The Hidden Academic Curriculum and Inequality in Early Education

How Class, Race, Teacher Interactions, and Friendship Influence Student Success

Karen Phelan Kozlowski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000505054
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Drawing on a rich ethnographic study conducted in first grade classrooms in the US, this book reveals the potentially invisible, yet significant ways that race and social class impact student success in the earliest years of their schooling.

The Hidden Academic Curriculum and Inequality in Early Education: How Class, Race, Teacher Interactions, and Friendship Influence Student Success explores key differences observed between the classroom interactions and academic behaviors of racially, socially, and ethnically diverse first grade students. Chapters offer in-depth analysis of the ways in which classed and racialized coaching by families, differentiated teacher-student interactions, and racially segregated friendships play out in the school environment, and ultimately influence a child's ability to decode the academic hidden curriculum. This in turn, dictates a child's understanding and ability to perform the specific skills associated with academic success. Ultimately, the text highlights the critical need for improved understanding of how in- and out-of-school factors impact child behaviors, and offers key recommendations to prevent the perpetuation of racial and socioeconomic inequalities in schools and classrooms.

This insightful volume will be of particular interest to postgraduate students, researchers, and academics in the fields of Early Childhood Education and the Sociology of Education. Those with a focus on racial, ethnic, and social inequalities more broadly, will also find the book of interest.

1 Understanding Sociocultural Differences in Decoding Instruction and Demonstrating Knowledge

DOI: 10.4324/9780429276361-1

It was mid-September, and the first graders I was observing at Foxcroft Elementary, a desirable, well-rated public elementary in North Carolina, had been in school about a month. For several weeks, they had been learning how to write “small moment” stories as a way to practice written story telling. Today’s “Writer’s Workshop” would continue this lesson. We (the students and I) gathered together at the base of the classroom’s Smart Board, where Mrs. Miller had projected a written example of a moment she experienced—swimming on a boogie board:

The ocean had big waves. I went swimming on a boogie board. There were other people there too. A big wave came. Whoosh!

It was a short example, but the point of the “small moment” assignment was clear to me. Students were to pick an event they had experienced and describe—apparently in about four sentences—what happened. The children had already written first drafts of their own “small moment” stories, whose topics ranged from the time someone poured a bucket of water on their sister’s head to family reading in the “nice bed” at night. For today’s lesson, Mrs. Miller had students review each other’s stories. She asked the students to identify at least two details in a partner’s story, then add some details to their own. Curious about what kind of stories students had produced, I decided to watch Maricella, a lower-SES Latina, and Preston, a higher-SES White boy, discuss their work.

By the time I arrived at their table, Preston had already started reading to Maricella his story about accruing “Globetrotters,” the class reward for good behavior. I noticed that his paper was full of writing. Each line was covered with words that were haphazardly spelled (as was the standard expectation and custom for first grade writing, I had learned), but whose meaning was easy enough for me to decipher. Maricella, though, had only written four unintelligible words on her page. “Did you finish?” Preston asked her, perhaps wondering why Maricella thought four words would suffice. “Yes,” she chirped happily, as Mrs. Miller walked by to check on them.

“This looks like a good title,” Mrs. Miller said to Maricella—another subtle cue that she probably wasn’t finished. Mrs. Miller continued to read over Maricella’s shoulder, asking whether the story was about her five-year-old birthday party. She suggested that Maricella share more about what she did there. “Did they have cake?” Mrs. Miller asked. “It wasn’t a birthday party,” Maricella corrected, then began to write on her paper, as if realizing the perfect detail to add to her story. “Oooh, she’s writing!” Mrs. Miller celebrated, whisking herself away to another table. However, Maricella only wrote one word on the page, then put it away.

Instead of focusing on her writing during writer’s workshop, Maricella later began to share with me different kinds of knowledge. As others around her illustrated their stories and added the details Mrs. Miller had instructed them to do, Maricella told me that it is important to teach students to “respect property, respect others, respect yourself.” “Say that,” she told me confidently. “That’s what Mrs. Miller does.”

For the next several minutes, Maricella vacillated between inane conversation and replacing her current story worksheet with crisp new ones. Every once in a while, she wrote a word or two on the ever-changing blank sheets of paper. As she reached for another new page, she told me that it is important for students to know all the classroom signals. “If you put one finger in the air, it means be quiet. If you put two fingers in the air, it means you have to go to the bathroom, and if you put three fingers in the air, it means you need to get water.” She told me to remember that.

