The Culture of Power

I recently read an excerpt from Lisa Delpit's book Other People's Children (1995) in which she talks about what she calls the "Culture of Power." This is, essentially, the culturally inherited values/norms/expectations that allow children of the dominant culture to be more successful in school than children of marginalized cultures. She says that the former receive constant implicit reinforcement that allows them such a greater level of success, whereas the latter need to be explicitly taught the "rules" of power in order to be allowed access to them.

Reading her work led me to think a lot about how this is at play in my practice at High Tech High. One way in which the culture of power is apparent in the classrooms of HTH is through the difference in the performance of “village” students (students from within the High Tech schools prior to high school) versus students who came recently from other schools. The class of students I currently have includes a number of students who were in the inaugural 6th grade class at High Tech Middle five years ago, and the degree of socialization into the “High Tech High Way” that they exhibit is pretty extreme. To observe the difference between those students and the students who were new to the village last year is pretty substantial. As some of my colleagues put it, the former have “drunk the Kool-Aid” – they understand projects better, they work more cooperatively in groups, they are able to budget their time more effectively, they verbally assert their ideas and opinions with greater ease, and they demonstrate other similar academic skills that make them more successful than the students who don’t yet have those skills.

These are all skills and strategies that we explicitly teach to students, particularly in 6th and 9th grade classes, through benchmarks and scaffolding. We model how to communicate and cooperate in groups; we set intermediate deadlines to help students understand the pacing of a long-term project; and we practice discussion skills through Socratic seminars, mock trials and debates. This kind of explicit instruction in behaviors that support academic success is similar to the kind of “rules” which Delpit enumerates and which schools such as KIPP provide to their students (see Paul Tough's "What It Takes to Make a Student," for a further discussion of the KIPP schools). As an aside, KIPP's "SLANT" approach feels so incredibly prescriptive that I can’t imagine being that kind of teacher, but I understand why some students might really benefit from it.

In spite of our complex socialization process, somewhere along the line some HTH students do not develop these skills to the same degree as others. As I think of the students in my own experience who are less successful at applying these skills, the faces that come to mind belong mostly to working class students and students with IEP’s. The latter may stem from the additional challenges that some students with learning disabilities face when it comes to organization, focus, and articulation of ideas. One thing I know I often struggle with is how to support those students so that they may be better able to enact the same strategies as their more successful peers.

The question of why working class students struggle with these skills perhaps comes from a difference in communication strategies employed by students of different socioeconomic backgrounds. As I perceive it (from my limited experience), more affluent students are often taught from a young age that speaking up, disagreeing with adults, and having opinions are behaviors that are rewarded – all of which are skills I know I personally value in my students. Meanwhile, many students of working class backgrounds are taught that respect for one’s elders and waiting one’s turn to speak are very important values. Those students – at least from what I see in my own classes – will usually answer when asked a question, but won’t tend to volunteer information or advocate for themselves when they are confused or need help.

In Tough’s article he references statistics to back up these observations, although I suspect that this is the kind of subject where I could easily find data that tells me the exact opposite is true. But regardless of the numbers, I still have a lot of learning to do in order to better support all my students in their acquisition of the kinds of skills and "rules" that will make them more successful later in life.

References:
Delpit, L. (1995). Other People’s Children, (pp. 21-26). New York: The New Press.
Tough, P. (2006, November 26). What It Takes to Make a Student. New York Times Magazine.