Subtractive Schooling

U.S. - Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring

Angela Valenzuela

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781438422626
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Multikulturelle Bildung

Winner of the 2000 Outstanding Book Award presented by the American Educational Research Association
Winner of the 2001 American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Award
Honorable Mention, 2000 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards Subtractive Schooling provides a framework for understanding the patterns of immigrant achievement and U.S.-born underachievement frequently noted in the literature and observed by the author in her ethnographic account of regular-track youth attending a comprehensive, virtually all-Mexican, inner-city high school in Houston. Valenzuela argues that schools subtract resources from youth in two major ways: firstly by dismissing their definition of education and secondly, through assimilationist policies and practices that minimize their culture and language. A key consequence is the erosion of students' social capital evident in the absence of academically oriented networks among acculturated, U.S.-born youth.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

“Listen,” [I told my class] “you don’t have to be here if you don’t want to be here. No one is forcing you.”

—Algebra teacher, Juan Seguín High School

“If the school doesn’t care about my learning, why should I care? Answer me that. Just answer me that!”

—Ninth-grade student, Juan Seguín High School

When teenagers lament that “Nobody cares,” few adults listen. Whether it is offered as an observation, description, explanation, or excuse, the charge that “Nobody cares” is routinely dismissed as childish exaggeration. But what if it were not hyperbole? What if each weekday, for eight hours a day, teenagers inhabited a world populated by adults who did not care—or at least did not care for them sufficiently?

This book is a field guide to just such a world. It presents the findings of my three-year ethnographic investigation of academic achievement and schooling orientations among immigrant Mexican and Mexican American students¹ at Juan Seguín High School (a pseudonym) in Houston, Texas. Rather than functioning as a conduit for the attainment of the American dream, this large, overcrowded, and underfunded urban school reproduces Mexican youth as a monolingual, English-speaking, ethnic minority, neither identified with Mexico nor equipped to function competently in America’s mainstream. For the majority of Seguín High School’s regular (non-college-bound) track, schooling is a subtractive process. It divests these youth of important social and cultural resources, leaving them progressively vulnerable to academic failure.

The progressive nature of academic underachievement among U.S.-born Mexican students has been documented by comparing their grades, test scores, dropout rates, and so on with those of immigrant youth. Studies show that among Mexican and Central American students, generational status plays an influential role in schooling experiences; first- and often second-generation students academically outperform their third- and later-generation counterparts (Vigil and Long 1981; Buriel 1984; Buriel and Cardoza 1988; Ogbu 1991; Matute-Bianchi 1991; Suárez-Orozco 1991; Steinberg et al. 1996). These findings, based primarily on small-scale ethnographic studies, are similarly evident in national-level data (Portes and Rumbaut 1990; Portes and Zhou 1993; Kao and Tienda 1995; Zsembik and Llanes 1996). Rather than revealing the upward mobility pattern historically evident among European-origin groups, research on generational attainments points to an “invisible ceiling” of blocked opportunity for Mexican people (Chapa 1988, 1991; Gans 1992; Bean et al. 1994).

Most scholars have sought to explain the observed generational decline in achievement by comparing the attributes/attitudes of immigrants to those of their later-generation counterparts (Vigil and Long 1981; Matute-Bianchi 1991; Portes and Zhou 1993; Buriel 1984, 1987, 1994). This approach has three major drawbacks. First, it accepts the differences among youth as a priori, rather than as linked to a larger project of cultural eradication in which schools play an important part (Bartolomé 1994). Race/ethnicity are not mere stock that individuals possess, manipulate, and bring to bear on institutional life. Instead, this study of the nexus between generational dynamics and institutional life shows that the latter significantly influences the direction and form that ethnic identities take.

Secondly, generational comparisons that fail to acknowledge schools as key sites for the production of minority status risk an invidious comparison. Contrasting the so-called optimism of immigrant youth with the “antischool” and “subcultural” (Matute-Bianchi 1991; Portes and Zhou 1993, 1994) attitudes of their later-generation counterparts results in a view of U.S.-born youth as “deficient,” fundamentally lacking in drive and enthusiasm. DeVillar (1994) cogently argues that U.S.-born, minority youth are seen by schools and society as lacking the linguistic, cultural, moral, and intellectual traits the assimilationist curriculum demands. These students are perceived as requiring ever more cultural assimilation and resocialization—as if the potency of initial treatments somehow systematically fades. This study proposes that the alleged “deficiencies” of regular-track, U.S.-born youth from a low-income community are themselves symptomatic of the ways that schooling is organized to subtract resources from them.

Thirdly, the interrelatedness of immigrant achievement and non-immigrant underachievement gets obscured. Since the framework advanced herein assumes that achievement is a social process whereby orientations toward schooling are nurtured in familiar contexts among those with similar dispositions, then any “politics of difference”—as McCarthy (1994) theorizes—are highly consequential. That is, when immigrant and non-immigrant youth produce invidious “we–they” distinctions, the achievement potential of the entire group gets compromised as windows to the “other’s” experience are closed.