I was struck by how differently Preston and Maricella had approached their assignment. Preston appeared to understand what Mrs. Miller was looking for and executed the assignment as intended. He was able to demonstrate the academic knowledge that Mrs. Miller expected. Maricella did not seem to understand what Mrs. Miller was looking for or how to do it. Instead, she focused much of her energy demonstrating procedural knowledge of classroom rules rather than academic knowledge of writing. How had Preston decoded Mrs. Miller’s academic expectations and demonstrated the expected academic knowledge, but Maricella had not?

Before answering this question, it is important to understand why it matters. First, Preston and Maricella’s academic success in first grade will matter for their academic success in middle school, high school, and beyond. Researchers can even predict a child’s academic success in eighth grade from the skills they demonstrated as first graders—seven whole years earlier (Claessens & Engel, 2013). Since education is a primary means to upward mobility in adulthood, there is a critical window in children’s earliest years of learning, where they are thrust onto an upward trajectory of success, or pushed onto a downward trajectory of missed opportunity. Understanding how students come to possess such disparate skills in first grade therefore provides insight into how inequality in education—and life—happens.

Second, Preston’s and Maricela’s status characteristics—socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity in particular—correspond to these lifelong academic disparities. In schools across the nation, affluent students, as well as those who are White and Asian, tend to dominate the top of the educational outcome distribution. Less-affluent students, as well as those who are Black, Hispanic, and Native American, tend to fall behind (National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2015; Kao & Thompson, 2003). This disparity, which grows the most in students’ earliest years of schooling (Yeung & Pfeiffer, 2008; Fryer & Levitt, 2004; Magnuson & Duncan, 2006), exists at every level of education from kindergarten through college, for every tested subject area, and for every educational achievement outcome, like standardized test scores and grades (National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2015; Reardon, 2011).

Since racial and ethnic disparities in achievement start so early, and early academic skills are so important for later academic success, it is crucial to understand why “Prestons” (higher-SES, White) and “Maricellas” (lower-SES, Latina) decode teacher expectations differently and demonstrate such different kinds of academic skills in first grade.

This brings us to the third reason this question is so important: it focuses on a part of the academic inequality process that sociologists like myself rarely examine—academic “decoding.” That is, how students interpret academic tasks and instructions, what steps they think they need to do to accomplish those tasks, and how they determine if or what they should share about their knowledge.

Scholars who examine social determinants of educational experiences and outcomes often point to inequality in structural arrangements of schools. For example, “Prestons” (higher-SES, White) often attend well-resourced schools with rigorous, college-preparatory curricula, abundant arts and extracurricular activities, and highly qualified teachers (Anyon 1981; Hanushek & Rivkin, 2006; Logan, Minca & Adar, 2012). “Maricellas” (low-SES and Latina) often attend low-performing schools, where resources are thin (Logan et al,. 2012; Kozol, 1991), curriculum is remedial or unchallenging (Anyon, 1981), and teachers are either too stressed, too underprepared, or too unsupported to facilitate effective instruction (Paulle, 2013; Abel & Sewell, 1999).

Yet Preston and Maricella both attend Foxcroft Elementary, one of the most desirable elementary schools in the state of North Carolina. Teachers are highly qualified; about 40 percent hold Master’s Degrees in education—higher than the North Carolina state average at the time of data collection. Each classroom at Foxcroft is equipped with a Smart Board, extra computers, and well-stocked table caddies of supplies. Students are guaranteed at least two full meals a day and snacks, if poverty prevents families from providing nourishment necessary for their children’s learning. Foxcroft’s curriculum centers world languages (every student takes Chinese, French, Spanish, German, or Japanese), the arts, and kinesthetic learning (yoga is an elective). Funding and school quality concerns—two popular structural explanations for students’ academic inequality—cannot explain why Preston had figured out what it took to execute his small moment writing assignment and Maricella had not.

A sociological exploration of what and how students decode as necessary for academic success, and why characteristics like social class, race, and ethnicity are aligned with this, can help us understand this difference better. This study aims to uncover and illustrate those processes.

