Three
Becoming Achievement Oriented
No matter what anybody says, we can’t have it all. Not if you are a woman. Not yet.
—AMA ATA AIDOO
FOR DECADES, Academy Prep Secondary School (APSS) was considered the school of last resort.1
Kwame Owusu, the assistant headmaster of APSS, explained the challenges his school was facing when I arrived in Ghana in 2009. “Being surrounded by some settlements … the squatters, they pose difficulty for us … they open liquor shops, sell drugs. [APSS] is more or less a community school … and we are [also] a day school so those who cannot afford a boarding school send their kids to us.” When I asked the students about their perceptions of the school, a girl named Ama exclaimed, “This is [APSS], the most stubborn school in Ghana, the most notorious, the most indisciplined.” Another girl, Lydia, interrupted to point out the additional burden of being a girl at APSS: “girls drop out because of pregnancies and other things.” In describing the school as “stubborn,” “notorious,” and a place where girls drop out, the students explained why APSS came to be known as the option for “those who cannot afford a boarding school.”
That is, until Mary Mensah arrived.
In 2007, Mary Mensah became the first woman to head APSS in its sixty-year history. When I met her in 2009, she was not only the first woman to head the school but also the only woman in its senior administration.
Born into a middle-class home, Mary Mensah is the oldest of three children. While her siblings moved to the United States and Europe to pursue their careers, she remained in Ghana and rose through the educational ranks. Her experience moving up the ranks has sensitized her to the challenges that girls face at APSS.
Like many schools in Ghana, APSS only began accepting girl students in 1990. Although the school’s acceptance of girls indicates a country seeking change in a positive direction, girl students have struggled to adjust to the school setting. As Mary said the first day we spoke: “Now what I notice about the females in this school … the girls in the school, they tend to be a bit timid. I think it has to do with their cultural background.”
Mary speaks slowly and confidently. She punctuates every few phrases with a flash of her pristine smile. She continued, “But I have a different background where the male and female are given the same opportunities, so I try to bring this to bear on my leadership.” In talking about the girls at the school, Mary touched on the sociocultural context in which most girls and women find themselves: an environment that in more than one way favors boys and men. In contrast, Mary viewed her household as providing equal opportunities for both the men and women in her family. Accordingly, Mary became intent on creating a similarly equal environment at APSS. Her efforts to increase girls’ enrollment have paid off: as of 2017, girls made up nearly 50 percent of all students enrolled in APSS.
Ama is one of those girls. When I met her in 2009, she lived with her mother, grandmother, and two siblings in a one-room shack. She was in her third year at APSS and had ambitions to be the first in her family to go to college. Yet, being from a poor family, her ambitions were met with resistance by her mother and her surrounding community.
“When you get ready to go to school and they see you moving in your uniform, they tend to laugh at you,” Ama said, describing the reactions she received on her agonizing walk to school every morning.
Ama’s agony was exacerbated by her mother. On the topic of school, she told Ama, “You won’t be able to make it. You can’t even get through [junior high school] or [senior high school]. How much more for college?”
Ama responded, “Mom, I will. You watch.” Ama told me that she thought about her mother’s disapproval in the following way: “I see it as a challenge. She is throwing a challenge at me, and I am throwing one back to show her that I can be better than she thinks I am.”
Not many young people who experience direct resistance to their ambitions from both their community and their family would be able to respond in that way.2 But to my surprise, many girls I met at APSS do. I wanted to know who these girls were. Would they make it to college? And, if so, how? More important, where did they get this can-do attitude? Was it formed in school, or by the influence of a role model? And finally, do their can-do attitudes last?
The Importance of Grit and Perseverance in Developing Countries
Education studies emphasize the significant role of noncognitive skills such as grit and perseverance in the success of students. While the budding research on these so-called soft skills has produced promising evidence about the crucial role they may play, the verdict is still out on whether people are born with them or if they can be taught. It is thought that if educators can find ways to teach soft skills and make them stick, students might succeed even if they come from environments where such skills are not fostered.
