MENTAL HEALTH DISABILITES AND STRATIFICATION 8 person might be highly discriminatory against people with mental health disabilities, but once they realize that this has affected someone from their own group, affiliation principles may act as a way of re-structuring those pre-established attitudes). Education and mental health disabilities Educational stratification is a highly-investigated topic in the field of social stratification, since schools can either dismantle the negative systemic patterns of inequality, or perpetuate them and strengthen them more deeply. At the intersection of educational stratification and mental health disability, the implications are multiple. In the first place, we must recall that schools were traditionally designed for the elites, so, consequently, for people who resembled the ‘default ideal’ as much as possible (so, not for people with mental health disabilities). In the second place, we must consider how schools can be limiting to individuals with mental health disabilities, which could have a direct effect on their development of skill, social mobility, and outcome.vi Such limitations may include restricted access to appropriate accommodations, lack of appropriate support, leading to limited access to further schooling, so that, ultimately, the educational attainment of individuals with mental health disabilities may be impacted. In their analysis of social inequality and schooling, Raudenbush and Eschmann (2015) compare and contrast two ‘similar’ groups of children, those who have attended school and those who have not, and suggest that schools are less variable than homes. Their model is reflective of the notion that public schools (should) promote a common set of skills for all students. Under this perspective, the connections between schooling and mental health disability are varied. On the one hand, the assumption that schools are less variable than homes may not necessarily hold for students with mental health disabilities. Although more-or-less standard interaction patterns MENTAL HEALTH DISABILITES AND STRATIFICATION 9 are established by the schools and are expected in the interactions between students and teachers (i.e. in the process of teaching and learning, as well as in the case of administering reprimands), the reality might be a bit more convoluted. Considering that schools employ teachers that have their own pre-established attitudes, it may be the case that one teacher is more knowledgeable and understanding of a student’s struggle with mental health disabilities and decides to act against school norms and introduce specific accommodations for the student for which the school does not account. As a result, schools, as institutions, may be less variable, but on a micro-level, the differences in pedagogies can either enable, or disable students with mental health disabilities. (This is something that Raudenbush and Eschmann also hint at in their paper). On the other hand, the assumption that schools should promote a common set of skills for all students seems to put students with disabilities (of any kind) in a deficient position. While the idea is to create a certain homogeneity among students in terms of access to a common set of skills, the way in which this access is provided and achieved should be differential, so as to account for a large array of student ‘predispositions’. Furthermore, the exploration of educational stratification merits an examination of the concept of meritocracy. Alon and Tienda (2007) describe how meritocracy is a fundamental part of American consciousness, defined by competition and equality of opportunity. At the core of competition lies the idea that ‘talent’ (as an all-encompassing term) can conquer all, and equality of opportunity refers to the fact that everyone has access to freely competing for a specific position. In regards to mental health disabilities, the notion of equality of opportunity is worth examining. It seems that equality of opportunity exists only superficially, since a deeper analysis reveals that, in fact, students may not be given equal opportunities to compete for the same position (i.e. admission to a college program or a graduate program). An anonymous testimony MENTAL HEALTH DISABILITES AND STRATIFICATION 10 submitted online by a graduate student shows how “you must prove yourself mentally sound in order to be given the opportunity to navigate academia”. The graduate student also recalls how one school that she was applying to for a graduate program asked her advisor to qualify her ‘temperament’ (i.e. mental health). So, how can we argue that equal opportunities are being given to individuals suffering from mental health disabilities when it seems that they are disqualified by default by means of having their mental health assessed by a party who is, by no means, qualified to provide an expert opinion The romanticization of mental health disabilities One particularly interesting situation that redeems individuals with mental health disabilities from stigma seems to be having an exceptional talent of some sorts. It is often the case that the disabilities from which some exceptional individuals suffer are portrayed in a good light in public discourse, oftentimes, even, as an argument to their exceptionality.vii This romanticization trend is particularly interesting because it might suggest that exceptional talent can serve as the ultimate ‘redeemable’ quality in the eyes of others. While Tumin (1953) asserted that societies may have a lot of talent, but are not able to recognize it, it seems that, 60 years later after the publication of his article, the situation might have changed, so that talent is more recognizable and capitalized upon. However, the fact that talent, when encountered in people suffering from mental health disabilities, automatically leads to the romanticization of that disability in order to allow for the public acceptance of that individual, seems to illustrate that the notion of talent does not exist on its own, but it is deeply attached to the person who has been recognized as possessing said talent. So, it might be that the romanticization of mental health disabilities in exceptionally talented individuals is just a way for people to rationalize between ideological, and material mechanisms that lead to unequal distributions of resources among different social groups. While the core ideas in my initial assessment of this social group did not change much, the conceptualizations and arguments in the scholarly articles helped me develop a more nuanced and contextualized understanding in how CLD children and their families are positioned in a stratified society in terms of differential income and wealth, occupational status, family structures and resources, and educational processes and outcomes. Synthesizing the readings and the artifacts that represent some lived experiences of the CLD groups, I came to see how social stratification is embedded and embodied in both the macro level (such as institutions and