CHAPTER 5
Socioeconomic Cultures
On September 17, 2011, some one thousand people convened in Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park to protest…well, a lot of things: the failure of the government to take banks to task for the global financial crisis, high unemployment, bad health care, runaway income inequality, and corporate interference in politics, to name a few. Despite their disparate grievances, the protestors united under one slogan, “We Are the 99 Percent,” and directed their fury at the richest 1 percent of Americans, who own some 43 percent of the nation’s wealth.1
Despite its hazy agenda, the Occupy Wall Street movement traveled far and fast, sparking hundreds of protests around the world. One year later, many of these protests were still simmering.
The broad appeal of the Occupy movement demonstrates that the clash between the haves and the have-nots is growing ever louder. Yet in the United States, the deepest divide isn’t between the 99 and the 1; it’s between the 70 and the 30—that is, the 70 percent of Americans who don’t have a college degree versus the 30 percent who do.2 College-educated Americans have better jobs, earn more money, enjoy more free time, suffer from fewer physical and mental illnesses, and live longer lives than do Americans without a college degree.3
Your level of education shapes your life in many other ways, both large and small. Will you marry? If so, when? Will you get divorced? How many kids will you have? Will you fight in a war? How will you vote in the next election? Where will you go for vacation? What music will you listen to tomorrow morning? What will you eat for dinner tomorrow night? The answers to these questions hinge heavily on whether you earned a bachelor’s degree.4
The same is true in many other industrialized countries, where the number of diplomas on your wall is the most powerful predictor of your place in the pecking order. Income and occupation are also measures of socioeconomic status. But education packs the largest punch in determining just how your life is going to turn out.5 In particular, a college education has become the tipping point that separates those who thrive from those who struggle just to survive.6
Many scholars dice socioeconomic status into finer divisions such as the underclass, working poor, professional class, capitalist class, and so on. In this chapter, we focus on just one distinction: people without a college degree (whom we call working class) and people with a college degree (whom we call middle class). Of course, some people without a college degree consider themselves middle or even upper class, while the ranks of the college-educated include people who call themselves all sorts of names. But because a college education has become so crucial, we use it as our main dividing line.
A bachelor’s degree has not always been so important. In 1979, college graduates earned only 40 percent more than Americans with just a high school diploma; they now earn 74 percent more.7 As the economy shifted from manufacturing and construction to service and information, people without a college education saw their jobs go overseas or simply disappear. Those with a bachelor’s degree, in contrast, had the skills that paid the bills. College-educated Americans now bring home $56,665 per year on average, compared to $30,627 for high school graduates.8
In previous chapters, we noted that population growth and technological innovations are forcing people from different cultures to interact more than ever. But the story for social class is different: the worlds of people with and without college degrees are becoming ever more balkanized. The United States is now the fourth most unequal nation among members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a consortium of the world’s thirty-four wealthiest democracies. Only Turkey, Mexico, and Chile have greater inequality.9 Getting ahead in the United States has also gotten harder. Once known as the land of opportunity, the United States is now the third least socially mobile of the OECD nations, topped only by Italy and Great Britain.10 The United States has also lost its lead as a country that sends its kids to college; the nation now ranks number sixteen in the OECD when it comes to the percentage of twenty-five to thirty-four-year-olds who have completed a college degree.11
The widening gap between people with and without a college education is a problem not just for the have-nots. Inequality hurts everyone. The larger the spread between a society’s rich and poor, the more dysfunction—including crime, depression, anxiety, drug use, school dropouts, and early deaths—its denizens of all social classes suffer.12 A study spanning the years 1972 to 2008 similarly finds that Americans are less happy and trustful when there is more income inequality.13 Liberal academics are not the only people worrying about inequality. No less a libertarian than Charles Murray (of The Bell Curve fame) recently released a book documenting how social class divides are tearing the United States in two.14
One proven way to reduce inequality is to produce more college graduates.15 This would help not just the have-nots, but the nation as a whole. More than 70 percent of the nation’s jobs require specialized skills that high schools do not teach.16 With a dearth of qualified workers, many companies must now import workers to the United States or move their operations abroad.17 This situation is likely to worsen. By 2025 the United States will need twenty million more college-educated workers than it is on track to produce.18
Yet educating more people requires softening another culture clash, this time between the selves of the people delivering education and the selves of the people in greatest need of it. Educators are far from our nation’s wealthiest people. But with a college education under their belts, and the cultural knowledge, connections, and income that come with it, they tend to see themselves as separate, unique, controlling, free, and equal. In other words, college-educated teachers and professors tend to use independent selves.
