students talked about transfers but were not able to transfer. Consequently, Jakeena figured out how to transfer. She used a family contact in the police department to falsely claim she needed a safety transfer because she was harassed in school. She orchestrated this plan on her own and transferred to an alternative school based on advice from people in her church choir. 15. Interview #119 Time 3. 16. Benjamin mistakenly thinks that the exam he takes to apply to the specialized high schools is based on passing or failing as opposed to competition based on highest test scores. 17. Interview #106 Time 1. 18. Interview #106 Time 3. 19. Interview #106 Time 4. 20. Interview #2 Time 2. 21. Interview #2 Time 2. 22. (Wells 1996:32) 23. The school was divided into two separate buildings located about fifteen minutes apart. The Addition was the more isolated building, lacking many facilities found in the Central building. 24. Interview #68 Time 3. 25. Students in this neighborhood school were highly transitory as evidenced by the approximately 1,000 students called “over the counter” who entered school in the middle of the semester and the 1,000 students who left. 26. The impact of feeling tricked into attending a run-down school without proper facilities should not be underestimated as a factor influencing students’ experience in school. When students describe the school or what they would change about the school, almost every student refers to the poor physical maintenance and decay of the school building. Across all interviews over four years, students responded similarly to the deteriorated facilities. 27. Interview #26 Time 4. I checked the Directory of High School listing for the year Valeria would have chosen schools (1995–1996) and found that Health Careers is listed as a special program only for Special Education students (1995–1996:67). 28. Interview #137 Time 2.

what if you can’t learn anywhere? / 169 29. Checking the Department of Education (DOE) website for listings of LCHS’s specialized programs I was intrigued to find that LCHS listed a “curatorial program” (accessed January 21, 2002). Curious about what this entails, I call the school asking for more information. The first person I speak to is also unaware of the “curatorial program.” After several transfers, I am connected with a teacher with whom I am friendly. Though I am aware of her activities in school, I do not think the art gallery she organizes (and that I had written grants for) comprises a “curatorial program.” Although students do contribute to its functioning, there is not a class or a sequence of classes on the subject. The gallery is also dependent on the caprice of grants. Through e-mail correspondence the teacher indicates she is also surprised the gallery is listed as a “curatorial program.” 30. Interview #128 Time 2. 31. The questions students are asked about peers encourage them to talk in general terms about the broader circle of people with whom they have contact. Some students refer to this broader circle as associates, to distinguish them from friends or best/close friends. It is peers (as opposed to best/ close friends) who the students in this study feel negatively toward. It is a generalized other student, not a single person, they describe—a descriptive overview culled from experiences, reputation, and stereotypes. 32. Not one student in this study describes their peers in glowing or even positive terms such as they are smart, trustworthy, interesting, supportive, helpful, or focused on school. Talking about peers in school does not evoke a discussion of camaraderie, collective identity, or shared experience. When students discuss positive attributes about the people in school it is likely to occur in discussions about their best friends, close friends, or general group of friends. This suggests that policymakers need to consider how conditions in school influence the group life of the community, paying special attention to differences among types of relationships such as peers, close friends, or best friends. 33. Violence and gangs are a major a concern of students attending LCHS. When this study began in 1996, students carrying box cutters and razors were a major problem in this and other public schools in the city. 34. For example, in 1993, on the first day of school, a former student slashes the throat of another former student in the stairwell (Dillon 1993).That same year, almost two weeks later, an immigrant Chinese American student is kidnapped from his parent’s restaurant. After what appears to be a police mess-up, the student is stabbed twenty times and left on a parkway (Ben-Ali 1993). Many other incidents are unreported and underreported by the local media and the school statistics. 35. (Cookson and Persell 1985; Lareau 2003) 36. (Lareau 2003) 37. (Cookson and Persell 1985) 38. (Brint 1989; Karabel 1972; Karabel 1977)

170 / the multiracial urban high school 39. (Karabel 1977) 40. (Darling-Hammond 2010)

References 1995–1996. “Directory of Public High Schools.” New York City Board of Education, New York City. 1999–2000. “Comprehensive Educational Plan.” New York State Education Department Board of Education of the City of New York, New York. Attewell, Paul. 2001. “The Winner-Take-All High School: Organizational Adaptations to the Educational Stratification.” Sociology of Education 74:267–295. Ben-Ali, Russell. 1993. “Cops Accused: Family Blames Police in Son’s Kidnap Death,” pp. 23 in Newsday. New York. Berger, Leslie. 2002. “School Maze,” pp. City 1 in The New York Times. New York. Blair, J. 1985. “Lost in the Labyrinth: New York City High School Admissions.” Educational Priorities Panel, New York. Brint, Steven, and Jerome Karabel. 1989. The Diverted Dream. New York: Oxford University Press. Cookson, Peter W. Jr., and Caroline Hodges Persell. 1985. Preparing for Power: America’s Elite Boarding Schools. New York: Basic Books. Linda Darling-Hammond. 2010. The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future. New York: Teachers College. Devine, John. 1996. Maximum Security: The Culture of Violence in Inner-City Schools. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dillon, Sam. 1993. “Asbestos in the School; Disorder on Day 1 in New York Schools,” pp. 1, Section A in The New York Times. New York. Fine, Michelle. 1991. Framing Dropouts: Notes on the Politics of an Urban High School. Albany: SUNY Press. Goodnough, Abby. 2003. “Many Are Shut Out in High School Choice,” pp. B3 in The New York Times. New York. Hartocollis, Anemona. 2002. “Date of Exam for Elite Schools Is Moved Up, Disturbing Parents,” pp. B1 in The New York Times. New York. Karabel, Jerome. 1977. “Community Colleges and Social Stratification: Submerged Class Conflict in American Higher Education,” pp. 232–254 in Power and Ideology in Education, edited by J. Karabel and A. H. Halsey. New York: Oxford University Press. Kozol, Jonathan. 1991. Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s School. New York: Crown. Lareau, Annette. 2003. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

