Dividing Classes: How the Middle Class Negotiates and Rationalizes School Advantage
Dividing Classesforces us to confront perhaps the most troubling and least studied challenge to equitable schooling: Middle-class Americans' presumption that their own superiority accounts for their school success and the life chances that successful schooling brings. In her penetrating account of affluent, mostly liberal, mothers and education professionals, Brantlinger shows how powerfully the ideology of meritocracy undercuts the educational opportunities of low-income young people. Most important she illuminates how this undercutting works through the seemingly innocent, day-to-day talk and actions of middle-class Americans that consistently advantage society's already-advantaged young people.–Jeannie Oakes, Presidential Professor of Educational Equity, UCLADescribes how members of the educated middle class act to secure the best of what schools have to offer for their own children and how they rationalize their actions.–Journal of Economic Literature--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.