College Readiness and Critical Capital: Mediating the Dual Meanings of Readiness at a Transfer School

• In Event: Beyond the White Gaze: Centering Black Perspectives on Social Justice in Education

Abstract

As alternative high school spaces, transfer high schools are required to quickly and effectively prepare their students for high school graduation. With the push for college and career readiness (U.S. Department of Education, 2015), transfer high schools must also attend to preparing their students for college and beyond. College readiness has often been defined by traditional academic means that limit the inclusion of Black and Latinx students and other traditionally marginalized high school students. Townsend Transfer High School is a community school co-founded by a community-based organization (CBO) and co-located in the same building with the CBO. This duality has led to dual approaches to college readiness that are sometimes in opposition to one another and leave students unsure of how to define college readiness for themselves. The study explores how Black and Latinx students make sense of college readiness under the leadership style of the Black woman principal and that of the White woman CBO director.
This study utilizes frameworks of capital (Bourdieu, 1986; Yosso, 2005) and proposes a critical capital framework that reimages current notions of capital. Critical capital recognizes Bourdieu’s (1986) argument that the unequal distribution of capital is why inequality persists. It also recognizes Yosso’s (2005) expansion to six forms of capital that more adequately acknowledges the wealth of communities of color and interrogates how Black and Latinx students are made responsible for accumulating capital or demonstrating how the capital they possess makes them worthy of equitable education. This case study (Yin, 2003) of a transfer high school draws on data from a previous embedded mixed methods multi-case study. The initial study explored college readiness regarding students’ access to college preparation programming and resources, as well as the educational leadership practices centering pre-college interventions. The re-analysis of the transfer high school space explores how the dual leadership of the school building leader and the community program director shape the pre-college interventions and college preparation offered to the predominately Black and Latinx students the school serves. The findings indicate that although in opposition at times, the duality of college readiness worked to empower students’ critical thinking and understanding of their readiness for college and beyond.

Author

• Nakia M Gray-Nicolas, Queens College-CUNY