Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 59, No. 4, 2003, pp.

841--860

Class Notes: Toward a Critical Psychology

of Class and Schooling
Michelle Fine and April Burns
The Graduate Center, City University of New York

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 dedi-
cated 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
(Freeman, Rogers, Cohen, & Reich, 1998). This issue insists that we, as a na-
tion and as a profession, take seriously the material, social, and psychological
ways in which class is lived in America; more particularly, the ways in which
class arrangements influence schooling opportunities and the ways in which ac-
cess to schooling affects class position. Toward this end, the issue, edited by Joan
Ostrove and Elizabeth Cole, is nothing short of an intellectual and political gift to
psychologists.
We have been invited to publish our “Class Notes” reflecting upon this issue.
Like all class notes, we will include some of the big ideas we learned, jottings and

∗ Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Michelle Fine or April Burns,
Department of Social and Personality Psychology, Graduate School and University Center–CUNY, 365
Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016–4309 [e-mail: [email protected]] or [[email protected]].
The authors wish to thank Elizabeth Cole and Joan Ostrove for their very helpful comments, and
to acknowledge the generous support of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Spencer Foundation through
the Disciplinary Studies in Education grant at the Graduate Center, and the Leslie Glass Institute.
841

C 2003 The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues
842 Fine and Burns

musings in the margins, and then our wild speculations on a critical psychology of
social class. We begin with a geography lesson, mapping the class stratifications
that organize schooling in America and investigating how those class stratifications
saturate the bodies, minds, souls, and imaginations of youth.

Class and Schooling/Schooling and Class in America

In a bold and comprehensive analysis, Jennifer Hochschild (this issue; see

also Ostrove & Cole, this issue) specifies the ways in which class inequities are
inscribed, historically and today, within public education. Her article reveals the
social, political, and economic conditions that create the experiences of class. With
analytic frames imported from political science, readers come to understand the
gross inequities that constitute public schooling in America, reproducing class
relations often in interaction with race, ethnicity, geography, and gender.
Hochschild details the ways in which financial inequities abound across
schools and districts, and the ways in which racial integration, within schools,
has waned (Orfield, 1997/2001). She describes how privatization of public institu-
tions flourishes as race, ethnic, and class-based achievement gaps widen (Darling-
Hammond, 2001; Wells & Serna, 1996). From this reading, we come to recognize
that racial/ethnic and clas-based segregation is associated, over time, with the with-
drawal of economic and political support from poor schools, especially schools
serving poor and working-class African American and Latino youth (Anyon, 1997;
Gittell, Vandersall, Holloway, & Newman, 1996). Segregation and integration are
political markers that, on the surface, concern whose bodies are in the schoolhouse.
More deeply and perversely, degree of segregation affects the extent to which the
state invests in a school or a district, based upon whose bodies are (and are no
longer) located there.
To understand the perverse consequences of the systematic, inequitable dis-
tribution of state resources based on class, race, and ethnicity, consider two recent
studies. An analysis conducted by the California State Department of Education
reveals a strong correlation between the percent of students eligible for free and
reduced lunch and the percent of uncredentialed teachers in a school. In schools of
near 100% free and reduced lunch, over 25% of the teachers teach without certifi-
cation; in schools with less than 10% of students eligible for free and reduced lunch,
fewer than 5% of teachers teach without certification (see Fine, Burns, Payne &
Torre, in press). Poor and working-class children are more likely to be taught by
inexperienced and uncredentialed educators than middle-class and wealthy chil-
dren; and evidence suggests that three years with such inadequate teaching yields
serious achievement consequences for youth (Ingersoll, 1999).
Likewise, the New York City Board of Education data base, available on
its Web site (http://www.nycenet.edu/daa/01asr/default.asp), reveals that com-
prehensive high schools throughout the city, particularly those with substantial
CLASS NOTES: Toward a Critical Psychology of Class and Schooling 843

proportions of students of color living under the poverty line, report freshman
classes of between 1200 and 1500 ninth graders and senior classes ranging from
67 to 250 seniors (Fine & Powell, 2001), revealing extraordinarily high dropout
rates, which spiked for the first time in a decade, with the recent enforcement of
high stakes testing (Haney, 2001). As the percentage of students living in poverty
rises in a school, the conditions for academic success (finances, teacher quality,
educator stability, small school size, facilities) decline. Federal and state calls for
accountability rise without the resources to facilitate school improvement (Haney,
2001; Hauser, 2001). The shameful irony of American education is that the very
students who need the most resources receive the fewest and pay the biggest price
(Darling-Hammond, 2001).
A series of federal and state policies currently underway are likely to exacer-
bate these gaps already evident by race, ethnicity and class. The implementation of
annual high stakes standardized testing (Mizell, 2002), the move to privatize pub-
lic schools, the retreat from Affirmative Action, the shifting of state budgets from
public schools to vouchers, the refusal to pay urban teachers and finance urban
schools equitably, all conspire to diminish the likelihood that education could ever
flatten the opportunity structure. These policies will, more likely, swell and cement
the chasm of existing inequities (Applied Research Center, 2001). Reflecting, then,
on the structural relation of class and education, we offer three organizing points.
Class “predicts” the quality of schooling American youths receive. The higher
the social class of youth and community is, the higher the quality of education;
the lower the social class is, the lower the quality of education. It is also true, of
course, that level of education affects class position. As Table 1 reveals, looking
across the rows of racial, ethnic and gender groups, more education consistently
translates into higher income. The U.S. Census Bureau Current Population Survey
(2000) documents quite substantial gains in yearly income between high school and
college graduates. And yet, while class predicts schooling and schooling affects
income, some of the diagonals on Table 1 tell a more complex story. Race, ethnicity,
and gender mediate the degree to which increased education enhances earnings.
Look down the columns in Table 1. You will notice large discrepancies in income

