Social Class and School Success

Most immigrant children and youth who enter U.S. schools are not proficient in English. This is their most salient feature, or at least it is what schools and school people focus on as the biggest challenge for the schools and the children alike. Many of these young people also have an additional characteristic that is probably no less important. Many of them come from a social class and an experiential family history that is substantially different from that of the White English-speaking group with whom they will share classrooms for several years.

What role do social class and histories of family schooling play in the way that immigrant children engage their school experience in the United States? How do issues of class compare with language incompatibilities in the school context? These questions are difficult to answer partly because American researchers have not paid enough attention to the formal study of social class as a factor in school success. Researchers have studied poverty, but social class is a broader concept. Americans tend to be uncomfortable with the notion of class differences. As a society, Americans tend to regard low social class not as a condition with long-term consequences, but as something that can be outgrown through diligence and hard work. Many Americans believe that education trumps class. They proudly proclaim that class has little or nothing to do with finding one's niche in U.S. society. U.S. residents are, as a people, proud of having discarded the idea of nobility and social standing based on lineage or high birth.

Recent research and analysis on the subject suggests that this collective wisdom may be wrong. Class, the relative status of groups within U.S. society, may have as much to do with the school success of immigrants and linguistic minorities as does language incompatibility between schools and learners. Equally important is the close association between the “hidden curriculum” of the schools (the “unofficial” or “unintended” knowledge that children get from schooling, such as good manners or competing for good grades) and middle-class, English-speaking society. The hidden curriculum favors individuals and groups who share the social and cultural assumptions of the persons who design the curriculum. This entry discusses those issues.