Their students hailing from working-class backgrounds, by contrast, tend to use interdependent selves. For working-class Americans, interdependence is not just an interesting philosophical stance; it’s a useful strategy for surviving when there are too few resources to go around. Relating to and fitting in with other people helps build networks that can deliver not only emotional support, but also material assistance, when necessary. Adjusting to situations makes good sense when changing them is above your pay grade. Rooting yourself in tradition and location is likewise a good way to weather a relatively chaotic world. And when you’re on the lower ranks of the social ladder, it behooves you to pay attention to who’s above and below. Consequently, working-class people tend to see their selves as more relational, similar, adjusting, rooted, and ranked.
Working-class interdependence is not identical to East-Asian, female, or other forms of interdependence, nor is a working-class European-American woman’s way of being interdependent the same as a working-class man’s. Indeed, even though female teachers can make classrooms uncomfortably interdependent for boys as we discussed in chapter 3, teachers’ middle-class independence often clashes with the interdependence of their working-class charges. When independence and interdependence collide in the classroom, many working-class students conclude that school is not for them.19
Some educators come to agree with them, viewing their working-class students as unmotivated, uncooperative, or just plain dumb. This is a failure not only of education, but also of the American Dream—“a simple but powerful one,” as President Bill Clinton described it, that “if you work hard and play by the rules you should be given a chance to go as far as your God-given ability will take you.”20
Now that dream must be amended: you must not only work hard and play by the rules, but also get a college education. And though there are exceptions—Steve Jobs, for example, was adopted into a working-class family, dropped out of college because it was too expensive, and then grew up to establish and run a computer company you might have heard of—they are so rare that they prove the rule.
To bring more people into the academic fold and create more prosperity for all, educators must tune in to the interdependent selves of their working-class students. At the same time, to take advantage of educational opportunities and make a better rank for themselves, working-class students must cultivate more independent selves. This meeting in the middle will require changes throughout the culture cycle: institutions, interactions, and I’s, and then, ultimately, our big ideas about how to divide money, education, and opportunity.
Although we draw primarily from American research and examples, our prescription applies to many other contexts. Over the past three decades, governments around the world have cut programs aimed at helping less affluent people climb the social ladder. The Great Recession only exacerbated that trend. Now education alone must do much of the heavy lifting of social mobility. To narrow the wedge of inequality, nations around the world will have to grapple with class in the classroom like never before.
“So, why are you taking this course?” Hazel asked on the first day of her psychology seminar. She looked out at the ring of undergraduates and called on John Hopper.21 Like all the other students, he was sporting the West Coast collegiate uniform of jeans, T-shirt, and flip-flops.
“My adviser said I should take a freshman seminar, and this one fit my schedule,” Hopper told his hands, which were splayed on the conference table.
Next Hazel called on Matthew Reynolds,22 another tanned freshman in full university regalia.
“I chose this class because it has always seemed to me that the mind and the body work in unison,” he began, looking Hazel in the eye and then meeting the gaze of his fellow students. “So it seems that they should be analyzed together, not separately. This is my philosophy, and now I want to find out if I’m right.”
A few weeks into the seminar, John Hopper knocked on Hazel’s office door for his one required meeting. He came prepared to talk about an upcoming paper assignment, but as the conversation warmed, he ventured what was clearly a difficult question. “All those students who talk all the time,” he asked. “How do they do it? How do they already have so many ideas and opinions?”
It was the best question Hazel had heard all year, so she tried to get to know her students even better than usual. She learned, for instance, that Hopper was the first in his family to go to college. His father had been a skilled electrician (he abandoned the family when John was still an infant), and his mother was an administrative assistant at a small business. Hopper worked hard in high school, earning great grades, nearly acing his SATs, lettering in two varsity sports, and gaining proficiency in Spanish.
Reynolds also had an impressive résumé, with excellent grades and scores and a national science fair award. All his siblings and cousins were attending or had already graduated from college. His father was an attorney, and his mother was a hospital administrator. An accomplished swimmer, Reynolds also sang and played guitar in a band that was forming in his dorm.