what if you can’t learn anywhere? / 171 Medina, Jennifer. 2002. “Stress Just Part of the Test for Selective High Schools,” pp. B1 in The New York Times. New York. Price, Janet. 1985. “Public High Schools Private Admissions.” Advocates for Children, New York. Twin, Stephanie L. 1991. “High School Admissions: A Question of Choice?” Educational Priorities Panel, New York. Wells, Amy Stuart. 1996. “African-American Students’ View of School Choice,” pp. 25–49 in Who Chooses? Who Loses? Culture Institutions, and the Unequal Effects of School Choice, edited by B. Fuller, R. F. Elmore, and G. Orfield. New York: Teachers College Press.


Ch a p t e r Se v e n P e e r Pow e r Un de r m i n ed

Most people consider their friendships as resulting from personal choices such as attraction or shared interests. When asked to think about friendships, it’s typical to talk about commonalities that emanate from individual identity, personalities, experiences, or perspectives about the world. Similar to the way Americans think about poverty or school failure as an individual shortcoming (as opposed to structural inequalities), social relationships are understood as motivated by individual behavior. Of course, people do choose their friendships and it would be ludicrous to argue people do not exert choice and agency when choosing friends. However, by considering friendships as a predominantly individual choice, both researchers and individuals tend to ignore the ways in which friendships are structured by the conditions that profoundly shape relationships. Yet many aspects of friendships are organized by the contexts in which they occur including elements such as the place, institutional structure, other people, and historical period. In this study I followed students over four years and closely listened to how they talk and think about their relationships in school. I paid close attention to how conversations about friendships directed me to specific contexts in students’ lives that deeply influenced friendships. As such, one purpose of this book is to elucidate how friendships are also political and sociological because they originate in contexts that influence the dynamics of friendship. Friendships are often burdened with an individualistic conceptualization that relieve institutions, such as schools, from claiming responsibility for shaping environments that are more or less conducive to particular kinds of relationships. The term “burdened” emphasizes how an individualistic understanding of friendship means that many aspects of friendships, such as their continuity,


degree of trust, or even existence, can be directly dependent on the behaviors of individuals. That is, those who are socially competent or trusting are more likely to be successful at having and maintaining meaningful relationships. Conversely, individuals who lack these skills are, in a sense, culpable for their loneliness or isolation. The act of politicizing and sociologizing friendships acknowledges that contexts are critical to the extent individuals are able to socially flourish or to find common identity with others. Of course, friendships are experienced by individuals but the ability to have and maintain friendships is also deeply framed by the contexts in which they occur. My book explores New York City teens’ embeddedness in a distrusting and negative school environment. I argue that a hostile context is akin to lacking resources such as textbooks, extracurricular activities, or an engaging, caring, and knowledgeable teacher. In this case the resource is social capital or the kinds of information and assistance a student can benefit from through their social relationships with teachers, friends, and peers in school. These social relationships and the environments in which they occur that have the potential for social capital are activated through interpersonal dynamics. Furthermore, similar to the financial and political structure of the American educational system where students and schools that need the most assistance receive the least resources, the disadvantaged school in this study was ripe with conditions that breed mistrust and fearful interactions with others. That is, disadvantaged students who are likely to need the most nourishing and encouraging school environment received the opposite. Strong social relationships are a resource that flourishes in institutional contexts that develop social cohesion, opportunities to interact in a range of contexts, trust and feelings of safety, and emotional well-being. In contrast, weak social relationships are the result of institutional contexts that appear unable to positively influence students’ social relationships. Based on in-depth interviews over a four-year period and my experiences working at Last Choice High School for two years, this book offers an intimate view into the world of adolescents’ friendships. The school itself and many of the students were failing academically; furthermore, students felt it was hostile to their social and emotional needs. My book documents how students’ perceptions of the school climate influenced their social relationships. Minority students talked with me about how they negotiated intricate and deeply meaningful social relations in a school that most of them initially tried to avoid. Many