public discourses) and people’s everyday experiences, in which they actively construct, conform to, or contest the dominant ideology and existing stratification. Processes of Social Stratification Firstly, I had a clearer understanding of the psychological, social, and institutional processes in which CLD children and families came to be positioned as a social group with particular perceived attributes in American society. Massey (2007) concisely outlined the process of framing, through which individuals form categorical mental representations of social groups based on the affective proximity and competence of the group to the individual or the individual’s in-group. The boundaries of these categorical groups are then reified and negotiated through people’s lived experiences and interactions a process termed boundary work. This process of boundary defining and meaning-framing, although arbitrary in terms of the initial meaning-designation, is never a neutral process, according to Massey (2007), as privileged in- groups continually strive to exploit other groups and hoard opportunities by establishing and maintaining institutional structures that would yield unequal access to various forms of capital. The boundary work can take on a social and psychological form, but it can also be expressed in (Paper exploring social status of culturally and linguistically diverse children) concrete spatial and physical boundaries; in fact, spatial segregation has been both a manifestation of the unequal distribution of resources and a major mechanism through which resources are channeled to privileged in-group members at the deprivation of out-group members. When spatial boundaries align well with social boundaries, stratification becomes more effective to the extent that certain social groups are minoritized and confined to specific neighborhoods by law or by practice, such as the “red lining” practices that denied people of color to white, affluent neighborhoods and the “white flight” after the implementation of the busing policy to promote racial integration. Such intersections of spatial, economic, social, and cultural boundaries are solidified to preserve the stratified categories and to prevent mobility or movement between social categories (Massey, 2007, p.19). This process of social categorization and institutionalization of the categories are evident if we look at the development and trends of language, immigration, and education policies in America, which more often than not served to preserve the interests and advantages of Anglo Americans by denying equal access to resources to immigrant families and CLD children. As the essential venue for communication and social interactions, language serves a vital role in constructing an imagined national community, drawing an imaginary boundary that defines how individuals or groups are positioned and how identities are constructed in relationship to the community (de Jong, 2011), through its ability to frame ideological discourses about the nation and its symbolization of community membership. The pendulum shifts in America’s language and immigration policies provide a window to the tension between the assimilationist discourses, which linked the ability to speak English with being an American, and pluralist perspectives that stress the multicultural roots of the country and value different linguistic resources as assets, both of which existed long before the foundation of the country. The changes of U.S. language policy can be divided into four major eras: the tolerance of multilingualism and repression of native Americans in the early years, the focus on assimilation in the immigrant era, the return to bilingual education in the second half of 20th century, and the modern English-Only movement (de Jong, 2011, p.125). Especially with the English-Only movement, languages spoken by immigrant families were positioned in an inferior status that signal a general out-group social status, a discourse that delegitimates their rights of access to specific resources and participation as full American citizens. For instance, with the promulgation of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, there has been a significant concern regarding the accountability pressures and the use of inappropriate and invalid high-stake assessments that have punitive consequences to CLD students, such as schools’ disincentive in implementing bilingual education programs and viewing CLD students as liabilities or having limited capacity to excel in school (Menken and Solorza, 2014). The processes of social exclusion, exploitation, and opportunity hoarding by white middle-class families at the expense of minoritized CLD families have a long history, but just as Massey (2007) pointed out, the boundary work and exclusionary framing imply a two-way interaction, a delicate, negotiated process that is always resisted and challenged by members of the subjugated groups. The 1968 Edcouch-Elsa High School Students Walkout was a vocal demonstration against the segregationist policy and institutionalized discrimination that results in inferior educational resources and access that undermined Mexican American students’ development and civic participation in American society (Guajardo & Guajardo, 2004). A decade after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, progress toward meaningful school integration happened “with all deliberate speed” (Wilkinson, 1979; referred in Guajardo& Guajardo, 2004, p.512), and in Edcouch-Elsa, South Texas, schools continued to fail at meeting 5 effected through deliberate legislation by the white ruling class with the intention of strengthening native attachment to English cultural values, which would in turn reinforce the social hierarchy that gave whites power. Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986) points to the 1952 state of emergency as a turning point in the establishment of English cultural dominance, when the colonial government shuttered nationalist-run schools that used local languages for instruction and taught students to value indigenous culture. Speaking from his own experience, Ngugi recounts that “English became the main determinant of a child’s progress up the ladder of formal education,” and therefore the main determinant of one’s social mobility (p. 12, Ngugi’s emphasis) . A typical result of English gatekeeping is that one student, a boy in Ngugi’s class of 1954, “had distinctions in all subjects except English, which he failed. He was made to fail the entire exam. He went on to become a turn boy in a bus company” (p. 12). Ngugi, meanwhile, was an average student in all subjects except English, in which he received a credit, and as a result he went on to study at universities in Africa and England and become a professor at Nairobi University (Ngugi 2012). Today Professor Ngugi is on faculty at the University of California, Irvine, illustrating the great social and geographical mobility enabled by the cultural capital he acquired through colonial