Over the quarter, Hazel observed that Reynolds always asked questions and made comments, some of them quite insightful. Even when his remarks weren’t particularly trenchant, he spoke confidently. During Hazel’s weekly office hours, which Reynolds regularly attended, he confessed that he had a strong desire to distinguish himself from “the crowd,” and asked for Hazel’s help in doing so. He inquired about a summer internship in her lab. His actions echoed decades of research findings: people at the tops of hierarchies are more likely to express their attitudes and opinions, to take risks, to formulate long-term goals, and to break social norms in pursuit of those goals.23
In contrast, Hopper talked only if called upon. Hazel learned that he also had many interesting ideas, but he didn’t yet know which ones were good, and until he did, he didn’t want to make a fool of himself. The advice of his grandmother rang in his ears: “It’s better to sit quietly and look stupid than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”
Hazel knew, however, that by graduation Hopper would get much better at expressing his unique ideas, not only because he was a bright young man, but also because it is the job of colleges to impart an independent self. In addition to large doses of information about the human genome, the laws of economics, and the Holy Roman Empire, colleges also dispense a lot of time to stew over that very special project: the I inside. Who are you? What are your interests and talents? What do you believe and why? After four years with few obligations to others and so much attention on their selves, college students cultivate the view that life is mostly about their thoughts, feelings, achievements, and choices.24
In interviews with thousands of North American adults, we hear the familiar refrain of independence among middle-class Americans and the echoes of interdependence among working-class Americans. For instance, when asked to describe himself, a college-educated forty-five-year-old man had this to say: “I’m smart, maybe not brilliant, but well-organized, a good sport. I plan for the future and I make choices about what I want, feel, and want to be.” Notice his emphasis on uniqueness, control, and choice—all facets of the independent self.25
Now consider this self-description from a forty-seven-year-old working-class man: “I know what is right and wrong. I’m kind to people. I never talk down to anyone and I never talk behind their backs.”26 Notice his emphasis on rooting himself in morality, relating to others, and (dis)regarding rank27—all aspects of the interdependent self. A thirty-eight-year-old construction worker likewise stresses the importance of relating and adjusting: “What matters is endurance, not giving up, just being in there, sticking with your friends when the going is not so good, hanging tough.”28 In working-class worlds, family and friends are often a higher priority than individual achievement.29
The different selves of working-class and middle-class Americans are apparent not only in their words, but also in their deeds. As we discussed in previous chapters, independent selves cherish choosing because it allows them to shine all five facets of their independent selves. Indeed, thousands of studies show that when middle-class people get to make choices, they are happier and healthier, produce more, persist longer, and perform better than when they do not get to make choices.30
But working-class Americans have a different take on choice, as Alana and Hazel discovered. Their research team invited shoppers at strip malls to participate in an alleged marketing study on pens, for which they would receive a pen as compensation. Half the participants chose which of five different pens they would evaluate and take home; the other half rated and received a pen that the researcher chose. As studies with college students had already found, middle-class participants who chose their own pen liked it more than did middle-class participants who were simply given a pen. But working-class participants (who are seldom included in social science experiments) liked their pens equally well no matter who had chosen it. They were just delighted to get a free pen.31
Middle-class Americans not only value the act of choosing more than do working-class Americans, they also see more of their actions as chosen. Hazel and her colleagues Nicole Stephens and Stephanie Fryberg asked college students from working- and middle-class backgrounds to list all the choices they made from the moment they got up in the morning. Even though the details of their daily lives seemed quite similar, the middle-class students made twice as many entries as the working-class students. For the middle-class students, “getting out of bed,” “taking a shower,” and “putting on clothes” are not just steps in a morning routine; they are chosen acts to be undertaken or not depending on the druthers of an independent self.32 Studies in Hazel’s lab also show that working-class participants are less upset when they don’t get to choose, are less likely to pursue opportunities for choice, and have more negative associations with choosing than do middle-class participants.33
Because the people taking the bus can’t be in the driver’s seat, working-class Americans master skills other than choosing and controlling, including adjusting and relating. People without college degrees agree with statements such as “Once something has happened, I try to adjust myself to it because it is difficult to change it myself” more than do people with college degrees.34 Working-class Americans also work hard to relate to the people around them. Compared to middle-class adults, for example, working-class adults chatting with a stranger more frequently nod their heads in agreement, raise their eyebrows, and look at their conversation partner’s face. In contrast, those with higher social status spend more time grooming themselves, doodling, and checking their phones.35 Working-class adults are also better at guessing the feelings of both strangers and friends.36
Perhaps because their own emotional lives are so closely tied to those of other people, working-class Americans invest more in the happiness of others. For instance, in 2001, Americans with household earnings of $75,000 or more contributed 2.7 percent of their income to charity, while those making $25,000 or less donated 4.2 percent of their income.37 To get a close-up view of this generosity in action, psychologists Paul Piff, Dacher Keltner, and their team gave college students a gift they could share with an anonymous partner in a laboratory experiment. Participants who considered themselves to be lower in social rank gave 44 percent more to the partner than did participants of higher rank.38 Keltner’s lab also finds that lower-status participants make more ethical decisions, negotiate more honestly, and compete more fairly than higher-status participants.39
Paying close attention to the thoughts, feelings, and actions of other people is a smart strategy when people of higher rank control your fate. Yet interdependence can take a toll on both body and mind. When other people are demanding, rejecting, or disrespectful, and you are in a subordinate position, you feel the sting more deeply than do people in higher positions. In one study, for example, psychologists Edith Chen and Karen Matthews read to working- and middle-class children a set of humiliating situations, such as hearing a classmate laugh at your comment in class (much as Hazel’s student John Hopper feared). The researchers found that the working-class kids literally took the insults to heart, registering a greater change in blood pressure than did the middle-class kids.