Table 1. Full-time Workers Median Income for 1999

High School Dropout High School Graduate Bachelor’s Degree
White Men 21,696 32,269 53,557
Black Men 20,812 26,682 41,442
Hispanic Men 18,372 23,373 42,311
White Women 16,111 22,486 37,454
Black Women 15,925 20,611 35,634
Hispanic Women 14,013 19,448 32,469
From the U.S. Census Bureau Current Population Survey, (March, 2000). Income in 1999 by
Educational Attainment for People 18 Years Old and Over, by Age, Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin
(Table 8, see pp. 18 & 34).
844 Fine and Burns

between race, ethnic, and gender groups within equivalent levels of educational
attainment. White and Black male high school dropouts still earn more than Black
and Hispanic women who have graduated from high school. African American
women with some college, who work full time, earn the equivalent of White men
who dropped out of school (Fine & Weis, 1998). The per-level gains for White
men, as well as the absolute levels for White men, far exceed any other group (U.S.
Census Bureau Current Population Survey, 2000). Education matters enormously
within groups, but less so across.
Given the complex relation of schooling to social class, it is a masterful feat
that central to the workings of capitalism thrives the ideology of meritocracy. The
belief that “if you work hard, you’ll succeed” persists, relatively unproblematized,
pumped out across educational contexts and prevails in our national consciousness.
Like a shimmering veneer laminating the knotty relations of class and schooling
(see Anyon, 1997; Flanagan, Ingram, Gallay, & Gallay, 1997; Kozol, 1991), this
belief obscures the inequities documented above, camouflages structural group-
level barriers, and points a damning finger at individuals who seem to be personally
responsible when they don’t succeed.
At the core of this ideology lies the belief that life chances are determined
not by the politics and structures of race and class privilege, but by educational
achievement. Schools are sold as the exit ramps out of poor communities and
into the middle class. Indeed, for a small and well-advertised few, they do. As
the studies in this issue reveal, however, the ideology of the American dream
keeps most seduced and encouraged by the vision of economic success, despite
widespread evidence to the contrary. It also diverts attention away from structural
designs that systematically block poor people, and people of color, in the aggregate,
from realizing material access to that dream. These inequities and their justifying
ideologies have profound consequences for a psychology of class in America; for
the identities, aspirations, social relations and the social movements that youth and
young adults engage and those they refuse. That is the intellectual territory this
issue dares to enter.
The articles in this issue seek to tie an analysis of the material conditions of
inequality, within which class is lived, to those national ideologies, institutional
contexts, social relations, and psychological dramas through which individuals
experience “class” (see Ostrove & Cole, this issue). In this epilogue, we too, seek
to theorize the relation between the material, social, psychological, and political.
From the front, however, we acknowledge that psychologists in this issue (and in
the nation)—ourselves included—are more inclined to produce fine analyses of
that which is psychological and social, and we are not as good at documenting the
material conditions that constitute class arrangements and class inequities. Said
differently: in this issue, there is far greater attention paid to experiences of class
rather than the conditions of class. To the extent that conditions are documented,
more attention is paid to conditions of wealth, privilege, and higher education—and
CLASS NOTES: Toward a Critical Psychology of Class and Schooling 845

the varied reactions that youth and young adults from poverty and the working class
have in “adjusting” to such settings. Less attention is paid to the material conditions
of poverty or the struggles of the working class that American society has imposed
on so many youth. Without a detailed, fine grained look at the intersections of
economic, social, and psychological conditions across class positions, we may
skew our understandings of class toward the psychological alone, misrepresenting
class as if it were largely carried around in the heads of youth and young adults,
and therefore transformed simply by a change in attitude.
With that caveat, the essays in this issue raise a stunning array of intellectual
and political issues; an agenda you might say, for a critical psychology of class and
schooling. The authors enter theoretically and empirically through many different
levels of analysis. Across the set, we gain a full sense of the architecture of class
relations, through education, in the United States. For the purposes of this epilogue,
we identify four theoretical venues through which these writers open a conversation
about class and schooling: ideology, institutions, contradictions in consciousness,
and methods and consciousness.

Ideology

Across articles in this issue, researchers deliberately turn our attention to

those ideologies about schooling and class that float barely visible in the winds of
daily life in the United States and in other market economy nations (Flanagan &
Campbell, this issue). Across sample and context, the researchers capture a set of
beliefs about schooling and the possibilities for individual mobility and prosperity,
presumably available to all. Schools rank as the central fountain from which these
ideologies are fed to the young; in which youth absorb, challenge, internalize,
and resist such belief systems. Frequently neglected in American psychology,
ideology emerges as a crucial site for social psychological analysis of class and
schooling.
British psychologist Michael Billig (1995) helps us think about ideology, when
he writes on “banal nationalism,” which he defines as the everyday practices by
which we in the United States learn to be patriotic. Billig argues that, “ideology
comprises the habits of behavior and belief which combine to make any social
world appear to those who inhabit it, as the natural world” (p. 37–38). Practices
of ideology seep into mind, body, and soul, slipping under the skin with depth,
intimacy, and automaticity. We appropriate Billig’s theorizing to suggest that “ba-
nal meritocracy” operates through the structures, rhythm and the seductive pull of
the ideology of “hard work breeds success” which is fundamental to the workings
of capital and nowhere more pronounced than in public and private schools and
universities.
French theorist Pierre Bourdieu (1998) also has written on the global as-
pects of this ideology. He is concerned about the “inculcation in which journalists
846 Fine and Burns