Earlier studies suggested that students were more likely to demonstrate noncognitive skills if schools such as APSS created environments which facilitated their development.3 Very little of this work has explored how gender affects noncognitive skills and educational achievement, or even what the relationship is between these soft skills and academic performance in Ghana and other so-called developing societies.4 In a study on noncognitive skills and academic performance conducted in 2010, George Frempong, a policy researcher, found that confidence levels rather than the location or quality of the school explained the disparate academic outcomes of students from low- and high-education backgrounds in Ghana. He found these results to be especially strong among the girl students sampled, which reinforces the notion that confidence, a noncognitive skill, is more critical for academic achievement than factors typically studied, such as parental education level and school quality.5 The findings indicate that the teaching of noncognitive skills to girls might help reduce disparities in academic outcomes across Ghana, but virtually no studies in Ghana investigate this claim. Furthermore, by focusing only on the relationship between noncognitive skills and academic performance, the study’s results are based on relatively narrow evaluations of achievement.
Margaret Frye’s research on school-aged girls in Malawi examines the role of educational institutions, development organizations, and the media in espousing an ideological rhetoric of a “brighter future” to promote the value of girls’ education. She finds that this rhetoric encourages an inflated sense of girls’ chances of educational achievement and life success in light of the disadvantages girl students face. Frye explains this disconnect as attributable to the fact that girls in Malawi learn to evaluate themselves based on their ability to be virtuous women—of high moral standard. Girls’ perceptions of themselves as virtuous contribute to their confidence and positive attitudes toward learning, or as I would say, their net achievement.6
While developing confidence and positive attitudes toward learning are clearly positive outcomes, Frye’s findings also point to the danger of building educational identities on rhetoric espoused by external bodies rather than delivered by the school itself. More specifically, she highlights how claims to virtue, rather than an inherent belief that girls are deserving, has become the predominant reason to pursue education among girls already marginalized within society.
Frempong’s and Frye’s studies emphasize the potential role of noncognitive skills in evaluations of academic performance and net achievement across different contexts. I argue, however, that most literature on noncognitive skills does not address how these skills are used to combat the gender-based barriers, such as sexual harassment, which girls face in their everyday educational environments. Unlike noncognitive skills, the concept of achievement-oriented identities (AOIs) requires, first, that educators understand the specific inhibitors girls face. Second, this concept requires a focused effort among teachers and administrators to develop girls’ self-efficacy and confidence before providing them with specific tools to strategically respond to challenges and transgress norms at school and in the world. In short, AOIs are the tools feminist schools provide students to effect change in society and reach their individual goals.
Achievement-Oriented Identities
In this chapter I document why schools should facilitate the development of achievement-oriented identities as a more comprehensive approach to teaching noncognitive skills. The term AOIs can be used to describe positive beliefs in one’s own ability, and the facility to translate those beliefs into realizable actions through the development of confidence, strategy, and transgression. AOIs constitute a tool kit that helps girls think and respond in proactive ways to the challenges before them. These identities are constantly being shaped and reinforced by all aspects of a school’s culture, whether by the school’s leadership or in the classroom.
Accordingly, I explain how AOIs orient a school’s institutional culture toward net achievement, which impresses upon students a positive academic identity. Evidence of the context AOIs provide schools can be observed through the intentional actions of teachers and school leaders, in addition to the activities conducted throughout the typical school day. The context’s influence on its students can be observed through the goals students express and the proactive strategies they take in response to challenges at school and in the world.
Education in Ghana
Despite its progressive education policies, Ghana continues to experience disparities in educational outcomes for its youth. In 1957, Ghana became the first African country south of the Sahara to gain independence from British colonial rule. Shortly after, in 1961, Ghana became the first African nation to provide universal education under its Education Act. This effort, while progressive in theory, was unfortunately unrealized in practice. Despite the promise of free education for all, the nation faced multiple political and financial challenges. Thus, a number of identifiable groups found themselves excluded from the educational system.7 When the new republic was established in 1992, however, an equal rights amendment was included in the constitution, establishing what came to be known as Free and Compulsory Universal Basic Education (FCUBE). It was only then that the number of girls attending school began to increase significantly. These domestic policies—in tandem with a number of international policies, such as those included in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), in addition to the development of local government agencies such as the Ministry of Women and Children’s Affairs (MOWAC)—have created space for what seems to be changing societal perspectives on women in Ghana.
In 2008, the speaker of the parliament of Ghana was a woman, as was the chief justice and the attorney general. In 2011, Samia Nkrumah became the first woman to head a major political party, and, in 2012, three vice-presidential candidates were women. Descriptive representation aside, local civil society dedicated to women has made huge strides, including the development of the Women’s Manifesto for Ghana in 2004—a comprehensive list of demands to political parties; the passage of the nation’s first domestic violence act in 2007; and, in 2012, the development of a national gender policy.