Keeping an “I” on other people can also impede interdependent selves from scaling the social ladder. For example, across several studies, psychologist Joe Magee and his colleagues asked half their sample of MBA students to think of a time when they had power over someone (the high-status condition), and the other half of their sample to think of a time when someone else had power over them (the low-status condition). The participants assigned to the low-status condition negotiated worse deals, took fewer risks, and generally acted more “beta” than their randomly assigned “alpha” colleagues. Meanwhile, the arbitrarily alpha participants were quicker to pull the trigger across a variety of business situations—a readiness that helps maintain and ultimately widen the gap between higher- and lower-status folks.40
Crafting class-appropriate selves starts early, anthropologist Adrie Kusserow finds. She observed the daily interactions of mothers and their toddlers on the tony Upper East Side of Manhattan and in two working-class communities in Queens.41 To help their children thrive in these very different worlds, parents aim to rear very different selves.
In Queens, that world is a rough place that requires an interdependent self. To protect their children from the corruption around them, parents’ first order of business is to root their children in traditional morals. “You have to give them a very strong background,” said one mother, “principles that you have to rely on, and…you draw the line for them.”42 Working-class parents also make sure that kids know their place. To reinforce who is in charge, they more often use teasing, yelling, spanking, and direct commands than do middle-class parents. These practices help prepare children for working-class jobs, which often require conforming and carefully following orders under close supervision.43 Parents also give their children more unstructured time with other children to learn how to negotiate status on their own. “I hate it when they don’t stand up for themselves,” said one mother. “I have one child who whines. I don’t want her to come running. I’m like, ‘defend yourself and fight it out.’”44
But on the wealthy and educated Upper East Side, the world is safe, welcoming, and full of possibilities. Here, parents’ main task is to coax their children’s independent selves into full bloom. Parents are affectionate and warm, offering their children opportunities to discover what they like and what they’re good at. As was the case with Hazel and her daughter in chapter 2, life proceeds as a series of questions: Do you want to read a story before putting on pajamas or after? Which book do you want to read? What did you like about that book? Even discipline comes in the form of a question: Do you have to jump on that chair now? Don’t you think you should stop hitting your brother?
Middle-class parents also meet tall tales with a question mark, psychologist Peggy Miller and her colleagues find. A child who contends that, say, Santa Claus comes at Easter, will be asked, “Really, does he? Tell me about it? How does that work?” With a safety net in place, middle-class parents can encourage risk-taking and questioning the status quo. In sharp contrast, working-class parents tend to challenge the same confabulations with a simple, “No, he doesn’t. Don’t be stupid,” conveying that reality is not theirs for their making.45
Throughout their exchanges, many middle-class parents bend down to their children’s level and look into their eyes, communicating, “We are equals.” Working-class parents, in contrast, don’t stoop to conquer.
“Upper-middle class parents consciously and unconsciously teach their children how to communicate with teachers and other adults in power,” writes Kusserow. “As a result, when [the children] show up for their first day of school, they have already mastered a large, albeit implicit, portion of the curriculum. These behaviors then in turn get called ‘talent,’ ‘sensitivity,’ ‘intelligence,’ ‘imagination’ and other traits that are supposedly inborn and supposedly necessary for scholastic success—rather than class-based knowledge.”46
Wealthier parents confer another advantage by immersing their children in what sociologist Annette Lareau calls “a steady stream of speech.” In a single hour, middle-class children hear their parents speak almost twice as many words (2,153 words) as do working-class children (1,251 words) and more than three times as many words as poor children (616 words). Middle-class parents also read more to their children and encourage them to share what they’re thinking and learning.47 As a result, by the time middle-class children enter preschool, they already have bigger vocabularies and better comprehension than their less affluent classmates.48
The daily interactions of working- and middle-class adults likewise drive and derive from different notions of the self. Advertisements in magazines targeted at readers with a high-school education (e.g., Reader’s Digest), for example, paint a picture of a very different ideal self than do ads in magazines for college-educated readers (e.g., Time). In one working-class magazine, for instance, a wife tempts her husband with a thick piece of chocolate cake over the slogan, “Mama said there’d be cake like this.” A careful analysis of hundreds of other working-class magazine ads reveals a prominent theme of enjoying comfortable times with family. But in middle-class magazines, the theme of expressing uniqueness sells the wares. An ad for a music player, for example, features a thin woman lounging on a leather couch with the tag line, “You are your play list.”49
Popular music also pumps out different messages about how to be a self. Musical genres have strong associations with social class. The more education you have, the more likely you are to like rock music, and the less education you have, the more likely you are to like country music—regardless of what region of the country you live in. In a systematic comparison of the bestselling rock and country songs of the last forty years, we found that more rock songs hollered about expressing uniqueness and controlling one’s world, while more country songs twanged about maintaining integrity and controlling one’s self. The rock band Steppenwolf is “lookin’ for adventure” because they’re “born to be wild,” but country singer Johnny Cash is just keeping “a close watch on this heart of mine.” Led Zeppelin is buying the stairway to heaven while Tammy Wynette is standing by her man.50
After eighteen years of daily interactions with distinct practices and products, college students such as John Hopper and Matthew Reynolds emerge with distinct selves. Their different selves, in turn, react differently to the institutions, interactions, and I’s they meet in college.
