Who You Know

Unlocking Innovations That Expand Students' Networks

Julia Freeland Fisher, Daniel Fisher

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781119452928
• eBook ISBN: 9781119452935
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

Improve student outcomes with a new approach to relationships and networks

Relationships matter. Who You Know explores this simple idea to give teachers and school administrators a fresh perspective on how to break the pattern of inequality in American classrooms. It reveals how schools can invest in the power of relationships to increase social mobility for their students.

Discussions about inequality often focus on achievement gaps. But opportunity is about more than just test scores. Opportunity gaps are a function of not just what students know, but who they know. This book explores the central role that relationships play in young people's lives, and provides guidance for a path forward. Schools can:

• Integrate student support models that increase access to caring adults in students' lives
• Invest in learning models that strengthen teacher-student relationships
• Deploy emerging technologies that expand students' networks to experts and mentors from around world

Exploring the latest tools, data, and real-world examples, this book provides evidence-based guidance for educators looking to level the playing field and expert analysis on how policymakers and entrepreneurs can help.

Networks need no longer be limited by geography or circumstance. By making room for relationships, K-12 schools can transform themselves into hubs of next-generation learning and connecting. Who You Know explains how.

Chapter One
The Social Side of Opportunity
Why Relationships Matter to Meritocracy

Meritocracy's Mythical Origins

The year is 2033, and Britain is witnessing an upheaval in the face of vast inequality. A fragmented underclass wages its final revolt against the meritocracy—an economic and political system that has, for nearly a century, purported to sort people into various schools and jobs according to their talents. The merit-based machinery was originally designed to combat class divides. But it has failed to account for the uneven playing field many face, and has ended up simply reproducing a society profoundly divided between haves and have-nots.¹

In 1958, then-fledgling sociologist Michael Young envisioned this bleak British future in his essay The Rise of the Meritocracy. Young intended the piece to be both a satire and a warning. At the time, he was concerned that all sorts of worthy people might inadvertently find themselves left out of Britain's system committed to rewarding individual merit. He worried that without equal opportunity, this system would yield unfair outcomes and create a permanent underclass. He mocked the false tidiness of this commitment to merit and dubbed it with a new name, meritocracy.

Young meant this made-up term to be something of a joke. The word combines the Latin verb merere or “earn” with the Greek suffix cracy—“power” or “rule” (that's bookish British humor for you!). But as use of the word spread through the second half of the twentieth century, it quite magically shed its ironic origins. Meritocracy morphed into something altogether positive—and across the pond, the idea came to capture a distinctly American sentiment.

When our parents, school principals, and political leaders now talk about merit, the term is cast with a rosy hue. They celebrate a system that rewards some mix of raw talent and hard work. The vast majority of Americans subscribe to this notion. They are, in fact, one of the most likely populations in the world to favor meritocracy.² It has become virtually impossible to disentangle the concept of who gets what from the idea that individual capacity and effort ought to play a leading role.

As Young pointed out, however, the health of any meritocracy depends on ensuring equal access to opportunity. And in this regard, America has witnessed an ongoing struggle. If America's enthusiasm for meritocracy is alive and well, then so are Young's 1958 fears. The complexity, trade-offs, and messiness of what constitutes equal opportunity are more stark and confusing than ever.

Opportunity by the Numbers: A Tale of Two Childhoods

No institution sits more in the crossfire of meritocracy and opportunity than our schools. School is an institution responsible for providing the foundation of equal opportunity on top of which our meritocracy can stand proudly. Americans have long lauded school as society's “great equalizer.”

But playing society's equalizer is no easy task. By many accounts, the contours of opportunity in America are shifting far beyond our school buildings. Our schools are being asked to level exceedingly complex—and unequal—terrain.

Drive across any US city and you'll be reminded of the vast income inequalities facing the country. The first half of the twentieth century witnessed relatively steady progress among low- and middle-wage earners. But income inequality has shot up since the 1970s. In the post-2008 Great Recession era, it has continued to grow at an astonishing clip.³ Further, these gaps hamper economic mobility. Only half of Americans born in 1980 are economically better off than their parents, compared to 90 percent of those born a generation earlier.⁴ These differences are appearing not only on Americans' bank statements but also in their zip codes. Residential segregation by income has increased since the 1980s, including in twenty-seven of the nation's thirty largest major metropolitan areas.⁵

Children, of course, are not immune to the effects of these trends. As researchers have long pointed out, families' economic and geographic circumstances have lasting impacts on gaps in children's cognitive, educational, professional, and health outcomes. This reality has grown even starker as income inequality has gotten worse. For better or for worse, schools often function as the first line of defense—and the last hope—for addressing these shifts.

Many have attempted to trace the impact that economic shifts and family circumstances have on children. For example, the Opportunity Index (a joint effort of the national campaign Opportunity Nation and the nonprofit Child Trends) compiles American state and local data to create annual composite measures on Americans' access to opportunity. Explaining the index's purpose, the organization describes two children from disparate geographies and backgrounds, John and Jane. John hails from Nassau County, New York, where the median household income is $90,634. Jane, by contrast, lives in Tarrant County, Texas, where prospects are not as bright. Tarrant County has a median income of $53,170. Its violent crime rate is more than double that of Nassau County, and its rate of enrollment in pre-K is two thirds that of Nassau.⁶

These geographic and economic conditions spell greatly different educational prospects for John and Jane. Extending the hypothetical, John attends an award-winning high school in Garden City, Long Island, which is ranked 121st nationally by US News & World Report. Jane lives in inner-city Fort Worth. At her high school, only 11 percent of students who qualify for free and reduced lunch are proficient in math and English.⁷

Such disparate conditions are all too familiar to those of us steeped in education reform. Economically disadvantaged children like Jane have historically had fewer developmental and early education opportunities, received less reliable health care, and enrolled in disproportionately low-performing schools.

But measuring opportunity in terms of household income or school quality doesn't paint the whole picture. John and Jane, it turns out, are competing on an even more complex playing field, one that's often masked by statistics on income and achievement. John's well-resourced childhood introduces a whole new set of inequities between him and Jane: social gaps. John and Jane possess vastly different webs of relationships that each can rely on and tap into. And if diverging income levels remain the starkest drivers of unequal childhoods, then relationships are becoming the best-hidden asset in the modern opportunity equation.⁸

Relationship Gaps: Hidden Disparity

Schools deal in the intricate webs of students' relationships every day. They interface with parents and guardians. They watch social groups form and dissolve. They forge connections between teachers and students. But because relationships are not an overt metric of school quality or educational excellence, social connections are rarely measured or talked about in their own right.

Still, data on the state of students' networks does exist—and reveals some alarming realities. In recent years, a few key statistics have emerged that paint a startling picture of divergent childhood experiences that reflect not only financial gaps but social ones.

First, neighborhood segregation is worsening as families from di...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Social Side of Opportunity
• Chapter Two: Getting by with a Little Help from Our Friends
• Chapter Three: There's No App for That
• Chapter Four: Edtech That Connects
• Chapter Five: Making Space for Relationships
• Chapter Six: If You Build It, Will They Connect?
• Chapter Seven: What Gets Measured Gets Done
• Conclusion: Designing for a Networked Society, Labor Market, and Life
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• End User License Agreement