With regard to education today, Ghana boasts near gender parity (.96 on the Gender Parity Index) at the primary level with over 90 percent of the country’s population attaining at least basic education. Yet as the education levels rise, there are significant drops in enrollment, particularly among girl students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds.8 Financial means and gendered responsibilities play significant roles in the ability of girl students to pass into higher levels of education.
Public schools are technically free, but schools often charge students fees for services including registration, books, and supplies. These fees make even government-subsidized schools still relatively unaffordable for some.9 These fees typically increase at higher levels of education, which can impact how many girls, especially, are able to stay in school.
Even once girls gain access to schools, they may have trouble remaining enrolled. Girls may face challenges boys do not. For example, girls often bear more responsibility at home compared with their male peers. They may walk several miles to fetch water for their family before school or do hours of housework after school. For this reason, when parents are faced with financial hardship and must choose which of their children should stay in school, they consider boys over their girl siblings. These gendered decisions further disadvantage girls’ prospects for educational success.
Within the classroom, girls face challenges unique to their gender as well. For example, in selecting an academic track for students, many teachers in Ghana still hold outdated views about girl students’ capacity to perform in certain disciplines. Consequently, girl students are funneled into the arts or home sciences even if they have the aptitude and interest to pursue traditionally male-dominated subjects such as math and science.10 A lack of interest in their assigned academic track can lead girl students to lose interest in school altogether.
Another more recent concern is that of male teachers and administrators pursuing sexual relationships with girl students. More specifically, girls must contend with what one expert I interviewed called “STGs,” or “sexually transmitted grades.” She used the term to describe the process by which a girl student is asked for a sexual favor in exchange for accurate reporting of her academic work. So even though more girls are attending higher levels of school, they are also facing increasing sexual harassment in the classroom. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that teachers are predominantly male, and in Ghana, girls are often afraid to speak out against male authority figures for fear of retaliation.11
Thus, despite recent developments in public policy, girls in Ghana continue to operate under the context of patriarchal hierarchies and traditional gender norms.12 The potential for a girl to achieve in Ghana is related not only to gaining educational access but also to developing the capacity to navigate everyday societal barriers based on gender, a dilemma that can be resolved if girls’ achievement-oriented identities are recognized and fostered.
Achievement for Girls at APSS
This chapter uses original data collected between 2009 and 2012 on the educational experiences of girls attending APSS in Ghana to demonstrate how the school shaped attitudes critical for girls to develop achievement-oriented identities. APSS is a four-year government-subsidized school founded in 1946 and made public in 1954. It long acted as a neighborhood school for the kids of Coco Bay until it moved about thirteen miles east to its current location in 1987. While its proximity to Coco Bay is originally what attracted families in that neighborhood to APSS, many still attended even after the move.
At the time of my study, APSS had more than 1,000 students and a gender ratio of sixty girls to forty boys. More than 80 percent of its students lived within a ten- to fifteen-mile radius of the campus, and nearly 75 percent came from low-income backgrounds, defined in Ghana as earning 2 USD or less per day (or between 100 and 350 Ghanian cedis per month.13
A product of its environment, APSS is a microcosm for gender relations in Ghana at large; it has experienced a lot of progress and some setbacks. Accordingly, most girls who attend APSS face the same burdens as Ama: They are both beneficiaries as well as victims of the educate-the-girl-child policies meant to help them.
While the opportunity to attend school is potentially life changing, girls in Ghana often come from neighborhoods and households that rebuke their decision, and they attend schools that have few resources and are far from practicing gender equality. Still, these girls are expected to achieve and have the desire to achieve as well. Unless they have unwavering resilience or are academically exceptional, however, these students may never meet that expectation. I returned to Ghana, and APSS, for several years after the completion of the study to see what these girls had achieved.
During the active years of the study, I observed Headmistress Mary as she assessed the larger issues of patriarchy and gender inequality and their effects on girl students. She designed solutions that the school could use to help the girls be less timid, have more self-belief, and respond to the gender-based challenges they regularly experienced at school and at home. These actions took place across the institution—at the senior leadership level through changes in policy, after school through clubs and activities, and within the classroom through the addition of religion and moral education courses.14
The Role of Women Leaders
In the effort to improve net achievement for girls, school leadership matters. And in Ghana, this is no different. From Day One, Headmistress Mary’s approach to leadership, especially in relation to her girl students, became a critical element to any success they ultimately achieved. Mary viewed her identification as a woman as opportune for engaging in discussions and activities around gender: “Since I am female, it has given me an opportunity to mold the females in the school. I try to encourage them … make them feel like there is nothing like you being an inferior sex.”
