Class Warfare

Class Warfare Class, Race, and College Admissions in Top-Tier Secondary Schools

by Lois Weis, Kristin Cipollone and Heather Jenkins

University of Chicago Press, 2014
Cloth: 978-0-226-13489-5 | Paper: 978-0-226-13492-5 | Electronic: 978-0-226-13508-3
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226135083.001.0001

AVAILABLE FROM

University of Chicago Press (cloth, paper, ebook)
Amazon Kindle
Apple Books
Barnes & Noble Nook
Chegg Inc
DeGruyter Multi-User Ebook Program
ebrary
EBSCO eBooks (formerly NetLibrary)
Google Play
Kno
Kobo
University Press Scholarship Online (UPSO)

ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Stories abound about the lengths to which middle- and upper-middle-class parents will go to ensure a spot for their child at a prestigious university. From the Suzuki method to calculus-based physics, from AP tests all the way back to early-learning Kumon courses, students are increasingly pushed to excel with that Harvard or Yale acceptance letter held tantalizingly in front of them. And nowhere is this drive more apparent than in our elite secondary schools. In Class Warfare, Lois Weis, Kristin Cipollone, and Heather Jenkins go inside the ivy-yearning halls of three such schools to offer a day-to-day, week-by-week look at this remarkable drive toward college admissions and one of its most salient purposes: to determine class.

Drawing on deep and sustained contact with students, parents, teachers, and administrators at three iconic secondary schools in the United States, the authors unveil a formidable process of class positioning at the heart of the college admissions process. They detail the ways students and parents exploit every opportunity and employ every bit of cultural, social, and economic capital they can in order to gain admission into a “Most Competitive” or “Highly Competitive Plus” university. Moreover, they show how admissions into these schools—with their attendant rankings—are used to lock in or improve class standing for the next generation. It’s a story of class warfare within a given class, the substrata of which—whether economically, racially, or socially determined—are fiercely negotiated through the college admissions process.
In a historic moment marked by deep economic uncertainty, anxieties over socioeconomic standing are at their highest. Class, as this book shows, must be won, and the collateral damage of this aggressive pursuit may just be education itself, flattened into a mere victory banner.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Lois Weis is the SUNY Distinguished Professor of Sociology of Education at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. She is the author of many books and most recently the editor of The Way Class Works. Kristin Cipollone is a lecturer at Buffalo State College, SUNY, and a postdoctoral associate in the Graduate School of Education at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Heather Jenkins is director of academic programs and High School Prep at Buffalo Prep.

REVIEWS

“Class Warfare makes an important, timely, and original contribution to our understanding of the role of education in the production of class during an era of neoliberal globalization that threatens the security of the middle class. Through rich ethnographic data, Weis and her colleagues demonstrate the intense efforts that go into packaging students for college admissions and how it reflects a neoliberal subjectivity that is encouraged by neoliberal discourses, practices, and policies that characterize the current political economy.”

— Stacey J. Lee, author of Unraveling the “Model Minority” Stereotype

“Class Warfare is a richly theorized, powerfully written book. It works well across a range of macro- and microlevels, keeping wider social structures in constant play alongside the lived experiences of the young people and their families at these top-tier institutions. It ably demonstrates the usefulness of the sociological imagination in explaining complicated social phenomena, highlighting central issues in middle-class identity in a nuanced and sophisticated manner. Weis and her colleagues reinvigorate debates around class and its grounded workings in contemporary practices. They chart the complexity and nature of class work in the United States today, presenting powerful evidence of how upper-middle-class privilege is being consolidated across racial and ethnic difference.”

— Diane Reay, coauthor of White Middle-Class Identities and Urban Schooling

“Covering an impressive amount of ground, Class Warfare does an excellent job of mapping the intricate ecosystem in which students are enmeshed, from school to parental gossip networks, and also offers a complex, noteworthy discussion of how race and class dynamics combine to compound marginalisation for outsider minority students. . . . This is a welcome addition to research on the US university admissions system’s role in perpetuating inequality.”

