Dismantling Racialized Tracks: Possibilities and Limitations of Social Capital

• In Event: Perspectives on Social Capital in K–12 and Higher Educational Contexts

Abstract

This paper presents a qualitative work highlighting the voices of 26 African American parents whose children attended a racially diverse middle school while living in a poor Black community. The research focuses on ways in which social networks provided a means for a few of the African American parents to receive information about academic success; yet, these same parents were not afforded vital information regarding academic placement. The paper further explores how a framework of respectability politics was used to explain why many of the African American students were in lower academic track placements. Within the paper, intentional engagement becomes a targeted approach for redirecting the attitudes and perspectives about the capacity of social capital, as a means of access and accountability, to change the life trajectory of students.

Author

• Richard Lofton, Johns Hopkins University