and ordinary citizens participate passively and, above all, a certain number of intel-
lectuals participate actively,” as a “symbolic drip feed . . . by which neo-
liberalism comes to be seen as an inevitability” (p. 30). Individuals rise and fall
on their own merits. The state need not assist; the market is fair for all. Education
is the way out of poverty.
How to collect data beneath the drip feed that saturates global, national, and
individual consciousness is the task before us (see Apfelbaum, 2001; Billig, 1995;
Kitzinger, 2001; Wilkinson, 2000), the very task these researchers have begun for
us. Within the present issue, Heather Bullock and Wendy Limbert (this issue), Joan
Ostrove (this issue), Constance Flanagan and Bernadette Campbell (this issue),
Sandra Jones (this issue), and Peter Kuriloff and Michael Reichert (this issue), help
us hear the “drip fed” ideology and show us how youth and young adults receive
and transform the story being told. Their articles bear witness to its everyday
seduction.
Bullock and Limbert (this issue) document how structural inequities penetrate
the bodies of working-class students, producing desire to become middle class, to
distance from class of origin and to victim blame. Bullock and Limbert quote a
woman who embodies such mixed sentiments: “My neighborhood, my education
status and my occupational status make me feel poor but [italics added] my values
are to try to reach for the stars” (p. 700). Running from the tainted space of
poverty, this informant insists on a rigid separation between her class position and
her “values.” With a “but” she signals agreement with the dominant belief that
middle-class people have aspirations, and poor people don’t. Most of Bullock and
Limbert’s informants assume that they will exit poverty and the working class. At
the other side of the class hierarchy, Kuriloff and Reichert (this issue) detail the
ideological architecture of an elite private school as it shapes the “habits of mind
and heart” that are historically positioned for material success—for both “lifers”
and “recruits.” Across these essays, one can hear the relentless, consistent and
inviting tempo of banal meritocracy.
While the words and voices of respondents may reveal the workings of class,
we can see, also, in these narrations, the limits of what people see/know/reveal
and what remains hidden in the ideologically ironed creases of class-based privi-
lege and class-based shame. No method can transcend the banal, and yet reading
through these articles, we began to ask how do institutions carry and legitimate
these ideologies? How do educators, youth workers, or youth, themselves, interrupt
and resist so that fractures can ripple through these ideologies and institutions?
To what extent can or should psychological research be designed to interrupt,
challenge, or pry beneath the banal laminations on capitalism and meritocracy
which permeate our individual beliefs and collective ideologies about schooling
and class? If ideology hides or protects the ways in which the privileged maintain
their relative advantage, do researchers have an obligation to lift the veil of “pri-
vacy” and re-view the workings of power? To continue this journey, on the heels of
CLASS NOTES: Toward a Critical Psychology of Class and Schooling 847

the explicit study of ideology, we move to institutions, the next level in the study
of class.

Institutions

A second level of analysis introduced in this issue concerns systematic inves-

tigations of educational institutions—public schools, universities, and elite private
schools—as they structure, enable, obstruct, and silence class-based advantages,
opportunities, shame, hope, critique, and activism. We applaud the wide range of
institutionally situated voices introduced in this issue—voices and perspectives
rarely heard. Such analyses are crucial to documenting how class moves through
people, networks, social relations, opportunities, and institutional life.
Through a close look at institutional policies, networks, practices, and iden-
tities, we can begin to see how the material conditions of class come to enter
the skin and consciousness of groups and individuals. The confounds of social
class of student, and quality of institution, are all too apparent. Being poor usu-
ally means attending schools that are under-funded, with inadequate textbooks,
under-credentialed teachers, too many kids in a room, and facilities that are de-
ficient. The academic, social, and psychological “costs” in terms of learning and
alienation, views of the state and democratic participation, sense of entitlement,
and ability to see self as an agent of change, are significant (Fine, Burns, Payne &
Torre, in press). These articles advance analyses of how such material conditions
of class—from wealth to poverty—permeate the mind, body, and soul of youth
through the institutional conditions of schooling (Anyon, 1997; Fine, 1991).
In an interesting design move, throughout this issue, institutions are studied,
largely, through the voices of individuals who don’t belong there by virtue of class
position. That is, a number of articles focus on individuals located in a class-
dissonant setting, e.g., middle-class or elite academic settings in which poor and
working-class youth and young adults attend school. Methodologically situated
at the nexus of a person-institution class rupture, these studies reveal powerful
evidence of exclusion, alienation, and yearning. We are concerned, however, that
by studying poor and working-class youth or young adults in these settings, we
may confound the study of class identity with the study of institutional alienation.
What would it look like to include studies of class among poor and working-class
youth inside poor and working-class institutions? This may mean documenting
the wretched conditions of schooling in America for most poor and working-class
youth (Kozol, 1991), or studying educational sites of comfort and loyalty for poor
and working-class youth (e.g., working-class youth in unions, churches, families,
camps, picnics, kitchens, high-quality local schools). As significantly, we might
call for research on middle-class and elite youth as they live a “no sweat” existence
within institutions of privilege, and how they would fare in poor and working-class
settings. We cannot confuse studies of tokenism with studies of class identity.
848 Fine and Burns

At base we find ourselves looking for a social psychology of social class

architecture—with an analytic eye on the structures, ideologies, relations, and
identities that constitute social and economic arrangements, in addition to this rich
array of institutionally particularized standpoints. We thus encourage a conceptual
shift to the broad analysis of class arrangements, analogous to the shift from
studying sex differences to gender relations or patriarchy; from studying race as
a “variable” to seeing racial formations as foundational structures through which
power inequities flow (see Omi & Winant, 1994; Pinderhughes & Shim, 2001).
For social class, like gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality, is never just lived.
Rather, class is lived, reproduced, sustained, and challenged through social and
historical relations, ideologies, and institutional structures of privilege, power, and
inequality. Perhaps no one study can accomplish all this, but the field may need a
more ambitious reach on “class.”

