This article draws from research conducted with poor and working-class youth in California attending schools that suffer from structural disrepair, high rates of unqualified teachers, high teacher turnover rates, and inadequate books and instructional materials. Arguing that such schools accomplish more than simple “reproduction” of class and race/ethnic inequities, the authors detail the penetrating psychological, social, and academic impact of such conditions on youth and educators, accelerating schooling for alienation. The evidence suggests that these schools not only systematically undereducate poor and working-class youth, and youth of color, but they taint pride with shame, convert a yearning for quality education into anger at its denial, and they channel active civic engagement into social cynicism and alienation. The consequences for schools, communities, and the democratic fabric of the nation are considered.
In this epilogue, we offer a theoretical mapping of notions that have emerged across the articles in this issue of the Journal of Social Issues specifically dedicated to questions of social class. Social class is often included within the "race, class, gender, and sexual orientation" mantra of feminist and critical race work in psychology, but rarely scrutinized with rigor or serious scholarship. Thus, for the purposes of this epilogue, we theorize the relationship between the material, social, psychological, and the political. We identify four theoretical venues through which these researchers have opened a conversation about class and schooling: ideology, institutions, contradictions and consciousness, and method. We conclude by crafting a research agenda for a critical psychology of class and schooling.In the United States, the gap between the "haves" and the "have nots" stretches by day, with every swipe of the President's pen and most congressional acts
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