peer power undermined / 175

students described “uncaring” teachers, classes where teachers did not teach, and peers whose behavior ruined the school for everyone else. I describe the friendships and peer relationships of a racially and ethnically diverse group of adolescents attending a large, neighborhood high school in NYC beginning in 2000; students’ language, ideas, and thoughts are emphasized throughout the book. I analyze those aspects of adolescents’ social relationships that remain fairly constant, such as their descriptions of peer groups; close friendships that change over four years are also explored. Case studies are used to exemplify how these intimate friendships change over time. In sum, I find students experience fearful peer relationships while struggling to maintain close-knit friendships. The working class and poor, immigrant and minority youth maintained their close friendships in neighborhoods that are often dangerous, in a school that was under-resourced and had a high dropout rate. Despite conditions that work against trusting others and building ongoing, supportive friendships, the youth in this study desired and indeed had supportive friendships. The beginning of the book describes the school in both historical and current context. The changing characteristics of the immigrant neighborhood are briefly explored. The school is academically failing and most students begin high school trying to avoid attending their neighborhood school. About 1,000 “over the counter” students enter and leave the school over the course of one year, creating a large population of transitory students. Consequently, it is common for some students to not know the names of peers sitting in the same class. Students talk a lot about the physical environment of the school, particularly the building’s poor condition. Every student in the study disappointingly mentions the school’s state of disrepair at some point in their four years of interviews. Though some students believed the school is “good,” most students eventually recognize the school’s lowly position in the educational hierarchy of the public educational system. In New York City, neighborhood high schools have a stigmatized and lowly reputation, particularly in impoverished neighborhoods. Even students who talk about positive attributes of the school, such as a supportive relationship with a particular teacher, were also likely to talk about negative features, such as the decrepit building. In general, educational research tends to focus on variables that seem directly related to student outcomes such as grades, standardized test scores, or graduation rates. This is particularly salient during the era of


high-stakes testing strengthened by federal policies such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Less appreciation is given to how the characteristics and qualities of relational skills learned in school may contribute to student outcomes. An informal outcome of schooling is the production of social relationships among students that influence their perspectives about the kinds of people in the world. Their willingness to trust others or consider them a source of knowledge or support is taught and learned in school. This kind of unofficial knowledge is not usually a declared objective of state curriculum or directly taught in the classroom. Still the organization of teaching and learning can certainly influence the conditions that shape students’ contact. The degree of trust in peers is created and recreated through many interactions in the school that occur over time. It is a generalized sense of well-being, comfort, and feeling taken care of by others. Feelings of trust or mistrust such as others “have your back” or are “out to get you” are part of the dynamics students experience in school. The sense of being surrounded by people who have your best interests at heart and are likely to offer help when needed is the social resource students at LCHS lacked. LCHS shaped students general mistrust toward people they did not know and reinforced thinking about peers along fairly rigid and stereotyped lines. Most students left high school without feeling a cohesive sense of connectedness with their peers. Most students did not trust their peers and would not consider them people with bright futures or someone they would call upon if they needed help finding a job, housing, or organizing a community activity. They did not consider their peers as potential resources, support, or like-minded people. In other words, the students at LCHS did not have the opportunities in school to construct the social ties and networks social scientists find are conducive to obtaining the privileges connected to upper middle class lifestyles. Furthermore, what students learned in school about social relationships might be pernicious to their ability to trust people outside of their close friends and family. Not only did they view their peers as unsupportive, but they also saw them as preventing the school from functioning or being known as a successful school. They saw their peers as the problem instead of focusing on how the institution and educational system failed poor and immigrant children. Most students did not understand the complicated nature of the NYC educational politics and had minimal knowledge about issues of policy, funding, and bureaucratic functioning. It’s not that students


weren’t interested or couldn’t understand the institutions’ function; rather, they were not taught about the political machinations of their local environment or school system. The lack of knowledge and training about how educational systems work may be more common among working class and poor students in comparison to upper middle class students. Upper middle class parents and students feel more entitled and knowledgeable in their abilities to make educational institutions work for their benefit. Students did not learn in school how to change or influence their local environment. Even civics classes focus more on facts about how laws are made than local politics. Knowledge of grassroots activism could potentially encourage students to work for change. Civics education can also be restricted to an emphasis on charity, volunteerism, and good works for the community while avoiding thorny issues such as inequalities in resources and power.1 As a result, it makes sense why students constructed their peers as the source of the problems in schools—they had minimal understanding or skills to process the failures they observed other than through individual blame. The Racialized Peer Group The structure of peer groups in school upholds a system of racial and ethnic hierarchy and segregation congruent with the one in the broader society. Students perceptions of peers are based on racialized and dichotomous categories they refer to as the “good kids and the bad kids.” Their perceptions of each other relied on rhetoric about the kinds of kids who ruined the school for everyone else and included racial and ethnic stereotypes. As explored in chapters three and four, the Chinese American students are depicted as the model minority: studious, quiet, and socially awkward; in contrast, the Latinos and African American students are described as the “ loud” and disruptive. According to students from all racial and ethnic backgrounds, “bad kids” cut classes, disrupt teachers, fight, are in gangs, and are blamed for the school’s failure. The students who attended a low-status, zoned high school confronted a friendship dilemma: everyone told them and they believed “bad kids,” who went to neighborhood schools, the worst in the school system, should not be trusted. Still, they wanted to have intimate friendships and indeed were “relationally resilient” in their ability to overcome the hostile school climate to achieve close friendships. Though many adults, including parents, teachers, and community members,