Contradictions in Consciousness

A third level of analysis for studying class is, of course, the psychological,
sometimes called the study of consciousness (Crosby, Pufall, Snyder, O’Connell,
& Whalen, 1989; Jost, 1995; Marx & Engels, 1846), including the consciousness of
class position, relations, and structures. This is the level of analysis best represented
in this issue.
Within psychology there has long been a tradition of “discovering” system
justification, from those who least benefit from economic arrangements, and from
those who most benefit. In 1980, Patricia Gurin, Arthur Miller, and Gerald Gurin
found that those persons who most strongly identified as working class were also
least likely to question the legitimacy of status inequalities in the broader society. In
this issue, Ostrove offers a similar finding, and suggests that alienation and exclu-
sion may provoke yearning and wanting. While such system justification may seem
ironic, Flanagan & Campbell (this issue) argue that working-class youth strategi-
cally put their faith into meritocratic structures to maintain their stamina and drive
to continue trying. So, too, Kuriloff and Reichert (this issue) suggest that privileged
youth confidently endorse self-rewarding meritocratic beliefs, which bolster their
own sense of entitlement, and distance them from responsibility for others.
However, most of the researchers writing for this issue offer evidence to
challenge system-justification theorists. Most found that alienation and critique
are associated with critical class-consciousness. Those least privileged narrated
the strongest critique of the class structure (see Bullock & Limbert, Kuriloff &
Reichert, Mahalingham, & Ostrove, this issue). Even more important than system
justification or challenge, across articles, striking contradictions abound. Poor and
working-class people criticize the very institutions in which they hope to achieve. A
woman can yearn for mobility as she narrates a searing critique of the system within
which mobility is desired. Sandra Jones (this issue) explains these contradictions
CLASS NOTES: Toward a Critical Psychology of Class and Schooling 849

to be a vehicle for constructing a narrative for engaged, gifted, poor, and working-
class young women. She cleverly works this “finding” of “contradictions” into a
methodology by systematically studying the linguistic use of “buts” as a signifier
of split consciousness.
As W. E. B. Dubois (1935) argued a century ago, living in and at the margins
of society provokes collectively and individually, a visual duality, a capacity to see
and speak through what may sound like contradictory registers: a dual conscious-
ness. Contradictions are fundamental to the struggle to survive within, while also
trying to change, economic and social relations in America. Finding contradictory
consciousness can no longer be considered empirical news.
It seems, therefore, important to revise our theoretical focus so that instead of
theorizing an “essential” class (of origin) consciousness, we take seriously these
contradictions. By interrogating situated class-consciousness, we seek evidence of
what Monique Guishard describes as hybrid consciousness (2003). The notion of a
locally and historically situated class-consciousness of divided loyalties challenges
static and biographic notions of class awareness and specifically implicates the
ways in which institutions, cultures, and structural arrangements enable, suppress,
silence, and encourage differing forms of class of consciousness.
The most stunning example of an historically and socially situated analysis
of consciousness in this issue comes from Elizabeth Cole and Safiya Omari (this
issue; see also Hochschild, 1995) who report that respondents from the Black mid-
dle class, despite often working-class origins and substantial economic mobility,
still describe lives filled with the frustrations of racial discrimination and stratifi-
cations. Historically denied equality of opportunity, these men and women have
attained some degree of privilege and still confront significant obstacles. Black
middle-class respondents offer a strong critique of —and engagement with—
traditional achievement ideologies (see Fine, Stewart, & Zucker, 2000). Being
multiply situated in both oppressed and privileged positions may increase bitter-
ness, resentment, and cynicism. Personal histories of hard work and sacrifice have
not insulated them or their families from discrimination, nor has this dedication
guaranteed fair treatment for their children (see Mahalingam, this issue). These
men and women carry substantial biographic data about the seduction, the disap-
pointments, and the lies of the American dream. Their contradictions are America.
The articles in this issue speak boldly for the need for a psychology of class
mobility. Class mobility in the United States, at this moment—as dream, struggle,
desire, fantasy, hope for the next generation—emerges as a theoretical construc-
tion zone, to be sure. Understood quite differently by ethnic immigrants (Ogbu,
1990), working-class Whites (Deaux & Ullman, 1983), middle-class Blacks, youth
in post-“security” nations, and those living within market economies (Flanagan &
Campbell, this issue), class mobility may be framed as familial or community duty
(Cole & Omari, this issue), individual and earned success (Bullock & Limbert, this
issue), or a form of cultural code-switching and betrayal (Kuriloff & Reichert, this
850 Fine and Burns

