Quote:
You're right. If you ever read any of Ruby Payne's work on poverty and education, you'll find that school culture often correlates directly to the socioeconomic status of the majority of students that attend the school.
Schools where most of the kids come from wealthy families often have more relaxed rules and have lots of collaborative assignments and large projects that teach skills like leadership, innovation and decision-making. Schools where most of the kids come from poverty are more likely to have lots of rules and not a lot of collaboration in the classroom (kids are more likely to use workbooks that they work on by themselves silently, especially at the high school level).
There are a lot of reasons why this occurs. One reason is because kids who come from wealthy families come from the culture of privilege and have already been taught many of the skills they need for collaboration and leadership by watching their parents' example. The teachers can give the kids an assignment and away they will go to get it done. They don't need a lot of hand-holding, usually, because they already know the "rules" for behavior and expectations in a school setting and adapt naturally to school. They grew up with these things.
The "hidden rules" of social class are things that people are not aware of unless the "rules" are explained to them explicitly.
I think that's why teachers (who are mostly middle or upper middle class), spend a lot of time teaching school rules to kids who are middle class or in poverty. Kids from poverty don't necessarily know how to behave in the "middle class" setting of a school because they only know the rules of the culture of poverty. For example, one of the rules of poverty (from Ruby Payne's book) is enjoying and valuing the "here and now" rather than planning for the future because in poverty, the future is uncertain. Kids from poverty don't always know how to plan ahead because they've never seen their parents do it. Using an agenda book or planner is foreign to them.
If you're interested in how this all works, go read Ruby Payne's book. She spent years doing research on how social class affects us. It's really interesting!
That's pretty interesting. I agree with another poster that at the elementary age, prizes and affirmation would go further than punishments.
When I was a freshman in high school, I had braces. My mom worked, but made up her own schedule. She went in when she wanted to and left when she wanted to. She would always schedule my orthodontist appointments for the morning, despite me asking her to do it later in the day. My PE class was during the first half of the day and every absence lowered my grade. It didn't matter if the absence was excused and beyond my control, the teachers didn't care. When I brought home my progress report with an F in PE, my parents had a fit and grounded me. I had told them early on what happened when I was absent, but they didn't care until I got my grades. My mother still refused to schedule later appointments. I ended up having to run miles for lunch to get my grade back and keep it at an A.
