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Alternative High
Effort Explains School Success
Alternative High is a small school. It is also a new school, opening just two years before I began my research in 2005. At the time I started my observations and interviews, the student body consisted of only freshman and sophomores, fewer than one hundred students in all. The school’s design and mission is based on a school reform effort that was launched on the East Coast, although several dozen schools around the country now work from its model. These schools take a nontraditional approach to education, focusing in particular on ways to advance the prospects of inner-city students.1
While Alternative High is dedicated to helping students fulfill all the course requirements for college entrance, it is also designed to prepare them for the world of work. The explicit goal of the school model is to help students identify what they are passionate about and hone skills and goals that build from these personal interests. Students attend school on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but spend Tuesdays and Thursdays doing internships at local businesses, government offices, and the like. Typically students start work on these internships at about 9:00 A.M. and finish at about 12:00 P.M. This means that they have a good portion of those days to schedule as they please. School officials expect students to do schoolwork on their own during that time, but do not expect students to attend school after their internship hours.
Many students I talked to were thrilled with their internships and felt that new career fields had been opened up to them. One student was delighted to be interning at a law office; another was similarly excited about shadowing a police officer. However, I also saw cases in which students’ internships did not live up to the goal of the program. For example, three students were interns at a private photography studio, and one complained to me that she had not learned anything about photography even though she had been an intern there for two years. She had sought out this particular internship in hopes of learning photography skills, perhaps even developing a portfolio to launch a career of her own. But rather than treating the internship as an apprenticeship, the owner of the studio scheduled his interns to answer phones while he was away from the office on off-site shoots. He did not have the them shadow him and learn as he worked. Thus, their internship, in effect, did little more than train them for low-level clerical work. Likewise, Deshawn, whom we met in the introduction, spent most of his internship working at the cash register and busing tables rather than learning kitchen skills that would give him a leg up in pursuing a career as a chef.
Students’ internships are intended to be field sites where they can put their academics into action. Toward this goal, students keep journals on their internship work and, for example, record any math that they do in the course of their jobs. Students can earn credit toward their grades in any subjects that they practice in their internship work. The principal tells me, “We have to believe that learning outside of the school is powerful. . . . Internship provides a great opportunity for children to allow their brilliancy to come in.” Of course, how well these academic and career goals are realized varies from student to student and site to site.
Alternative High promotes an image of itself as a place where students are able to discover their own strengths and work somewhat independently to achieve success in those strong suits. The school promises to hold students to rigorous academic standards while giving them opportunities to participate in the real world of work. Students are required to set their own academic goals (approved by the teacher) and prove that they have reached those goals by means of an end-of-quarter demonstration of their schoolwork. This is very different from assessment in traditional high schools, which typically involves a week of final exams. Nonetheless, these end-of-quarter demonstrations are every bit as stressful for students. They wear professional attire and create elaborate demonstration materials to exhibit their academic work. Posters and PowerPoints are common presentation strategies. Students’ homeroom teachers are the primary judges of the demonstrations, but other teachers also watch and judge the work. Schoolmates and the general public are invited to attend and to offer written and verbal comments and criticisms, which the judges can take into consideration. Generally, the “public” does not include more than the students’ parents and internship mentors, but in principle, students must be prepared to respond to comments from outsiders as well. During the period of my observations and interviews I attended ten end-of-quarter demonstrations and found them to be an excellent venue for practicing presentation skills, although they were relatively weak in terms of academic content.
Students at Alternative High perform poorly on some of the California standardized tests and at an average level on other state measures, though its academic performance index (API) is more than twenty points higher than the state average.2 The school does not serve a particular neighborhood zone. As an alternative school in a large urban school district, it is able to draw students from any school zone within the district’s boundaries. Students who would normally be assigned to their neighborhood high school can opt to attend Alternative High instead. “We are a school of choice,” the principal explains. “We take fifty incoming ninth graders every year and any tenth, eleventh, or twelfth grader who wants to apply. It’s first come, first served. The only students who have a guaranteed spot are those that already have a sibling here.” Alternative High is a Title I school with a majority-minority student body. More than 50 percent of the students are socioeconomically disadvantaged, as defined by the state of California.3
Education’s Role in Social Reproduction
Social reproduction refers to the way in which people who are born into families with advantages and privileges are often able to secure lives for themselves that include advantages and privileges. Meanwhile, people who are born into families that face disadvantages often remain in similarly disadvantaged positions throughout their lives. In many ways the idea of social reproduction is the opposite of the idea of the American dream, which is about moving up the social and economic ladder to become more successful than one’s parents were. While some Americans are able to accomplish this upward mobility over the course of their lives, most people tend to remain on the same socioeconomic rungs of the ladder. Generation after generation, we reproduce the existing social order.