During my time at APSS, I witnessed Mary’s actions align with her professed desires as she made several deliberate decisions to redirect the girls at the school. For example, inside and outside of her office, Mary posted motivational sayings and messages weekly. One, for example, read, “Be a woman with attitude and a lady with class.” In her office stood a mug that she showed to each girl, including myself. It read, “Act like a lady, think like a man, and work like a dog.” These clearly gendered messages reflected Mary’s views on the values she sought to instill in her girl students. Mary described herself as needing to share these messages because she is “the only female, the school is now 65 years, and it’s been headed by males.”
Indeed, her messages also raise questions about respectability, or rather what it means to be “a lady with class,” yet students appeared to internalize these messages and empathize with them, given their responses to the headmistress’s actions. As one girl student stated, “If you are a woman, and you’re in that position … men hate to see women in that position, so she has to be that way … so in working hours she has a tough face but after that she is sweet.” This student understands the gendered dimensions associated with the headmistress’s role as both a woman and an administrator. Her words also reflect a clear subscription to the rhetoric being promoted around campus. Headmistress Mary’s presence as a woman in a male-dominated space mattered.
Doing What Boys Do
At APSS girls faced the practical issue of being underrepresented across all classrooms, but especially within the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) academic track. When girls were first asked in 2009 about the disparities existing between the genders, one student responded, “The boys, I don’t know they just do better … I don’t know why … you do the same thing as they are doing but you work harder.” Another girl student complained that she found the presence of boys in her class to be distracting: “Sometimes when you want to learn is when they begin to make noise. I try to explain to them we are here for something but they don’t get it that way.”
These experiences affect girls’ perceptions of their ability to compete with boys. One of the best-performing students at the school, Lydia, states, “It’s a perception that we girls have … we can do something but we can’t be the best … even if we are going for it, we can’t really match up to the guys, and I think it has to be erased, it needs to be eliminated.” Lydia’s statement reflects the headmistress’s hope that girls’ negative perceptions of their skills can be changed.
Perhaps of the most obvious indicator of Headmistress Mary’s goals was her decision to encourage Lydia to be the girls’ prefect during the first year of my study, 2009. Despite her professed confidence when I spoke to Lydia in the second year of the study, in 2010, Lydia admitted that when she was asked to be prefect she did not want to participate because she was told not to get involved in leadership roles. More specifically, she states: “At first I did not believe in myself. From the house, I wasn’t being encouraged. I remember even before I came to [APSS], they were telling me don’t get into any leadership roles. ‘It will be too stressful for you.’ ”
Lydia, like Ama, also aspired to be the first girl in her family to go to college. She was raised by her mother, who worked full time as house help for a wealthy family. Her father died when she was twelve years old. Since he was the main breadwinner of the family, after his death Lydia was sent to live with an aunt, who agreed to cover her high school fees if Lydia agreed to clean her house and care for her shop. The arrangement proved to be difficult in more ways than one. Most relevant, her aunt did not support her educational aspirations and discouraged Lydia from taking on leadership roles and applying to college.
Yet with the encouragement of Headmistress Mary, Lydia applied for the prefect position anyway. In 2010, she became the head girls’ prefect of the school. That same year, the headmistress changed the policy around the annual speech and prize-giving day. Defying tradition, she appointed the girls’ prefect to give the keynote speech, rather than the boys’ prefect. Through her actions, Mary not only challenged Lydia to speak before a crowd, but also challenged others’ expectations of who should be able to speak. Her actions encouraged Lydia to evolve from timid student to self-confident speaker. As she states: “I was so nervous. All this time I said to myself, no one else is going to do it. You have to do it. So let’s just get it done and do it all right.”
Reflecting on the impact of the speech a year later, Headmistress Mary explained, “Today [Lydia] can stand in front of the school and give a speech without winking. That shows what the female leadership of this school has done.” And indeed, referring directly to the experience of giving the speech, Lydia exclaims, “After I was done, I had so much confidence, I felt like I could do anything … like there is nothing I can’t do.”
In response to the question of how competitive girls are compared with boys at the school, Headmistress Mary stated, “Now you can look around and see that the girls rub shoulders with the guys … This confidence has grown to the extent that students are really excited whenever you throw a challenge to them.” A similar sentiment is shared by the assistant headmaster as he recounts the story of Lydia and others: “Our girls have done well … They are rubbing shoulders with the boys.” In a separate interview, Lydia affirms these comments with the following statement: “I compete with them and I beat them … [chuckles] well not necessarily ‘beat,’ but I perform better than they do.”