For instance, before taking their places at Stanford, both men were accepted at the University of California at Berkeley. This is the letter that arrived in the big envelope:
There is truly no place like Berkeley. Anywhere. And you’ve earned a place here. We think you can take this excitement and make it your own. Take the world’s ideas and forge new ones. Learn. Imagine. Experiment. Create. Change the world. You can do it and you can do it here. We know you can. Choose Berkeley.51
For Reynolds, the words were reassuring. They said to him, “Keep on expressing your uniqueness, separating from your family, making choices, and otherwise realizing your independent self, just as you have been doing for the past eighteen years.”
But for Hopper, the message was bewildering. “What kind of person must I become to succeed in a place like this?” he thought. The interdependent themes of fitting in, relating, and adjusting were nowhere to be found.
The swag Hopper receives from other universities does little to comfort him. One college brochure boasts that its students have “the freedom to select and combine majors from more than 60 areas of study.”52 Another claims, “It is not the task of an academic advisor to tell you what to do…your advisor should be seen as a compass, not as a roadmap.”53
The mismatch between the interdependent selves of working-class students and the independent culture cycles of universities presents a catch-22: To ascend to the middle-class, you must have a college degree. Yet to succeed in college, you must already know how to play by middle-class rules.
What’s worse, universities do little to share the rulebook. Many colleges now recognize that people of color can feel alienated, and so design programs to support them. But “if you’re white and you come from a poor or working-class background, you show up on these campuses and you are having your mind blown hundreds of times a day, and your reality is never noticed or validated by anyone,” noted the late activist Felice Yeskel.54
Getting a college education is thus a decidedly more challenging task for a working-class student such as Hopper than for a middle-class student such as Reynolds. For Reynolds, college is simply the next stage in the plan he has been following since birth. Like 82 percent of students who have at least one parent with a college degree or more, Reynolds went to college immediately after high school.55 To this end, his parents copiloted his Internet searches and college visits, edited his application essays, consulted with friends and family, lined up $200,000, and helped their son select, shop for, and move into his new home. He is now poised to develop his voice, follow his passions, stand out, make good choices, and change the world. He even has a philosophy to test and a growing network of professors on his side.
In contrast, Hopper is like an athlete without a coach. His mother is bursting with pride for her son and would do anything to help him, but she doesn’t really know how. As she is not close to many college graduates, she has few people to ask for advice, and the counselors at Hopper’s large public high school are too burdened to be of much help. On his own, Hopper figured out how to apply to the schools near his town in Northern California. Like many working-class Americans, he didn’t want to go too far from home. As sociologist Michèle Lamont observes, working-class people tend to be “immersed in tight networks of sociability, in part because their extended family often resides within a few miles.”56 On his own, Hopper also applied for loans and scholarships, and earned extra money cleaning pools during vacations. He then went to college directly out of high school, bucking a long-standing trend: less than half of students whose parents do not have a college education enroll in college immediately after high school.57
Like many working-class students, one of Hopper’s main motivations for going to college was ultimately to give back to his family and his community.58 But in his first weeks at Stanford, he meets no one who shares his goals. He struggles to find the words to explain why he feels so out of step. But aware of the stereotype that working-class Americans are not as smart as middle-class ones, he is afraid to ask for help, lest he confirm the stereotype. He begins to question whether he is in the right place.
Hopper is not alone. One out of every six students at four-year colleges are the first in their family to pursue higher education. These students routinely trail behind those with at least one college-educated parent. So-called first-gen students receive lower grades, take fewer credits, and have higher drop-out rates. They report that professors and other students respond to them as different, passive, or even slow. And they are less likely to participate in student organizations or to develop close relationships with their peers and faculty.59
Working-class students’ interdependence conflicts with higher education in other ways. Some of these students worry that going to college will sever their ties to their family and friends back home. “I will become different from my mom and my friends, and what is the point of that?” one first-gen student told Hazel as part of a study. Others feel uncomfortable with all the attention they are getting. “I feel so selfish here with all this fuss about me and what I want to do with my life,” confided another student.60
As education becomes more expensive and less welcoming to working-class Americans, the class structure becomes even more entrenched. This loss of social mobility bodes ill for the country as a whole. The many challenges of the twenty-first century demand an educated and united citizenry. Yet the United States, like many other nations, is dividing along class lines for lack of access to a good education.