told them not to trust kids at school, students were able to overcome these negative messages to have friends. Giving voice to students’ personal experiences, I document how minority youth maintained and valued their close friendships while simultaneously insisting that most kids in school cannot be trusted. I demonstrate how structural conditions in school, such as the school choice policy and racial and ethnic discrimination and segregation, molded social relationships by contributing to the environment where students feared their peers. Unlike high school peer groups that develop from the community’s class structure and relationships with adults (as shown in classic sociological research), peer groups at LCHS were defined by race and ethnicity.2 Though the racial and ethnic peer groups shared some of the same structural characteristics of peer groups, such as stereotypes and oppositional identities, peer groups at LCHS differed due to the dominance of race and ethnicity as the primary division among students. Race and ethnicity constituted the social and academic hierarchy in school.3 Not only did Chinese American students dominate the honors classes, graduate at higher rates, and attend better colleges than the African American and Latino students, but they also perceived the teachers as supportive and caring. In contrast, Latinos and African Americans found that teachers discriminated against them by favoring the Chinese American students. They felt teachers had low expectations for their academic success and did not show they truly cared about them or their education. Part of these racial and ethnic dynamics was due to the myth of the Asian model minority and the message it sent to less academically successful minority groups. Inherent in the model minority argument was an “accusing message to Blacks, Latinos and American Indians . . . ‘They overcame discrimination-why can’t you?’ ”4 These unstated beliefs penetrated the social relations among minority groups and fostered a hostile school climate enacted through the harassment of Chinese American students by their Latino and African American peers, and between predominantly white teachers and African American and Latino students. When asked to talk about experiences of discrimination in school, Chinese American students described being physically and verbally harassed by their peers, making them nervous about interacting with others. Though they succeeded academically, social relationships were


fraught with realistic concerns about violence. A vicious cycle ensued, with teachers preferring to work with the “immigrant” students (coded language for only the Chinese American students and not the Dominican American recent immigrants) and generally having low expectations for the academic abilities of the rest of the student population. Students blamed their peers, fellow victims, for many of the schools’ problems. Their perception of peers started even before they entered 9th grade when they participated in the school choice program. Based on their limited knowledge of citywide high schools, students applied for acceptance at several schools. Many students in this study reported they wanted to avoid attending LCHS because it was known as a violent and “ bad school.” Most students applied to other schools throughout the city, were rejected, and were forced to attend their neighborhood school, the only one that had to accept them. Consequently, they believed that only students with minimal academic potential ended up in neighborhood schools. In chapter six, “What If You Can’t Learn Anywhere? Trapped by School Choice,” I document how the school system, the organizational structure of school choice, not only maintained these negative perceptions of peers but also reproduced racial and ethnic hierarchies and structure consistent with those in the wider culture. Unlike students’ abilities to maintain close friendships, their experiences and perceptions of peers in school was consistently problematized and stereotyped. Students’ perceptions of their peers were stable and similar over four years and did not notably vary among students. This generally negative assessment of peers in school was disquieting—particularly because social science research finds that these relationships can potentially be supportive and useful. Peers or the “wider circle of friends” can provide resources that differ from those provided by close and best friends who may have similar resources and social networks as the individual. For example, peers can provide each other with critical information about filling out college applications, going to college, or getting jobs.5 The extremely negative perception of peers described by students in this study implies they lacked these useful sources of information and meaningful connections. Mark Granovetter’s “strength of weak ties” premise states that varied and wide connections to diverse groups of people (such as peers) are a critical form of social capital.6 Previous research finds that second- and


third-generation Mexican immigrants do not have as many of these valuable relationships as very recent Mexican immigrants. Consequently, they become “socially de-capitalized.”7 A similar loss of social capital seemed to characterize the peer group dynamic at LCHS. Students did not see themselves as having a sense of “we,” also known as collective identity. Students’ interactions in school were influenced by the “code of the streets,” a system of regulating the use of violence under conditions where police officers are not reliable to maintain control.8 However, unlike the need to decode others’ intentions on the street, police surveillance in school was ubiquitous. The increasing use of surveillance and policing techniques is characteristic of the “new American high school.” Policing schools, particularly those attended by poor students in unsafe neighborhoods, creates a control regime where physical control of students’ bodies is removed from teachers to police officers.9 Most importantly for this study, the ubiquitous presence of police officers sends clear messages to students: (1) teachers and administrators do not trust the students; and (2) students should not trust each other. Consequently students developed strategies and behaviors to avoid hostile interactions while making friends. One strategy was trust tests that meant not talking with people they did not already know. Trust tests allowed students to reveal a small amount of personal information to a potential friend and then wait to see whether the information was gossiped about before sharing more information with that person. Through these strategies students were able to overcome a hostile environment to have friends they felt were trustworthy and avoid those who might betray them. Peer Groups Maintain the Social Order From a sociological view, studying the characteristics of peer groups in high school is like gazing into a crystal ball to tell the future socioeconomic status of students. Identifying with the goals of a particular peer group predicts social and academic placement in the school’s hierarchy. Higher status students are more likely to graduate from high school, attend college, and potentially enter middle-class careers. According to several classic ethnographies, identification with and integration into school-oriented peer groups legitimizes and lauds


