The Good Schools Do, and How Schools Think About Good

• In Event: 124 - Section on Sociology of Culture Paper Session. Grit, Luck, Warmth, and the Irrational: Frontiers for Theorizing Culture

Abstract

In this paper, based on fieldwork in San Diego, Charlotte, and New York City School Districts, looking at two urban public high schools in each, I argue that urban public schools operate on two levels of moral formation: helping for the teachers and self-actualization for the students. As such, public high schools teachers paradoxically do not have an organizational commitment to produce within their students the kinds of values that would encourage them to be public high school teachers (helping) but rather simply the values that will help them advance in college and a particular career (self-actualization), enacting a process I call the moral invisible hand. I argue that the concept of grit is a centrally important piece of this process.

Author

• Jeffrey Guhin, University of California, Los Angeles