— Times Higher Education

“An absorbing and detailed study of the reproduction of class privilege and the central role of access to highly selective universities as part of that process. It should be required reading for everyone interested in how social class and race work through educational processes and institutions.”

— London Review of Education

Class, Race, and College Admissions in a Changing US Context - Lois Weis, Kristin Cipollone, Heather Jenkins
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226135083.003.0001
[college marketplace, (production of) social class, education expansion and class inequalities, college access, academic preparation and social stratification, school opportunity structures, class positioning]
This chapter establishes the context within which the schools and families at the center of this book enact their “class work” vis-à-vis the college applications process. Highlighting recent economic instability and stratification of higher education wherein college credentials matter more than ever, it becomes clear that the college process becomes a site where affluent families seek to “lock in” class advantage through the mobilization of all available capital—economic, cultural, and social. Through conscious efforts to exploit any and all opportunities to position advantageously in the college admissions process, students and parents in this particular strata of secondary schools effectively constrict access to highly and most selective colleges and universities for the rest of the middle class, and, by obvious and clear extension, the working class and poor. Class Warfare takes up this theoretically located “class” project via multi-year ethnographic research with three distinct groups of students in three upper-middle class secondary schools. (pages 1 - 26)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Schooling in Privileged Spaces - Lois Weis, Kristin Cipollone, Heather Jenkins
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226135083.003.0002
[critical bifocality, Ethnography, childrearing practices, school practices, school habitus]
Class Warfare connects the story of students, parents, and school personnel to broad social and economic arrangements through specific focus on the secondary to postsecondary “linking process” (Perna et al., 2008; Hill, 2008). In so doing, we engage a triplet of theoretical and analytic moves—deep ethnographic work within schools and families in three purposively selected secondary school sites, serious relational analyses between and among relevant race/ethnic and class groups in a markedly altered global context, and broad structural connections to social and economic arrangements. In terms of substance and method, the three site-based studies were comparably conceived; all three investigators focused on the secondary to postsecondary transition, with particular emphasis on parent, teacher, counselor and student actions and activities in relation to the college admissions process. In this chapter we provide an overview of the school culture and communities, paying particular attention to the academic environments of each, and highlight the structure of the college process at each institution and detail similarities and differences in course offerings and college counseling. (pages 27 - 46)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Class Practices and the College Process in a Suburban, Public High School - Lois Weis, Kristin Cipollone, Heather Jenkins
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226135083.003.0003
[public schools, meritocracy, distinction, identity development, “selection by mortgage”, tracking, class practices, “leading from behind”]
Chapter 3 focuses on students and parents in an iconic affluent public suburban secondary school. In this chapter, we trace how parents position their children for advantage beginning at an early age, a topic that takes center stage in our rendition of “class work” with respect to this particular group. Parents engage a great deal of “up front” class work, and assist their children in taking on identities as “selective college goers,” so that they may “lead from behind” at the point of college applications. We trace the ways in which students and parents enact and conceptualize their work in the secondary school as well as the ways in which the school, through its college culture and its system of tracking students, contributes to shaping student aspirations, expectations, and outcomes. (pages 47 - 78)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Micromanaging the College Admissions Process - Lois Weis, Kristin Cipollone, Heather Jenkins
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226135083.003.0004
[private secondary schools, micromanaging college applications, school sector and class practices, choosing the “right” schools, college counseling and “managing” expectations, self-assessment, class positioning]
Chapter 4 picks up the same set of questions as chapter 3 among students and parents in a NAIS co-educational day school, tracing how students and parents enact and conceptualize their work in secondary school, and the ways in which they approach the process of preparing for college applications and admissions. We follow the students through the college application process in a highly detailed manner, with specific attention paid to all college related activities, including the work of the school counselors with regard to the top 20 percent of students in the class. In this chapter, we argue that the differences in class work that exist between parents and students in chapters 3 and 4 are tied to distinct differences in the discursive and material practices that become normative in a particular school sector. In the case at hand, differentially located parents and students (those in elite/affluent private versus elite/affluent public secondary schools) conceptualize and enact noticeably different “class work” at the point of college admissions, even though parent SES is largely comparable. Parents in the NAIS school more heavily monitor the college application process and students and parents constantly self-assess in order to select the “right” postsecondary destination. (pages 79 - 104)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

