Negotiating Opportunities

In Negotiating Opportunities, Jessica McCrory Calarco argues that the middle class has a negotiated advantage in school. Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Calarco traces that negotiated advantage from its origins at home to its consequences at school. Through their parents' coaching, working-class students learn to follow rules and work through problems independently. Middle-class students learn to challenge rules and request assistance, accommodations, and attention in excess of what is fair or required. Teachers typically grant those requests, creating advantages for middle-class students. Calarco concludes with recommendations, advocating against deficit-oriented programs that teach middle-class behaviors to working-class students. Those programs ignore the value of working-class students' resourcefulness, respect, and responsibility, and they do little to prevent middle-class families from finding new opportunities to negotiate advantages in school.

"Class in the Classroom reveals that the middle-class advantage in school is, at least in part, a negotiated advantage. Essentially, that means that middle-class students secure advantages not only by complying with teachers' expectations, but also by requesting support in excess of what is fair or required. The book traces that negotiated advantage from its origins at home to its consequences at school. It follows a group of middle-class and working-class students from third to seventh grade and draws on observations and interviews with children, parents, and teachers. The middle-class students learned to negotiate advantages from their parents' coaching at home. Teachers, meanwhile, tended to grant those requests, even when they wanted to say "no." As a result, middle-class students received the bulk of teachers' assistance, accommodations, and positive attention. That extra support gave middle-class students a leg-up over their working-class peers, including more correct answers on tests, more time to complete assignments, more opportunities for creativity, and more recognition for their ideas. The book concludes with a discussion of these findings and their implications for scholars, educators, parents, and policymakers. It argues that teaching working-class student to act like their middle-class peers will never be enough to alleviate inequalities, as middle-class families will just find new ways to negotiate advantages that keep them one step ahead"--

The productiveness of Calarco's work in raising fundamental questions is clear. By highlighting the agency of young children in navigating ambiguous social interactions, Negotiating Opportunities should encourage us all to push for accounts of inequality that recognize that mobility projects often entail navigating structural contexts in the absence of clear rules or guidance. -- Michelle Jackson, Stanford University, American Journal of Sociology

Persistent income inequality in American schools frustrates teachers, principals, parents and policymakers who want to help all children succeed. By revealing the unintended effects of seemingly ordinary exchanges between students and teachers in everyday classrooms, Jessica Calarco deepens our understanding of the challenges we face in creating more equitable outcomes. -Sara Goldrick-Rab, Temple University

Jessica Calarco's vivid portrayals of classroom life demonstrate that class cultures are as much about strategies as they are about values. Negotiating Opportunities will take its place alongside the very best studies of how social class works. -Aaron M. Pallas, Teachers College, Columbia University

Vividly written, and offering compelling details, Calarco highlights how working-class children and parents don't want to bother teachers, while middle-class parents coach their children to pester educators for assistance, attention, and accommodation. Not only is this path-breaking book of interest to sociologists, but every educator and parent should read it. -Annette Lareau, University of Pennsylvania