Some social inequality may be inevitable.61 Like our primate brethren, we humans spontaneously arrange ourselves into hierarchies. Put a group of people in a room and, fairly soon, they will establish a pecking order.62 Even Americans, who famously deny the existence of social class, can readily report on their social standing. In several studies, for example, health psychologist Nancy Adler and her colleagues show participants a simple line drawing of a ladder, and then ask them to mark the rung that represents where they stand relative to other people. The researchers find not only that people can complete this task reliably, but also that their simple mark reveals a wealth of information. The higher the rung a person selects, the better his or her health across a host of measures.63
Some of this inequality has its basis in biology. After all, to the larger, stronger, and smarter often go the spoils. Yet many humans create cultures that amp up the consequences of these hierarchies. The culture cycle then works so deftly that it hides the human minds and hands that created these distinctions in the first place. People wind up viewing status, class, caste, and their consequences as natural and inevitable, rather than as human-made and changeable.
Unlike our hairier primate counterparts, we humans can also use culture cycles to flatten the slopes and shorten the distances between the rungs of our social ladders. One straightforward approach to leveling hierarchies and bettering lives is to make a solid education available and appealing to everyone. Many countries, including Japan and Denmark, have used this institutional lever to lessen inequality and improve their citizens’ health and well-being.64
But in the United States, a good education is increasingly reserved for families at the top of the socioeconomic heap. The problem begins long before college. Because funding for primary and secondary public schools is usually tied to local property taxes, U.S. school districts with wealthier residents can spend up to $40,000 per student annually, while districts with poorer residents can spend as little as $4,000 per student.65 Such large discrepancies in funding are odd for an industrialized nation. In Canada, for example, provinces give each school the same amount of money. As a result, children in poor Canadian neighborhoods often have the same quality teachers, curricula, and materials as do children in wealthy neighborhoods.66
In the United States, however, unequal wealth often means unequal educations. Because working-class areas pay their teachers less than do more affluent districts, working-class neighborhoods cannot attract and retain the most qualified teachers. Students of less qualified teachers, in turn, drop out at a higher rate than do students of better teachers. Poor schools also lack the enriched curriculum, multimedia libraries, and science laboratories that their richer counterparts enjoy. With so little to hold them in the classroom, working-class students are more likely to join the mass exodus that is now plaguing U.S. secondary education. In the nation’s fifty largest cities, more than half the students do not complete high school.67
“How can we sustain an economy in the twenty-first century with these kinds of graduation rates?” asks educator Linda Darling-Hammond.68
The state of Connecticut has one answer: fund public schools sufficiently and equitably. With its 1986 Education Enhancement Act, the state increased and equalized teacher salaries, raised standards for teacher education, and invested more in teachers’ professional development. By 1998, Connecticut’s fourth-graders surpassed their competition in all other states in reading and math, and the state’s eighth-graders scored among the nation’s best in math, science, and writing.69
Simply throwing money at the education problem won’t fix it. As educator W. Norton Grubb recounts in The Money Myth, the relationship between how much funding a school receives and how well its students perform is weak.70 Although money alone may not be sufficient to close the gaps between working- and middle-class students, it can help buy the things that do make a difference, including early childhood education and government-sponsored, low-interest college loan programs (such as Pell Grants). Money also attracts the skilled teachers, sage principals, and stimulating curricula that Grubb cites as the heavy lifters in education. In short, at the institutional level of the culture cycle, an infusion of cash, smartly distributed, is one nudge that could set up working-class students for success.
Once in front of their classrooms, better-paid, better-trained teachers should enlist the interdependence of working-class students to boost their entire class’s performance. One of the best techniques for leveraging interdependence in schools is called the jigsaw classroom, which was created by psychologist Elliot Aronson in Texas in the early 1970s. At the time, school desegregation was fanning hostilities in schools across the South. Reasoning that the competitive techniques many teachers use were actually fueling the tensions, Aronson and his team asked, why not try cooperation instead?
Working with teachers, the researchers split classrooms into groups of five to six children, making sure that each group included plenty of gender, racial, and socioeconomic diversity. Teachers then divided their lessons into five or six interlocking parts, assigning one part to each student in each group. For example, for a lesson on World War II, one student researched Hitler’s rise to power, another student covered concentration camps, another handled Japan’s entry into the war, and so on. After researching their segments and conferring with the kids assigned the same topic in the other groups, students returned to their home groups and presented their reports. The entire group was later tested on its knowledge of all topics.