students coming from middle or upper-middle class backgrounds.10 Depending on the study and historical time period, the school-oriented groups might be called “Jocks,” “Earoles,” or “College boys.” In my study, students referred to their peers who succeeded in school as the “good kids.” This term also is coded language for the predominantly Asian American recent immigrants. They are the recipients of higher academic status and rewards by the school and school systems’ sorting mechanisms. The social groups that are not oriented toward academic success or school activities embody the characteristics of peer groups that have fewer academic opportunities. Teens in this group receive less investment and encouragement by teachers. Similar to the academically oriented group, they may be negatively stereotyped based on a limited component of their personality. In some studies they are called “Burnouts,” “Lads,” or “Corner Boys.” In my study they are referred to as the “bad kids,” which references the predominantly African American and Latino students who do not succeed in school. As reported by their peers, “bad kids” are perceived as preventing others from learning. Their behavior is also blamed for “ruining” the school for others and largely contributing to the school’s problems. Cutting classes, high drop out rates, and incidences of violence are easily explained by the behavior of “bad kids.” From a sociological perspective, peer groups in high school are a direct link to understanding the continuity, construction, reproduction, and socialization into the existing American class structure. This study differs from previous research because most of the students at LCHS come from similar class backgrounds; the primary social differences among students are racial and ethnic. Instead of relying on characteristics of students’ interests such as drug use, athletics, or music to construct peer categories, I chose racial and ethnic categories. Even so, categories of race/ethnicity were usually not directly stated. Rather students use local language that seemingly avoided overt racism or stereotyping. “Good kids and bad kids” was a commonly shared identifier that people commonly understood. Most students agreed about the existence of “good kids and bad kids.” Occasionally, when questioned or encouraged to talk about where they fit in these categories, students mentioned they were not part of either category or they identified as a “good kid” who hung out with “bad kids.” Few students described


themselves as a “bad kid.” Interestingly, most students viewed their close friends as exceptions to the typical “bad kids” in school. The sociological fascination with adolescent culture emanates from an understanding of peer groups as a source of permanence and stability in the social order.11 Peer groups encapsulate a timelessness—the outer styling of peer groups may change but their essential oppositional nature and societal function in reproducing the existing class structure remain the same. The influence of peer groups on the individual contributes to an explanation about how adolescents mediate and ultimately reproduce the class and racial categories existing in the adult world. In the classic study Jocks and the Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School, Penelope Eckert finds that peer categories are linked to the cultural differences between working class and middle class cultures. She writes, the indelible class characteristic of the Jocks and the Burnouts, conspires to elevate the category stereotypes to class stereotypes, to produce a polarization of attitudes towards class characteristics associated with either category within the value-laden atmosphere of the school, and hence to force a corresponding polarization of behavioral choice.12

The behaviors, values, and norms of peer groups are judged by the school and adolescents along a limited and oppositional dichotomy: positive or pathologized, success or failure, good or bad. These categories are set-up as extreme behaviors with limited nuance or choices outside of the existing polarities. It is precisely this nature that Eckert claims makes peer categories fundamentally conservative, enduring, and stable. Thus it is the oppositional nature that maintains the status quo or the reproduction of class. The content of these categories and the stereotypes that are emphasized, such as race and ethnicity in my study, change over time. In Eckert’s research, it is the cooperation between the middle class Jocks and the working class Burnouts to a limited construction of peer group dynamics that maintains the hegemonic control of the American class system. That is, despite competing to control both the physical space of the high school and the cultural definitions and meanings of their generation, they collude to perpetuate binary and limited categories. These restrictive and to a certain extent predictable


interactions among peer groups are problematized. Eckert writes, “It is not the categories themselves, but the opposition between them that is hegemonic.”13 Students who do not fit into or define themselves as belonging to either category are isolated or left out of the system of peer group relations. To this understanding of peer group dynamics, mine and others’ studies emphasize categories that are predominantly based on racial and ethnic categories.14 Consequently our future understanding of peer groups should explore not only the ways in which class categories are pitted against each other but also how these categories can also be constructed around race and ethnicity in the institutions in which they occur. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

(Westheimer and Kahne 2004) (Eckert 1989; Willis 1977) (Brown 1990; Eckert 1989) (Tatum 1997) (Stanton-Salazar and Spina 2005; Valenzuela 1999; Giordano 1995) (Granovetter 1973) (Stanton-Salazar and Spina 2005; Valenzuela 1999) (Anderson 1990; Anderson 1994) (Devine 1996; Kupchik and Monahan 2006) These names of peer groups are from the following studies: Penelope Eckert (Eckert 1989) “The Jocks and the Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in High School,” Paul Willis (Willis 1977) “Learning How to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs,” and W.F. Whyte (Whyte 1943) “Street Corner Society”. (Eckert 1989; MacLeod 1987; Willis 1977) (Eckert 1989) (Eckert 1989) (Staiger 2006)

References Anderson, Elijah. 1990. Street Wise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1994. “The Code of the Streets,” pp. 1–18 in The Atlantic. Brown, B. B. 1990. “Peer Groups and Peer Culture,” pp. 171–196 in At the Threshold: The Developing Adolescent, edited by S. S. Feldman and G. R. Elliott. Boston: Harvard University Press.

