Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [223]
8. Parent volunteers for organized activities had similar complaints. A father who oversees the local Cub Scout troops is dismayed by the number of parents who “drop [their] kid off and use the time to go do errands.”
9. There were differences in important aspects of school life. There was more emphasis on order and control of children’s bodies at Lower Richmond than at Swan. In Lower Richmond, for example, lining up children in an orderly way took longer and involved more teacher input than at Swan School. (There were also separate girls’ and boys’ lines at Lower Richmond, while at Swan there was one, gender integrated, line.) Yard duty teachers yelled more on the playground at Lower Richmond than at Swan school and physical fights were much more frequent at Lower Richmond. These differences in practices, however, should not obscure the important point of the cultural repertoires that teachers sought to enact and envisioned as most appropriate for children. In this regard, as well as in their own personal lives, educators supported the concerted cultivation of children’s talents, particularly the development of their reasoning skills.
10. See Jean Anyon, Ghetto Schooling, and Jonathon Kozol, Savage Inequalities. See also the U. S. Department of Education, The Condition of Education, 2001.
11. An exposition of how these beliefs developed, were transmitted, were contested, and changed over time is beyond the scope of this work. Still, it is apparent that professionals’ standards are shaped by multiple forces. These include what teachers learned from their professional training (i.e., teacher education programs), from the publications by National Teachers’ Organizations, from district in-service trainings and materials, and from informal conversation with teachers and administrators.
12. See especially Shirley Brice Heath, Ways with Words.
13. See Joyce Epstein and Mavis G. Sanders, “Connecting Home, School, and Community,” as well as Annette Lareau, Home Advantage.
14. In this book, all statistics, unless otherwise noted, are targeted to 1993–1995 (usually 1995), which was the time of data collection. William Kornblum, Sociology: The Central Questions, p. 159.
15. Childhood poverty has been demonstrated to predict a host of negative life outcomes, including lower levels of health, scores on standardized tests, school grades, and emotional well-being. See Greg J. Duncan and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, eds., Consequences of Growing Up Poor. For a comparative view of poverty rates in the United States and other industrialized countries, see Rainwater and Smeeding, “Doing Poorly.”
16. See Greg J. Duncan and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, eds., Consequences of Growing Up Poor. In 1997, 20% of all children were officially poor, but for white children the figure was 16% and for Black children it was 37%; for Black children under the age of six, 40% were poor. Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and John Schmitt, The State of Working America 1998–1999, p. 281.
17. For example between 1989 and 1997 the wealth of the top fifth of the country grew by 9% while it declined by 6% for the bottom tenth of the population. Mishel et al., The State of Working America, p, 264. See also Michael Hout and Claude S. Fischer, “A Century of Inequality.”
18. See Dalton Conley, Being Black, Living in the Red, and Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth.
19. The high school dropout rate in 1995 was 9% for whites and 12% for Black youth; by the end of the decade it had dropped slightly for white youth and increased slightly for Black youth. See U. S. Department of Education, The Condition of Education, 2001, p. 142.
20. In 1995, 28% of young people 25–29 had completed a bachelor’s degree; by 2000 it had risen to 33%. There is a significant difference between the proportion of white high school graduates who eventually earn college degrees (31% in 1995, 36% in 2001) and Black high school graduates who eventually earn degrees