At first, students chided the “slower” students for their less polished reports and speaking styles. Once they figured out that their grades depended on everyone’s performance, however, the students banded together to shore up one another’s weaknesses and capitalize on their strengths. By the end of the eight-week intervention, students randomly assigned to jigsaw classrooms scored higher on their exams, liked school more, and held less racial prejudice than did students randomly assigned to a no-treatment control condition.71
To further unleash the power of interdependence, educators should gear their materials (readings, videos, letters, etc.) to the selves of their working-class students. In one laboratory study, for instance, psychologist Nicole Stephens and colleagues invited first-generation college students to evaluate their university’s new welcoming materials for freshman. Half the participants viewed materials with an independent slant: the letter from the president, brochure, and flyers portrayed the university as a place to explore one’s personal interests. The other half viewed a package with an interdependent angle, presenting the university as a place where students can collaborate with others and become part of a community. First-gens in the independent condition later performed worse on spatial and verbal tasks than did first-gens in the interdependent condition.72 A second study suggests why: Working-class students in the independent condition underwent a sharp increase in cortisol levels, indicating that they were stressed out while completing the tasks. Middle-class students, on the other hand, remained unruffled in both conditions.73
Universities can use the working-class emphasis on community not only to welcome students to college, but also to keep them there. The Posse Foundation, a New York City–based nonprofit with sites in nine U.S. cities, identifies low-income high school students with strong academic and leadership potential, groups them in teams of ten, gives them eight months of precollege training, and then grants them full-tuition scholarships to attend an elite university together. Once at college, Posse Scholars help one another navigate the foreign, sometimes hostile terrain of college life.
Educator Deborah Bial helped create the organization after a promising inner-city student told her, “I never would have dropped out of college if I had my posse with me.” Since the program’s inception in 1989, it has sent 4,245 students to some three dozen partner universities, including Vanderbilt University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Northwestern. The program works; 90 percent of Posse Scholars leave college with a bachelor’s degree in hand.74
Educators at all grades and stages can help their working-class students by lifting the stereotype threat under which the latter labor. Two psychologists, Jean-Claude Croizet and Theresa Claire, found that when working-class participants were told that a test was designed to assess intellectual ability, they performed worse than when they were told that the test was a measure of readiness to concentrate on a task. The reason? In the ability version of the test, working-class students were anxious about confirming the stereotype that their group was stupid and lazy. This anxiety distracted them from the task at hand, and made them perform worse than when the test was not allegedly assessing some deep, fixed quality. As we have seen in the previous chapters, stereotype threat undermines many people in lower-status positions, including Blacks and women. Yet as this study also shows, alleviating stereotype threat is sometimes just a matter of tweaking directions.75
To succeed academically takes more than interdependence, however. Working-class students must also cultivate an independent streak. The story of the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) Academies illustrates why interdependence is not enough to thrive in mainstream middle-class worlds.
KIPP is a 20-state network of 109 charter schools that serve primarily low-income African-American and Latino students. Most KIPP Academies are middle schools. Launched in 1994, the program has placed an astounding 84 percent of its thirty-three thousand graduates in four-year universities. But unlike the Posse Foundation, it hasn’t kept them there: although their students beat the averages for low-income students, only 36 percent of KIPP alumni graduate from college within six years of leaving high school. This is only slightly higher than the national average of 31 percent for Americans between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine.76
Stalling these students’ meteoric climb is KIPP’s almost exclusive focus on interdependent skills. At the heart of the KIPP curriculum is a protocol called SLANT—an acronym that stands for Sit up straight, Listen, Ask and answer questions, Nod your head, and Track the speaker with your eyes. SLANT defuses many of the behavioral issues that plague low-income schools, and helps KIPP students and teachers endure nearly nine-hour school days and compulsory summer school—many hours of which are dedicated to practicing standardized tests.77
Yet most colleges want students who can do more than act nice and rock the SAT. They demand that their scholars identify problems, challenge doctrine, dream up solutions, communicate ideas, and refine creations based on the feedback of peers. To these ends, the Posse Foundation spends months training its scholars to cultivate and share their opinions with people from different class, gender, and ethnic backgrounds. In other words, Posse meets the interdependent needs of working-class students, and then helps them hone the independence they will need to excel in college.
Comparing the Posse Foundation and KIPP Academies is not altogether fair. Posse carefully selects its participants; KIPP takes all comers whose parents sign a commitment contract. Posse nurtures its scholars in small batches; KIPP operates full-fledged public charter schools. Yet KIPP’s founders, Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg, agree that its graduation rates need to grow. “We aspire for our students to earn four-year degrees at the same rate as students from the nation’s highest-income families, giving them the same opportunity for self-sufficiency,” they wrote in a 2011 report.78 That same report features a photo of KIPP’s earliest class of forty-seven students and a sign that reads, “Team Always Beats Individual.” Perhaps fortifying those individuals with a healthy dose of independence would help KIPP students succeed in middle-class worlds, where many believe the individual should sometimes try to trump the team.
Psychologist Daphna Oyserman and her team developed one such independence-inducing tactic. Noting that many working-class students have big dreams but no clear idea how to realize them, the research team created an eleven-week School-to-Jobs program to help students develop a sense of themselves as making choices, controlling their futures, and pursuing their unique paths. To test the program, the researchers randomly divided 280 low-income middle-school students into either a school-as-usual class or a possible selves class that met twice a week.79 The students in the possible selves class first found photographs depicting visions of the kinds of adults they wanted to grow up to be. The students then plotted time lines from their current selves to their possible selves, replete with likely setbacks and how to deal with them. Leveraging their interdependence, the students also met with family and community members to discuss their desired futures and to enlist support.