Altogether, Lydia’s story shows how the actions of a school, and its school leadership, can have a dramatic impact on girl students’ self-confidence and attitudes toward learning. Indeed, by encouraging Lydia to apply for a leadership role (despite being discouraged from doing so at home), allowing her to give the keynote (despite it being inconsistent with custom and tradition), and coaching her to bring out her voice (despite her clear nervousness), APSS—under the auspices of Headmistress Mary—taught Lydia to be confident and strategic, and to transgress norms both at home and at school. Mary’s attentiveness to the tactics employed and the calculated consequences of her strategies are important in understanding how achievement-oriented identities developed among her students thereafter.
Practicing Student Leadership
After-school activities, such as student government, facilitate connections between students and act as additional mechanisms for reinforcing AOIs. These activities also provide leadership opportunities for girl students not found in other areas of their lives. For many years at APSS, the representation of girls in student executive leadership roles was low. Fortunately, during the second year of my study, Ama became the first girl vice president of the student government in sixty-two years. Unfortunately, however, Ama became vice president during a period when the school was especially pinched for resources. In her role she led a successful campaign to raise funds for the purchase of fifty new chairs so that “students could have a place to sit and learn.” While Ama described the role as difficult, stating that, “people expect you to speak when everyone’s mouth is quiet,” the opportunity to participate in student government, particularly in an executive leadership position, gave Ama the confidence to raise her concerns and find a way to get them addressed. Ama described the student government members as being “proud of ourselves … to be the first group to give something back to the school.”
Ama also discovered that her role gave her the confidence and strategic skills to take on even more serious gender issues at the school: “A teacher was molesting one of the girl students. I got close to him, [but] he did not know that I was stabbing him in the back. I got together with my executives, and we reported the teacher. The next thing we know, he put in his resignation notice to leave the school before he got to know it was me.” When asked how she had the courage to report the incident, Ama described herself as “not afraid of anything,” and went on to state, “I have seen all that I have to see. I don’t think I am afraid to face anyone or anything … I don’t want to be like everyone, I want to prove a point that there still can be someone good from the Zungo [low income slum] where no one thinks there can be. That’s what I want to do: I want to prove a point.”
Ama’s leadership role in student government clearly provided a mechanism for her to translate the courage she derives from her neighborhood environment into a successful campaign to end sexual violence in the school. Yet Ama’s actions are undoubtedly conditional on being able to safely report the incident of sexual harassment to the school’s administration, without fear of retaliation. Accordingly, the lessons taught and opportunities available through these after-school activities—from raising school funds to taking action against a predator and holding him accountable—play an important role in encouraging girl students to have confidence in their abilities to strategically transgress the gender biases institutionalized at their school.
Perhaps the value of AOIs absorbed by Ama at school, and its persistence in other contexts, is even more telling in her response to the discouragement she continually heard from her mother: “When I [hear] my mother say, ‘You will not be able to finish [senior high school], you will not be able to go to a university,’ I say ‘Mom, you are wrong. I will be able to finish [senior high school], I will go to a university, I will work. It’s like, sit down [and] look at me.’ ”
In her last year at APSS, Ama worked part time to afford college applications. When she first applied to college after graduation, she was denied admission. She applied again the following year and was admitted into one of Ghana’s top universities. Ama’s experience with successfully taking on challenges in her leadership role in student government, the affirmation she received by being selected to be vice president, and the responsiveness from school leadership to her courageous decision to stand against sexual assault likely moderated the lack of affirmation received from her mother. Ama’s can-do attitude likely played an important role in her decision to apply to college a second time, even after being rejected. Together, these skills—confidence, strategy, and transgression—culminate in a set of skills critical for working toward her personal academic goals, despite her doubly disadvantaged background as a low-income young woman.
How Girls Are Taught Matters
During my time at APSS I found that the school’s emphasis on religious and moral education contributed to the belief that girl students could succeed despite the barriers before them. The creation of formal institutions of education across Ghana was largely the work of colonial Christian missionaries decades ago.15 Many of the religious activities rooted in traditional Christian schools, such as morning worship, have been institutionalized in educational practices in Ghana through the present day. For example, most government-subsidized schools continue to teach religion and moral education courses at the basic, junior, and secondary school levels. These courses and related activities promote positive messaging around “belief” and “overcoming” and encourage students to hold these perceptions. In particular, the religious and moral education courses emphasize the importance of spirituality, specifically faith in God, for overcoming education barriers and achieving future aspirations. Consequently, the existence of these religious and spiritual activities works to reinforce components of the achievement-oriented framework.
