School Resource Deficiency and the Neoliberal Project in Education

• In Event: 3429 - Section on Sociology of Education Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 4. Diversity, Inequality and Education: Good Schools/Bad Schools

Abstract

Extensive research has been dedicated to documenting the reduction of spending and access to resources within the U.S. public education system. Much less is known about how these reductions impact the day-to-day practices and procedures at the individual school level as well as what impact this systemic defunding of schools has on teachers and parents of differing class and racial backgrounds. Using five years of ethnographic data, I collected from William Edward Middle School in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), I find that the systemic structural policy of defunding schools has created a resource deficiency at William Edward. In turn, this resource deficiency produces what I term as ‘service gaps’ within the school. By service gap I mean the absence of a resource that school personnel generally offer, such as the dissemination of information to parents, returned phone calls from teachers and school officials,or the removal of student support within the school. These service gaps also put a tremendous strain on the teachers and staff at the school as they are ‘stretched thin’ and often required to do double the amount of work without an increase in compensation. The services William Edward can offer then become stratified in such a way that its distribution (or gaining access) becomes uneven and unequal. An important aspect of the service gap that impacts parental involvement is the formation of a communication hierarchy within the school. The communication hierarchy privileges middle-class modes of communication (i.e. emailing) over working-class modes (e.g. phone call/leaving a message). Therefore, working-class parents tend to experience significantly delayed returned phones call and teacher interaction and ultimately are positioned, by the communication hierarchy, to be less effective participants at school.

Author

• Aaron Crawford, UCLA