Permissible Advantage?

The Moral Consequences of Elite Schooling

Alan Peshkin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2000
• eBook ISBN: 9781135687694
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This study of Edgewood Academy--a private, elite college preparatory high school--examines what moral choices look like when they are made by the participants in an exceptionally wealthy school, and what the very existence of a privileged school indicates about American society. It extends Peshkin's ongoing exploration of U.S. high schools and their communities, each focused in a different sociocultural setting. In this particular inquiry, he began with two central questions:
* What is a school like whose students enter with a determined disposition to attend college, and all of whom are selected on the promise they display for college success?
* What can be learned from studying Edgewood Academy that transcends the particular case of this school?

The volume opens with a description of how moral choices look when they are made by the participants in an exceedingly wealthy school. There is a general picture of the Academy, a discussion of the processes the school uses to insure the quality of its students and educators, and an overview of teachers and students that reveals what is commendable about each group. These chapters clarify what a school of ample financial means and wise leadership can do. Peshkin goes on to reflect briefly on privilege and concludes with a discussion of what the very existence of a privileged school indicates about American society. Schools, he suggests, are about much more than what goes on inside them--they mirror what is and is not at stake for their particular constituents--and function similarly for the nation.

Edgewood Academy's host community is not a village, town, church, or tribe, as in Peshkin's previous studies. It is a community created by shared aspirations for high-level academic attainment and its associated benefits. Affluence and towering academic achievement are the two most relevant factors. In this book, advantage occupies center stage. The school's excellence is documented not to extol its success, but, rather, to call attention to what is available for its students that is not available for most American children. The focus, ultimately, is on educational justice as illuminated by the advantage of Academy students--that is, on justice denied, not because anyone or any group or agency consciously, planfully sets out to do injustice to other children, but because injustice happens as the artifact of imagined limitations of resources and means. Peshkin's purpose is not to detail the particulars of how educational justice is denied to the many, but to portray and examine the meaning of a privileged school where educational justice prevails for the few.

CHAPTER 1
A Moral Outlook

I

This is damn foolishness—it cannot be that the forty-ninth variety of bagel is more important than your schools…and you ought to ask yourselves why you act as if it were…

—Robert Solow, Nobel Laureate (quoted in Cassidy, 1998), commenting on Kenneth Galbraith’s (1969) Affluent Society

In America, it is illegal neither to create the forty-ninth variety of bagel nor to receive an education that is substandard compared to the best that others receive. But it is unfair, unjust, and unkind.

II

Advantage: “a factor or circumstance that gives superiority to its possessor or that puts him [her]…in a favorable or improved position.”

—Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1966)

Advantage surrounds me. I write from Stanford, California, a privileged “company” town that is redolent of physical, financial, and cultural well-being. I live down the street from Stanford University and Silicon Valley. The fabled Mediterranean climate brings year-round pleasure. The less advantaged live elsewhere.

By virtue of memory and contrast, my friend Cohn from Long Beach, California, often pulls me back to our ghetto on Chicago’s West Side. It still is a ghetto today but for kids much less likely to eventually live favored lives elsewhere. The ghosts of my parents pull me back to Jane Addams’ Hull House, which kept them off the street as children, and where I went for recreation each Saturday morning with my mother.

After seven, ten, maybe more false-start titles, I find Permissible Advantage to be the most fitting designation for this book about Edgewood Academy, an elite school, containing Grades 6 through 12, whose promise of outstanding educational opportunities and outstanding futures is eminently realizable. Edgewood Academy provides an educational experience and cachet that merits designation as privileged. The outcome of a privileged education is advantage, a relativistic term that indicates that Academy graduates have enhanced life opportunities compared to most students in the country.¹ Is it right that they do?

I find it interesting to think about advantage gained in biological terms, by which organisms seek advantage for their progeny in the selection of their mates. Similarly, Academy parents seek advantages for their children in their choice of schooling, which may represent a continuation of advantage seeking on the part of the parents and the initiation of advantage seeking on the part of their children. The lesson learned (or reinforced, as the case may be) is that choice of schooling is instrumental for keeping an already desirable status quo but also for changing an undesirable one.

I wanted to study a school where it was the norm that its students attended college, indeed, where it was a perverse act not to do so. Of necessity, this meant studying a school that served students with high educational and career aspirations. By good chance, I was introduced to and received permission to conduct research at Edgewood Academy,² a nonpublic school in New Mexico.

One does not drive by the school’s otherwise residential neighborhood, located near the northeastern edge of the city, without taking note of the striking nonresidential structures that rise above their surroundings. The Academy could easily be mistaken for a small liberal arts college, with its spread of brick academic and administrative buildings, well-tended lawns and gardens,

array of playing fields, and imposing large library. The campus is bounded by a tall, black metal fence that encloses and separates the school from its surroundings. In this high desert region of New Mexico, a state known more for its beauty than its affluence, Edgewood Academy is both a physical and an educational oasis. It has its cultural origins in and connections to the opportunities and prospects of the larger world beyond its immediate location. A school is known by what it is designed to lead to, by what, in fact, it makes possible afterward for those whom it serves. A school is known by the nature and reach of advantage that its experience affords its students, and the Academy experience affords far-reaching advantages.

III

Over the years, professional and lay media have dealt with a variety of issues and forms of nonpublic schools. Twenty-five years ago, the proliferation of new Christian schools brought joy to many parents who saw the “humanist” public school as anathema to their doctrine, and despair to public school educators who saw a shrinking enrollment and corresponding decline in state revenues. On a smaller scale, African American and Hispanic Americans, also disappointed with public education, opened schools that would do educational justice to their cultural interests and needs. Further, interest in nonpublic (most often Catholic) schools arose—on grounds that were neither doctrinal nor cultural—from their possibly superior contribution to the academic achievement of urban students who otherwise did poorly in public schools.

