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 DOI: 10.1525/ctx.2007.6.4.70

2007 6: 70ContextsCaroline Hodges Persell

The Class Divide in the Classroom  

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the class divide inthe classroomreview by caroline hodges persell

Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide inAmerican Educationby Peter SacksUniversity of California Press, 2007, 376 pages

How do public schoolsand universities help to main-tain and exacerbate class divi-sions in the United States?This is the central questionaddressed by Peter Sacks inTearing Down the Gates. Healso shows how some individ-uals and institutions are com-bating this trend and discuss-es why we should reopeneducational opportunities inthe United States.

Others have made this argument, so what is new here?Sacks assembles many discrete pieces into a much biggerpicture—including educational practices from kindergartento twelfth grade, higher education’s changing national mar-ketplace, and changes in public policy—to show how edu-cation favors the privileged and reduces opportunities forlower-income students. He compares the math and scienceachievements of U.S. students with those of students inother developed countries, indicating how the social posi-tions of low-income young people shrink their “opportunityhorizon” and how schools might respond.

Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas about cultural capitaland social reproduction, Sacks notes that schools arethought to reward innate “capacities rather than socialstanding,” thus allocating “power and privilege to thealready privileged and powerful.” Upper-middle-class par-ents lobby for and get enriched learning opportunities fortheir children in public schools, while economically disad-vantaged kids are shunted into classes designed to drillthem for No Child Left Behind annual assessments. Whiletracking has become less obvious, it is commonplace. FromReagan on, Sacks says, the policy paradigm of state and fed-eral legislators and educators has been that “targetingschools and penalizing the ones that didn’t perform up topar on standardized tests would be better for Americaneducation than helping families and individuals improvetheir social and economic conditions.”

Aside from his case materials, Sacks draws heavily onrecent data and research to discuss the correlation betweenthe degree of tracking in U.S. mathematics classes and thelow national achievement levels of U.S. children comparedto other countries. Mathematically, average U.S. eighth-graders are below their peers in Singapore, Japan, Korea,and the Netherlands. Japan, unlike the United States, pro-hibits ability tracking through middle school. Eighty percentof U.S. schools track students in math, while only 20 percentpractice tracking in science classes, and in science Americaneighth-graders were comparable to their peers in theNetherlands, Sweden, and Australia and close to the world’sbest students in Japan, Hong Kong, and Korea. Sacks sug-gests that tracking impairs the mathematical competency ofU.S. students overall.

Sacks also compares two low-income schools inCalifornia. One had open enrollment in advanced place-ment (AP) classes, and the other restricted access to APclasses. In the open school more than 50 percent of stu-dents taking the AP test scored a 3 or higher (eligible forcredit in some colleges), compared to only 17 percent in therestrictive school. Other features of the schools also dif-fered. As teachers worked to create a college-bound cul-ture, they used collaborative teaching and learning and ashared system of instruction, changed middle-class meth-ods of instruction, taught fewer concepts at a time to helpstudents master them, and developed a nontraditionalgrading system. The numbers of students taking the SAT,those achieving 1,000 or more on it, and those applying forcollege all increased dramatically.

With higher education, Sacks notes that many collegesand universities strive to maintain their status and prestige inways that hurt economically disadvantaged students.Because colleges’ and universities’ rankings in U.S. News &World Report depend quite heavily on the average SATscores of their entering students, they chase the higher-scor-ing students with “merit” scholarships. By 2000, affluentstudents received “merit” scholarships worth 82 percent ofthe total need-based aid received by students with the low-est family incomes. In addition to private colleges and uni-versities, many state-supported institutions follow this prac-tice. Nor have Federal Pell Grants kept pace with the risingcosts of higher education: the maximum award in 1972 cov-ered almost 90 percent of the cost for a lower-income stu-dent to attend a public, four-year university, but only 23 per-cent in 2004. Moreover, as colleges pursue status and high-er SAT scores, the proportion of enrolled students receivingPell grants declines. States have also reduced their contribu-tions to higher education, meaning higher tuitions even forin-state students. Among equally prepared eighth-graders,62 percent of those with higher parental incomes completedtheir B.A. degrees compared to only 21 percent of those with

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lower parental incomes, a gap of 41 percent. The gap in col-lege graduation rates between the highest and lowestincome quartiles has increased dramatically since 1970.

Sacks uses the distinction of Brewer, Gates, andGoldman (2002) between prestige-driven and reputation-driven institutions of higher education to illuminatechanges in higher education today. “Prestige-seeking col-leges ... developed their images ‘by looking right’ ...‘Quality’ for prestige-seekers bordered on the abstract—‘becoming a world-class university.’ ... Reputation-basedcolleges, in contrast, were far more concrete about theirobjectives because they wanted to serve their students andthe communities in which they operated.” Sacks discussesseveral alternatives to the U.S. News scheme for rankingcollege prestige, including that of the Washington Monthly,which considers how universities contribute to the publicgood through community service and the proportions oflower-income students they enroll. Another system, theNational Survey of Student Engagement, seeks to measureeffective educational practices and students’ personal andintellectual gains from attending a college or universityrather than characteristics that students bring with them.

We cannot separate educational policy from economicpolicy, Sacks asserts. Tax cuts that increase economicinequality also increase educational inequality. He is quick tosay that higher education need not be universal, but that itshould be a universal opportunity. Instead, at 42 percentthe U.S. lags behind the average rate (47 percent) of highschool graduates entering four-year colleges and universi-ties in Organization for Economic Co-operation andDevelopment (OECD) countries, and falls far below thefrontrunners, Sweden (69 percent) and New Zealand (76percent). Like the data on international achievement inmathematics, these data suggest that the United States islosing ground in preparing a knowledge-based work force

and citizenry. Many other countries have structured theireducational systems to reduce the effects of a student’sclass background on his or her educational achievement,but the United States is moving in the opposite direction.

Sacks is a journalist of the highest order: he engages ourhearts and minds by telling the stories of young people anddedicated educators whom he personally interviewed andaddresses the question of how generalizable their narrativesare by providing lots of clear, graphical data and citingnumerous social-science studies based on representativesamples to illustrate the extent of the trends observed. Thebook is as interesting to read as Jonathan Kozol’s Death atan Early Age, but is much better researched and docu-mented. At the same time, while the book describes the bigpicture very well and briefly discusses Bourdieu’s theory ofcultural reproduction and legitimation, it does not explicitlydefine class or the “class divide,” or develop a coherent the-oretical explanation for how and why these changes haveoccurred. Nor does it explain how conservatives fromReagan on were able to seize political power, put their ownpolitical appointees into many educational policy positions,and reframe educational issues. Sociologists can still con-tribute in these areas. At the same time, sociologists can seehow a skilled journalist writes engagingly about a widearray of current social-science research and data, field visits,and in-depth interviews, covering much more of the educa-tional landscape than social scientists normally tackle, whilealso setting forth a social-psychological conception of howclass shapes students’ opportunity horizons, knowledge,confidence, hope, and economic resources. I look forwardto discussing this book with my undergraduates.

Caroline Hodges Persell specializes in the sociology of education, edu-

cational inequality, the impact of computer technologies on educa-

tion, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.

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deflation:

Cost of a phone call from the U.S. to London when AT&T startedthis service (via radio) in 1927: $75 for the first three minutes.System capacity: one call at a time.

Cost of the same call in 1956, when AT&T opened its underseascable: $12. System capacity: 36 calls at a time.

Cost today, via the Internet: zero. System capacity: who knows?!

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