Abstract
Karen Hansen and Nicholas Monroe’s Working-Class Kids and Visionary Educators in a Multiracial High School: A Story of Belonging does what it says on the tin. It describes how working-class high school students developed a sense of belonging to their school community and the role of teachers, school counselors and principals in shaping students’ school belonging. The school, Sunnyvale High, was the second public school in the district of Sunnyvale, California, built in 1956. Hansen attended the school. It was while musing about the sense of belonging and the achievements of students at her high school reunion that she decided to interview former students and educators and to read the student newspaper and yearbooks. She says, “Exploring these questions prompted me to draw on my professional skills” to answer the question “How did Sunnyvale High sow the seeds of success in spite of the challenges we all faced?” (p. 7).
I too came from a working-class family and attended a multi-ethnic school in my working-class neighborhood. I am a professor at Birkbeck, which is the University of London’s only widening-participation college. The questions of how working-class students succeed despite attending poorly resourced schools and coming from poorly resourced homes is close to my interests, personally and professionally. Although this book does give glimpses into the lives of some of the school’s students and the teaching and leadership practices of some of the school’s teachers and educators, the book is largely descriptive rather than analytical, thus offering only a superficial explanation of student belonging and school impacts.
The people interviewed for this research were a self-selecting sample. The authors (it is not clear what role each of the authors played in the data collection, analysis, or writing) acknowledge this and try to compensate for the bias it introduces by reading yearbooks and the student newspaper and contextualizing some of the chapters in relation to the broader social and political landscape, especially around anti-Black and anti-Mexican racism and antiracist organizing. Yet there is insufficient material provided by these sources and insufficient depth in the account of the other influences on students’ identities (as learners and as people).
A theme that runs through the book, but which is simultaneously disavowed, is that minority students, especially Black students but also Mexican American students, experienced persistent institutional and interpersonal racism at Sunnyvale High. At the end of the account of how a Black Student Union was set up in 1969, two stories are recounted. The first is the response of a white student, who recalled, “People used to say ‘Don’t let the BSU B.S. you’” (p. 71), which is glossed as “She acknowledged BSU’s usefulness, but also felt that many students shared a common condition—poverty—that shaped their lives in similar ways” (p. 71). The second is a response from a Black student for whom “Black Power politics meant separation and division” (p. 72). This disavowal of the necessity of group organizing and the persistence of exclusion and discrimination that exceeded class-based experiences is repeated at various points in the book even while acknowledging that teacher expectations of students were routinely racialized.
The story that “We were all alike” seems to unravel, and yet this does not cause the authors to question their claims that students succeeded because they felt they belonged. The book offers little evidence that students did succeed at what schools are supposed to provide them with: access to knowledge and the skills to learn. And the school did fail: it closed after fewer than 30 years in operation (1956–1981). Reasons were many: falling enrollment but also a perception that it had not succeeded as a center of learning and teaching. The authors’ claim that students had succeeded did not convince this reader, even though some individuals, who were interviewed in the book, and the author herself did succeed. Of course, it depends how one measures success; but to attribute the many ways they thrived, other than in their professional lives, to their school rather than to their friends, families, and neighborhood seems unwarranted.
Overall, Working-Class Kids and Visionary Educators in a Multiracial High School: A Story of Belonging makes a contribution to the sociology of education through a case study of one school. However, the descriptive and partial account it provides does little to advance the already considerable scholarship on educational outcomes and social inequalities.