184 / the multiracial urban high school Devine, John. 1996. Maximum Security: The Culture of Violence in Inner-City Schools. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eckert, Penelope. 1989. Jocks and Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School. New York: Teachers College Press. Giordano, Peggy C. 1995. “The Wider Circle of Friends in Adolescence.” The American Journal of Sociology 101:661–697. Granovetter, Mark. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78:1360–1380. Kupchik, Aaron, and Torin Monahan. 2006. “The New American School: Preparation for Post-industrial Discipline.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 27:617–631. MacLeod, J. 1987. Ain’t No Makin’ It. Boulder: Westfield Press. Staiger, Annegret Daniela. 2006. Learning Difference: Race and Schooling in the Multiracial Metropolis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Stanton-Salazar, Ricardo D., and Stephanie Urso Spina. 2005. “Adolescent Peer Networks as a Context for Social and Emotional Support.” Youth and Society 36:379–417. Tatum, Beverly. 1997. Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations about Race. New York: Basic Books. Valenzuela, Angela. 1999. Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Westheimer, Joel, and Joseph Kahne. 2004. “What Kind of Citizen? The Politics of Educating for Democracy.” American Educational Research Journal 41:237–269. Whyte, W. F. 1943. Street Corner Society. Chicago: University of Chicago. Willis, Paul. 1977. Learning to Labor: How Working-Class Kids Get WorkingClass Jobs. New York: Columbia University Press.

I n de x

Adults Who are Parents/Stepparents 6–7, 103–104, 107, 117–119 Who are Police Officers/Security Guards 1–7, 18, 45, 54–55, 74–77, 81, 83–84, 135–137, 144, 168–169, 180; see also “Code of the Streets,” 68, 76–77, 80–83, 180; Violence/ Anti-Violence Who are Shop keepers 7, 136–139 Who Discriminate 135–139; see also Discrimination see also Teachers African Americans/Blacks 1–6, 11, 110–121, 135–139 see also Adults, “Controlling Images,” Discrimination, Neighborhood, Race/ Ethnicity, Stereotypes American Dream 29, 48–50 American Egalitarianism, see under Discrimination AmeriCorps 30–32, 120 Anderson, Elijah/“Code of the Streets” 68, 76–77, 80, 83, 180 Anger 14–15 see also Blaming the Victim/Blame Asian Americans 2–5, 11, 56, 59, 61, 67, 70–74, 85, 121–128, 134–135 American-Born Chinese (ABC) 3, 72–75, 140–141, 148 Fresh Off the Boat (FOB) 72, 75, 140–141

Model minority 9, 70–74, 144–147 see also Discrimination, Immigration/Immigrants, Neighborhood, Race/Ethnicity Blacks, see under African Americans/ Blacks Blake, William 14–15 Blame, see under Blaming the Victim/ Blame Blaming the Victim/Blame 6, 8–10, 12–16, 19, 68, 85–88, 157–159, 176–177 Board of Education (BOE) 17 Boys 17, 79, 110–122, 124, 134, 136, 140–141 see also Friendships, Interviews Brown vs. Board of Education 3 see also Civil Rights Care/Caring 1, 3–4, 8, 16–17, 70, 76, 99, 107, 125, 137–139 see also Noddings, Nell, Peers, Teachers Caucasians, see under White Chinese Americans, see under Asian Americans Civil Rights 3–5, 25, 61, 131 Class Middle Class 2, 12–13, 16–17, 29, 48, 54, 57, 70, 164–166, 176–177, 180–182 Poor 4, 10, 12–19, 31, 44, 50, 57, 76, 83–84, 86, 165–166, 175–177, 180

186 / index Class—Continued Working Class 2, 12–13, 19, 22, 31, 50, 54, 57, 70, 152, 164–166, 177, 182 “Code of the Streets,” 68, 76–77, 80–83, 180 Collective Dis-identity, see under Collective Identity/Collective Dis-Identity Collective Identity/Collective Dis-Identity 11–14, 22, 24–26, 28, 174–175 And Civic Engagement/DisEngagement 14, 24 And Collective Action 26, 174–175 And Trust 11, 13, 28; see also Trust/Distrust College 6, 123–124 see also Dropouts, High School Collins, Patricia Hill 17–18, 136 see also “Controlling Images,” Stereotypes Colorblind, see under Discrimination Context, see under High School “Controlling Images” 17–18, 23, 136–137 see also Collins, Patricia Hill Cultural Capital 5–6, 81, 164–166 Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction 13, 164–166 Darling-Hammond, Linda 166 “Degradation Ceremony” 45–46 see also Urban Schools Delpit, Lisa 16–17 Discrimination 6–7, 16–17, 21–22, 55, 131–147 And Colorblind/American Egalitarianism 6–7, 16–17, 21–22, 142–144, 147 And Definition 133–135 And Interracial 6, 7 And Intra-group 139–144 And Peers 7

