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including the advice to take their retaliatory actions “when the teacher isn’t looking.” This undercurrent of resistance is also tinged with hostility. Working-class and poor parents resent the power vested in school personnel to act on behalf of students they identify as abused in their home environments. As Wendy Driver’s mother explains, the fear these parents have that “they” might “come and take your kids away” is real. Complying with educators’ requests, even when they are seen as ridiculous by parents, reduces parents’ risk of intervention by state officials. Still, because parents’ child-rearing strategies are at odds with the approach of concerted cultivation stressed by “the school,” parents such as Wendy Drivers’ parents are openly criticized by educators for not taking more of a leadership role in their children’s schooling.

THE DRIVER FAMILY

Wendy Driver, the focal child, is a friendly and cheerful ten-year-old,1 who is in the fourth grade at Lower Richmond School. She lives in a rented two-story brick house with her older brother, Willie; her baby stepsister, Valerie; her mother, Debbie; Mack Fallon, Debbie’s boyfriend (and Valerie’s father); and two cats, Sweetie and Monster.

Wendy is very thin, with pale skin and big eyes. She often wears colored headbands that pull her long blond hair back from her face. She gives spontaneous hugs to her relatives and other adults, including the field-workers, when they arrive and exit. She often kisses two-month-old Valerie on the head and sometimes (when her mother is out of the room) wakes the baby up to play with her. In an interview, Wendy describes herself this way:

I’m nice. I’m not cocky, I’m not greedy, and I don’t spend that much money on one thing. Like, if I have the money, I’ll take my mom and [Mack] out to dinner . . . I like to play Barbies [and] play cards with my cousins. I like to ride my bike and go roller-skating. I like math.

Small pleasures bring an enthusiastic response as on one spring evening when Wendy, seeing a bolt of lightning, jumps up and down excitedly and says, “Let’s go outside! Let’s go outside!” She is thrilled to watch bolts of lightning from the safety of the front porch.

At school, Wendy is sometimes an assertive leader. During recess and lunch, she and her girlfriends (all white) run around, chase boys, and play various games. One day, we watch as she organizes an attack on the boys’ restroom. She orders two girls to approach the lavatory from the near side (“I told you guys to go! Go around . . . ”) and bang on the door; meanwhile, she and another girl begin advancing from the other side, crouching down, half-hidden, giggling. Wendy seems similarly uninhibited about expressing her many opinions, including this estimation of Ms. Olean, her dance teacher:

This year I’m dancin’ with my cousin Nicole. She goes to dancin’, too. And sometimes Ms. Olean can be a real brat. She always hollers at people. Like yesterday me and my cousin Nicole were dancin’ and we messed up a little . . . and she’s like, “POINT THE TOES! POINT THE TOES!” And she’s like, “DO IT!” She’s a real brat.

Wendy’s parents separated when she was a preschooler; they divorced two years later. Mr. Driver died suddenly during the fall that Wendy started second grade. Her mother began dating Mr. Fallon toward the end of that school year, and about twelve months later, they decided to live together.2 Wendy’s relationship with her mother’s boyfriend is amiable. For example, when she reports, after a camping trip, “Mack, I went horseback riding on my trip,” Mr. Fallon replies teasingly, “Horseback riding? Are you sure it was a horse and not a donkey?” Still, Wendy continues to miss her dad; at night, she sleeps with a doll that he gave her several years earlier.

Like Wendy, twelve-year-old Willie is an animated, talkative child. He enjoys visiting his cousins, riding his bike, watching television, and going fishing and hunting. Although he describes Mr. Fallon as “nice to us,” and notes that Mr. Fallon “drives us places,” Willie, like Wendy, misses his father. He and