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ENGINEERED STRUGGLE AND “EARNED” SUCCESS

Preparing Black and Latino Students to Attend Elite Boarding Schools

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2018

Amanda Barrett Cox
Amanda Barrett Cox*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology and Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania
*
*Corresponding author: Amanda Barrett Cox, Department of Sociology, 3718 Locust Walk, McNeil Building, Ste. 113, Philadelphia, PA 19104. Email: abcox@upenn.edu
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Abstract

This paper examines how a nonprofit organization prepares low-income Black and Latino/a students to attend elite boarding high schools. Using ethnographic data, I investigate how the program engineers the experience of academic and emotional struggle for students, how students experience these struggles, and what students learn from this process. I find that the program’s academically-induced emotional rollercoaster serves to strengthen students’ confidence in their academic skills and their ability to persist in the face of academic challenges—a valuable emotional asset for the students as they enter elite boarding schools. However, I argue, the feeling students emerge with of having earned their successes (and failures) may ultimately serve to reproduce the individualistic, meritocratic discourses that support the patterns of social inequality the program helps its students sidestep.

Keywords

Elite EducationSchoolingSocial MobilityPipeline ProgramsMeritocracy
Type
State of the Art
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , Fall 2018 , pp. 467 - 488
Copyright
Copyright © Hutchins Center for African and African American Research 2018 

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