And Social Structure 6, 7 see also Adults, African Americans/ Blacks, Asian Americans, English Language Learners (ELL)/English as a Second Language (ESL), Latinos/ Latinas, Race/Ethnicity, Stereotypes, Teachers, Violence/Anti-Violence, Whites Distrust, see under Trust/Distrust Dominican American, see under Latinos/Latinas Dropouts 4, 10, 18, 24, 48, 51–53, 75, 94–110, 116 see also Friendships, High School, Peers, Urban Schools Durkheim, Emile 11–12 Eckert, Penelope 182–183 Economy 50, 54, 58–59, 166 Education, see Adults, High School, Last Choice High School (LCHS), Urban Schools English Language Learners (ELL)/ English as a Second Language (ESL) 4–5, 12, 30, 34, 52, 56, 71, 140–142 And Status 12; see also Hierarchy And teachers’ preference 5 And transitions through high school 126–128 see also Asian Americans, Discrimination, Immigration/ Immigrants, Latinos/Latinas Extracurricular Activities, see under High School see also AmeriCorps Fearing Peers and Trusting Friends 9–11, 76, 80, 85 see also Collective Identity/Collective Dis-Identity, Friendships, Peers Fine, Michelle 51, 53 Flanagan, Constance 26–27

index / 187 Framing/Framework 6–8, 16, 24, 32, 46, 67–68, 70, 87–88 Friendships And Changes over time 8, 13, 84, 93–128 And Comparison to peers 11–13, 80–85; see also Fearing Peers and Trusting Friends And Gossip 80, 82, 112–113, 123–126, 163, 180 And Marriage/Boyfriend 97–98, 100–104, 108–109 And Political Action 12–15; see also Collective Identity/Collective Dis-Identity And Quality and Experiences 11, 13, 80–85 And School Context 94–110, 121–122, 126–128; see also High School And Support/Staying together 8, 11, 81–85, 94–110, 124–126; see also Care/Caring see also Adults, Dropouts, Peers, Trust/Distrust Gangs 2, 9, 69, 79, 111, 115–116, 163, 169 Girls 96–100, 105, 108, 126–127, 139–140 see also Friendships, Interviews “Good kids and Bad kids,” see under Peers Gossip, see under Friendships Graduation, see Dropouts, High School Hierarchy Academic 15, 68, 152, 164, 178 Social 7, 86, 135 Higher Learning/John Singleton 131 High School And Context/Social Foundation 16–18, 74, 84–88, 151–163, 173–174

And Experiences 9, 13, 79, 104– 105; see also School Choice Extracurricular activities 6, 71, 102–103, 120, 146; see also AmeriCorps And Graduation 5, 17–18, 53, 71; see also Dropouts And Multiracial 2–3, 131–132; see also Discrimination, Race/ Ethnicity And Resources 5, 12 And Size 5–6, 16 State Under Registration Review (SURR) 13, 52, 55–56 And Structure 9, 16–17 And Violence 13, 21; see also Violence/Anti-Violence see also Care/Caring, Last Choice High School (LCHS), Students, Teachers, Urban schools Immigration/Immigrants 2–5, 20, 44–50, 58–60, 71, 131–132, 139–142 Americanization 139–142 Illegal 59–60 see also Asian Americans, English Language Learners (ELL)/ English as a Second Language (ESL), Latinos/Latinas, Multiracial, Neighborhood Interviews 3, 9, 15, 52, 175 Anton 136–137 Benjamin 17, 73–74, 111–115, 136–137, 156–158, 160, 162, 168 Chloe 159–160, 162 Cindy 123, 125, 134 Donna 157–159 Isidora 32, 93–110, 116–118, 125, 127, 139, 140, 143 Jakeena 154–156, 158, 168 Kit Wah 134 Lena 32, 93, 109, 121–127, 129, 141

188 / index Interviews—Continued Mai 138 Megan 74–75, 126–127 Mei Ling 32, 74, 93, 109, 121–127 Methodology 3, 9, 15, 175 Meurice 163 Milena 84–85, 96 Nikki 68–69, 142 Omar 162 Reginald 1–9, 32–33, 73–74, 93, 110–122, 124, 128–129 Robert 77–80 Sara 81–82 Sheerah 132 Valeria 79–80, 102–103, 108, 118, 137, 161–162, 168 Vincent 155, 163 Lareau, Annette 164–166 Last Choice High School (LCHS) 2–3, 17, 28–30, 43–48, 57, 77–78, 82–84, 104–105, 160–162, 174–175 Physical building 28–30, 44–48, 57, 82–84, 104–105, 174–175 Reputation 29, 77–78, 82, 160–162 see also Dropouts, High School, Immigration/Immigrants, Neighborhood, School Choice, Students, Tracking Latinos/Latinas 2–5, 11, 60–61, 73–79, 94–110, 135–144 Dominican American 2, 4, 5, 11, 60–61, 139–144 Puerto Ricans 77–79, 139–144 see also Adults, Discrimination, Immigration/Immigrants, Race/Ethnicity Longitudinal Interviews, see Interviews Marx, Groucho 10 Marx, Karl 9, 12 see also Class

