Looking Smart: Race and Academic Ability in an Untracked Middle School

• In Event: Racialized and Gendered Constructions of Ability and Behavior

Abstract

Objectives
Examinations of racially diverse schools frequently highlight the ways in which tracking can contribute to, or detracking reforms can mitigate, the reproduction of racialized disparities in academic outcomes (Oakes 2005; Lewis and Diamond 2015; Rubin 2010; Tyson 2011). However, this research at times leaves unexamined the organizing role that notions of academic ability – or “smartness” – play, even in untracked schools. In fact, instructional practices designed for heterogeneous classrooms frequently reinforce the assumption that students can be sorted into high, middle, or low learners (Abu El-Haj and Rubin 2009; Varenne and McDermott 1998). In this study, I explore how students position themselves and their peers as “smart” or “not smart” at an untracked, diversifying middle school in New York City.

Theoretical Framework
Like race, ability is a relational system; both whiteness and smartness rely upon the “denigrated other” in order to award value, merit, and capital to a privileged group at the “normative center of schools” (Broderick and Leonardo 2011, 2208). Ability discourses, like earlier discussions of intelligence, are intertwined with racial ideologies (Annamma, Connor, and Ferri 2013; Oakes et al. 1997; Broderick and Leonardo 2011). Here, I look closely at how students take up the work of constructing smartness. In interactions with classroom pedagogy, their teachers, and their peers, kids perform (or attempt to perform) their academic abilities (Goffman 1959; Youdell 2006). Over the course of the school year, these interactive performances solidify academic reputations, teaching students where they and their peers belong within the relational and racialized world of the classroom (Wortham 2004; Rubin 2003; Collins 2013; Musto 2019).

Data and Methods
Using a situated perspective on learning (Lave 1991; Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998), I analyze a year of classroom observations and student interviews with one focal cohort of sixth-graders. I supplement these data with teacher interviews and document analysis.

Findings
Even in the untracked classrooms of a racially integrated school, widespread associations between whiteness and smartness persisted. Despite the multiple, substantial ways in which M.S. 917 worked to address racial inequality – by intentionally diversifying its student body and by detracking classes – students continued to situate themselves and their peers within academic and racial hierarchies. Students’ interactions and relationships produced and re-produced the racialized constructions of ability that saturated their schooling. Sixth graders positioned themselves and each other as experts or novices, assets or liabilities, haves or have nots. As they observed, responded to, negotiated, and resisted racialized school and classroom practices, kids actively constructed and performed their own academic identities. In doing so, they illuminated both the influence and the limits of school and teacher practices.


Significance
These findings raise important questions for both practitioners and researchers seeking to interrogate and disrupt racialized disparities in educational outcomes. Structural changes such as desegregation and detracking will not, on their own, disrupt deeply entrenched patterns within schools and classrooms. Even in untracked classrooms, widespread associations between whiteness and smartness persisted and students continued to situate themselves and their peers within academic and racial hierarchies.

Author

• Alexandra J. Freidus, University of Connecticut