Class conscious: how high schools condition students to accept their lot.

• Author: Kahlenberg, Richard D.
• Position: On political books - Class Rules: Exposing Inequality in American High Schools - Book review

Class Rules: Exposing Inequality in American High Schools

by Peter W. Cookson Jr. Teachers College Press, 146 pp.

Almost a half century ago, the famed sociologist James Coleman conducted a study of the factors that most powerfully influence academic achievement for American students. Authorized by Congress as part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Coleman Report analyzed 600,000 students in 4,000 schools. Many expected that the study would find that per pupil expenditure drives achievement, or that racial segregation does. But Coleman found something different: the biggest predictor was the socioeconomic status of the family a child comes from. The second biggest predictor? The socioeconomic makeup of the students in the school a child attends. Today, low-income students stuck in high-poverty schools are educationally two years behind low-income kids who are able to attend more affluent schools.

With Class Rules: Exposing Inequality in American High Schools, another veteran sociologist, the educator, scholar, and author Peter W. Cookson Jr. (whom I've known since 2010), returns to Coleman's central idea, with an interesting twist. Employing qualitative rather than quantitative methods, Cookson finds that the socioeconomic status of the students in a school affects much more than academic outcomes. He finds that high schools "pass on class position through rites of passage that instill in students the values, dispositions, and beliefs of their class." Certain schools groom students to be leaders, while others channel adolescents into the laboring class. The manner is not as explicit as the way West Point graduates become Army officers or seminaries graduate clerics, but it nevertheless happens with great consistency. Cookson writes that "almost nobody discusses this function of schooling, but it is very real." High schools have a "latent curriculum," a set of rules and norms that are written in considerable measure by fellow students. Almost as importantly, high schools also have different physical narratives that send what Cookson calls "unspoken messages." "Do I go to a school that is beautiful, well equipped, and mirrors back to me a sense of privilege," he asks, "or do I go to a school that reflects back to me poverty, disorganization, and confusion?"

Cookson focuses on high schools because they are such formative institutions--indeed, Americans spend nearly 6,000 hours of their lives there. High schools are critical in the process of...