February 11, 2015 - 15:49
"O'Connor argued that there is nothing about poverty in and of itself that places poor children at academic risk but, rather, it is how structures of opportunity and constraint come to bear on their likelihood for achieving competitive educational outcomes." (from "The Intersection of Race, Culture, language, and Disability")
"[Avery] was a kid caught up in gangs; he was being victimized and was violent against others; he had been in prison; he was large, black; he did not learn as fast as others; he had medical problems; he was dyslexic; and in the minds of business-oriented school administrators, he would be expensive to educate." (From "Being Down")
I'd like to agree with O'Connor's research in saying that children who come from a less affluent background are not inherently less capable or somehow have less potential than students who have a different socioeconomic background, but I find it hard to disentangle that from the "structures of opportunity and constraint" that those children are given or faced with. When someone uses parts of your identity or parts of you that you just can't change ("large, black; dyslexic; medical problems" or even "poor") against you, what does that mean about the way you interact with the system? What does it mean when these inherent qualities, like race or the presence of a learning disability (although the "inherentness" of a learning disability can be highly debated), suddenly become "structures of opportunity [or] constraint"? The way that the screening committee judges students like Avery - by taking apart his identity and relating the different parts to different societal structures - is clearly a dangerous way of looking at a person because it allows us to resort to stereotyping and categorizing, but what would happen if that system weren't in place?