schooling. The United States is steeped in the English intellectual tradition given value by colonial elites. Our first universities were founded on the model of Oxford and Cambridge, and we share the same classical literary and linguistic heritage. As has long been the case in England, literacy is central to U.S. culture, Greek and Latin are highly prized in our intellectual circles, and Homer and Shakespeare are among the canon of revered authors. In the United States, this culture is given value not by an intentional political program (as in the colonies), but rather by the intellectual elite housed in universities. That these elite universities reinforce the value of the (Paper exploring cultural capital, social inequality, and the elite) 6 Western European cultural tradition is plainly illustrated in my own work environment as a graduate student at Columbia University: at Columbia College, all undergraduates take a core curriculum that teaches classical thought and literary works of the Western European intellectual tradition. I have personally seen that if you ask a lecture hall of Columbia undergraduates who among them has read Homer’s The Odyssey, almost every hand in the room goes up, legible as a mark of belonging in this elite university. As in the British colonies, in the United States the form of culture valuable as social capital is the white Anglophone intellectual heritage. Again, as in British colonies, this produces a society stratified along ethnic lines and a hierarchy that supports the entitlement of the white elite and offers others integration into spheres of privilege only insofar as they successfully adopt and reproduce elite cultural values. While the type of culture most valued by U.S. elite is comparable to the forms of culture that acted as capital in British colonies, the schooling system is quite different. Firstly, the U.S. school curriculum is not dictated by deliberate political agendas comparable to the way English culture was institutionalized in the colonies. Moreover, whereas colonial schooling was relatively standardized, the U.S. school system is highly diverse, with schools of very different institutional structures and curriculum focuses, leading to greatly differentiated outcomes for American youth. Buchmann and Park’s (2008) study of the impact of parent-child communication on school success shows that in an unstandardized school system like that of the United States, children of highly educated, high-socioeconomic status parents benefit far more from parental involvement in their education than do the children of uneducated, low-SES parents. In short, the parents’ cultural capital (as well as economic capital) enables them to successfully navigate a complex school system and make the choices that will have the most advantageous outcomes for their children. This may mean encouraging children to take advanced 7 placement classes or get involved in beneficial extracurriculars like an honors society, or hiring an admissions consultant to help a student put together a stellar application to Harvard. Bennett et al (2012) underscore the significance of such “concerted cultivation” by educated middle class parents. In contrast to the more hands-off parenting of working class families, middle class parents in the study cultivated in their children specific attitudes toward schooling and helped them get involved in activities “that allow them to begin accumulating valuable cultural capital in middle school that can be more fully developed in high school and then presented to colleges as part of their academic and personal profiles” (Bennett et al 2012, p. 153). In the United States, families across social classes are unevenly able to take advantage of the schooling system, but those who are successful in doing so can consciously invest in the cultivation of cultural capital that helps pave the way for entry to elite universities. A university degree opens many doors for individuals seeking high-status, high-pay, and high-influence occupations, and cultural capital acts as a gatekeeper to access these institutions. Universities have served children of the elite since their founding, and they have always been the gateway for professional occupations. In the past, for members of lower classes, graduating high school brought a large return on the educational investment: they could attain a higher-status job and a larger salary with a high school degree than they would be able to without one. Today, however, high school degrees are common enough to no longer function as a differentiating credential. In contrast, there are strong socioeconomic returns to investment in higher education (Neckerman and Torche 2007). Consequently, members of lower classes are now seeking Bachelor’s degrees in large numbers, in pursuit of higher status positions. Just as access to high school expanded throughout the twentieth century, today we are seeing access to college expanding across the U.S. population (Pfeffer 2015). This is attended by greater social mobility: BEHIND THE “BAD” PARENTING STYLE 1 Behind the “bad” parenting style: why do working-class children fail in school Compared with their peers from middle- or upper-class, working-class children generally perform less well in school. Research has indicated that they have considerably fewer verbal and math skills, and more attention difficulties and behavior problems, than higher-income children. For example, children who are from the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution score more than one standard deviation lower on both verbal and math exams than children who are from the top 20 percent (Neeraj et al, 2011). There has been a long history of attributing this educational failure of working-class children to “bad” parenting. Misconceptions are that working-class parents do not value education, do not care about their children enough, or are not willing to cooperate with teachers and school administers. As a result, children from working-class lack motivations towards learning and suffer from high dropout rates and low test scores. The logic above used to be my initial assessment of working-class parenting. However, not only are these judgments one-sided but they also unfairly interpret the structural inequalities faced by the working-class parents as their own fault. Now, I would argue that firstly, the parenting style of working-class is disadvantaged rather than “bad” within the context dominant by middle- or upper-class culture. Secondly, apart from parenting style, other factors of one’s social origin also contribute to the educational failure of working-class children. Thirdly, except for social origin factors that disadvantage the working-class children, institutional inequality also largely affects the educational outcomes and perpetuates the socioeconomic hierarchy. (Not as strong but wanted to provide as an example of how this could be a focus of essay – how perceptions of parenting can be shaped by dominant cultural and social norms)