The “Hidden (Academic) Curriculum”

What, exactly, do students need to “decode” in school? Schools everywhere teach academic skills, like reading, writing, and math. However, schools also teach students other things, like obeying authority, waiting one’s turn, and “work.” These things are not explicitly stated as educational ends, but by structuring class space, activities, policies, and interactions in ways that socialize these ideas into students, they drill these skills into students through concerted means (Giroux & Penna, 1979). For example, students like Preston and Maricella learn to internalize meritocracy by working hard for higher grades on assignments (Aronowitz, 1973). They learn nascent patriotism by pledging their allegiance to the American flag each morning (Gracey, 1975). They learn that when authority figures, like teachers, talk, it is best to listen, lest they be reprimanded. These implicit lessons that schools teach us, are what sociologists refer to as the “hidden curriculum.”

Early hidden curriculum scholars focused on what structural arrangements of schools were communicating to students about how to be good social citizens. Later, critical theorists devoted more attention to how hidden features of schooling—which texts were selected to represent “legitimate” knowledge or not, which skills teachers developed in students based on their social class, and so forth—reproduced social existing inequalities (Giroux & Penna,1979; Pratt, 2020; Bowles & Gintis, 1979; Freire, 1970). According to this view, hidden features of schools provide socially advantaged students with knowledge and skills to prepare them for powerful positions in society, while they provide socially disadvantaged students knowledge and skills to prepare them for subordinate positions (Bowles & Gintis, 1979).

I add to this list of hidden school features the hidden academic curriculum, which I argue to be a central feature of social inequality reproduction in contemporary schools. As opposed to the traditional hidden curriculum, whose goals are not explicitly stated but whose means instill them into children (Giroux & Penna, 1979), the hidden academic curriculum’s goals are explicitly stated (academic information), but its means (the language, style, and structure of academic tasks and communication about them) are inexplicit, therefore “hidden.”

In schools like Foxcroft, teachers often use indirect instructional styles that allow students to learn through self-discovery, discussion, and problem-solving (Heaysman & Tubin, 2019; Rowe, 2006; Clements & Battista, 1990). Mrs. Miller’s writer’s workshop is an example of this. By reading Mrs. Miller’s example story, Preston, Maricella, and the rest of the class were meant to discover what “details” of stories were, identify abstract patterns and principles that govern and differentiate details from other story elements, then create from those abstract principles their own story details. This pedagogical style is meant to facilitate deeper learning than more direct instructional tasks, where teachers deliver information, then assess it via rote memorization or practice drills (Clements & Battista, 1990).

However, these styles also less directly tell students what they are supposed to learn. Without direct, explicit instruction, underlying academic processes and principles teachers want students to discover remain obscured and ambiguous—“hidden” from students. Because ambiguity forces students to correctly decode what the teacher wants, students must draw on their own cultural logics and scripts to make sense of what is presented to them (Calarco, 2014b). As evidenced by Preston and Maricella’s different approaches, demographic characteristics, which are connected to academic inequality, are connected to that sense-making process, which has implications for inequality in students’ academic success.

Cultural Variation in Language and Decoding

Decoding anything is a cultural activity intimately connected to our social backgrounds. This is because language itself, one of the most important elements of any culture, shapes how we see, make sense of, and interact with others in the world (Bernstein, 1977; Heath, 1983).

The way Preston and Maricella interact in classed language structures with their parents at home may have impacted how they interpreted and executed their writing assignment. When adults interact with their children in task-related situations, middle and working class/poor adults do two things differently; first, middle class parents “decontextualize” underlying principles governing tasks (e.g. “to sort these blocks into two groups, you need to pick something that separates them and put them into groups based on that trait”) (Hess & Shipman, 1965). Working class and poor parents issue the directive to do the task, without the deconstructed reasoning for it (e.g. “put these blocks here and those there”) (Hess & Shipman, 1965). This difference allows middle class children to have comparatively more experience identifying and applying abstract principles in other institutionalized settings, like writing small moment stories at school, where such skills are valued.

Preston, being a higher-SES student, may have more easily recognized the abstract, decontextualized patterns in Mrs. Miller’s story—the number of sentences, the narrative structure, the types of words she used t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Understanding Sociocultural Differences in Decoding Instruction and Demonstrating Knowledge
• 2 Unequal Skills: Decoding and Demonstrating Knowledge
• 3 Learning How to Decode and Demonstrate Knowledge from Parents
• 4 The Hidden Academic Curriculum: Learning How (Not) to Decode and Demonstrate Knowledge from Teachers
• 5 Unequal Rewards and Punishments for Demonstrating Knowledge
• 6 Unequal Skills and Punishments: Segregated Friendships and Concentrated (Dis)Advantage
• 7 Moving Forward as Theorists and Practitioners
• Appendix A: Research Methods
• Index