Methodology, see Interviews Mills, C. Wright 86–87 see also Sociological Imagination/ Sociological Perspective Model Minority, see under Asian Americans Multiracial 2–4, 14, 16, 24, 68, 131–132, 175 see also Immigration/Immigrants , Race/Ethnicity, Urban Schools Neighborhood 4, 8, 11, 83–84 see also Friendships, High school, Immigration/Immigrants, School Choice, Segregation Neighborhood Schools, see under School Choice Networks, see Weak Ties New American High School, see Urban Schools New York City 2, 7, 43, 50, 57–58, 71, 139, 151, 174–175 see also Economy, Last Choice High School (LCHS), Neighborhood, School Choice, Urban Schools Noddings, Nell 20–21, 24 see also Care/Caring Parents/Step Parents, see under Adults Peers 1–3, 8–17, 26, 67–70, 77–88, 132, 163–164, 177–183 Care 8–10; see also Care/Caring Comparison to friendships 16, 17, 79–85; see also Friendships “Good kids and bad kids”/“Quiet and Loud” 1, 9–11, 67–70, 77, 82–88, 132, 163–164 Previous research 1–2, 88; see also Class, Eckert, Penelope, White Race ethnicity 1–3, 8, 67–69, 86; see also Race/Ethnicity Trust/Distrust 8–15, 67–69, 83–85; see also “Code of the Streets,” Trust/Distrust

index / 189 see also Fearing Peers and Trusting Friends, High School, Last Choice High School (LCHS), Segregation, Tracking Poverty And Dropout Rates 4–5 And School Segregation 4–5, 17 see also Class, Dropouts, School Choice Puerto Ricans, see under Latinos/ Latinas “Quiet and Loud Kids,” see under Peers Race/Ethnicity 1–3, 6–8, 11–13, 146–147 And Hierarchies 13; see also Hierarchy And Inequalities 3, 11–12 And Interactions 6–8, 12, 146–147 Social vs. Biological Categories 20–21 And Structure 6, 7, 11–12 And Students Worldviews 1–3, 11–13 see also under African Americans/ Blacks, Asian Americans, Discrimination, Latinos/ Latinas, Peers, Segregation, White Racism, see Discrimination see also Race/Ethnicity Relational Journey 3, 16, 175–177 School Choice 2, 8–9, 30, 43, 50, 57–59, 71, 76, 84, 151–166 And Admissions Process 152–154, 159–163 And “Bad kids/Good kids” 8, 154–156; see also Peers And Neighborhood schools 2, 8–9, 43, 50, 57–59, 76, 84, 151–156 And “Non-Admits” 151–153

And Specialized schools 8–9, 71, 151–154 And “Trappings of choice” 152, 164–166 And Unequal resources 8, 153–154; see also Urban Schools see also Peers Segregation 4–7, 12, 18–19, 61, 72–73, 131–147 And Connection to Poverty 5, 12; see also Poverty In Neighborhoods 4, 61; see also Neighborhood And Race/Ethnic Groups 5, 18–19, 72–73; see also Discrimination, Race/Ethnicity In Schools 4–7, 12, 18–19, 61, 72, 144–147; see also School Choice, Urban Schools see also Discrimination, Tracking Social Capital/Social De-capitalization 9, 81, 165, 174, 179–180 see also Valenzuela, Angela Social Context, see under High School Social foundation/Context, see High School, Relational Journey Social Relationships, see under Friendships, Peers, Adults Social Reproduction, see Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction Sociological Imagination/Sociological Perspective 7–9, 86–87, 173–174, 180 State Under Registration Review (SURR) 52, 55–56 Status 7, 15–16, 30–32, 45, 135, 146, 177, 180–182 Stereotypes 89 About minority youth 22–23, 74–75, 89, 103–104, 136–137; see also “Controlling Images”

190 / index Stereotypes—Continued And resistance 22, 74–75 see also Adults, Asian Americans, Discrimination, Segregation Students And First Year (9th grade) 8, 94–97, 110–114 And Second Year 98–105, 114–116 And Third Year 10, 105–107, 114–116, 118–121 And Fourth Year 108–110 see also Dropouts, High School, Interviews Surveillance, see under Urban Schools see also Adults Teachers 6, 16–17, 106, 137–139, 145–147 And Caring/Not caring 16, 106, 137–139; see also Care/Caring And class 16; see also Class And culture 16 see also Adults, Discrimination Tracking 70, 73, 127, 146, 164 see also English Language Learners (ELL)/English as a Second Language (ESL), School Choice Transfer Students/“Over the Counter” 56, 168, 175 Trust/Distrust 8, 11, 28, 68, 76, 80–85, 88, 176–177, 180 Friendship 8, 11, 94–110, 174–175; see also Friendships Politicize 10, 13, 173–175; see also Collective Identity/Collective Dis-Identity

“Trust Tests” 68, 76, 80–83 see also Anderson, Elijah, Peers, Race/Ethnicity “Trust Tests”, see under Trust/Distrust Urban Schools 4, 174–175 And Surveillance 54–55, 88 see also Dropouts, High school, Poverty, Race/Ethnicity, School Choice Valenzuela, Angela 9, 12 see also Social Capital/Social De-Capitalization Violence/Anti-Violence 29–31, 48, 54, 62, 76, 78–84, 134–136, 163, 169, 178–181 see also AmeriCorps, Anderson, Elijah/“Code of the Streets,” “Controlling Images,” High School Way, Niobe 73, 85, 131–147 Weak Ties 9, 19–20, 176–177, 179 see also Collective Identity/ Collective Dis-Identity, Fearing Peers and Trusting Friends White 6–7, 21 Privilege 7, 21 Supremacy 6 see also Discrimination, Teachers Zoned Schools, see And Neighborhood schools under School Choice

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