In comments on my post “Talking about Striving” (8/26), readers headed toward an important "gold nugget": parents who train their children in behaviors that will be rewarded by educators help their children get rewarded by educators.
I have an article coming out in December 2008 called "From Shallow to Deep: Toward a Thorough Cultural Analysis of School Achievement Patterns" (Anthropology and Education Quarterly 39 (4): December 2008) that relates very much to this conversation. In the piece, I talk about how a truly thorough cultural analysis looks not just at how parents interact with their children, but also at how educators then react to children (and how children and parents react to educators, etc.).
Annette Lareau's book Unequal Childhoods argues that middle class parents, who have themselves been relatively successful in schools, tend to train their children purposefully in behaviors that they know will get rewarded by schools. (She finds this across race lines.) In turn, schools tend to reward behaviors associated with "middle class" people. Her book overstates some claims about class group behaviors, but it does demonstrate nicely how schools give “points” to particular behaviors -- and how some parents prepare children to get those “points.”
Lareau shows that it is not inherently better on some absolute developmental scale to train your child for particular versions of school success (for example, Lareau shows how many children whose parents are NOT constantly preparing them for school are learning usefully how to be self-directed. She also argues that many “middle class” children are exhausted by their parents’ constant “concerted cultivation” of school success.). A related argument can be made about behaviors often associated with “white people”: it is not inherently better to talk like a “white person,” for example, but schools and workplaces more often reward such talk (see John Baugh’s and Prudence Carter’s chapters in Everyday Antiracism.) Many useful behaviors are not typically rewarded in the schools we have. Why not reward a child’s ability to speak in multiple dialects, for example, or to translate? (See Ted Hamann’s chapter in Everyday Antiracism.)
Still, in the chain of events that produce a child's school success over time, parents can help propel a child toward such success by drilling them in the skills typical schools will reward. So, since schools will reward a kindergartner who shows up prepared for literacy, children whose parents read to them – or children who attend preschool – show up with a serious advantage. (See David Kirp’s book The Sandbox Investment.)
At the same time, so many actions aggregate to form a child's school achievement that a child is not guaranteed school success even if her parents prepare her for school success. As Baugh and Carter show, a child trained in "good school behavior," for example, can still be sanctioned negatively for ways of talking or dressing not associated with "white middle class people." Eugene Garcia shows in EAR that a child trained in "good school behavior" can still be disadvantaged if her teachers think less of her parents' other ways of parenting.