Before dismissing urban, U.S.-born youth as lazy underachievers, it behooves researchers and practitioners to first examine the school’s role in fostering poor academic performance. Bringing schools into sharper focus, as my study does, reveals that U.S.-born youth are neither inherently antischool nor oppositional. They oppose a schooling process that disrespects them; they oppose not education, but schooling. My research suggests that schools like Seguín High are organized formally and informally in ways that fracture students’ cultural and ethnic identities, creating social, linguistic, and cultural divisions among the students and between the students and the staff.

As a direct consequence of these divisions, social relationships at Seguín typically are often fragile, incomplete, or nonexistent. Teachers fail to forge meaningful connections with their students; students are alienated from their teachers, and are often (especially between groups of first-generation immigrants and U.S.-born) hostile toward one another, as well; and administrators routinely disregard even the most basic needs of both students and staff. The feeling that “no one cares” is pervasive—and corrosive. Real learning is difficult to sustain in an atmosphere rife with mistrust. Over even comparatively short periods of time, the divisions and misunderstandings that characterize daily life at the school exact high costs in academic, social, and motivational currency. The subtractive nature of schooling virtually assures that students who begin the year with only small reserves of skills, as do most regular-track, U.S.-born youth, will not succeed; and conversely, those who come with more positive orientations or greater skills, as do Mexico-born students, are better equipped to offset the more debilitating aspects of schooling. Thus, what is commonly described as a problem of “generational decline in academic achievement” is much more accurately understood as a problem of subtractive schooling—a concept I introduced and developed elsewhere (Valenzuela 1997, 1999).

This chapter briefly describes the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the study I undertook at Seguín (see appendix for a complete description of the research methodology); reviews the literature on immigrant and nonimmigrant achievement; and explains the theoretical framework of the present study. The notion of sub-tractive schooling that forms the core of my work combines insights from social capital theory (especially Coleman 1988, 1990) and from the academic achievement and educational attainment literature comparing immigrant and U.S.-born youth (i.e., “subtractive assimilation” literature [Cummins 1984; Skutnabb-Kangas and Cummins 1988; Gibson 1988, 1993]). This general orientation is further enriched by existing research on caring and education (Noddings 1984, 1992; Fisher and Tronto 1990; Noblit 1993; Courtney and Noblit 1994; Danin 1994; Prillaman et al. 1994), much of which originally developed out of a concern for the alienating consequences of comprehensive, overcrowded, and bureaucratic schools like Seguín High (Noddings 1984, 1992).

The importance of caring/not caring in the present study also reflects the emphasis accorded to this factor by both students and teachers: explanations for the negative quality of life and schooling at Seguín often involved teachers and students each charging that the other “did not care.” Taken together, these three bodies of literature—caring and education, subtractive assimilation, and social capital theory—enable the construction of a more nuanced explanation of achievement and underachievement among immigrant and U.S.-born youth than currently exists.

THE STUDY

My decision to pursue a modified ethnographic approach, one that combined collecting and analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data on generational differences in academic achievement among Mexican youth, was guided by several considerations. First, an exclusive dependence on quantitative data would have precluded my arriving at an in-depth understanding of the meaning of schooling for the study participants. Second, my emergent interest in the quality of interpersonal relationships as well as student groupings and grouping behaviors required my active involvement in the life of the school. Finally, the difficulties of surveying a student population with a large, disaffected segment—many of whom refused to fill out my questionnaire—were overwhelming.

I quickly realized that if I wanted to succeed in my goal of producing a rich, multilayered account of the relationship between schooling and achievement, I would need to gather data from as many sources and through as many means as I could fashion. The key mode of data collection became participant observation, augmented by data gathered from extensive field notes and informal interviews with students, parents, teachers, administrators, and community members and leaders. I did not abandon quantitative measures, however. In addition to questionnaires, I used quantitative data extracted from school and district documents. This kind of information helped direct my attention to important dimensions of schooling, most notably orientations toward school and achievement.

The qualitative component of my study of Mexican youth at Juan Seguín High School began in early fall of 1992. This involved informal, open-ended interviews with both individual students and groups of students, as well as with teachers, and observations at the school site. These encounters alerted me to the importance of human relations to students’ motivation to achieve. Relations with school personnel, especially with teachers, play a decisive role in determining the extent to which youth find the school to be a welcoming or an alienating place. Youth, especially the U.S.-born group, frequently expressed their affiliational needs in terms of caring. Each time I reviewed my field notes, I would be struck by how often the words “care,” “caring,” and “caring for” seemed to leap off the pages, demanding my attention. This naturalistic discourse on caring led me toward the caring literature and a more focused examination of the meanings and uses of caring.

My early qualitative data collection also made clear that how youth group themselves (especially along immigrant/non-immigrant, Spanish-speaking/non-Spanish speaking axes) and the kinds of activities they undertake in those groups (e.g., school-related or non-school-related) bear directly on academic achievement. Students were invested in schooling if their friends were invested in it, or if their teachers were invested in them. In following up on this observation, I found the literature on social capital and on education and caring to be most useful.

