he most hardened student had a beautiful and deep story full of choices, thoughts, and emotions, and once that story was told-bam!-the ste-reotype of who I thought she or he was split open like a chrysalis revealing the beautiful complex person inside. Amazing. My students, especially because we differed in race and class, taught me to see that in the classroom and beyond. What a gift. Every student has a story to tell, and often those stories are difficult to hear. Teaching

's blinds be lowered so the sun wasn't in their eyes, badgering the teacher for permission to retake a math test for a higher grade, and demanding to know why no cupcake had been saved when an absence prevented attendance at a classroom party. In these encounters, children were not simply complying with adults' requests or asking for a repeat of an earlier experience. They were displaying an emerging sense of en-titlement by urging adults to permit a cus-tomized accommodation of institutional pro-cesses to suit their preferences.

ANGUAGE USE. Like other middle-class families, the Williamses often engage in conversation that promotes reasoning and negotiation. An excerpt from a field note (describing an exchange between Alexander and his mother during a car ride home after summer camp) shows the kind of pointed questions middle-class parents ask children. Ms. Williams is not just eliciting informa-tion. She is also giving Alexander the oppor-tunity to develop and practice verbal skills, including how to summarize, clarify, and amplify information:

I mentor students by caring for what's best for them and showing interest in their lives.

These arc the images I conjure when I hear or read about parents from lower-earning families not supplying their children with the cultural capital that they need for early success in elementary school, capital that higher-earning families arc more likely to provide. I think about parents who struggle to provide, to exist.

Mom bought me a pack of valentines, and I carefully read each one to be sure that it went to exactly the right person. But the next day at school, the joy became pain when I saw the beautiful cards and candies that some of the other classmates brought. It made me feel like Charlie Brown. Somehow everyone else knows you're poor. How is that? You feel so different, alone, ashamed, and at a total loss of what to do about this "lack of.

owever, the lowered expectations that are common in many urban and rural schools are steeped in a belief that student are unable to learn. Schools reify hierarchies by the experiences they provide children. So instead of schools being the great equalizers, we see quite the opposite. What is the rationale as to why suburban schools have an extensive list of Advanced Placement (AP) courses but urban and rural schools do not? Why do urban schools have cosmetology courses and suburban ones do not? Why do poor children experience drill and kill instruction, while wealthy students study rhetoric and robotics? Why do many urban and rural schools mandate teachers adhere to scripted curriculum and suburban schools do not? How do our class expectations continue to inform the type of schooling children receive?

n these cases, we see how struc-tural mechanisms reinforce poverty. Poverty is not solely an issue of indi-vidual will. Adding more credence to the problem of structural barriers is the fact that “in America, more than in other advanced Western nations, rich chil-dren stay rich and poor children stay poor” (Cass, 2010). In troubling research cited by Berliner (2006), the United States leads the world in terms of failingto help people exit from poverty. Said another way, the United States has the highest rate of permanently poor when compared with other industrialized countries.Despite wanting to rely on the “anyone-can-lift-themselves-up” mentality, generations of people are not able to “rise above” poverty. Faulty schools, few work opportunities, inadequate health care, a lack of a living wage, geo-graphic isolation, poor child care, and a host of other factors weave together to threaten the chances people in poverty have of getting out (see Anyon, 2005).

Chronic socioeconomic deprivation can create environments that undermine the development of self and the capacity for self-determination

can identify six types of poverty: situ-ational, generational, absolute, relative, urban, and rural.

f someone who was “diff erent” (i.e., non- Asian) joined an AP class or a challenging extracurricular activity, she would be greeted with surprise and praise for exceeding expectations of low achievement. Devalued with the stigma of low expectations from the outset, the student would grow increasingly likely to disengage with academics, unless this patt ern was interrupted by mentors or other factors that recognized and nurtured her abilities and potential.

n its capacity as an everyday, “racialized landscape,” school concretizes and normalizes “some prescribed social, racial, class, economic, or political order that not only stands for the past and present, but also inescapably embod-ies power relations that make claims on the future,” although its norms are “unconsciously promoted and unrecognized as anything other than ‘common sense.’”7

tionally, when compared to their similarly educated white counterparts, highly educated Asian Americans suffer from disproportionately higher unemployment rates. Asian Americans with bachelor’s degrees are more likely to be unemployed than whites. This

ian American students “are negative, such as non-Asians’ notions that Asians ‘don’t speak English well,’ ‘have accents,’ and are ‘submissive,’ ‘sneaky,’ ‘stingy,’ ‘greedy,’ etc.”18 To complicate matters, racial stereotyping is gendered and sexu-alized.

Teachers were shocked when I got below an 80 on a quiz or something like that, or if I got less than a certain grade. They were like, “What’s going on?” I don’t think they understood that it was hard. I felt that like from then on there would be these high expectations of me and I had to meet them because it’s a small school; teachers talk.... From 8th grade and on, it was just these high expectations, and I felt kind of pressured to meet those standards. It was parental pressure too, to get the good grades and to do well in school.

ostile stereotypes articulated by classmates and a professor felt like personal attacks on her national origin and cultural identity. Appalled at the stereotyped generalizations, Fareena continues by describing her own reactions:And at that time I identified as Muslim American; I practiced it in a sense.

