Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [181]
As when Billy was younger, his mother’s frequent interventions with “the school” were filled with frustration. And, as in the past, Ms. Yanelli’s efforts generally did not yield an ideal outcome. There may have been many factors involved, but Ms. Yanelli herself reported that she was “not educated.” She felt her relative lack of education impaired her ability to interact with educators.
The urban school district that included the Yanellis’ neighborhood was vastly bigger and more bureaucratic than relatively small suburban school districts. This difference may have lowered her chances of negotiating successful outcomes. It is also possible the educators, who were middle-class, treated Ms. Yanelli and other working-class and poor parents with less deference than they did middle-class parents. Even so, Ms. Yanelli had only a vague understanding of the bureaucratic sequence for due process. Her first meeting at the school board offices, for instance, was likely intended to be for scheduling only—a clerical first step in which the date would be set for a formal hearing during which the Yanellis could present their case. The important point, however, is that the Yanelli family’s considerable efforts on Billy’s behalf did not ensure his educational success. He dropped out of school. Moreover, it is relatively unusual, both in my sample and in other studies of parent involvement, for working-class and poor parents to intervene either as frequently or over as long a period as the Yanellis did.49
Even though working-class and poor parents were less interventionist than middle-class parents, they had strong views about how their children’s lives were unfolding, as comments from the Taylors show. Tyrec had an erratic work history. His parents reported that he was fired from one position for tardiness, that he quit another, outraged over the manager’s unfair treatment of employees, and that he then was unemployed for many months. Ms. Taylor was extremely agitated about this period of unemployment. At one point during the interview, she began to yell about the importance of Tyrec finding work.50 He had to be employed full-time in order to support himself. Ms. Taylor’s anxiety about Tyrec’s future was palpable. She ached for her son to go to college, but her own financial situation made it impossible for her to help much with the cost of college (she thought she “could help him get a loan” and possibly help with books or other expenses). She continued to dream that someday “he would be a successful lawyer.”
The youth, including Tyrec, were aware of their parents’ hopes and dreams for them:
ANNETTE: Did anyone talk to you about the possibility of going to college?
TYREC: Yeah, they came to our school. Colleges came to our school. I could have went to SUNY Geneseo, but I never really like took no SATs. I wasn’t really thinking about going away to no university. I could have. My mom and them probably wanted me to, but I was like . . . after high school I really wanted to do what I wanted to do.
Tyrec also said, “My mom and them kept trying to get me to go to school.” But Ms. Taylor’s approach differed in key ways from that of the Marshall and Tallinger families. She cajoled, pressured, and nagged, but she viewed the actual interactions with institutions (e.g., signing Tyrec up for the SAT, filling out college applications, visiting colleges, and narrowing the pool for applications) as outside the purview of parents. These steps were understood to be the rightful responsibility of the school.51 She and Tyrec’s father were involved parents. They went to great lengths to help their son graduate from high school, and Mr. Taylor paid the tuition for Tyrec’s first semester of community college. But Tyrec did not complete his courses for the term, and Ms. Taylor felt that fundamentally, the decision to pursue college was up to Tyrec.
Both parents repeatedly intervened to help Tyrec