To understand how education facilitates social reproduction, scholars study differences both among and within schools. We know that public schools that serve more affluent neighborhoods tend to offer curricula and teacher instruction that promote more rigorous academic engagement than do schools that serve lower-income and ethnoracial-minority neighborhoods. This sets up students at more privileged schools for college and professional futures and students at less privileged schools for low-skilled jobs in the workforce.4 Alternative High was designed explicitly to challenge this pattern by preparing low-income minority youth for promising futures.
Regarding curriculum tracking within schools, scholars often find a similar pattern. Lower-income and ethnoracial-minority students tend to be disproportionately placed in lower curriculum tracks, while middle-class, white, and Asian American students are disproportionately placed in higher curriculum tracks.5 Thus, schools reproduce the social order by educating different groups of students with knowledge and skills that are appropriate for different kinds of adult futures.6 This is why Alternative High does not practice curriculum tracking but gives every student access to the same curricular content.
In addition to the formal curriculum and the way in which teachers teach it, scholars pay attention to “hidden curricula” that tacitly teach norms and values.7 They find that that working-class students are more often taught to value traits such as being on time, respecting authority, and following instructions—behaviors that workers need to be successful in low-skill jobs. Meanwhile, students from the middle and upper middle classes are more often taught to value skills such as creative thinking, problem solving, self-motivation, and assertiveness—abilities that managers and professionals need. Importantly, school administrators, teachers, and students do not necessarily reinforce these curricula in a conscious way. As Michael Apple writes, “a fundamental problem facing us is the way in which systems of domination and exploitation persist and reproduce themselves without being consciously recognized by the people involved.”8 Hidden curriculum can be invisible even to those who carry it out.
Of course, it would be wrong to see schools only as blind reproducers of the existing social order, as if their role were completely determined by inequalities in the types of jobs that the economy offers to American workers. Like Alternative High, many schools actively attempt to fight against these dynamics of reproduction: they “untrack” students and target low-income and ethnoracial-minority students for advanced, rigorous academics that will lead to successful college futures.9 Similarly, the widespread program known as Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) supports minority students’ preparation and enrollment in honors and AP curricula at Comprehensive High as well as in many other schools across California and throughout the country.
Connected to schools’ role in social reproduction is the widely held notion that doing well in school pays off with a bright, successful future after graduation. Americans generally believe this truism, and schools themselves encourage it.10 For many students, however, it is a false promise. They leave high school with knowledge and skills that are suitable only for low-level, often dead-end work. They simply do not receive the kind of schooling that qualifies them for ambitious careers or higher education (see chapter 7). Research also shows the many ways in which poor, working-class, and minority students themselves resist school messages about success. They recognize that, whether their report cards show As or Ds, their prospects as adults will likely be the same.11
In the course of my research, I looked carefully at how students create identities for themselves in the cultural environment of their own school.12 None of the students I talked to resists messages about the positive benefits of school success. Each endeavors to do well in school and contends that school success is a good and valuable pursuit. The schools work to support this attitude. Alternative High, for instance, seeks to redress the systematic inequality of U.S education, and in many respects it succeeds. Students are drawn to the school because it is committed to doing things differently from traditional high schools. Many of Alternative High’s students were underperforming in their middle schools and came here in hopes that more individual attention from teachers and the relative freedom of attending school only three days a week would yield better academic results. While the academic content of the lessons I observed was relatively low, I certainly saw that most students at Alternative High are challenged by their curriculum and that their homeroom teachers hold them accountable for improving their skills in each subject.
