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Negotiating Opportunities

How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School

Jessica McCrory Calarco author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc

Published:5th Apr '18

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Negotiating Opportunities cover

In Negotiating Opportunities, Jessica McCrory Calarco argues that the middle class has a negotiated advantage in school. Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Calarco traces that negotiated advantage from its origins at home to its consequences at school. Through their parents' coaching, working-class students learn to follow rules and work through problems independently. Middle-class students learn to challenge rules and request assistance, accommodations, and attention in excess of what is fair or required. Teachers typically grant those requests, creating advantages for middle-class students. Calarco concludes with recommendations, advocating against deficit-oriented programs that teach middle-class behaviors to working-class students. Those programs ignore the value of working-class students' resourcefulness, respect, and responsibility, and they do little to prevent middle-class families from finding new opportunities to negotiate advantages in school.

The productiveness of Calarco's work in raising fundamental questions is clear. By highlighting the agency of young children in navigating ambiguous social interactions, Negotiating Opportunities should encourage us all to push for accounts of inequality that recognize that mobility projects often entail navigating structural contexts in the absence of clear rules or guidance. * Michelle Jackson, Stanford University, American Journal of Sociology *

  • Winner of Winner of the 2020 Bourdieu Best Book Award Winner of the 2019 North Central Sociological Association's Scholarly Achievement Award.

ISBN: 9780190634445

Dimensions: 231mm x 155mm x 15mm

Weight: 386g

272 pages