Two years later, Oyserman and her coauthors found that the students who had charted their futures had higher standardized test scores, better grades, fewer absences, and less depression than did students in the control group. A strengthened independent self seems to be at the heart of the program’s success. “Students begin to see choices that were invisible before, and to see themselves as the architects of their own futures,” says Oyserman.80
To build some independence at the university level, psychologists Nicole Stephens and MarYam Hamedani developed an intervention for working-class students. The researchers assigned half their sample of first-generation freshmen to hear first-gen upperclassmen describe how their interdependent ways (for example, fear of asking questions in class) initially caused them difficulties, but how they eventually learned more effective independent strategies (for example, speaking up in class, or asking for help). The other half of the sample heard the same upperclassmen discuss general study skills. Stephens and Hamedani found that first-gen students who learned about how to be independent felt less stress and anxiety and earned higher grades in their first year of college than did first-gens in the study-skills control group.81
Individuals can also help change their culture cycles to bridge social classes. To start, middle-class folks can extend an interdependent hand to their working-class brethren and acknowledge the power of social class. Americans are particularly slow to recognize the socioeconomic structuring of their own culture, even though the United States has long been one of the most stratified industrialized countries. The belief that the United States is a land of level playing fields is an independent one, allowing the better-off to believe that they succeed solely because of their own hard work and brilliance, rather than because thousands of cultural quirks paved the path to their affluence.
Many middle-class individuals who have taken a dose of interdependence see that their own education, income, and occupation have more to do with their parents’ education, income, and occupation;82 with tax laws; with their excellent rapport with their eighth-grade science teacher; and with other institutions and interactions than with their own native awesomeness. They also understand that with this status comes a particular way of seeing the self, an independent way, that is no more natural, right, or inevitable than is their position in society. Many of these cross-class pioneers then set out to understand more interdependent ways of being—which, rather than being slow or weak, are actually the way most people in the United States, not to mention the world, live their lives.
To get a clearer glimpse of interdependence, psychologist Barbara Jensen recommends that middle-class Americans take a trip to the other side of the class divide. Working-class worlds have “an integrity all their own,” she notes, “which means you just have to go and experience them for yourself.” And who knows? You might like what you find; working-class cultures have much to recommend them. Compared to the middle-class pressures to individuate, choose, control, and plan, working-class worlds can offer “an unearned sense of oneself as part of other people, part of the world we live in, part of life—a foundational sense of belonging,” she writes.83
Within your own world, take the time to talk to the working-class people you encounter every day, recommends activist and author Betsy Leondar-Wright in her book Class Matters. At work, for example, she suggests asking the lowest-ranking people “how they see the organization.” You will likely find that things look quite different from below. “Keep asking and listening, as the first answer may not be their whole story,” she adds.84
Working-class individuals can also get into the class-crossing act by sharpening their independence. A first target is to recognize that you have more options than you may initially perceive. While working-class communities and jobs objectively offer fewer opportunities for choice and control than do middle-class worlds, middle-class worlds probably do not proffer as many choices as their inhabitants perceive. Yet thinking that you are in control, even when you are not, is one of the tricks that more powerful people use to stay optimistic, healthy, and action-oriented.85 Although delusions of control are likely not good for anyone, a few more illusions of control may give you the extra independence you need to thrive in middle-class worlds.
The achievement gap between low- and high-income families is now double the Black-White gap—a complete reversal of the pattern of fifty years ago.86 Reducing the racial disparities of the 1950s and ’60s required changes at every level of the culture cycle. Closing the growing chasm between social classes will likewise require overhauling our institutions, interactions, I’s, and, ultimately, our ideas about how to divide our planet’s diminishing resources.
One particularly troublesome idea is that the wealthy should have more of society’s spoils because they earned them. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls this way of thinking “the social alchemy that turns class privilege into merit.”87 Bourdieu was among the first social scientists to track how culture cycles—especially their educational institutions and interactions—erect and echo class divides. He documents that higher social status is less a matter of money and more a matter of having the right thoughts, feelings, and actions—in our words, the right self—showing that you belong in the upper echelons.88
Judging their young charges against this yardstick, schools inadvertently channel working-class kids into the same dead-end jobs their parents had, rather than giving them the selves they need to make a better life. This is as true in the United States as it is in France: You need an independent self to succeed in school, but your parents needed a solid education to give you that independent self in the first place. In both nations, and in many others around the world, schools thus perpetuate the myth that the rich are rich because they deserve it.
Yet education need not be the obstacle that keeps poor people in their place. To quote Bourdieu, “Enlightenment is on the side of those who turn their spotlight on our blinkers.”89 By training our spotlights on the quiet clashes between independence and interdependence at every level of the culture cycle, we can turn schools into the engines of social mobility that most people want them to be.