Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education
by Peter Sacks, $24.95, University of California Press; (May 2007) ISBN-10: 0520245881, ISBN-13: 978-0520245884,
388 pp.
Public education is not the level playing field that Americans like to imagine it is, Peter Sacks tells us. Not only is the system failing young people from ethnic, racial and linguistic minority groups, but it is also failing all children who are not from privileged backgrounds. By extension then, it is failing even the well-advantaged, the society at large and the democratic ideal specifically.
Sacks is an author and journalist whose last book was, Standardized Minds: The High Price of America’s Testing Culture and What We Can Do to Change It.
With a storyteller’s eye, the author tackles “the taboo subject of social class in American society and in our educational system in particular.” He lays out his case for how and where it fails, through the voice of students like Ashlea, an aspiring White high school junior who grew up in a trailer park with parents of limited means and education.
With extensive reporting, relevant data and sharp insights, Sacks demonstrates how the Ashleas of the world, as well as her schoolmates of various disadvantaged groups, enter the race for education several laps behind and usually remain there That is because, as he argues, their parents cannot provide the “cultural capital” — connections, power, sophistication, in-group knowledge, enriched experiences — the elite enjoy as a matter of course. Students like Ashlea, for instance, often have parents who do not even know the right questions to ask to make sure their children get the proper curriculums and tests to qualify for college.
This leaves the non-elites vulnerable to a system already stacked against them, he finds. His reporting and the statistical charts included indicate that the chances of getting an equal education in school, enrolling in any college and earning any of kind of degree remain elusive for those who are not part of the elite when they enter the schoolhouse door. Education is “a self-reinforcing system that reproduces social class advantage” and widens gaps rather than narrows them, he says.