issue). After reading these articles, we come to understand that so-called opportu-
nities for mobility are rarely clean. More often they are fraught with ambivalence,
loyalty oaths, and alienation.
For poor and working-class youth and young adults, particularly youth of
color, “opportunities to succeed” may tear at the fabric of biography, identity,
loyalty, and belonging. Often tithed, materially and/or psychologically, exiting
one’s class status (having a “great chance”), or betrayal of one’s “home class,” and
terror of one’s “new environment,” may double as cruel seduction. Every “terrific
opportunity” may be filled with the potential for abandonment and shame. Every
“offer” may be tainted with the weighty sense of those left behind (see Cole &
Omari, this issue).
This is true, in large part, because poor and working-class students confront a
loyalty oath far more often than middle-class and elite students do (Omi & Winant,
1994; Sennett & Cobb, 1972). For poor and working-class students it is difficult
to distinguish psychologically between critical collective efforts toward improved
material conditions (the work viewed as altruistic in these articles) and more self-
serving, individualistic desires for upward mobility (the attitudes that appear more
“selfish” in this issue). We have yet to envision a version of success—in the United
States, in schools, and in psychology—that is outside of a discourse of upward
movement and hierarchical progress; success which is not purely individual; suc-
cess that doesn’t inherently abandon and necessarily disadvantage those struggling
beside and those left behind. Respondents in this issue ask us to expand our no-
tions of what constitutes upward mobility. Frustratingly, however, interrogating
upward mobility remains a struggle to see the bathroom wallpaper—a pattern that
is routinely unseen, yet always there, insistently informing and reminding. Here
we have work to do.

On Methods and Critical Consciousness

Finally, it is interesting to review these articles for the ways in which method
produces evidence; that is, to ask, under what methodological conditions do re-
searchers find, from similar samples, evidence of alienation as shame or criti-
cal consciousness as activism (see Daiute & Fine, 2003; Tatum, 1997); privilege
viewed as personally deserved or privilege viewed as social responsibility (Burns,
2003)? From a number of the studies in this issue, using quantitative survey data
or qualitative narratives, we hear alienation expressed as shame, distancing, or
repression. The women interviewed by Ostrove (this issue) explain that their class
biographies and their desire for a better life shrink into “secrets” not to be revealed.
In the elite private school that Kuriloff and Reichert (this issue) describe, coming
from the working class becomes a source of “shame”—“Well, like, I come from
a family that doesn’t have a lot of money and unless I get to be really really good
friends with someone, I don’t . . . tell them . . . .” (p. 762).
CLASS NOTES: Toward a Critical Psychology of Class and Schooling 851

From these respondents we learn that exclusion seems to construct yearning

itself. Alienation highlights that which is to be desired, and marks that which is to
be hidden, operating specifically through the desire for consumer goods, upward
mobility, and competitive success (Hochschild, 1995). The connections between
yearning and exclusion, then, may be more dynamic than contradictory, more
thoroughly a dialectic than a binary. Contradiction is embedded within the very
experience of alienation itself.
Kuriloff and Reichert reveal this process by highlighting the anxiety that char-
acterized the “conversion” experience of Alex, one working-class, high-achieving
student. They find that poor and working-class students “. . . often had glimmers
that what they were becoming might separate them from what they had been”
(p. 757). All the boys, but especially the African American boys, survived by be-
coming proficient at the “drills” of the school. Rahim, an African American boy
who “consciously decided to emulate the successful students, watching the way
they engaged and borrowing from them” (p. 764), explains that to succeed at “BS
Prep” he will have to “learn to control my mouth and my temper” and that the
development of performance skills may constitute “ . . . small stuff but it is going
to translate into real life” (p. 764). To what extent can children be expected to
learn the drills without, also, being changed by them, in terms of their values, de-
sires, aesthetics, and sheer comfort within a particular classed environment? And
then, to what extent does this produce a shame of or separation from the past,
biography, family, and community of origin? Asked methodologically, is it likely
that interviews with working-class youth in an elite setting would produce evi-
dence of critique, outrage, or activism? Might these young men from Kuriloff and
Reichert’s article tell a different story once they have graduated, speaking reflec-
tively as alumni of this school? Design decisions about sample, method, and timing
have serious theoretical consequence.
In contrast to the evidence of exclusion incorporated as shame, we diverge, for
a moment, from our review to introduce some work we have recently undertaken
with “youth researchers” in a Participatory Action Research Project (PAR) in which
we find that those historically “excluded” from quality education are most likely
to express outrage. We have, over the past year, been collaborating with over 70
diverse youth from 11 racially integrated suburban school districts and 3 New York
City high schools, crossing racial, ethnic, class, gender, academic, geographic,
and sexuality lines. With this cohort of youth researchers, brought together to
study the “achievement gap,” we designed a series of research opportunities in
schools, off site on college campuses, and in communities ranging from wealthy
Westchester suburbs to the South Bronx of New York City. In these sessions we
studied theory, epistemology, and method. We read about the “achievement gap,”
finance inequities, and the distribution of quality education. We rigorously trained
the youth researchers to be critical analysts of race, class, and ethnicity in their
own and each others’ schools. Through a series of youth research camps, these
852 Fine and Burns