For example, every morning assembly at APSS is opened with prayer. A typical prayer said at these assemblies might be: “Dear Lord, we thank you for bringing us here safely. It wasn’t for our strength. It wasn’t for our might. It wasn’t for our energy. You delivered us out of the hands of the evil one. Amen.”
In addition, motivational sayings posted on bulletin boards throughout the campus have a religious or spiritual message:
Success keeps you glowing, but only God keeps you going.
Let us thank the Lord for making us feel so beautiful for ourselves and for each other.
When the prophetic grace is poured on you, even your mistakes will become ladders to your success.
As displayed, the school’s strategic use of these messages enables them to connect religious values such as “grace” to academic “success” for students. And certainly, it appears that those values are translated to the students. When a girl student was asked in 2010, “What does it take to be academically successful?” she responded, “In order to be successful, you have to be determined, just believe in yourself, you have to know who you are … you have to know those abilities … those talents that God has deposited in you … so that you can unearth them for the benefit of yourself and the benefit of the whole nation.”
This student is connecting her academic abilities and future aspirations to her belief in God. Statements that directly invoked God were common across all students examined. A clear example of the role of religion in shaping educational aspirations is highlighted in this response from Lydia in 2011 to the question of how she would be able to afford college: “I have a faith that … God is going to make a way. I figured out thinking and worrying won’t solve any problem, so I just have to pray to God.” From this response, it appears that religion and spirituality are contributing to the construction of Lydia’s worldview. Accordingly, even if a student does not regularly attend church or identify in a strong way with a religion, the pervasiveness of religious messages still structures critical aspects of her educational experience.
Although religious messages can be used in negative ways, in Lydia’s case they contributed specifically to her development of self-efficacy. Schools draw on religious and spiritual accepted wisdom to instill educational values of self-efficacy in large part because girls have already learned how to strategically maneuver and transgress prescribed gender confines. Their ability to consciously navigate gender confines enables them to take on the aspects of religion that are most beneficial. Ultimately, then, development of girls’ self-efficacy, in this case through religious messages, acts as a critical base on which their achievement-oriented identities are built. These religious messages also likely play an important role in girls’ persistence in the face of difficult odds.
The Persistence of Achievement-Oriented Identities after Secondary School
Once Lydia graduated, she took a break from school in order to work and save money to apply to college. A year later, in 2012, she was admitted into a top school in Ghana but could not afford to enroll. When I asked her how she felt about it, she responded: “You have some of your colleagues in school … they call you [and say] oh this and this is happening … and you feel so bad because you haven’t been able and you’re still not too sure you will be going to school and you feel anxious. So I was trying to check on my application for the scholarship but nothing was happening. I was trying to look for other alternatives … other things I can do.”
I then asked her the same question I had asked her the year before, “Do you see any barriers to achieving the goals you have set for yourself?” Lydia responded, “I know next year someone will have to pay; I cannot say I am afraid of that. I don’t have fear because I have faith.” Even a year after graduating, Lydia continued to profess a strong belief in her ability to find a way that is clearly influenced by her faith. Her experiences at APSS reinforced her belief.
In 2012, I also asked Headmistress Mary about Lydia and the challenges she was experiencing. She responded by stating, “Here was a brilliant student and a girl as such … I told [her] you will go to school no matter what.” Both Lydia and the headmistress showed a similarly high level of confidence in Lydia’s ability to be successful in overcoming her challenges, even though objectively she did not have the resources to do so.
Ama, like Lydia, also did not have the resources but got into college. When I asked her in 2012 if she was excited for college, she responded: “I am not that excited because I am going to school without the gadgets that I need. So psychologically I am down … I have to just sort it out. But what really encourages me [is that] I am the only female from my mom and dad’s side … the first girl to go to college.” Ama is keenly aware of her disadvantaged social and economic position. She is equally aware of why it is important for her to move forward regardless as “the first girl to go to college.” Students like her, who objectively appear to have none of the factors traditionally associated with academic achievement in terms of resources or parental support, highlight how noncognitive skills such as confidence, strategic skills, and the ability to transgress might contribute to their ultimate net achievement. The school, especially through its leadership, curriculum, after-school activities, and peer networks, helps students develop these qualities and retain them after they have left secondary school.