I decided that a ground-level, inside look at students’ affiliational needs in their schooling context was the optimal approach through which to examine the extent to which school orientations among immigrant and U.S.-born youth were conditioned by affiliational concerns. My interest in teacher-student relations, as well as in student grouping behaviors, translated into consciously seeking out students at times and places where they were likely to congregate. This meant talking to students in groups during their lunch hour, in the halls between classes, in the school library, in the bathroom (girls), during their Physical Education (P.E.) classes, in front of school buildings before and after school, and under the stairwells and in other hiding places favored by students who preferred to skip classes. I also attended numerous school and community functions (see appendix).

I began the quantitative component of my study with a survey of Seguín’s entire student body (N = 2,281) in November, 1992. I was primarily interested in determining the extent to which generational status helped explain the varying levels of achievement. Analyzing the data on grades reported in this survey allowed me to establish some basic facts. First, students from Seguín High conform to the general pattern observed elsewhere among first-generation Mexican immigrants and U.S.-born Mexican American youth. The record of achievement among Seguín’s immigrant youth is significantly higher than that of their U.S.-born, second- and third+-generation counterparts. Among the generations of U.S.-born youth, however, differences were not statistically significant.² Moreover, this difference in achievement is only evident among youth in the regular, non-college-bound track. In other words, as one would expect, being in the college-bound track erases these differences. Romo and Falbo (1996) and Olsen (1997) similarly underscore the importance of track placement as a highly consequential variable that structures the schooling experiences and achievement outcomes of immigrant and Mexican American adolescent youth.

Second, females in every generational group tend to outperform their male counterparts. However, this gender difference is again only evident among youth in the regular, non-college-bound track. Thus placement in the college-bound track has a leveling effect, erasing these differences, as well. Though she did not control for tracking, Matute-Bianchi (1991) reported similar findings on gender in her study of Mexican immigrant and non-immigrant youth. Her statistical analyses pointed not only to females’ higher levels of aspirations and hours dedicated to homework, but also to this group’s more positive rating of school climate. These findings, coupled with my survey data, led me to consider ways in which gender intersects with generational status to influence schooling orientations and outcomes.

Third, as Matute-Bianchi (1991) found, immigrant youth—regardless of either gender or track placement—experience school significantly more positively than their U.S.-born counterparts. That is, they see teachers as more caring and accessible and they rate the school climate in more positive terms, as well.³ These students’ attitudes contrast markedly with those of their second- and third+-generation counterparts whose responses in turn are not significantly different from one another. Data gathered from interviews and participant observation corroborate this finding of a schooling experience that distinguishes immigrant from U.S.-born youth.

Fourth, the survey showed the students’ parents’ educational levels to be extremely low, with a “high” average of around nine years attained by the third generation.⁴ This information alerted me to the ninth grade as a watershed year, as well as to the idea that parents had little educational “advantage” to confer (Lareau 1989). Accordingly, I tried to talk to as many ninth graders as possible and to incorporate their voices and experience into this ethnographic account. I also pondered the implications of the parents’ limited formal education as I recorded the criticisms teachers leveled at students, parents, and the community.

Combining quantitative evidence with my deepening role as a participant-observer helped generate the overarching conceptual frame for this study. I came to locate “the problem” of achievement squarely in school-based relationships and organizational structures and policies designed to erase students’ culture. Over the three years in which I collected and analyzed my data, I became increasingly convinced that schooling is organized in ways that subtract resources from Mexican youth.⁵

For theoretical guidance in tracing out the ways in which the schooling experiences and orientations of Mexican high school students affect the range of their schooling outcomes, from achievement through disaffection, psychic withdrawal, resistance, and failure, I turned to the large volume of literature on immigrant/non-immigrant achievement. I review the most relevant aspects of that literature below. To address the issues that my research with Seguín’s students identified as most salient, however, it was work in the specific areas of subtractive assimilation, social capital, and caring that proved the most useful. These combined perspectives help explain why schooling is a more positive experience for immigrant than for non-immigrant, U.S.-born youth. They bring to light the ways in which mainstream institutions strip away students’ identities, thus weakening or precluding supportive social ties and draining resources important to academic success.

MEXICAN IMMIGRANT AND MEXICAN AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT

Explanations for differential academic achievement among immigrants and non-immigrants are many and varied. Most offer insights that help explain the gap I observed at Seguín High, but all leave important questions unanswered. Below, I begin by reviewing this literature and noting where it converges with and diverges from my findings. Then, in the theoretical framework section, I discuss the subtractive assimilation, social capital, and caring and education studies that inform and frame my subtractive schooling explanation of underachievement.

Immigrant Achievement

Linguistic and anthropological studies of immigrant academic “success” evident at Seguín point to cognitive and psychocultural factors, respectively, that enhance their adaptability to new school settings.⁶ The linguistic literature, in particular, underscores the importance of academic competence in one’s own language as a precondition to mastery in a second language (Cummins 1984; Hernández-Chávez 1988; Montaño-Harmon 1991; Lindholm and Aclan 1993; Merino et al. 1993).⁷ Immigrant students who possess essential skills in reading, writing, comprehension, and mathematics in their own language (or those who acquire these skills through a bilingual education program) outperform their U.S.-born counterparts. Immigrants’ academic competence is further confirmed by findings that students schoo...