9th through 12th graders learned about epistemology (Harding, 1987), standpoint
theory (Collins, 1991), and were tutored in specific methods for implementing
surveys, focus groups, interviews, archival research, and participant observation.
Actively engaged in theorizing how the “achievement gap” plays out in their
integrated high schools, during the first youth research camp, the youth decided
to survey other students in racially integrated suburbs and New York City. We
developed a survey that was, within a few months, administered to over 7,000
youth in the New York metropolitan area, on questions of race, ethnicity, class,
and opportunity in the nation and in their schools. These surveys included stan-
dard Likert scales, Cantril’s ladder (Kilpatrick & Cantril, 1960), and open-ended
questions including, “What’s the most powerful thing a teacher ever said to you,
positively or negatively?” Survey respondents were asked to interpret a cartoon
inserted in the instrument, a chart from the U.S. Census Department about the
“achievement gap” and provide narratives on their “worst” and “best” possible
school experiences.
At the second camp, after 3799 surveys were returned from 13 public schools,
we began participatory data analysis. Working through quantitative analyses, we
coded the qualitative material drawn from almost four thousand youth. Because
so much of the qualitative material that they were coding was distressing to the
youth, we created a “graffiti museum” on site, where they could write on the (paper
covered) walls, the most “distressing” and “hopeful” comment they read or heard.
Scrawled onto the wall were quotes from student surveys, “The achievement gap
is due to genetic differences in the intelligences of different races.” and “Why are
integrated schools so segregated?” and “Why is it that I’m not considered Black
enough and I’m not White enough?” Poetry, drawings, cartoons, expressions of
delight and pain, decorated the walls.
In the course of our work with this range of youth researchers, we had the
opportunity and the obligation to work through the dynamics of power among us,
the researchers; to analyze questions of “difference,” opportunity, and “deficit; ” of
privilege and responsibility; of shame and outrage. We are wealthy and poor; living
in mansions and Section 8 housing; White, African American, Afro-Caribbean,
Latino, Asian American, and every combination of these categories; living in foster
care, playing Lacrosse, in the Steppers Group at school, in Special Education, in
Advanced Placement (AP) courses, going to Yale, scared about failing the high
stakes standardized test required to graduate.
Over the course of the year, the youth co-facilitated focus groups, conducted
participant observations in their own schools, designed and analyzed survey data,
and visited each others’ schools—in New York City and wealthy Westchester
suburbs—districts which receive approximately $8,000 per child, and districts that
receive over $16,000 per child. Over our time together, as a research collective,
we have witnessed some of the more privileged youth, when there is institutional
support for equity, come to re-view their status as a responsibility to work toward
CLASS NOTES: Toward a Critical Psychology of Class and Schooling 853

change in their schools, and we have witnessed poor and working-class youth
convert shame and embarrassment to outrage and activism. To illustrate, in a focus
group with “high achieving” and privileged youth, one young man described his
school in terms of what he would like to see changed:
Kyle: One of the things that I noticed is that [my school] is kind of a microcosm of the
world . . . . Kids are getting a harsh reality . . . . I’m on the equity advisory council for, like,
the superintendent. We’re looking at test scores. You have that achievement gap all the
way through. But then, like, one of the ways this school is like, quick, fix the problem and
prevent racial tension is by saying, well, if a kid wants it, we’ll put him in [level] 5 or if
a kid wants it, we’ll put him in [level] 4 . . . . We’re not fixing anything. We just look and
say, the problem is Black kids and the White kids don’t sit together. The problem is the AP
classes are a large percentage White. Well, the reason the AP classes are a large percentage
White is because when I was in middle school, if I didn’t get into a top level class, or some
of my friends didn’t, my mom was coming in to raise hell. Where otherwise, there are some
kids that don’t have that opportunity. They don’t have the support at home. Their parents
are working a couple of jobs. Like, I know my mom, when she was a kid, her parents both
worked three jobs. She didn’t get any support at home. It was up to her and that’s a difficult
thing when there is nobody backing you up, when there’s nobody else on your team. And, I
just think we’re just kind of standing still. We’re on a treadmill, but we think we’re running
up the hill.

Likewise, in focus groups with poor and working-class youth involved in a

“sister” research project in California, we heard shame transform to public outrage,
as one young man described his concern:
Joseph: “Because before we had a teacher for like the first three weeks of our multi-culture
class and then the teacher didn’t have all her credentials so she couldn’t continue to teach.
And since then we’ve had like ten different substitutes. And none of them have taught us
anything. We just basically do what we wanted in class. We wrote letters, all the class wrote
letters to people and they never responded. We still don’t have a teacher.”

What was striking and distinct about the California focus groups was the
powerful voice of institutional betrayal that these youths expressed to audiences
who refused to listen. It was not simply the case that these youth, like so many youth
across America in under—resourced schools, were denied adequate education and
felt helpless. Many of the youth had, in the face of overwhelming odds, actively
tried to secure help. They had spoken up, protested, asked for a “real” teacher, or
raised an academic concern. What broke their hearts and their spirits was that few
adults listened. Even fewer acted. One young woman in a focus group offered:
Sarafina: “The teachers, they are there and then they are not there. One minute they’re there,
they’re there for like a week, and then they gone next week. And you try to find out where
the teacher, and they say, ‘We don’t have a teacher.’ We outside the whole day, you just sit
outside because there ain’t nobody going to come through. We ask the security guards to
bring us the principal over there. They tell us to wait and they leave. And don’t come back.
They forget about us. We ain’t getting no education by sitting outside.”

Students in another high school focus group were most agitated as they con-
trasted how their schools ignored their requests for quality education, but responded
(albeit superficially) when the state investigated school policies and practices:
854 Fine and Burns

We all walked out, ‘cause of the conditions, but they didn’t care. They didn’t even come
out. They sent the police. The police made a line and pushed us back in. Don’t you think
the principal should have come out to hear what we were upset over? But when the state is
coming in, they paint, they fix up the building. They don’t care about us, the students, just
the state or the city.

These youth describe a doubled experience of disappointment and betrayal.

