Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [241]
47. Ms. Yanelli’s story went further:
MS. YANELLI: He [the principal] said to me, “You and your son get out.” And he walked up, and he opened the door for us to leave, and there were like five other people sitting there who he had called down. See he was allowed to call in who he wanted to call in, but we weren’t allowed to call who we wanted to call. And he opened the door, and as we were walking by, he said to me, “I hope you and your fucking son croak”—or die, or something, one of them. And when he said it, my whole body started shaking. And my knees shaking. And I was like, “I don’t believe this man just said this to me.” And people heard him say it. They heard him say it. And they didn’t care. Like the secretaries that were working there.
ANNETTE: Did they look up at all?
MS. YANELLI: Yeah, they looked up and they looked away. And we went storming out. So then I came home and I called the school and I said, “I had a tape recorder and I just want you to know that what that principal said to me, I know he said. It’s on tape.” Which was really stupid of me because . . . I was trying to bluff him, but I forgot I went through that metal detector.
48. This district employee also raised the possibility of Billy quitting school. Ms. Yanelli recalled, “She said, ‘Would you like your son to quit school?’ And he was almost at the sixteen-year-old point at that time, and I said, ‘Yeah. Yeah. I would rather him be done at that point.’ ” See Michelle Fine, Framing Dropouts, on how educators “push out” some youth, encouraging them to drop out.
49. Quantitative studies are unable to differentiate the level of detail that would illuminate this pattern, but there is evidence that parents with more education are more likely to initiate contact with schools and be more active in school matters. See Kathleen Hoover-Dempsey and Howard M. Sandler, “Why Do Parents Become Involved?” Ethnographic research also shows considerably less involvement by working-class and poor parents than middle-class parents. See Amanda Lewis and Tyrone Forman, “Contestation or Collaboration?”; Annette Lareau, Home Advantage; Fiona Devine, Class Practices; Val Gillies, “Teaching and Learning Guide for Childrearing, Class, and the New Politics of Parenting.” See also Gill Crozier and Jane Davies, “Hard to Reach Parents or Hard to Reach Schools?” Note that in addition to class differences in parents’ actions, educators may differ in the degree to which they perceive parents are powerful; educators’ perceptions of parents may shape how responsive educators feel that they need to be. I am grateful to Lisa Smulyan for this point.
50. Mr. Taylor suspected that Tyrec might have been selling marijuana at this point.
51. Put differently, it was not Ms. Taylor’s aspirations that impeded her involvement, but her class position. If she had had more knowledge about how to intervene more in high school to facilitate college enrollment, it is likely that she would have done so. Paul Attewell and David Lavin show, in Passing the Torch, that child-rearing practices change among women who are the first in their families to graduate from college (particularly compared to comparable women who do not attend college). They show that college graduates are more likely to read to their children and become more involved in schooling. Thus, there appears to be something transformative