This study of Edgewood Academy focuses on one type of nonpublic school—the elite school, known also by its primary function as a college preparatory school. My book differs from Arthur Powell’s (1996) fine study that explores “the education that privileged schools provide and not privilege itself” (p. 6). The latter is more my focus. It also differs from Peter Cookson and Caroline Persell’s (1985) work that concludes by wondering if the “prep experience” has become so outmoded that we should look, rather, “to those who are less shackled by conventional ways of doing things,” to those who are less “prisoners of their class” (p. 207). Perhaps because it is not a boarding school, and because it is a relatively new school located in the more egalitarian southwest, Edgewood Academy’s students show no sign of shackling or being class prisoners.

Clearly, there is a host of conceivable focal points in the study of elite schools. Many of them already have been incorporated in existing literature:

• Legal issues (Devins, 1989)

• a rationale for their existence (Heely, 1951)

• pedagogical lessons (Powell, 1996)

• the economic advantages of their students (Bills, 1988; Collins, 1979; and Kingston, 1981)

• reproduction of elites (Cookson & Persell, 1985; Maxwell & Maxwell, 1995)

• enhanced access to elite higher education (Cookson & Persell, 1985)

• identity formation (Proweller, 1998)

• historical analysis (McLachlan, 1970)

• comparative academic achievement (Haertel, James, & Levin, 1987)

• tuition tax credits and governance structures (James & Levin, 1988)

• minority student attendance (Doyle, 1981)

• moral traditions (Hays, 1994).

There is more; this list is suggestive of the topics and literature available to illuminate the working of elite nonpublic schools.

IV

Morris Dickstein (1996) wrote that Congress’s “diminished sympathy for society’s losers” can be traced to several factors, “but some of it arises from a willed ignorance of how the other half lives. Because we all lead insular lives…the poor remain part of a distant underclass and take on no individual reality” (p. 19). Dickstein is right about our so-called losers, but his point extends equally to our so-called winners, who enjoy a corresponding oversight. Anthropologist Laura Nader (1969) reminded us of the disproportionate focus of researchers on the poor and the powerless, as did Lois Weis and Michele Fine (1991), who stress that we should not forget those institutions embodying historical power—the private secondary school. This oversight tends to preclude us from asking who the winners are and what they are walking away with.

Privilege and advantage operate as my controlling concepts, the filtering terms that shaped what I saw and what I care to write about. Zygmunt Bauman’s (1995) point about our moral responsibilities leads to an admonition that only the most depraved would deny. Of course, we have moral responsibilities, a cost-free concession. Moving beyond this concession is where everything becomes moot and where our accord gets lost, then abandoned, in the deep morass of Who gets how much? Who decides? and What next?

All school decisions are moral in nature because in one way or another, sooner or later, they relate to the well-being (e.g., political, economic, cognitive, emotional, social) of students, parents, community, and society. Of procedural importance are questions such as: Who, in fact, makes the judgments— pedagogical, curricular, organizational, and interpersonal—that determine what the nature of the school will be, and who does not? Who are the beneficiaries of these decisions? Whose good do they ignore or slight or undermine? And do they take account of the short-, middle-, and long-term needs and aspirations of students?

Of substantive importance is the outcome of decisions made about what schools elect to teach; what form teaching takes; what ideological orientation is given to what is taught; and what resources are provided for the efficacy of what is taught. “Education,” as Chris Clark (1991) observed, “is a profoundly moral business” (p. 431; see also Dewey, 1909; Jackson, Boostrom, & Hansen, 1993; Tom, 1984).

I am attracted to the perspective provided by moral choice because of our conventional concern as a society for what is moral, albeit a concern that is much more often associated with religion than with education, more often with the Girl Scouts than with the glee club. Behavior considered moral, outcomes considered moral—as a people, we take these matters to be salient and essential, perhaps inevitably so (Kagan, 1998). If only for the sake of appearances, we learn that we should not demean what others take to be moral. By focusing on moral choices, I underscore that while on the face of it, schools are about algebra and accounting, basketball and drama, field trips and competitions, they are, as well, most fully, inevitably, and irrevocably about what is moral. As such, what schools do and what happens in school must never be taken lightly, for all this goes to the heart of our lives.

Furthermore, the mere existence of particular types of schools—doctrinally suffused Christian schools, ethnically centered schools, or academically oriented, elite prep schools—indicate moral choices that some American subgroup has made and, moreover, that American society has made about legally acceptable ways to educate American children.

Some moral choices that affect schools originate in the action of state legislatures and state departments of education, some in the financial and regulatory stipulations that emerge from federal government action. Day-to-day, however, a school’s moral choices originate in and are enacted by the ongoing action of its local clientele and community. In fact, as an embedded institution (Peshkin, 1995), schools are subject to an enormous number and type of agencies—e.g., interest groups, think tanks, professional organizations—d...

Table of contents

• Sociocultural, Political, and Historical Studies in Education
• Contents
• Preface
• CHAPTER 1 A Moral Outlook
• CHAPTER 2 Circumstances of Education
• CHAPTER 3 Judgments for Excellence
• CHAPTER 4 The Goodness of Teachers
• CHAPTER 5 The Goodness of Students
• CHAPTER 6 Privilege
• CHAPTER 7 American Values
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index