Not all the students examined had the same outcomes. Some went straight to college (n = 4) instead of waiting an entire year (n = 4). Others waited more than a year (n = 3), one joined the army (n = 1), and several changed their goals from traditional college to teacher training schools (n = 5). Nonetheless, the positive identities shaped at the school appeared to remain relatively intact. Statements by these former APSS students, such as “When I say I’m doing something, I have to get to the highest point,” and “I am focused, I know what I am about, and I know what I am here for” indicate the persistence of achievement-oriented thinking.
By the time these APSS students graduate, they have acquired important values that will serve them throughout their lives. Most important, they have developed a belief that they have acquired the necessary skills to meet challenges—to be confident, strategic, and transgressive in handling a hostile society. Achievement-oriented identities are about developing the tools to react and engage when faced with obstacles in the world. This is what the school context has impressed upon these students.
The labor of dealing with educational inequality should rest with the school. School, of course, cannot fully protect its students. Students should not have to deal with issues such as sexual harassment, in or out of school. The conditions for success should not require girls to be resilient or to engage in additional labor to dismantle inequality. But in the real world, these inequalities persist. If we accept the premise that educational inequality should be properly addressed by the school, then it is the work of the school to create conditions for girls to thrive. Thriving in a hostile society involves not only having an equitable school to attend but also acquiring the tools to navigate an inequitable society. If schools foster an environment in which students are encouraged to build such a tool kit, then schools are developing student identities oriented toward achievement.
The Value of College for Girls in Ghana
It’s obvious that in Ghana it is a significant achievement for girl students to graduate from secondary school and to be accepted into college. Still, when I present my research at American institutions, I often get asked, “How many of these girls who make it to college—if they graduate—will actually get a job?” The truth is, many probably will not. This is a country that continues to struggle with high levels of unemployment, and young women often get the short end of the stick. Nonetheless, a degree certainly improves their odds of employment.
However, the question brings to the light the differences in how college is perceived in the United States and Ghana. In the United States, students go to college as the first step toward a career. In fact, it is nearly impossible in the United States today to earn a livable wage without a two- or four-year college degree. In recent years, as more US students have graduated and have been unable to find meaningful careers, especially jobs that match their skills or are in their intended career path, major discussions have arisen about the utility of higher education altogether. Even though higher education has acted as a path toward gender equality in the United States, structural inequities in the workplace, from the invisible glass ceiling to pay inequities in salaries, have been obstacles for women in the corporate world. The obdurate nature of these obstacles raises questions about whether the success women have experienced in the United States is equivalent with its intent.
In Sub-Saharan African countries like Ghana, the utility of going to college, particularly for girls, is often framed differently. At the societal level, educated women are more likely to immunize their children, less likely to contract HIV, and more likely to reinvest in their family’s education. Their children are more likely to survive past the age of five, and more likely as well to get married and have children later.16 The societal benefits, therefore, also play an important role in making a case for the value of attending college that extends far beyond getting a job. At the individual level, college is seen as a mechanism of social mobility. Many factors make college an attractive option for girls. They meet many new people, learn how to live independently, and become more highly respected in their communities.
The experience of college graduates in Ghana stands out because the country has a long-standing national service program in which college students are required to work for the government for one full year within two years of graduation. The students are offered a very modest monthly stipend for food and transportation. The experience helps them gain skills and develop connections with potential employers. While there are a lot of challenges with the program related to finding quality positions to fit graduates’ interests and skill sets, the program assures girls and their families that if they graduate, they are guaranteed employment for at least one year after college. This type of program is crucial particularly for girls because upon graduating from college, girls are expected to either contribute to the household or get married and start a family. This program buys girls time to figure out how to find a job and reintegrate into a social context that is often much less progressive than their college environment.
When these girls come home, especially as the first in their families to go to college, they have a high level of confidence in their abilities and pride in what they have accomplished. They are often able to convince their families of the power of education simply through the symbolic prestige it affords them. Thus, the act of going to college becomes a powerful tool not only because of their potential ability to get a job but also because of the many personal, symbolic, and social benefits associated with the degree.
Self-Delusion or Self-Belief?
To be sure, there were many times during my research when I heard girl students express such a high level of optimism in their ability to attend college that I worried they were not being realistic. On one hand, I enjoyed the departure from the rather hopeless perspectives I often heard from students living in low-income neighborhoods in other contexts I studied. On the other hand, I feared their self-belief may have been veering toward self-delusion.