Disappointed by the relative absence of quality faculty and materials, they feel
helpless to master rigorous academic material and powerless to solicit effective
help. Were that not enough, when these youth do complain, grieve, or challenge
the educational inequities they endure, they confront a wall of silence.
We introduce this methodological note on Participatory Action Research (see
Fine, Torre, Boudin, Bowen, Clark, Hylton, Martinez, “Missy,” Rivera, Roberts,
Smart, and Upegui, 2003; see also Fine et al., 2001) because we believe that
this design, and the associated range of methods, conducted over time, offers a
distinct methodological insertion into theoretical questions of shame and outrage.
With PAR, as with the focus groups in California, we can hear youth producing a
textured, “hybrid” consciousness in privileged and marginalized youth, revealed
over time (Guishard, 2003). That is, youth speak at once through a discourse of
searing social critique and, at the same time, they yearn for quality education in the
system in which they experience a sense of betrayal. As youth (or in the case of Fine
et al., 2003) interrogated the institutional conditions in which they were situated,
were given license to convert their critique and analysis into knowledge and inquiry,
forced to work across lines of power and status, and invited to document inequitable
aspects of institutional life, we heard a shedding of shame by (some) poor and
working-class youth and shattering of system justification by (some) privileged
youth (Leach, Snider, & Iyer, 2002).
The task for critical psychologists of class and schooling is to make explicit
the “banal” and its consequences, but also that which lies beneath the banal. We
now know that distinct features of class-consciousness can be uncovered by distinct
methods (Daiute & Fine, 2003; Hartsock, 1985), and we know to expect contradic-
tions. We are suggesting, here, that some methods of data collection and analysis
may pull primarily for narratives (or numbers) of shame, while others produce
evidence of critique, discomfort, anger, or activism. Some methods document the
reproduction of drip fed ideologies, and others pierce the lamination of meritoc-
racy. Indeed, we might then ask, under what conditions do specific quantitative and
qualitative methods tip toward the production of evidence of shame (for poor and
working-class students) or the justification of privilege (for more elite students)?
Conversely, it may be time to ask which methods tilt toward unearthing evidence
of the relation between critique and activism (see Apfelbaum, 2001; Carney, 2001;
Harris, Carney & Fine, 2001; Kitzinger, 2001; Scott, 1992), and which methods
allow us to hear those muffled occasions when privilege turns to responsibility
(Burns, 2003)?
CLASS NOTES: Toward a Critical Psychology of Class and Schooling 855

Class Fantasies

Across these scholarly articles, we note a floating, under-articulated but con-

sistent fantasy about economically oppressed people. The fantasy goes something
like this: poor and working-class people will see themselves as a collective, pool
their subjugated wisdom and critique, organize, rise up, and slay the evil dragon of
economic oppression. Within the fable, of course, there is the bitter disappointment
by scholars (ourselves included!) that “their” critique is not without complication.
“They” contaminate it by believing in mobility. “They” voice critical conscious-
ness, but it’s littered with shame and hopelessness, not action. Or, most distressing,
“their” social critique boomerangs onto self-blame or distancing as far as possible
from others in like circumstances. If only, we seem to plead, “they” would realize
the strength of the working class and stop victim blaming. Perhaps “we” have pro-
jected our own contradictions onto “them.” So, while “they” yearn for mobility,
we “yearn” for a revolution (by “them!”).
We witness this fantasy as a predictable, but not so useful, tendency within
critical psychology toward reifying the poor/working-class subject as the new
hero. We are probably, at times, guilty of indulging in this romanticized image as
well. Yet the data presented here suggest that the working-class subject is aware
of inequity and yearns for a better life. She is almost always too tired to slay the
dragon, much less get all the other women in the neighborhood to join her for a
collective slay.
This academic class fantasy of the underdeveloped working-class critical spirit
places an enormous burden on poor and working-class youth in America, for whom
no social movement equivalent to feminism or civil rights, queer liberation, or even
disability rights, exists outside the trade union movement. And even in the labor
movement, union membership continues to decline, from a 1954 peak of 35%,
to 13.5% in 2000 (AFL-CIO Union Membership Trends, http://www.aflcio.org/
aboutunions/joinunions/whyjoin/uniondifference/uniondiff11.cfm; see also the
Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm). In
the United States, there is little pride in being poor or working class (Sennett &
Cobb, 1972). It is still, here, a condition defined as a “lack.” Another significant
area for research involves the study of the creation of critical identities in the
absence of large-scale social movements.
We note further an irony inside critical class studies. The massive amount
of evidence of self hatred, shame, and the desire to be mobile, reported here and
narrated by poor and working-class respondents, is a condition that would be
considered highly problematic (these days) with respect to race, ethnicity, and/or
sexuality (Cross, 1991). And yet, when it comes to class in the United States, it
is just assumed that it is “better” to be middle-or upper middle-class than poor
or working-class. Shame is relatively unproblematized. The desire to exit or be
in the closet about poverty or the working class is understood. The need for a
856 Fine and Burns