“Outsiders Within” - Lois Weis, Kristin Cipollone, Heather Jenkins
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226135083.003.0005
[low-income Black students, “outsiders within”, private secondary schools as pathways to opportunity, college counseling, academic inequality, college access]
This chapter focuses on the college-related experiences and practices of low-income Black students in elite private secondary schools. Like other groups in such schools, low-income Black students and their parents explicitly intend to use elite private schools for social and economic advancement. However, unlike privileged parents in both affluent public and elite privates who have consciously engaged the preparation and packaging of their children with an eye towards competitive college admissions since they were very young, low-income Black parents operate from a different structural location and accompanying set of perspectives. As data make clear, both parents and children conceptualize attendance at elite, private, secondary institutions as constituting an escape from poverty and a virtually guaranteed opportunity to enter the four-year (in contrast to two-year) postsecondary sector, a sector to which they do not see themselves as having access had they remained in under-resourced, predominantly Black and Latino urban public schools. In this chapter, we also highlight the unintended consequences of facially neutral policies and practices embedded within elite private schools. (pages 105 - 142)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Race and Class Matters - Lois Weis, Kristin Cipollone, Heather Jenkins
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226135083.003.0006
[college destinations, facially neutral racial policies, colorblind racism, socio-cultural experiences, habitus, transition from middle school to high school, college outcome patterns, selectivity]
In this chapter we focus more directly on individualized and felt treatment of low-income Black students in a context in which difference manifests itself in the school's environment in particular kinds of ways. To be clear, we address felt peer racism but we do not have evidence from White and/or privileged students of color, or participant observation data, that validate such treatment directed towards this group. Significantly, however, the topic surfaced strongly among low-income Black students, making such felt treatment as linked to the nature of their “outsider within” status, important to unpack. As part of this discussion, we additionally take up the position of privileged multi-generational Black students and the privileged children of “flexible immigrants” of color in elite private schools. We then examine the college destination patterns of all students included in this book. We intentionally break from strong ethnographic form to probe, at a more deeply analytical and theoretical level, the meaning behind data reported here and in earlier chapters. At times, then, we go well beyond the actions and words of the participants themselves in order to theorize, in new ways, class and race productions. (pages 143 - 191)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Class, Race, and Postsecondary Destinations in New Global Circumstances - Lois Weis, Kristin Cipollone, Heather Jenkins
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226135083.003.0007
[upper-middle class, consolidation of class advantage, segmentation of postsecondary structure, fracturing the middle class, global economy and academic positioning, mobilization of class resources, helicopter parents, massification of higher education]
Here we take up three interrelated theoretical and empirical points, as follows: 1) Class formation in 21^st century U.S., with specific focus on the power and complexities of race/ethnicity/national origin as linked to class, in what will arguably become a “new upper middle class” of the 21^st century, one that is specifically linked to intensified struggle over particular kinds of postsecondary destinations; 2) The extent to which women's surge into highly valued postsecondary destinations within this class fraction portends altered roles and responsibilities for men and women of the new upper-middle class; and 3) The ways and extent to which this ties to the workings of the postsecondary sector of the future, particularly as linked to segmented pathways in a sector that itself is riddled by deepening stratification, linked inequalities, and division. We examine these points with specific focus on the extent to which student location at each stage in the structure of educational opportunities limits their possible locations at the next stage (Kerckhoff, 1995; 2001). We pay particular attention to the possible implications of this statement for both class structure, the fracturing of the middle class, and the workings of the postsecondary sector more broadly. (pages 192 - 215)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Epilogue - Lois Weis, Kristin Cipollone, Heather Jenkins
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226135083.003.0008
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...