The girl students I worked with were by all measures objectively poor. Many of their parents worked as petty traders, lacked formal education, and resided in Ghana’s poorest urban slums. Furthermore, whatever school the girls happened to attend was not necessarily a pipeline to college. In fact, only 20 percent of Ghana’s high schools provide 80 percent of the nation’s college students. The 20 percent are often legacy schools of colonial Ghana that serve the country’s economic elite. In short, these schools were not the type of institutions that the poor students I worked with typically attended.
The clear disparity between the ambitions of these girls and the objective reality raises questions about the value of this growth mindset. What is the value of grit if you are objectively poor? What does it mean to work hard and be accepted into college but not have the resources to attend? Is it useful to encourage students to believe they can go to college when the odds are so clearly stacked against them?
The answer to this last question is mostly “yes.” Indeed, believing in their own abilities should positively contribute to their outcomes. To be sure, many of them will still fall short of achieving these goals, but the pursuit heightens the probability that they may be successful. For example, I saw girls fail their college entrance exams and retake them multiple times. I witnessed them work for multiple years to save money, and I even saw them borrow money to pay for college applications and work a part-time job to pay it off. I witnessed girls continue to make a way out of no way, just to be the first girl in their family to go to college.
Nonetheless, while the girls described in this chapter fit neatly into common conceptions of resilience and individual agency, their actual entry and success in college was made possible by the schools they attended and the people around them. Consider Lydia, who came from a single-parent home and a very poor background. She was admitted to college but could not enroll because of her inability to afford it: “I applied for scholarships and nothing was happening,” she said. “I was stressed … losing weight.” After waiting a year, Lydia was able to secure support to attend school from members of her community, but Lydia’s predicament illustrates how even resilience may not be enough without the help of others. Lydia’s story makes clear that while the ability to overcome odds should be celebrated, it is important to recognize that these successes are not without clear costs. The fact that such costs are common for girls like Lydia should not lull us into thinking that such costs are acceptable. In other words, girls like Lydia should not need to be resilient. We simply need to do better.
Becoming College Girls and Graduates in Modern Ghana
What does college look like for girls who are the first to attend college in their families and do not benefit from attending a highly ranked secondary school? By the time these girl students are admitted to college, they have competed with students who are far more prepared, and, indeed, they typically struggle. Year after year, I would check in and see some of the top students from APSS, such as Ama and Lydia, receive the lowest grades in college, especially as they took more specialized courses related to their majors. While these students had a desire to do well and appeared to maintain a belief that they could, this desire and belief did not translate to high grades. In short, they had the right attitude but perhaps an inadequate aptitude.
These students left APSS with achievement-oriented identities which were critical for staying in school, but they no longer operated in an environment in which those skills were being developed and affirmed. Additionally, each year in college they struggled financially in an economic environment that was only getting worse. Finally, they had each come from a school that lacked the same level of resources and academic rigor as the schools of many of their peers.
Still, they persisted, and by May 2016, exactly seven years since the first day I met them, I received an invitation from Ama and Lydia to attend their college graduation ceremony in August. I was unable to attend, so I asked a colleague to go on my behalf. Happily, he agreed. On the day of the graduation, he travelled four hours to Cape Coast and made his way through the large crowd. Ama spotted him and waved him down. After taking several photos with her, he asked after Lydia. As neither Ama nor my colleague were able to find her at the ceremony, I sent Lydia an email to congratulate her. Weeks later, I finally heard back: “I missed the ceremony because I could not pay for the graduation fee on time.”
My heart stopped. After enduring so much to be the first in her family to attend and graduate college, a fee, the equivalent of 75 US dollars, kept her from attending her own graduation. Did Lydia lack grit? Did her grittiness run out? Not at all. Like many poor girls, her objective conditions continued, and will continue, to constrain her life chances. It is unfortunate that a single young person should be expected to have the fortitude to withstand it all.
In the end, Lydia did what she said she would do and graduated college, whether her struggle was fueled by self-belief or self-delusion or something else entirely. Still, her story acts as a reminder that, while these noncognitive skills matter, the development of these skills should occur in a society in which girls, regardless of their economic status, can thrive. Nonetheless, achievement-oriented identities, honed in schools, improve a school’s ability to produce girl students who can be confident, strategic, and transgressive until the day they no longer have to be.