School Is Like a Second Family
During the three days a week that students are at school, they spend the entire day in their homeroom class with their homeroom teacher. This fosters a tight-knit community among classmates and the teacher. Jimmy, a student ambassador who is assigned to greet campus guests such as myself, explains, “We don’t like to call it homeroom; we like to call it a family.” Many times I heard teachers, students, and the principal compare homeroom units to being “like a big family.” Students such as Sherie, an African American sophomore, enjoy this aspect of school life tremendously: “I mean how many schools do you know where you get to know your teacher on this level? And all your classmates, they are like a big dysfunctional family; that’s what I always say. I love school. I come here and have fun.”
Homeroom teachers are generally responsible for English and history curricula. Most other subjects are taught by part-time staff members, some of whom are retired instructors from a nearby community college. When it is time, say, for a chemistry lesson or a Spanish lesson, that teacher comes to the students’ classroom rather than the other way around. Students see their subject-specific teachers just once or twice a week. There are no honors classes, every student in homeroom participates in the same subject lessons, and homerooms are not stratified into ability groups. For science and math subjects, the majority of the students’ work is accomplished via online programs, which offer some internal “help” features for students as they complete assignments on their own. Students also have the option to visit their teachers during assigned office hours.
Monique, an African American sophomore, says that she would prefer to have “more one-on-one time” with her teachers: “The only time we get to see our teachers is maybe the hour and a half when he or she comes in and then if they have an office when they’re actually in their office to talk to them. Because they’re usually with another class, so we’re kind of stuck. So it’s either you look on the website, if that’s what we’re using, and try to figure it out from what they give you, or you just skip it and in some cases like for math you can’t skip it. You have to learn it or else [the online math program] won’t let you go to the next level.” Most of the students I spoke with felt that office hours were either inconvenient, intimidating, or both. As in Monique’s case, this generally meant that students got little help on their homework assignments from their subject-specific teachers.
Because they have a stationary homeroom class, students are able to make the classroom space their own in a variety of ways. Many rooms are adorned with personal photos of students, their families, their non-school friends, and their romantic interests. Even during lunchtime, each cohort of twenty or so classmates plus the homeroom teacher stays together, confined to an enclosed patio adjacent to the cafeteria. During my classroom observations, I came to agree that the groups have family-like rhythms and dynamics. Arguments, bickering, and avoidance strategies are common, but everyone seems to know what to expect from everyone else. This is especially true in the sophomore class, which had already been together for a year and a half when I observed them. They are the group that Sherie calls “a big dysfunctional family.” Each student seems able to carve out a comfortable place for herself in the space of the classroom. At the same time, everyone is more or less aware of what the others are doing. Importantly, this means that one’s work and study habits are visible to everyone in the “family.”
As in family life, spending time together in a bounded space can help develop nurturing interactions among individuals. For example, one morning the chemistry teacher asks the class a question, and Lupe says the answer out loud. The teacher looks around: “That’s right. Who said that?”
Lupe sits silently and does not identify herself. Her classmate Sheena bursts out, “Go on, girl! Lupe! It’s the first time she’s spoken up in homeroom since freshman year!”
Lupe blushes and nods toward the projector screen: “The answer is written right up there.”
Pointing to the text on the screen, the chemistry teacher smiles excitedly: “That’s right! Why do you think I do this?”
Although homeroom families often give positive, public support to one another in ways that affirm individuals both academically and personally, not all interactions are so cheerful and encouraging. On another day, half an hour after the class returns from a schoolwide awards ceremony for internship mentors and their students, Sheena calls across the classroom, “Hey, Keesha, you used to be a wacked-out intern? Is that why you got ‘Most Improved’?”
Keesha bristles. Seemingly offended, she turns away from her computer to face Sheena (and most of the rest of the class, who are all working at the computers that line the classroom walls). She calmly explains, “I had to improve my public-speaking skills for my internship. Now I’m not quiet anymore. That’s why I’m ‘Most Improved.’” Still looking hurt, she turns back to her computer.
When I observed this interaction, I couldn’t tell if Sh...