cover story is appreciated. Yet another area for research—what does it mean to
embrace a critical identity that is, at best, filled with pride and shame, with pleasure
in “self,” but desire to be “other”? To what extent, do race, gender, or sexuality,
for poor and working-class youth, enable engagement with social movements of
pride and struggle (e.g., cultural, feminist, sweat shop organizing, anti-war, anti-
globalization, and/or gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender) rather than lack?
In addition, given the paucity of psychological research on privilege, espe-
cially within the fields of social (in)justice, it appears that researchers expect
little critical consciousness or activism from those of privilege. The absence of
a sense of responsibility in privileged youth is assumed, as shame is assumed in
their working-class and poor peers. Rarely is theoretical or empirical attention fo-
cused on the development of critical consciousness in privileged bodies and minds
(Burns, 2003), although, Mahalingam (this issue) optimistically argues that criti-
cal ideological commitments held by dominants, such as those made by Marxist
Brahmins, “can mediate and often contest essentialized representations (Deliege,
1992)” (p. 745). However, our participatory work mostly suggests that we sell
privileged youth short. They, too, notice the fractures of a class-stratified system,
and in the right settings, with sensitive methods, may whisper words of responsi-
bility and distress (Burns, 2003). This, too, marks a significant and necessary area
for future research.
Finally, for a bit of critical self-reflection, if psychologists can no longer claim
surprise at class-based contradictions narrated by informants, then we can, also, no
longer be naı̈ve about our own participation and collusion in class formations and
justifications; that is, our own contradictions. Pierre Bourdieu (1998) writes that
“. . . intellectuals are holders of cultural capital and, even if they are the dominated
among the dominant, they still belong among the dominant. That is one of the
foundations of their ambivalence, of their lack of commitment in (class) struggles.
They obscurely share this ideology of competence” (p. 44). Taking this mandate
seriously means addressing the banality of our own contradictions as psychologists,
researchers, and educators—borne of the same conflicting desires to both succeed
and yet also change the very institutions we inhabit, and continue to progress within
(see Flanagan & Campbell, this issue). Just as poor or working-class people’s
confidence in the American dream waxes and wanes depending on context (see
Bullock & Limbert, this issue), the class consciousness of upper- and middle-
class individuals transforms within different social, discursive, and psychological
contexts (see Cole & Omari, this issue).

Inciting Insight—Toward a Critical Psychology of Class and Schooling

Schools and universities are liminal spaces in which class, race, ethnic, and
gender inequities are reproduced with little notice and they are vibrant spaces
that hold out possibilities for individual and collective social change. They hold
promise and disappointment, at one and the same time, with respect to altering
CLASS NOTES: Toward a Critical Psychology of Class and Schooling 857

class arrangements. Jean Anyon (1997) has argued that trying to change schools, to-
ward social and economic justice, without reforming the political economy around
schools, is like trying to clean air on one side of a screen. And yet . . . schools can,
in the image of Paolo Freire (1973), Maxine Greene (1995), Michele Foster (1997),
and scores of critical theorists and educators who have followed, embody a space
for intellectual, political, personal, and spiritual growth and action. In such spaces,
schools educate through W. E. B. DuBois’ (1935) dual consciousness, inviting
youth to theorize at the center and the margin, to engage and critique, to work
within “what is,” and also struggle toward “what could be.”
To create and sustain schools that work critically on ideologies, institutions,
relations, and psychologies of class, we need to know much more about the social
psychology of class—how much does believing in hard-work-produces-success
really sustain internal motivation, when counter evidence is so abundant in some
communities (Ryan & LaGuardia, 1999)? In the absence of broad-based social
movements, what collective images are available to poor and working-class youth
for embracing their class identities with pride? How can opportunities be “offered”
in ways that don’t double as betrayal and exit? Under what conditions do privileged
youth experience dissonance or guilt? Under what conditions does guilt provoke
critical action? How do critical understandings of the material conditions of class
come to inform a liberatory psychology of class and schooling (Martin-Baro,
1994)? What is the relation of critique and activism, and when does critique provoke
a sense of helplessness?
Moving from individuals to nation, given recent global shifts in power and war,
we might ask how relations of privilege and poverty affect global relations; how
national consciousness of privilege in the United States affects solidarity with—or
retreat from—the needs of other nations? When does national privilege become
international responsibility abroad and at home? What role does the media play in
supporting an ideology of global domination by nations of privilege, or supporting
international collaboration across nations with and without wealth?
The scholarly space opened by Joan Ostrove and Liz Cole, and all of the
writers, is for the moment, an intellectual and political sanctuary. But this issue
speaks also for an academic obligation and insists on urgency. We have much work
to do. Critical psychologists engaged with issues of class and class struggle have
our work cut out for us. Psychologists who work through feminism, critical race
theory, and queer theory have much to offer to these conversations. The challenge
is before us.

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MICHELLE FINE is Distinguished Professor of Social Personality Psychology,

Women’s Studies and Urban Education at The Graduate Center of the City Univer-
sity of New York. She received her B.A. from Brandeis University and her Ph.D.
in social psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research
focuses on urban high schools and, more recently, women in prison. She is the au-
thor of numerous books and articles, including, most recently: Construction Sites:
Excavating Race, Class and Gender with Urban Youth (with Lois Weis, Teachers
College Press, 2000); Speedbumps: A Student Friendly Guide to Qualitative Re-
search (with Lois Weis, Teachers College Press, 2000); The Unknown City: Poor
and Working Class Young Adults in Urban America (with Lois Weis, Beacon Press,
1998); Off-White: Race, Privilege and Power (with Linda Powell, Lois Weis, and
Mun Wong, Routledge, 1996); Becoming Gentlemen: Race and Gender Politics
in Law School (with Lani Guinier, Beacon Press) and Framing Dropouts (SUNY
Press, 1991). She is an expert on race and gender in education, and has served as
an expert witness in a number of critical court cases and has been a consultant in
a wide variety of educational settings.

APRIL BURNS is a doctoral student in Social Personality Psychology at the City

University of New York, Graduate Center. She is a 2001–2002 and 2002–2003 re-
cipient of a Spencer Foundation Discipline Based Studies Fellowship in Education
for Social Justice and Social Development. Her research focuses broadly on issues
of privileged consciousness, ideology, and the psychology of social class. Current
projects include an investigation of academically successful youths’ understand-
ing, and sense of social responsibility for, race and class-stratified differences in
educational outcomes, or what has been called the “minority achievement gap.”