Another routine way in which the everyday flow of school life erodes the importance of cultural identity is through the casual revisions that faculty and staff make in students' names. At every turn, even well-meaning te2chers "adapt" their students' name_$: Loreto becomes Laredo; A211ce11a is transformed into Suzy. Because teachers and other school personnel typically lack familarity with stress rules in Spanish, surnames are especially vulnerable to linguistic butchering. Even names that are common throughout the South-west, like Martinez and Perez, are mi~ronounced as MART-i-nez and Pe-REZ. Schooling under these conditions can thus be characterized as a mortification of the self in Goffman's terms-that is, as a leaving off and a taking on.

e who are concerned about teachers and teaching must insist that our teachers become knowledgeable of the liberal arts, but we must also work like the dickens to change liberal arts courses so that they do not continue to reflect only, as feminist scholar Peggy McIntosh says, "the public lives of white Western men."

When teachers receive that kind of education, there is a tendency to assume deficits in students rather than to locate and teach to strengths. To counter this tendency, educators must have knowledge of children's lives outside of school so as to recognize their strengths.

ordham described one such strategy as racelessness, wherein individuals assimilate into the dominant group by de-emphasizing characteristics that might identify them as members of the subordinate group

It was really a very paradoxical ex-istence, here I am in a school that's thirty-five percent Black, you know, and I'm the only Black in my classes ..

Sofia and Lola describe the classroom atmosphere from the point of view of students, but they also offer glimpses of what the teachers at Santa Ana have to confront. "There were kids with guns in the school, lots of fights, people throwing stuff in class, being very disrespectful to the teachers. Kids would spit in their faces, tell them off, start argu-ments, be really rude. It was nasty." We were unable to speak with any Santa Ana staff, but we can imagine what the world of Santa Ana must look like to them.

A 2004 report by rhe Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government identified Santa Ana as the Most Troubled City in America because of its high unemployment, high poverty rate, undereducated population, and crowded housing. Latinos in Orange County are more likely to live not only in poverty bur also amidst street violence and gang activity. Santa Ana alone is home co 29 street gangs.

In conclusion, if we do not intentionally unveil the hidden advantages that middle-class and upper-class students have over their low-income peers, we run the risk of indirectly reinforcing these inequalities in our classrooms. Many of us enter the teaching profession to challenge the status quo. Then we get swept up in rules and mandates and procedures, and we lose sight of why we went down this road in the first place. It takes courage to go on our own in a system that perpetuates itself at the expense of poor students. But not challenging this, not aligning ourselves with the strengths of the communities and neighborhoods from where our students come, is going back on our own moral center. It is, in the end, a civic responsibility to ensure that all students have opportunities to imagine lives of great hope.

According to some scholars, the school system privileges individuals who comply with dominant culture, like that of middle-class and upper-middle-class teachers, professional staff, and administrators

The study generated the often-cited finding that over a year's time, pro-fessional parents utter an average of eleven million words to their toddlers. The corresponding figures for working-class and welfare families were six and three million, respectively. There was a long list of class-related lan-guage differences.26 And some of these language differences were associ-ated with reading achievement when the children were in fourth grade. National data later confirmed some of the differences identified by Hart and Risley. For example, while 72 percent of middle-class children start school knowing their letters, this is true of only 19 percent of poor chil-dren. And three times as many middle-class as poor children know begin-ning word sounds.

More income enables families to purchase better housing in better neighborhoods and thereby reduce their children's exposure to neigh-borhood violence and toxins such as lead and airborne pollutants, while increasing access to parks, playgrounds, better schools, and health care. National consumer expenditure data provide a systematic look at spend-ing differences between high-and low-income families.11 High-income families report spending twice as much on food and four times as much on housing and clothing as low-income families. Schooling outcomes are likely to be affected most by "child enrichment" expenditures-extracur-ricular activities like the sports Garrett played, high-quality child care for preschoolers, home-learning materials, and Alexander's private school-ing. Anthony's family scraped together enough money to pay his school tuition in his senior year, but Harold's family was having trouble putting enough food on the table.

These kinds of expenses were not unusual for the upper-middle-class families in Lareau's study. All could easily afford comfortable and reliable cars to transport their children from activity to activity. All lived in spa-cious houses in quiet, relatively crime-free neighborhoods.

These kinds of differences affect children's daily experiences and ulti-mately their educational outcomes.

As students nwve through the Berkck:y High system, they become increasingly stratified and segregated hy race and class. The racial a~hievement gap, as measured by course-Laking trajectories anJ grades, docs not level off after the ninth grade b~1t grows wider over time. In part, this is because the largely white, middlc-clas student popul;:irinn, who entered high school at or above grade level in math, spent their ninth-grade ye:1r taking care of graduation requirements and prerequisites for advanced science and math classes, and then they rook off in tenth grade along a college-bound track. It is also du~ inI?~rt to a cycle of failure am.ong many studen of color, who often end up failing Algebra l or Math A and then repeating it in summer school and tenth grade. With each failure and repetition, the e students fall further behind.

It is even more disturbing and telling that the remain-ing 16 percent of Algebra 1 students were enrolled in no language class at all.

Math placement typically serves a benchmark for ninth-grade aca-demic standing, ;rnd the <lisparities in math placement by race arc striking. As is true nationally, white, mid<lle-class, or affluent stu-dents at BHS tend to receive access to advanced math courses early, and thus start their high school careers with a major ndvantage (Moses and Cobb, 2001; Perry, reelc, and Hilliard, 2004). The Diversity Projccr's class of 2000 research team found that 83 percent of rhc ninth graders who were placed in Math A, the low~crack prealgebra class, were African American. In contrast,►87 Qercent of students from that same cohort of ninth graJers \yho were placed in Honors Geometry, the advanced-track math class,